Missed the TechCrunch Sessions: Blockchain in Zug? Here Are Key Insights From the Conference

On July 6, 2018, a few hundred blockchain and crypto enthusiasts arrived in the Swiss town Zug, often dubbed Crypto Valley, for the TechCrunch Sessions: Blockchain event.

TechCrunch attracted a large variety of industry veterans behind organizations such as the Ethereum Foundation, ConsenSys, Hyperledger, Binance and Coinbase to speak at the conference. In this article, we highlight the top interesting insights from the event.

The Beauty of Open-Source Projects

In multiple interviews, the concept of open source was discussed. It may come as no surprise that all speakers were very optimistic about open-source projects as blockchain technology ideally is open sourced.

Galia Benartzi from Bancor emphasized that their project, but also most other blockchain startups, must realize that it really is a community effort and success is dependent on the strength of the community. Because of this, communication is very important. As advice, she shared that it is vital to take your community members seriously and also encourage them to take their own role seriously. Bancor, for instance, is really open for actual conversations with community members.

Jarrad Hope, from the Ethereum-based mobile communications startup Status, agreed and added:

Our online community is large, but their suggestions and critique really guides us. In the end, it’s open source and thus made for the people, by the people. Most of our core developers were actually already contributing and SNT token holders before they became core team members.

Benartzi also said, “Everything is under a magnifying class because of the blockchain environment, which is stressful for a startup but greatly improves accountability.”

Following this, Jun Hasegawa from OmiseGo went into detail about the partnership they just entered with Status, in which it became clear that OmiseGo is building tools that other Ethereum-based project really need. The spokesmen from OMG, Status and Bancor firmly agreed with the statement that “one of the coolest thing that blockchain founders are discovering is how much we need each other. Collaboration is essential and happening more and more.”

Brian Behlendorf from Hyperledger weighed in on the open-source principle in his one-on-one. He told the audience that Hyperledger has been around for about 2 years now and comes from the Linux foundation, which is the biggest, most successful open-source project we know.

Behlendorf said:

The ultimate vision of Hyperledger is based on the idea of open source. Through open source, we can collaborate on the more basic software to speed up to process. Because of this, we save a lot of time and money and we can use this to develop more specialized software and projects.

He added that, “Right now, blockchain projects do not really fail, they create interesting biological material for new projects to build on. There are no failures, just experiments that forward the industry as a whole.”

The Ethereum Foundation representatives also discussed the open-source principle.

The openness of blockchain projects was discussed and when the hosts asked how they feel about all their discussions being visible to the entire community, all 3 Ethereum developers agreed that it is the best way to go forward. No one person knows it best and through openness, progress happens much faster.

Finding Talent

Blockchain project are global, collaborative projects which means anyone can contribute to them. However, multiple interviewees indicated how hard it is to find talented developers.

Jarrad Hope from Status told the audience that the talent pool for the blockchain space is incredibly small and competitive. People that have experienced the evolution of the internet are seeing the same potential for blockchain technology. This realization is slowly attracting more talent to the space. Blockchain is a collaboration paradigm shift.

Balaji Srinivasan, founder of Earn.com and current CTO at Coinbase added:

One thing about blockchain is, the educational aspect of it, there is almost no undergraduate education and the are scarce, unstructured graduate education programmes. And yet it’s gonna become this huge thing that is revolutionizing the entire financial industry. We want to educate people to spread understanding of this disruptive technology.

This is the motivation behind Coinbase investing in informing and educating people about blockchain technology.

Experts on Blockchain and Cryptocurrency Regulations

The event also featured an interview with a regulatory panel.

Pierre-Edouard from PWC had the following to say:

A hands-off approach is much better than strict regulations and doesn’t kill innovation. In Gibraltar for example, regulatory bodies have taken a rather interesting approach where they try to regulate code and smart contracts instead of the tokens themselves. Regulating tokens is very shortsighted in my opinion. Regulating code is probably the way forward.

