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This story is described in the 4Q number of PlayBook of the private PitchBook market.
In a surprisingly hot morning in October, several dozen devotees of a technology that they believe will change the world into a comic club on the third floor of a mall to discuss the future of the blockchain.
It was an unusual place to plan the revolution. A 10 foot tall inflatable ghost greeted the lecturers in front of the main door. A maze of darkened corridors passed an empty bar and abandoned pool tables to a back room, where photos of past artists like Joe Rogan and Kevin Hart stared off the walls. Inside, pockets of professionally dressed men and women sat on rows of tables arranged in front of a stage. There were scattered conversations and a sandy-haired child who seemed to be skipping the school. There were waitresses running around. There was only one man in a fedora.
They were here at the BlockchainNW Summit, this mix of true believers and opportunists, at the end of a year marked by several cryptocurrency busts and not enough bumblebees. It was just last winter that the price of a bitcoin rose to nearly $ 20,000, with a string of new million and billionaires and turning mom-and-pop investors around the world into cryptic speculators. But the last 11 months have seen prices fall, not just for bitcoins but for most of the hundreds of other blockchain-based currencies and tokens that have arisen from the ether, including what is known as "ether".
And this has caused something of an existential crisis for the family industry of professionals trying to turn blockchain technologies into big business. Is this the beginning of the end, or a bump in the middle of the road? Are the gospel blockchain believers crazy or the rest of the world? Is there something real behind all those and zeros? Is it all a joke? Is this why this conference was in a comedian club? I had so many questions.
Perhaps Justin Wu would have the answers.
This was his show. Justin is a co-founder of BlockchainNW and half a dozen other companies, a self-appointed "blockchain nomad" who has spent the past six months traveling in Asia and Europe to gain an international perspective on space. He is about twenty years old and on the day of the summit he wore a black T-shirt, a black jacket and black jeans, and that's how I imagined that all the blockchain nomads should get dressed. Things have had a difficult start. Justin went up on stage at 9:00 am, the scheduled start time, to timidly inform the crowd of technical difficulties. When we left half-hour later, there were other bad news: the scheduled speaker was a no-show. But do not worry: Justin would instead give us his opinion on the status of Blockchain.
I was confused in 10 minutes, which probably says more about me than about Justin. If he is a nomad blockchain, then I am a blockchain without knowing anything. I was fascinated by the boom of last year from afar, but the way everything works is still painfully obscure. I'm used to writing sentences, not code. What is a blockchain? I could describe it as a way to keep track of transactions and other data permanently and transparently, regardless of whether these agreements involve cryptocurrencies or other resources. But what is a Merkle tree? What are online ramps? This is when I start scratching my head.
Regardless of your experience, it was easy enough to understand from Justin's speech that it was a difficult 2018 for the cryptic community, full of scams and prices crashed by ICO and evanescent optimism, or "a year of infrastructure" "as Justin has kindly described. Another note of our guest's nomadism is that the small Mediterranean nation of Malta has been "a very welcoming environment" for the cryptic community, which can not be said for most countries.
At least not yet. This was part of the first panel of the day, which followed Justin on the stage to talk about ways to use blockchain technology for asset securitization. For Maggie Hsu of Fluidity, this means tokenise the debt and equity of real estate to provide more liquidity than typical real estate transactions and open the market to a new group of investors. For Mike Monohan of BAZAAR.market, it means doing the same with expensive items like vintage cars, again offering access to a typically opaque market that can be difficult for everyday investors.
For Bill McGraw of Northstar Venture Technologies, a Canadian blockchain company, it means working with Canadian regulators to develop a legal framework for such tokenized transactions. It wants to make Canada the next Malta, a place that founders and investors turn to all their needs for cryptocurrency.
"We believe that the regulated side is an opportunity," he said.
This was a vision of the future of the blockchain, attempts to graft the new technology on existing systems. To see the other side of the virtual currency, I had to meet my second Justin of the day.
Justin Renken is ARK's communications specialist. me, and he wanted us all to know that he used to do the stand-up, so he felt at home on stage. What is ARK.io? "We want to connect all the blockchain," said Justin at one point: there was a slide dedicated to the company logo: "It's very pretty, red and pointed". Halfway through his regulatory notice on how his presentation is not an investment advice, he offered 20 ARK (the company's cryptocurrency) to the first person who downloaded the company's app, which seems to be missing at least in part the point?
