What Happened During India’s First Blockchain Summit?
On December 6th, 2016, attendees in New Delhi listened to the world’s top experts in blockchain discuss distributed ledgers, smart contracts, crypotgraphy, and decentralised applications (Dapps).
Zero Field Labs, founded by Arifa Khan, hosted its very first Blockchain Summit, with the godfather of Ethereum himself, Vitalik Buterin, leading the panel. Attendees were briefed by top experts of the technology on cryptography, smart contracts , and distributed ledgers. Also represented in attendance were major systems integrators and consulting firms in India such as Accenture, Synechron, Cognizant, WiPro, EY, KPMG , Barclays, and IIT Madras.
Representing ConsenSys as a guest speaker was Andrew Keys, who drives strategic partnerships, business development, and enterprise strategies for Fortune 500 blockchain solutions.
Andrew gave an overview of the current state of the development of a decentralized web 3.0 spearheaded by the Ethereum blockchain and its complementary technologies: IPFS , Swarm , Raiden, and mesh peer-to-peer networks that cut out big players from the consumer Internet access pipeline. He touched on the challenges of the early days of Ethereum as the necessary growing pains of a robust and battle tested next generation internet.
Keys introduced ConsenSys’ work on the Ethereum blockchain, including the development of:
2. Dapps cultivated in the venture production studio.
3. Enterprise solutions on the operation benefits of a distributed computing platform.
The one day summit included panel speakers :
- Cale Teeter, Senior Software Development Engineer at Microsoft, who gave a presentation on architecture for enterprise blockchain systems, the Azure marketplace, and the various one-click deploy applications which a developer could access easily via a devtest labs search for blockchain. He then demonstrated Strato, a process of creating an Ethereum Consortium Blockchain.
- Rajesh Mirjankar, Managing Director & Chief Executive Officer of Infrasoft Technologies, spoke about “black money” in India and the adoption of cryptocurrency as a counter to tight government control and monetary policy with regards to cash. Mirjankar identified trade finance, syndicated loans, payments & reconciliation, insurance, clearing & settlement as a few of the early adopters of blockchain in India.
The most recent shift in the nation’s monetary system (with the government unadvisedly writing off its high value currency notes) makes 2017 economically ripe for opportunities in the blockchain industry. India’s growing technological workforce also makes it a prime training pool for developers, potentially enlisting thousands of employable software developers on the blockchain.