 

I personally do believe that automatization of most regulation can be done with blockchain technology itself.

 

I can’t wait to lose my job to technology-based regulations.

Mona El Isa from Melonport added, “If we just apply the old rules to this new asset class we risk introducing more risk to the market instead of reducing it. More global alignment of regulations would help the industry a lot, as the differing set of laws are serious roadblocks for blockchain startups.”

Binance News and Developments

Over the past few months, Binance CEO, Zhao Changpeng, has been emerging as a key blockchain figure. At the TechCrunch event, he shared some of the developments of the world’s fastest growing exchange.

When he was asked about Binance’ rapid growth of about $150 million in profits in the first quarter of 2018, he answered:

Binance is not a 6-month project, I’ve been working on exchange systems for 16 years.

 

Once I saw Bitcoin in 2013, I understood it and I quit my job to work full time in the space.

 

We had the advantage of the blockchain, which we believe made us grow big so fast. We could issue our own token, but also attract people globally which led to a huge user base. Blockchain is fully global.

About Binance moving to Malta, Zhao had this to say:

We want to be legal, and Malta makes this possible whereas other regulatory frameworks made us illegal.

On expansion to other countries, he said:

We are not actively looking at expanding in the US, as our competition is better positioned than we are. Right now, we’re talking to about 22-25 countries all over the world, for example  in Africa, but also Bermuda. Most of these countries are looking for investments and we are willing to invest, so it’s a mutually beneficial deal. Some countries want us but we think the rules are too strict, so we don’t go. We can be picky when it comes to choosing locations.

Zhao was also asked about the Binance investment fund and the plans for it:

We want to help the project we invest in grow, but we don’t want to have a majority stake because we are experts in what we do, not in the what project we invest in does per se. What we’re mostly interested in when we invest in projects devoted to improving the blockchain infrastructure. We especially like teams that are very technical but lack marketing and finance. We provide them with those, and they don’t have to worry about money anymore.

Any Tips for the Future?

It is always interesting to hear the thoughts of professionals in blockchain technology close to the sources of information, especially about what they think the future will look like.

Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan seems to be especially bullish on Ethereum, recapping the Coinbase announcement that they’re going to list more ERC-20 tokens and adding that he is personally bullish on Ethereum-based games and gaming implementations.

When Brian Behlendorf from Hyperledger was asked when he thought blockchain will become commercially available, he replied, “A lot of consumers are not going to realize they are actually using blockchain for financial transactions or even social media platforms. I think the first consumer application will be personal identity and reframing how digital identities work. Self-sovereignty in this regard will be the disruption in my opinion.”

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin, one of the key figures of the blockchain industry, was also interviewed. Most notable was his comment about centralized exchanges:

I definitely personally hope centralized exchanges burn in hell as much as possible. On the fiat to crypto side, it’s very difficult to decentralize because you ultimately are interfacing with the fiat world which is highly centralized. Decentralized exchanges will rise based on crypto to crypto trades.

 

The better decentralized exchanges are as a baseline, the more happy I am. That way, we can take away this stupid kingmaking power of centralized exchanges where they have the power which coins go big and cash big on listing fees.

Concluding Remarks

We’ve already been hearing a lot of talk about interoperability for blockchains and have seen a clear pattern of emerging partnerships, and these trends are affirmed by several project leaders. Open-source only works when people are open to collaboration and rational communication. Talent remains hard to come by even though the space is still exploding.

A novel idea presented at the conference is to regulate code and smart contracts instead of regulating the technology of cryptocurrencies. Binance opposes regulation too, as expressed by their CEO who indicates that they will solely focus on countries that welcome them with regulations they can work with.

Both Binance and Coinbase are especially interested in developing the blockchain infrastructure, which is a responsible and very positive attitude expressed by these two centralized crypto influencers — an influence Vitalik Buterin would rather see “burn in hell.”

Great insights from a great blockchain session. Click here to see all the TechCrunch Sessions: Blockchain interviews.