Unblock Tokyo - Blockchain Conference Recap
The Unblock Tokyo blockchain conference was hosted by BinaryStar and Asia Blockchain Week prior to Ethereum Developer Conference (DevCon) in Osaka, with many leading projects in the ecosystem attending. Here is a recap of some of the key presentations, with the detailed transcripts available on the Tokyo FinTech Medium Publication.
Ejaaz Ahamadeen, Global Lead for Digital Asset Design at Consensys, was interviewed by Nicole Nguyen, Head of Asia Pacific at Infinity Blockchain Ventures and Head of the Asia Blockchain Review, about Decentralized Finance, or DeFi in short. "It is important to understand that there are certain functions and products from traditional finance that make sense to operate on a decentralized public chain. And we are seeing this come to bear through their increasing popularity. In the ICO bubble, there was a lot of talk, there were a lot of white papers being written, and not much of substance being built. The difference between the ICO craze and DeFi is that there has been less talk about very few functions — lending, stable coins, margin trading — but there is actual development and building of infrastructure.", said Ejaaz. Please check out the full conversation here.
Pong Cheechrern, Technical Product Manager at OmiseGO, presented on “OmiseGO’s Plasma: Building a Production-Ready Layer 2 Solution”. "In late 2015, we came upon Ethereum, and we realized very quickly that transactions on Ethereum do not scale. We worked with different people within the Ethereum community, including Vitalik. And that really was the inception of the Plasma design, which is a way to scale Ethereum. So we created the first OmiseGO white paper and the first initial Plasma design called the “Minimum Viable Plasma”. And fast forward a little bit, we are at the point where we have the first released version of Plasma." For Pong's full presentation, please go here.
Gustav Arentoft, Head of Business Development (Europe) at MakerDAO, presented on “An Open Source, Bank Free Monetary Ecosystem”. "Decentralized Finance is the ability to create and have financial services without a trusted centralized entity. We are not going to take the system that worked for hundreds of years and say “this does not work anymore”. Instead, we are improving processes with technology, and we are reducing overhead. We are increasing efficiency by removing the middleman, and also replacing a lot of manual labor with automated actions executed by smart contracts. So this is a very important topic. For example, Compound, which is the second largest DeFi protocol, allows people to to deposit DAI, and you receive currently around 8.26%, or 8.54%. So that is very, very attractive for people who use DAI to gain a bigger piece of the pie, because instead of having the bank facilitating the transaction, you have a smart contract system in the middle." Please check out Gustav's full presentation.
Soravis Srinawakoon, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Band Protocol, presented on “Use Cases of Decentralized Oracles for Mass Smart Contract Adoption”. "At Band Protocol, we provide a standard framework for the Dapps to collect data from off-chain. We have a number of data providers, who need to stake tokens as a collateral at the protocol level. So they have some skin in the game, just like miners. These data providers push the data on-chain, so the data such as the price of Ethereum is actually written on the blockchain itself. This allows all the apps to consume the data instantly. Just like when they look up data using SQL, the apps can process the data within one transaction, there is no delay. And it is scalable — whether you have one app or hundreds of thousands of apps consuming the same data, there is no extra cost in the data provision. The data consumers, the decentralized finance applications, are paying a fee to access the data." Soravis' full presentation can be found here.
Dieter Shirley, CTO at Dapper Labs, presented on their new Flow blockchain. "So why do we have to build our own blockchain with Flow? Obviously, we are building on Ethereum today. Well, as we discovered with Crypto Kitties, the Ethereum architecture cannot handle the kind of load that games with mass appeal will bring to the network. And so we knew that we needed to find a solution that had better scaling properties. We looked at something called sharding, which is a great way to scale a blockchain. But it also means that it is very hard for smart contracts to talk to each other. We wanted to find a blockchain that was able to scale while having the full composability of smart contracts and being able to talk seamlessly to each other. Sharding does not allow for that. So we designed our own blockchain." Please also check out Dieter's full presentation.
Lastly, John Wang, Head of Ecosystem Growth at NEO, presented on “Decoding the Future”. "Now, NEO is building NEO 3, the next generation for the NEO mainnet. The reason we have started this program is because NEO wants to provide the optimal infrastructure for mass adoption. How are we going to do that? Allow me to highlight some of the features of NEO 3. The first point is on the architecture — dBFT 2.0 (distributed Byzantine Fault Tolerance), a new permissioning system, and we are also building new functionality for a NEO address and a NEO ID. On the tooling side, we are integrating with Visual Studio and building extensive documentation and tutorials." John's full presentation is available here.