I travelled 3179 miles from Ireland to go to the Tokensummit. Here are my main takeaways:
The cost to attend was 1/5th the cost of Consensus tickets. This led to a good mix of developers, investors, lawyers, hobbyists, researchers and startup founders.
Promising signs
Siacoin, Civic and Brave stood out to me as having a combination of strong development teams and an ability to execute. Juan Benet & Muneeb Ali also spoke with great clarity about IPFS & Blockstack.
0x was the most promising project that I hadn’t heard of. Its a peer to peer exchange for ERC20 tokens. You can learn more here. Prism, a portfolio management application from Erik Voorhees has the potential to be the first widely used smart contract application. Chris Burniske’s talk on valuations had every suit wearer in the room furiously scribbling notes.
Worrying signs
If there was a consensus on one thing, it is that ethereum is great. A number of people used the following logic: It has most of the new token sales so there is huge value in that. It is worth considering if the opposite is true, that this dependency creates a more fragile scenario for tokens. Interestingly Civic was the only company that discussed issuing their token on RSK.
There were very few dissenting voices on the viability of the token sale model. I would like to have seen more of a heated debate around the potential dangers inherent in this structure. Tone Vays, who was in attendance would have been useful on a panel.
Long term
The event was oversubscribed and benefitted from the small venue. Apparently some people were willing to spend 5x the ticket price to get in. I suspect the next version will be bigger and it will be hard to for the organisers to resist the big corporate sponsor invasion that Consensus suffered from.
My long term view on the current token model is neutral. Not a very satisfying conclusion but I’m trying to hold the ideas of the bitcoin maximalists, the token evangelists and the confused lay person in my head. Picking tech breakouts is very difficult so beyond Bitcoin and Stripe, I rarely do it.
Overall it was well organised and brought together some of the best people in the space. It will be interesting to look back on it in 5-10 years.
The cost to attend was 1/5th the cost of Consensus tickets. This led to a good mix of developers, investors, lawyers, hobbyists, researchers and startup founders.
Promising signs
Siacoin, Civic and Brave stood out to me as having a combination of strong development teams and an ability to execute. Juan Benet & Muneeb Ali also spoke with great clarity about IPFS & Blockstack.
0x was the most promising project that I hadn’t heard of. Its a peer to peer exchange for ERC20 tokens. You can learn more here. Prism, a portfolio management application from Erik Voorhees has the potential to be the first widely used smart contract application. Chris Burniske’s talk on valuations had every suit wearer in the room furiously scribbling notes.
Worrying signs
If there was a consensus on one thing, it is that ethereum is great. A number of people used the following logic: It has most of the new token sales so there is huge value in that. It is worth considering if the opposite is true, that this dependency creates a more fragile scenario for tokens. Interestingly Civic was the only company that discussed issuing their token on RSK.
There were very few dissenting voices on the viability of the token sale model. I would like to have seen more of a heated debate around the potential dangers inherent in this structure. Tone Vays, who was in attendance would have been useful on a panel.
Long term
The event was oversubscribed and benefitted from the small venue. Apparently some people were willing to spend 5x the ticket price to get in. I suspect the next version will be bigger and it will be hard to for the organisers to resist the big corporate sponsor invasion that Consensus suffered from.
My long term view on the current token model is neutral. Not a very satisfying conclusion but I’m trying to hold the ideas of the bitcoin maximalists, the token evangelists and the confused lay person in my head. Picking tech breakouts is very difficult so beyond Bitcoin and Stripe, I rarely do it.
Overall it was well organised and brought together some of the best people in the space. It will be interesting to look back on it in 5-10 years.
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