European Blockchain Convention Gains Momentum
By Frankie Elmquist, Eternic
Barcelona, Spain — We kicked off 2020 at the European Blockchain Convention’s annual event in Barcelona. We had been hearing buzz that this blockchain event was picking up steam and drawing quality speakers, so we thought it would be worth looking into.
Finding the right blockchain event to attend in an industry flooded with events can be time-consuming and difficult to gauge both the quality and the credibility of the event. This is especially true in the blockchain space, where the focus on cryptocurrency can supersede the focus on the technology, and the cost can be excessive, especially for startups like ourselves. To ensure we get a return on our investment in events, we look at three key factors — relevance, opportunity to learn, and lead generation potential. Here’s our take on how the European Blockchain Convention measured up:
Blockchain Talks and Speakers
The European Blockchain Convention is a fast-paced, single-day conference covering real-life applications of blockchain. This year’s Barcelona conference packed in twelve back-to-back panel discussions into an ambitious agenda that covered distributed ledger technology (DLT) use in finance, energy, supply chain, and healthcare, as well as legal and regulatory issues. As a fintech building a cross-border payments solution using blockchain technology, the most relevant panel discussions for us were:
- Financial Markets Infrastructure & Services in the DLT era
- Central Bank Digital Currencies & Innovation in Payments
- Regulation in the Evolving Payments Landscape in Europe
- Security Tokens — Enabling new Business Models
- The State of Technical Aspects of Blockchain
To find a conference where five out of twelve panels were relevant for us held a high degree of promise. Additionally, the panels included industry leaders from R3, Banco Santander, ING, IBM, and the European Commission.
While panel discussions do not typically allow for a deep dive into the topics at hand, a number of these panels did provide impressive depth and value for us. In particular, the panel on central bank digital currency, which gave us insight into views of the European Central Bank and Bank of England on digital currency adaption, including attitude, concerns, research underway, and forecasts. Taken as a whole, the panels provided an overview of where the blockchain industry stands now, development and regulatory challenges, and relevant opinions on where the industry is heading and possible next steps.
Blockchain challenges and benefits
Throughout the event, several consistent themes emerged around the challenges and benefits of blockchain. Adaption challenges focused on applicability — determining which use cases are a good fit for DLT, which types of ledger are appropriate — Public, Private Permissioned, or Permissionless, and for which stage of development.
Consistent throughout the discussions was frustration that regulation is lagging behind slowing adaption. It’s hard for blockchain and regulation to be discussed without Facebook and the Libra blockchain project coming up, and here was no exception. There was clear agreement, even among participants from the central banks, that big tech’s push into the payments sector provided an important wake-up call for financial regulators, but not one that should inhibit innovation and prevent beneficial technological advancement.
While blockchain has been around since 2012, it is still relatively new technologically speaking, even though the encryption it is based on has existed since the 1980s. It was evident at the conference that a shift in focus is happening away from the niche uses of blockchain towards practical applications and enterprise use. With this maturing, comes new technical challenges, which many of the fintech and innovation teams that participated in the conference are actively trying to resolve. Three technical challenges in blockchain development that were omnipresent in the panel discussions — scaling, interoperability, and digital identity. We heard these same challenges voiced during use case presentations at R3’s CordaCon blockchain event.
Despite these challenges, there was universal agreement that the benefits of blockchain technology to reduce operational cost and to improve risk, as well as business transparency, will continue to fuel industry growth. The overall message the conference delivered was to not let the challenges stop you — keep innovating and disrupting. Build a strong business case for the technology, and regulators will have no choice but to catch up.
Attendance reaches critical mass
One of the best ways to keep innovating and pushing the boundaries of the technology is through collaboration. This was a call to action at many of the fintech events last year. Yet many did not find an effective way to put it into practice. This is where the European Blockchain Convention really stood apart for us. The organizers listened that the industry wanted more opportunities to connect, and they made it their mission:
“ Our mission is to provide world-class content in collaboration with the brightest minds in the space, while we facilitate an exclusive networking environment where all participants meet to form business relationships and seek potential partners for ventures.”
The Barcelona event drew 400+ attendees, including decision-makers, investors, innovation team leads, fintechs, and developers who are actively working with blockchain every day. While not huge by event standards, it had the critical mass to be effective. The agenda dedicated time throughout the day for attendees and participants to interact and connect. They even had us turn around to greet each other at the start and, hokey as it might sound, it was a smart ice breaker that built a sense of comradery and common purpose. We reconnected with our “neighbors” throughout the day and are now interviewing one of them. The smaller scale and shared focus of this event worked to its advantage and made for productive networking that resulted in important connections and possible collaborations for our project… and maybe even a new hire.
It’s all in the Attitude
The event’s focus on real-life applications, collaboration, and straightforward approach made it an “easy sell” for us. We didn’t have to sift through clever themes to get at the content and connections on offer, and the ticket price is reasonable and did not give us pause. This same no-BS attitude and focus on delivering were consistent throughout the event. While one could argue that newer events lack the budget to have an impact, I would say the European Blockchain Convention has found its niche and is an event on the rise.
We look forward to its progress and hope to see an additional day focused on use case presentations similar to the keynote delivered by Vechain CEO, Sonny Lu, on supply chain logistics. So, if you’re looking to determine if blockchain is right for your business and you want to get an understanding of where the technology is at and meet people who can help, this is an excellent place to start. If you’re a fintech, institution, or business working in blockchain and you want to get an overview of where the industry is going and the challenges others using with the technology are also trying to solve this event is for you. OR, you want to gauge the regulatory temperature first-hand from those who are tasked with evaluating it; this is a good place to do it.
This event typically occurs twice a year, in two separate locations — Barcelona and Copenhagen. The Barcelona event introduced us to the city’s commitment to establishing itself as a southern hub for technical innovation and a bridge to Latin America that was not previously on our radar. A similar technological revolution is underway in the Nordics — with Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland all vying to establish themselves as the northern hub of innovation. Which makes Copenhagen a natural fit for the Nordic European Blockchain Convention, which was scheduled to take place later this year. However, due to COVID-19 this event will now take place virtually, check it out — European Blockchain Convention-Virtual Edition.
We hope to virtually-meet you there!
You might also want to read
Distributed Ledger Technology for International Banking — our analysis of blockchain solutions applicable for global payments and settlement
What the UK CBDC Could Look Like — Bank of England’s digital currency model for retail payments
R3’s CordaCon Event — This blockchain means business for banking. Now virtual for 2020!
Eternic is a new global payments and settlement platform that uses blockchain technology to enable real-time cross-border transactions between banks. To learn more visit www.eternic.io.
