Lisk North America Tour 2018 Recap
With a mission to expand Lisk’s global presence, we announced that we would be embarking on a Lisk North America tour in early spring. With the completion of the tour, I’m excited to share all of the details with you! This blog post will detail the cities I visited, the events, as well as the wonderful people and community members I met.
First Stop — April 2, 2018: Meetup, San Antonio, Texas, US
Second Stop — April 4–5, 2018: Conference and Meetup, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Third Stop — April 9, 2018: Meetup, Seattle, Washington, US
San Antonio, TX
The first city I visited on the Lisk North America tour was San Antonio. The city’s warm climate and people made this part of the trip very memorable. With a population of approximately 1.5 million, San Antonio is one of the fastest growing cities in the United States; San Antonio contains one of the fastest growing Lisk communities in the country as well.
The San Antonio Lisk meetup took place at Geekdom Event Centre in downtown San Antonio and was hosted by Lisk Ascend member Brandon, also known as Nimbus76, and Lisk USA, which is led by Edward, also known as StellarDynamic. The meetup opened with cyber security industry programmer Omar Quimbaya, who spoke very eloquently on the topic of blockchain scalability. Following his presentation, I provided a recap of the Lisk Relaunch and our newest products. I met many interesting people to list them all off here. However, one attendee that I had the pleasure of getting to meet was Javier, who runs TechQuarry, an IT services company in San Antonio. We discussed several topics, including the fact that he is in contact with many companies that have expressed interest in the Lisk platform.
Later in the evening, several community members and I continued our interesting discussions over a delicious dinner on the city’s famous Riverwalk.
To join Lisk San Antonio Meetups group, click here.
Ottawa, Canada
For those who haven’t been to Ottawa, Canada, it is a vibrant place with a perfect mix of historical old town and bright city lights. This stop on the tour was to attend the Forward JS: Ottawa Summit at the Adobe Systems corporate office. This event was one of the major highlights of the tour, as it gave me the chance to present Lisk in front of a crowd of nearly 200 JavaScript developers, which are such an integral part of Lisk’s ecosystem. I discussed the Lisk platform and how Lisk is bringing together blockchain and JavaScript. Other speakers at the conference were developers, engineers and scientists from companies such as Shopify, IBM, Else Labs Inc., Washington Post and Adobe. The presentation that really resonated with me came from Adobe Senior Software Scientist Simon MacDonald, on the potential of JavaScript. Throughout the conference, I was able to network with the brightest minds in the JavaScript industry, including the likes of Brian Farias Tavares, a software engineer with Else Labs, James Rauhut, a frontend and UX designer for IBM’s Design System, and many other valuable developers.
Lisk’s first meetup in Canada, co-hosted by Bloqspace and LiskHQ, was held the day after the Forward JS Summit. I presented an overview of the Lisk ecosystem to the crowd over quintessential American snacks — nachos, chicken fingers and onion rings. I had the fortune of meeting an incredibly talented and dedicated developer by the name of Greg Sienkiewicz, who was able to speak very eloquently about the immense potential that Lisk will offer to developers looking to develop blockchain applications.
Going forward, JavaScript developer and Lisk community member Adam Daw will organize Lisk meetups regularly in Ottawa. Following the continued success of Lisk meetups in Ottawa, I am confident that other cities across Canada will follow suit.
To join the Lisk Ottawa Meetups group, click here.
Seattle, WA
Seattle, Washington is energetic, young and also home to tech giant Amazon. It is a city for technological innovation and very, very good coffee. Lisk community members Paul and Yaman organized this meetup, the first meetup to-date in Seattle. The event garnered over 200 RSVPs within two weeks of its announcement, indicating the tremendous interest in Lisk in Seattle.
The meetup was held at the Wells Fargo Center in downtown Seattle complete with chicken wraps and croissants. My presentation included an informative and detailed look into Lisk’s ecosystem and our major advantages in the blockchain space. The audience was very engaged and full of great questions. I really enjoyed the open discussion we had regarding potential use-cases for Lisk.
This event was Lisk’s biggest community-organized meetup ever hosted in North America. It was also incredible to see the number of Lisk Seattle meetup members soar following the meetup.
To join the Lisk Seattle Meetups group, click here.
In conclusion, I’m so grateful to have had the opportunity to attend all three meetups and conference in North America. I am also more confident than ever before in the communities’ ability to accomplish great things, having seen how passionate and knowledgeable they are. Everyone in attendance expressed their strong faith and belief in the Lisk project, its team and mission.
I want to give a huge thank you to all of our Lisk community members around the world for their dedication to supporting a decentralized world and future. The team at Lightcurve is working very hard to make blockchain accessible to everyone. We see the expansion of our global presence as a primary way to achieve this.
Although this is the conclusion of the Lisk North America tour for now, we will surely visit many more cities in the US. As always, we will keep you posted as soon as we solidify upcoming plans. As we previously announced, we will be attending the blockbuster blockchain and cryptocurrency conference Consensus 2018 in New York City in May.
-Jan C. Liz-Fonts
