Summary of First Tezos Geneva Meetup
30th August 2018
On Thursday 30th August Tezos Geneva held its inaugural meetup, sponsored by the Tezos Commons Foundation and hosted by Fusion.
A full recording of the meetup is available here:
This article provides a brief summary of the event.
TL;DR
Two key themes that ran through all presentations were:
- Tezos provides a different approach to other blockchains: on-chain governance, formal verification and Liquid Proof of Stake make it truly distinctive; and
- Tezos is about community and ecosystem — there is no central authority and it is the community that will drive the ecosystem forward.
Statistics
- 54 attendees travelling from Romandie, Zurich/Zug, Germany, Austria, Czech Republic, France, and more
- 3 speakers, 2 showcase presenters, 1 open stage speaker/announcement
- (At least) 3 delegation services in the audience
- 40 tacos consumed
- 38GB of video taken
- 2 exhausted but happy hosts
- 1 very large and very friendly dog
Introductions
Arran and Robert provided an introduction to the event and to the aims of Tezos Geneva which will create a build focused hub for Tezos in Geneva. This will include meetups, workshops, creating educational content, blogs, training etc.
Sal Matteis, CEO of Fusion, gave an introduction to Fusion and it’s mission to supercharge innovators within its blockchain lab and other accelerators.
First Speaker — Ryan Jesperson, President of Tezos Foundation
Ryan gave a personal account of his journey as a community member and more recently as president of the Tezos Foundation.
This was followed by a summary of recent actions by the Tezos Foundation and a description on the Tezos Foundation’s role in the Tezos ecosystem.
“There is no central authority in Tezos”
“The success of the community and of Tezos is in everybody’s hands”
This was a recurring theme in all presentations: the important of decentralisation in all aspects of Tezos and the role of the community in developing and driving forward the ecosystem.
Second Speaker — Arthur Breitman, CTO of Dynamic Ledger Solutions
Arthur gave an introduction to Tezos from a technical perspective, describing its origins and highlighting some of its distinguishing features: on-chain governance, Liquid Proof of Stake consensus mechanism and formal verification.
“The nice thing about formal verification is that it works like a ratchet — because instead of eliminating bugs you eliminate classes of bugs”
Arthur also discussed some of the areas where further research and development in Tezos might occur from the community, including: more security (work on the network layer, adding redundancy etc), privacy and zk-SNARKs, gas model etc.
Third Speaker — Sam Harrison, Director of Operations, Tezos Commons Foundation
Sam gave an overview of the Tezos ecosystem across four layers (base, tools, industry, products) and how TCF helps to support the growth of the ecosystem through education, events, meet-ups, training and other activities.
“Such grand ambitions require more than just one centralised organisation building an amazing thing. They require a massive ecosystem to come together and move towards that conclusion”
Showcase speakers
Every Tezos Geneva meetup will have a “showcase” session for startups, researchers and teams building on Tezos to introduce themselves and their work to the community. Our three presenters were:
- Awa Sun Yin, Co-founder of Cryptium Labs gave an overview of Cryptium Labs’ work in infrastucture & security, tooling development and worldwide community development.
- Martin Pospěch, Founder of Smart Contract Labs gave an overview of his recent work in building smart contract prototypes and commercial products on Tezos.
- In addition to our pre-announced showcase speakers, Juraj Selep took an open stage slot and gave a very brief overview of his work on a Trezor integration for Tezos.
A call for volunteers
Tezos Geneva has the aim to create a hub for Tezos in Switzerland and the surrounding regions. If you would like to help build the local ecosystem please get in contact with the Tezos Geneva team.
Where to find Tezos Geneva
You can also find Tezos Geneva at:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/tezosgeneva
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tezosgeneva/
Meetup: www.meetup.com/Tezos-Geneva/
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/tezosgeneva/
Facebook: www.facebook.com/TezosGeneva
