On 16th June, more than 1,000 blockchain professionals and enthusiasts descended on to the city of San Francisco for LATOKEN’s Blockchain Economic Forum. Those in attendance got to hear from over 200 speakers – all experts in their field – on topics including biotech, the future of capital markets and regulation.
As befitting a major international conference, the event featured some high profile individuals, who shared their views on the ever growing sphere of blockchain and the huge potential the tech has for real-world applications.
Venture capitalist and Draper Fisher Jurvetson Founder, Tim Draper, explained that “80% of what a government does can be done in the Blockchain, it can be done with smart contracts.”
Projecting Bitcoin at $250,000 by 2022, Draper shared the story of an encounter he had with an Argentinian entrepreneur, who told him his family has lost their entire fortune three times in the 30 years since he was born, due to the government repeatedly either taking it or making it worthless. This has made him determined to bring Bitcoin to his country, as, despite its volatility, it is bound to change things for the better.
Blockchain and Bitcoin’s huge potential in ending government corruption is part of what makes them so exciting. Eva A. Kaili, a member of the European Parliament who was behind the resolution on distributed ledger technologies and blockchains, revealed that the EU spends up to $500m per year on exploring various blockchain applications.
Perhaps unsurprisingly for a tech conference, not all experts were strictly human. In a panel titled The New Life, humanoid robot Sophia said: “This is the year that humanity discovers the world’s model and recognise that life is a programme evolving to survive. This programme in the format of DNI and ideas stored in chromosomes in brains. Humans have the nodes of biological blockchain.”
While many of the experts agreed that much still needs to be done in terms of regulation and mainstream adoption, it’s forums like this one, which bring the best minds in the sector together, that will help speed up and inform these processes.
LATOKEN’s CEO Valentin Preobrazhenskiy summarised the event’s appeal: “The forum is a great place for the market leaders to introduce and reinforce rules of self-conduct protecting uninformed contributors and preventing misuse of crypto transaction, while scaling benefits such as built-in rights registry, early adopters acquisition and low transaction costs due to absence of middlemen.”
