A Look-Back at Berlin Blockchain Week
Keep hosted and attended a number of great events during this year’s Berlin Blockchain week
Last month, some of our team members traveled to Berlin to attend the Berlin Blockchain Week 2019. This whole week was very productive time and a lot of ideas were exchanged. Keep also hosted its own events, including an Interoperability Summit — an event to foster candid conversation and to bring together people that are building.
Interoperability Summit
On Monday, 19th August, Keep Network and Fabric Ventures organized the Interoperability Summit, where some of the leading projects in the space shared their latest efforts and development updates on bridging the decentralized ecosystem.
After the opening by Richard Muirhead, Managing Partner at Fabric Ventures, Matt Luongo presented tBTC, the first major app slated to be launched on the Keep Network. tBTC builds on the work token, random beacon, and Keep’s t-ECDSA technology.
tBTC is a powerful ERC-20 two-way peg between Bitcoin and Ethereum. It maintains Bitcoin’s value as hard money while allowing that liquidity to be leveraged by Ethereum smart contracts.
tBTC is completely decentralized, allowing for trust-minimized maintenance of the token’s Bitcoin backing. This open-source project is focused on Bitcoin vs trying-to-solve-everything, and, more importantly, it aims for greater decentralization. tBTC is planned to go live shortly after the Keep Network’s initial phase, Random Beacon.
Learn more about tBTC:
- Keep’s tBTC announcement article,
- Leigh Cuen’s article on CoinDesk,
- tBTC presentation at Cross-Chain Summit article,
- tBTC technical specification draft, and
- Podcast with Matt Luongo and James Prestwich, hosted by the Wyre team.
The presentation was followed by discussions broken down into two subjects:
Panel 1: Technical Approaches to Decentralized Cross-Chain State Transfer with Matt Luongo, (Keep Network), Joe Petrowski (Polkadot) and Christopher Goes (Cosmos Network). The panel was moderated by Richard Muirhead, Managing Partner, Fabric Ventures.
Panel 2: Injecting Fiat into the Realm of Web 3.0 with Szymon Sypniewicz (Ramp Network), Mariano Conti (MakerDAO),Ryan Selkis (Messari), Matt Luongo (Keep Network). Moderated by Max Mersch, General Partner, Fabric Ventures.
You can watch the summit’s recording in the video below.
Interoperability Summit Afterparty: The Spree Cruise
After the Interoperability summit, attendees mingled at Factory Berlin to collaborate and discuss before the cruise party.
Discussions ensued about user on-ramps, the future of Libra, and what true interoperability might look like.
The opportunity and implications of transfer of wealth was also a huge topic of discussion, especially with the presentation of tBTC.
After the summit, Keep hosted a river cruise down the Spree to continue discussions in a less formal atmosphere. Luis Cuende of Aragon was spinning music and we got the chance to unwind. The group reflected on tribalism, the future of Bitcoin, interoperability, and more.
Interoperability Panel at dAppcon
Conferences and workshops were held 21–23 August at dAppcon. Matt Luongo joined the Interoperability Panel on 21st August, with Igor Barinov (POA), Sunny Aggarwal and Zaki Manian from Cosmos Network. The panel was moderated by Arlyn Culwick from The Blocknet Protocol.
Matt Luongo talks about tBTC at the Chorus One podcast
During Berlin Blockchain Week, Keep was invited to take part in a podcast hosted by Chorus One team.
The interview goes into Matt’s background, how the technology and economics around tBTC work, as well as the role of the Keep Network in creating tBTC. There is also a transcript by Chorus One in their blog post (thanks for that, guys!).
Keep has joined the Messari Disclosures Registry
During the Berlin Blockchain Week, Messari announced that along with 10 other crypto projects, Keep has joined the Messari Disclosures Registry. By joining the Registry, projects commit to bringing a higher level of transparency to the crypto asset space through ongoing disclosures. There are now more than 50 projects adhering to the same values and standards.
“The effort is intended to be a collective action to push standards of basic disclosures that should be expected of projects with numerous global stakeholders. We want to allow for honest projects to have a platform to differentiate themselves and build trust with their communities and anyone looking to better understand their project.” — Messari.
Read more in Messari’s article and CoinDesk’s article.
Eth Berlin Zwei Hackathon
One of our newest developers, Liam Zebedee, has participated in a 3Box Hackathon and won the 3rd best integration prize!
He built Ciao, a native web3 social network built on 3Box. It is similar to Facebook groups concept, but is based on token membership. Ciao uses 3Box for profiles, storage, and a chatspace.
Follow this tweet to find out more!
Oracle whiteboarding design session
When we publicly published the draft of the tBTC paper, we received tons of valuable feedback. We knew the price feed oracle was nowhere near robust enough, however, we had full faith that our friends and community would help out, and wow, they did.
When we were in Berlin, our project lead Matt Luongo said: “Why not gather anybody that’s interested and work on it right here right now?” One tweet thread and a borrowed whiteboard later, Rick Dudley, Arlyn Culwick, Liam Zebedee and many others gathered outside a small cafe and what followed was a whirlwind hour of debate about sharding, canaries, and over-collateralization.
When the dust settled, this one session got us about 99% of the way to our solution. We’re very happy with the steadfast attitude of collaboration that our industry maintains!
We can’t wait to share our updated oracle spec soon, so be on the lookout!
Having recently formed a Cross-Chain Group with Summa, we are continuing the interoperability efforts.
Working together as a community will bring greater interoperability of networks and ultimately, compelling product development, innovative solutions, and improved user experience.
Find out more about Cross Chain Group and if you or anyone you know would like to be involved, reach out to us!
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