What. A. Week.
An amazing event. Well done to the Aus Crypto Con team - David and Matt and many others behind the scenes.
First up, we got to meet so many cool people at the event. If you thought we are in a bear market, think again. Because whilst we are down on price, we are still high on the biggest asset, the people. Prices can fluctuate, but the people who are here and believe in the ability of blockchain tech to be transformative remain strong in this space.
We had 2 talks on Saturday. A panel in the afternoon on the first day about doing better in DeFi (and Web3) and another, filling in for another speaker who felt unwell earlier in the morning. We brought up some pretty cool things such as the new event we’re running with Stone and Chalk in Sydney on the 28th. We love our other venue but we needed to expand and we’ll still use it for future events but a new home for now. We also announced a partnership with Seoul DeFi in South Korea so the moves towards going global have already begun.
The most interesting thing we spoke about, for us, at least putting my venture studio (NotCentralised) hat on, was the Regulatory Wrapper project we’re embarking on. The basic idea is to create a set of smart contract templates for developers (similar to ones they already use with providers like Open Zeppelin) but with compliance built in. This is something we see as necessary to get us to mainstream sooner. We can wait on token mapping exercises and they’ll no doubt be fruitful. But, rather than wait for when these happen, we can actively do something.
The platform we're building provides wrappers on tokens that imbue them with the necessary abilities to comply with Australian jurisdictional law. These types of wrappers would be done by other jurisdictions too and by working with law firms that help shape regulation anyway, we can ensure a few things:
Developers can create programs with lowered risk of having code that gets misused
Regulators see an industry taking actionable steps towards protecting consumers
Lawyers get to see their advice actioned in a meaningful and positive way
Web2 companies become more accepting of web3 capabilities because it’s now seen as safer to participate
At the end of all this, web3 businesses get to see mainstream access sooner and we move the needle forward for what blockchain tech enables in the future.
Apart from that, we also gave updates on the real-world use cases of crypto we’re building with TradeFlows (link) and we got to chat with a bunch of different, interesting businesses who either had stalls or had their members in the audience.
Next year the event jumps over to Melbourne and no doubt we'll be there to help and participate and continue to take big bold steps that move web3 forward.
Check out some of the Tweets from the event
Additionally, it was fun to get on The Assets Show with Rob Kaay and Ed Keay-Smith - check out this video and the other shows they’ve done
News
Looking at the news it was all Merge, Merge, Merge and we saw videos in the lead up to the final hours before the event (such as this one from The Defiant)
As well as post-mortems highlighting what happened after
Furthermore, if you need to learn more about what this is all about you can check out this video from Finematics
It wasn’t all Merge news as we also saw Starbucks getting into the NFT space with its Odyssey community which rewards loyal customers with perks. It downplays the blockchain component of the products which is a direction we’ll likely see more and more real world products go - https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/12/starbucks-unveils-its-blockchain-based-loyalty-platform-and-nft-community-starbucks-odyssey/
We also saw South Korea issue an arrest warrant for Do Kwon of Luna/UST fame - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-14/south-korea-seeks-the-arrest-of-terraform-labs-founder-do-kwon
In institutional moves, we saw Fidelity, Charles Schwab, Citadel and others come together to form a new crypto exchange, EDM Markets. This continues the pattern of institutional money coming into the digital assets space - https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/09/13/charles-schwab-citadel-fidelity-and-others-start-crypto-exchange-edx-markets/