Things to Look Forward to at Token Summit SF
Token Summit SF is set for Tuesday, December 5th at Robertson Hall at UCSF. There are a limited number of tickets still available.
There’s so much happening in the ecosystem that it’s impossible to fit everything in a 9 hour agenda, but William and I gave it a shot (see here for the full tentative agenda). Here are a few things I’m looking forward to:
1) New product show and tell
One of our main objectives with the event is to give great founders a platform to showcase their products. In 2017, most of the attention has been on raising money via tokens rather than shipping products (unfortunately), but underneath the surface there are some impactful products being built.
Founders of new projects like Basecoin, 1protocol, dYdX and Ocean will be on display as well as more established projects like Cosmos, Numerai, Steem and Storj. We weren’t able to highlight as many as we’d like, but we’re excited about the teams that will be showing off beta and live versions of products.
2) Decentralized exchange discussion
Decentralized exchange is one of the few emerging segments of the ecosystem that is starting to experience real user traction. Yesterday, over 3% of ERC20 trading volume was on EtherDelta, the most widely used decentralized exchange (DEX).
The 0x project had one of the most successful new token launches this year and interfaces are starting to emerge on top of 0x’s DEX protocol like Radar Relay and Paradex. Kyber Network and OmiseGo are two pre-launch protocols that promise a vision of providing people around the globe the frictionless exchange of digital assets in a secure, trust-minimized environment. Will Warren from 0x, Loi Lou from Kyber, and Thomas Greco from OmiseGo will be talking about their vision for the future of decentralized exchange in the morning.
3) Scalability, scalability, scalability
It’s no secret that as currently constructed, blockchains cannot maintain performance as throughput increases.
There are a variety of approaches to blockchain scalability: protocol solutions like increasing the block size (BTC) and sharding (ETH), vertical solutions like Lightning (BTC), Truebit (ETH), Plasma ( ETH) and Raiden (ETH) and horizontal solutions like Cosmos and Dfinity. In the afternoon, we’ll have three of the best technical minds thinking about scalability, Jae Kwon (Cosmos), Jason Teutsch (Truebit), Joseph Poon (Plasma), discussing their vision for how blockchains will ultimately get to processing thousands of transactions per second and the pros and cons of their approaches.
4) Getting a feel for sentiment from a broad range of entrepreneurs, lawyers and investors
There’s an endless list of important unanswered questions as we head into 2018: Are we in a massive bubble? Will the regulatory landscape become more clear in the coming year? Do we really need a world of thousands of tokens? What are the use cases that take us beyond investment/speculation to real usage? People like Balaji Srinivasan, Juan Benet, Naval Ravikant and many others will touch on these questions and many more.
I hope to see you on December 5th but if you can’t make it, we’ll be filming the entire event so you can see view it for free online.
Special thanks to all of our sponsors for supporting the grassroots token movement, especially Ledger, Coinbase, Silvergate Bank, and Perkins Coie, who are four of the cornerstones for the whole ecosystem (they also happen to be service providers that I use and recommend).
About the author: Nick runs 1confirmation, an early stage crypto fund. Sign up for the newsletter and check out the next Token Summit in SF on December 5th.
