Bringing Canada to Decentralized 2019

I attended Decentralized in Athens, Greece last year and I was impressed. The speakers were super engaging and the conference floor was buzzing with creativity and collaboration. Also, it was really, really fun. Since my arrival in Athens, I have been working to uncover ways to support Canadian companies to find the right partners to validate, adapt or commercialize their new technologies. ENTER Decentralized 2019.

Decentralized is a conference that is young (2019 is its 3rd year), dynamic and full of interesting people doing fantastic things around the world using distributed ledger technology. Canada is full of interesting people doing interesting stuff in this tech space and the Canadian Trade Commissioner Service has been supporting innovation since before it was a cool buzz word. So of course, the logical next step is to -- Bring Canada to Decentralized!

It's a great day when I can combine my passion for innovation with a fantastic event to support Canadian companies.

Thankfully, my light bulb moment also coincides with Start-Up Canada's 2018 Census results in which Canadian entrepreneurs recommend that government programs and policies be reviewed and pivoted to support greater entrepreneur and enterprise diversity, financing, scaling, and export needs.

In fact, when specifically asked how the Federal government can help, respondents asked for greater exposure and support to enter and thrive in export markets - specifically Europe.

Europe is definitely doing things differently than we are in Canada. The majority of the politicians here speak to large social needs and are trying to find ways that technology can better support society to link people and governments together. The entrepreneurs are then addressing that challenge by building technologies to support people to manage their data and finances to better interface with their governments and politicians. Europe is defining policies and systems to deploy eIDs but it's still anyone's game on the technology side. There are no clear winners yet.

Maybe the winning solution will come from a collaborative team composed of Canadians and Europeans? Well, that's obviously what I'm rooting for.

Step one: bring Canadians speakers to Athens to participate in the event.

(Here's where you picture Mister Burns with steepled fingers saying, "excellent...".)

Loudon Owen is the Chair and CEO of DLT Labs Inc., an organization which has completed the largest enterprise rollout of blockchain globally with Walmart. With experience working with many Fortune 100 companies, Mr. Owen's talk entitled, "Blockchain: The future of Enterprise Software", will detail the data management challenges that the largest companies in the world face and how blockchain will solve the existing IT problems facing these organizations. Leveraging his experience delivering the world's leading enterprise blockchain technology, Mr. Owen will deliver behind the scenes insights into how companies are approaching and solving some of their most prolific data management challenges at Decentralized this year.

Tanner Philip is the Technical Advisor to Ted Livingston, Founder and CEO of Kik, Founder of Kin. Mr. Philip has been with Kik since 2014, working across product, marketing, operations, and finance. Mr. Philip was part of the team that launched Kik Points, the precursor to Kin, and was part of the core team that developed and launched Kin in 2017. Prior to Kik, Mr. Philip studied finance and economics at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo where he wrote a thesis paper on Bitcoin.

At Decentralized, Mr. Philip will present, "The Go-to-Market Strategies for a Trillion Dollar Opportunity". Mr. Philip notes that in technology there have historically been once a decade opportunities: (i) put a personal computer in every home (ii) organize the world’s information, (iii) put a personal computer in everyone’s pocket (iv) establish the world’s address book, etc. Crypto is different. He believes that the opportunity to reinvent something as fundamental as the transfer of value is a multi-generational opportunity. In his talk, he will unpack these different strategies - pros and cons - the challenges and the opportunities. Mr. Philip says that the race is just starting to heat up, and the winner could be worth trillions of dollars.

Michael Thoreson is the Founder and CEO of KRATE Distributed Information Systems Incorporated. KRATE aims to enable self-governed data sovereignty; be it for an individual, the company, or government, within privacy regulation. Mr. Thoreson is passionate about solving real-world problems with blockchain, decentralization, self-governance, and data sovereignty. He is also a fan of the Saskatchewan Roughriders. At Decentralized, Mr. Thoreson will speak to "Self-Governed Data Sovereignty". His talk will posit that modern data privacy is an illusion trusted by many and explain why everyone should take back their digital lives. He believes that this can be done with self-governed data sovereignty and the KRATE storage platform.

I am so excited that these three gentlemen will participate this year and represent the variety in distributed ledger technology in Canada - some new tech and some established tech - but all with interesting ideas and experiences.

Step two: invite other Canadian entrepreneurs to the event.

If you are a Canadian company or innovator working with distributed ledger tech, the TCS in Athens can support you at Decentralized by:

• setting up B2B meetings for you with other attendees
• setting up meetings for you in Greece

As a Canadian attendee, you can use the code canada30 to get a 30% discount on your admission to the event - there are also two workshops being held on October 30th where you'll get to work with CORDA and Hyperledger and meet some of their teams.

It is sure to be a great event in a great European city!

Don't hesitate to contact me for more details or check out our Trade Commissioner Service information about this event at: https://www.tradecommissioner.gc.ca/greece-grece/events-evenements/0008888.aspx?lang=eng