Maybe ARK.io will change the world. But at the end of a 20-minute commercial about the company's desire to be "actors, not observers" and create an "inspirational feedback loop", I had the distinct feeling that I had just moved from a field to buy a timeshare on Mars. . I do not understand how it works, and even if I did, I would not.
"I have a website called ARKStickers.com," the second Justin told us about the end of his session. "Send ARK stickers all over the world, it's very nice."
So at least there is.
The next was Caesars Entertainment's Rizwan Patel to discuss how the game giant could use blockchains to separate more people from their money. It was followed by QuarkChain's founder, Qi Zhou, who is developing ways to increase the volume of transactions that blockchain can sustain, apparently a major obstacle to widespread adoption. I learned that the "classic classic slave project" of the company is not as nefarious as it seems.
When you think of the blockchain, you usually worry more about the health of your wallet than about your physical body. But another branch of the community is dedicated to using the blockchain to improve both, including Change Healthcare's Davis Aites, which believes technology can help eliminate up to $ 1 trillion in waste and fraud in the US healthcare sector. .
"You could start radically saving money in the US healthcare system and improve care," he said.
What does it look like exactly? During a panel with Aites and two other health professionals focused on blockchain, Rajan Patel of GE Healthcare highlighted a possibility: use technology as a supply chain tool to follow the life of a drug from creation to consumption. Rich Bloch, the founder of Digitalhealthcare.io, offered the example of using a blockchain to maintain standardized medical forms for patients so that doctors in all cities and states can access the same unassailable record of a person's care.
These ideas reminded me much more of Maggie Hsu's plan to use the blockchain to facilitate real estate investments rather than Second Justin's mission to create a super blockchain and make ARK coins the currency of the future. For me, at least, the potential uses that are not related to cryptocurrencies continue to seem more interesting.
Now we were fine in our fifth hour of blockchain, and the crowd was beginning to thin out. But the next speaker certainly caught my attention: the sandy-haired boy who had the impression that he was skipping the school. As it turned out, it is exactly what Justin Ehrenhofer was doing. He is an executive of the University of Minnesota who has rescheduled an exam to be here. He also proudly said that he was an elderly moderator of the subreddit cryptocurrency, which is both a legitimate cachet in this room and perhaps an accusation of what counts for legitimate cachet.
"I'm the third Justin to talk to you today," he offered as an introduction. "I apologize for this."
The third Justin was here to talk about a coin focused on privacy called Monero. He could be the smartest person who spoke all day, and Monero's idea of enabling anonymous transactions certainly has his appeals. But in a short while, just as during the chronicle of Primo Giustino on the State of Blockchain, I was lost. It could be a good idea, but I do not understand it. If I can not understand it, I will not use it. And in terms of widespread adoption of blockchain, this is a problem. If technology is about to take hold, it will have to reach a critical mass of users large enough to create a network effect. For the Internet, it was email that showed the potential for altering the technology landscape.
What will make ordinary people want to use a blockchain?
In other words, they are on the same page of Greg Zinone. He took the stage for a panel of electronic sports wearing a black T-shirt stretched over muscular and tattooed arms that read "Injustice against all". He wore a black hat with his beak pulled down almost over his eyes – all in all, a look a little different than most of the cryptic crowd.
And he also had different ideas. After introducing himself and what he does – Zinone is the CEO of 514 eSports and Pro Vs. GI Joe, two companies focused on bringing athletes and other celebrities into e-sports – quickly launched an appeal to the blockchain community to broaden their horizons.
"The people here are intimidating," he said, "I do not feel included in this group. You need something different."
This is perhaps the main Catch 22. of the Blockchain. It becomes exponentially more useful the more people use it, but the barrier to entry is incredibly high. Smart people can make an effort in good faith to understand what a blockchain is and completely fail. And it's not fun not to understand it.
"When it comes to the normal person, you have to make things fun," Zinone said. "I mean, who wants to come to this conference? Justin, no offense."
I think he was talking to First Justin. But at that point, I could not be positive. It had been a long day, and it was dark in the comedy club, and the sun was still shining outside. I have not understood the ramps yet. As I left the conference, the rest of the bar outside the comedy was starting to fill up. The pool tables were no longer deserted. The true believer blockchains had been their first, but the rest of the crowd was beginning to gush out.
