Last November, Trace went out to San Francisco to attend Blockchain Week 2019 as a sponsor and speaker. For the first two days, Josh and Paul attended the Crypto-Economic Security Conference, where they caught up on the bleeding edge of decentralized technology, including a talk from Christian Catalini, the head economist at Facebook’s Libra (Paul and Josh were not impressed), and a positively dense presentaion from Ethereum’s founder Vitalek Buterin, who discussed the key aspects of the new and improved scalability of the Ethereum blockchain that will be rolling out this year.
Some emerging themes in the research community Paul noticed include a shift away from private and permissioned blockchains and back to public and permission-less ones (a philosophy he has long supported), layer-2 solutions that leverage the older POW blockchains like Bitcoin for their proven security, and a movement towards interoperability of blockchains using cross-chain protocols like Cosmos.
For the final three days of blockchain week, Trace’s co-founders had a booth where they had a chance to show Trace’s technology and vision to a wide cross-section of people, from investors, to entrepreneurs, to developers and technologists, to hemp and cannabis growers. Paul’s talk on day 5 was well-received, and we were invited back to speak next year! Check out his presentation here:
