The Biggest Trends in Blockchain, According to Penn Blockchain

Lane Rettig, Ari Paul and others share their thoughts about blockchain governance and crypto opportunities on the horizon.

The 2nd Annual Penn Blockchain Conference happened this past Saturday, April 6th, 2019. It’s one of the largest student blockchain clubs in the nation with over 640 members across, undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty.

The conference hosted some great speakers and many UPenn alumnus participated in interesting panels, fireside chats, and keynotes. The conference centered around 3 overarching themes: Design, Build, and Invest. Overall, the conference was insightful, educational, and delightfully pragmatic.

Here are some of the key takeaways from the 2nd Annual Penn Blockchain Conference…

Decentralization Is Not Binary.

Decentralization is an admirable goal. However, the blockchain community often categorizes decentralization as a binary, either something is decentralized or it’s not. In truth, decentralization is a spectrum. There were an overwhelming amount of speakers, whom when faced with this controversial topic opted for rationality. The overall sentiment was that we will obviously try to decentralize and disintermediate where possible, but some instances will take time. Banking and finance won’t be on public blockchains tomorrow, but permissioned blockchains offer a step in the right direction. Kathryn Harrison, Global Product Manager at IBM Blockchain even suggested private blockchains will eventually connect to public blockchains which would add a greater level of decentralization.

Identity Will Be Vital For Blockchain Governance

Lane Rettig’s keynote was full of bunny rabbit slides, the examination between Autonocrats and Anthropocrats, and the importance of governance in Ethereum. Overall, he discussed how there’s no perfect way to enable governance, whether by one vote per address, per ether, or any other metric. Identity will be massively important for blockchain governance in order to ensure Ethereum enables the best system possible.

“Blockchain is an operating system for building better human institutions”

–Lane Rettig, Ethereum Core Developer

Technology Is Driving Business Strategy

Two decades ago business strategy drove companies to use new technologies. The goals to become more efficient and increase sales were drivers for companies to use technology where possible. Now, new innovations in technology are driving the business strategy. Companies must proactively implement and develop new technologies when deciding how they want to progress. Enterprises are asking how technology will impact their businesses in the future rather than how can they increase efficiencies.

2019 Is The Year Securities Get Digitized, Not The Year of Digital Security Offerings

While the tokenization of securities presents new and exciting opportunities, there still aren’t many tokenized securities. Securitize, a leading compliance platform and protocol for digitizing securities on the blockchain has only conducted a handful of security tokenizations. Companies and funds are slowly getting their feet wet and exploring the possibilities. The panel consisting of Jor Law, Leeor Shimron, Jamie H. Finn and Jitin Jain also claimed real estate and investment funds, like SPiCE VC are likely to be among the first digitized securities. Additionally, the panel shared a united opinion that start-ups will be unlikely to tokenize their companies until the later venture funding stages, such as series B or C rounds.

Crypto Needs More Awesome Flashcards

Tech Takeaways

The scaling and engineering panel was educational and full of great conversations between Lane Rettig (Ethereum Core Developer), Arthur Breitman (Tezos Co-Founder), and Patrick Nielsen (Clovyr CTO & Co-Founder). The panel mostly debated the advantages and disadvantages of using WASM for Ethereum. Although there was disagreement on some governance and tech stack issues, there were a few shared viewpoints.

• Blockchain has created more value per line of code than ever before
• We still don’t know what type of smart contracts people will write
• The industry needs better tools to onboard new developers

Blockchain May Open The Floodgates For AI and Big Data

Multiple speakers discussed their excitement for new data modeling and big data applications once blockchain technology gains greater adoption. The potential that can be generated from accessible and immutable data records are captivating. Artificial intelligence may obtain vaster use cases from coordinated and trusted data sets. Enterprises will be able to use their data more efficiently by combining data, updating information in real time, and sharing permissioned accessible copies.

Investing Models Are Continuously Developing

Small equity rounds are common for venture capital firms while others are still buying tokens and cryptocurrencies. Moreover, centralized apps on top of decentralized protocols, such as Veil on Augur present interesting models and may become more common in the future.

The Fat Protocols thesis, which states value will accrue at the protocol level as opposed to the application level is neither proven nor debunked. It will take time to determine if the Fat Protocol thesis wins out. Finally, security-utility hybrid token models will likely become more prevalent in the future as loyalty features are combined with revenue sharing models.

There Are Plenty of Blue Ocean Markets in Crypto

Ari David Paul, Chief Investment Officer and Founder of BlockTower Capital discussed blue ocean markets in crypto and blockchain during his keynote address. He explained how the internet had several key problems, such as bandwidth and payments. The companies that solved these problems became the unicorns and industry giants of the internet era.

Drawing from his analogy he emphasized that most of the major obstacles that exist in crypto today, such as custody, data provisioning, and exchanges are billion-dollar opportunities. The companies that solve these issues will become vastly successful and bring billions in value to the world.

Overall, the Second Annual Penn Blockchain Conference was a huge success and events like these are great for the blockchain ecosystem. There weren’t any people asking “when moon” or any 25-year-old crypto fund managers trying to raise capital. Instead, there were interesting discussions from insightful individuals coupled with hundreds of students and dozens of professionals eager to learn and listen.

Disclaimer: The views expressed by the author above do not necessarily represent the views of Consensys AG. ConsenSys is a decentralized community with ConsenSys Media being a platform for members to freely express their diverse ideas and perspectives. To learn more about ConsenSys and Ethereum, please visit our website.