March ’18 — Progress Update
Launch of the GovBlocks MVP, a new adviser and lots of community interactions!
March was a big month for us! 6 months of hard work finally got some life. We shipped the GovBlocks Protocol MVP on 28th March!
If you’ve missed on reading why we are building GovBlocks, you might want to skim through Ish’s article on why blockchain governance needs more attention.
Off to the races!
We started the month with some fanfare as GovBlocks was adjudged as one of the Top 10 Emerging Startups in India at the Fintegrate Conference in Mumbai.
Ish was also involved in an engaging debate, at the conference, along with fellow panelists Satyen Kothari (Cube), Dusan Stojanovic (True Global Ventures), Rudra Dalmia (Crypto Investor) and Sanjay Mehta (Angel Investor).
We got a great adviser on board!
We are super excited to announce that Dr. Jane Thomason is now advising GovBlocks. Ish has been closely working with Dr. Jane ever since they met at the London Blockchain Week in 2017.
Dr Jane is an awardee of the Top 10 Digital Frontier Women & Inaugural Quantum Impact Global Champion UN Decade of Women. She’s a thought leader in the applications of Blockchain Technology for social impact with over 25 years of experience as a development entrepreneur and innovator.
Euro trip!
(but nothing like the movie :p)
Ish, Nitika & Stefanie attended the #EthCC (Ethereum Community Conference) held at Paris from 8th to 10th March. One of the best tech conferences in the recent times, we learnt a great deal from talks around Sharding, Plasma Cash, and Casper from the community.
It won’t be a stretch to say that Governance has started getting its fair share of attention from the community lately. There were a number of talks that touched upon the subject with Vlad Zamfir doing an hour long talk on Governance 101!
A day after the conference ended, we managed to get a seat at the FINMA round table on #ICOs in Switzerland, organised by Crypto Valley Association.
The round table helped us understand the FINMA guidelines a lot better. They demystified the three classifications — payment, asset and utility. I think it’s safe to presume Ish was fairly happy 😛
“No more Utility Tokens unless you have a live product! Let’s #buidl it, I say!” — Ish (after the event)
Intrigued by Chennai
One of the interesting aspects of this technology is that it is universal in its appeal. When we got invited by Great Lakes Institute of Management for a panel discussion on Blockchain, we were intrigued to say the least.
We were impressed by the enthusiasm shown by the students during the day long event and hope to see some real action coming in from Chennai soon!
More student interactions!
While Ish was busy in Paris, I got a chance to interact with students from IIT Roorkee during their inaugural e-summit.
It was quite refreshing to see a number of students interning with crypto projects across the globe, trying to better understand the technology and its use cases.
Conclusion
We launched our MVP on the Ethereum Rinkeby Testnet, attended some really cool tech conferences globally, got some love from our super awesome community :)
Next logical steps for us is to start integrating dApps and learn from the experience. Here’s a sneak peek into the MVP!
If you are an #Ethereum dApp developer or an entrepreneur looking to build a dApp, we would love to work with you. Please fill up the ‘Test Alpha’ form on the website and we’ll be more than happy to set up a demo!
