Previewing Consensus 2017

Consensus, the blockchain conference of the year, starts May 22nd, and I am excited to be attending for the first time. According to Coindesk, there will be over 2000+ attendees, 100+ speakers, and over 20+ countries represented.  Everything going on in the blockchain world will be covered, however, there are a few talks I’m most looking forward to.

Top Three Talks I’m Excited to See

Legality & Structure of ICOs

Speakers: Chris Burniske – Ark Invest – Moderator; Preston Bryne – Monax; Thomas Linder – MME; Matthew Tan – Etherscan; Peter Van Valkenburg – Coin Center

Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs), where crypto-tokens are offered for sale to fund a project, are a wild west of crowd funding these days for new blockchain projects. This talk should be lively as some people are convinced that these tokens are securities, and other people are convinced that these tokens are something new entirely.

Falling Behind? Is the United States Fostering Blockchain Innovation or Sending it Overseas?

Speakers: Perianne Boring – President – Chamber of Digital Commerce – Moderator; Jeff Bandman – FinTech Advisor – US Commodity Futures Trading Commission; Valerie Szczepanik – Head, Distributed Ledger Technology Working Group – US Securities and Exchange Commission

Blockchain based innovation really is worldwide, and it is inherently focused on value exchange, whether that’s currency or assets. What is interesting to watch is how blockchain solutions are being adopted in various countries. This talk should shed some light on where the US stands in all this.

Technical Challenges in Blockchain: Consensus Mechanisms & Smart Contract Verification

Speakers: Stefan Thomas – CTO, Ripple; Mark Staples Blockchain Group Leader, Data61

Smart contracts are a huge part of why people are excited about blockchain. The ability to distribute trust, computation, business relationships, and more is on the horizon. These two speakers are in the trenches hammering out that future.


Ultimately, I have no doubt the conference will be illuminating in many ways I can’t anticipate. I’m sure I’ll have more to write about what I saw and heard when I return.

Blockchain Businesses and Users

The blockchain business space is convex. By convex I mean that the businesses developing in the space are either large organizations, or small startups. The space looks a little like the graph below.

This isn’t necessarily good or bad, it just is. On the right of the graph you have very large organizations, like Accenture, Microsoft, and IBM. On the left you have companies like Monax, Ripple, and Coinbase.

Given the relative newness of blockchain technology the distribution of companies into two peaks, one of small companies and one of large companies, makes sense. Large organizations have the resources to test out new ideas without too much disruption to their business. On the other side, small companies have the agility, and often exclusive competencies, to try and build businesses around new ideas.

On the flip-side, the blockchain user space looks similar to the blockchain business space. The early adopters are largely very small users (e.g. individual holders of bitcoin), and large enterprise institutions. The chart is effectively the same as that for the business space.

Until a “killer app” for blockchain is developed the chart above will not change, and widespread adoption will not exist. For widespread adoption to actually exist the blockchain user space will have to look something like the chart below.

When midsize and small organizations are using blockchain, say a trucking company in southern Illinois or a local grocer in Argentina, then blockchain can be considered to have made it, but that is a long way off.