On August 17th, Elastos participated in a community meetup at Bitwork. The event is the first of a series of community activities in Hong Kong. Attendees included programmers, blockchain personnel, crypto investors, tech enthusiasts, and the general public. Bitwork provides a co-working space for blockchain startups, and it also provides a venue for various blockchain activities such as talks, seminars, and hackathons.

The meetup started with an introduction given by Raymond Chan, co-founder of Bitwork. Clarence Liu, VP Development of Elastos Foundation, introduced Elastos and gave the audience an overview of the technology and recent developments. At the time of his speech, Elastos had reached over 60% of BTC’s hash power and the Ethereum sidechain had been up for public testing.

This could provide ample incentive for developers to develop smart contracts using the sidechain which comes with greater TPS and is secured by more computational power.

Clarence further introduced the recently launched Elastos Academy so as to provide a portal for developers to learn the various components Elastos offers and how they could dive into them.

Cyber Republic was also a key feature to introduce. Compared with the governance models used by many other “community-based” projects, Elastos’ founding team will disband and the community, through Cyber Republic, will take over the platform.

The fully decentralized nature of the Elastos platform is comparable to the Internet itself with its founding company Netscape having left the scene. Great technology cannot prevail without the support of contributors and users, so everyone is invited to join and perfect the ecosystem. Clarence encouraged the audience to apply for CR funding through making suggestions and proposals if they come up with ideas and wanted to try to build something.

During the break, Lawrence Hui, CTO of Bitwork, showed us how to set up an Elastos wallet; every attendee received an ELA airdrop, and voting for DPoS nodes was also demonstrated.

Kevin Wong, HK IPFS Community Lead & Protoschool Organizer, presented the global development of IPFS. While IPFS is not a blockchain project, many blockchain projects utilize it as a core part of their technology. Elastos has the decentralized storage solution Hive in development with significant improvement in terms of speed and the way it operates.

The once decentralized internet (Web 1.0) has been taken over by some large websites (Web 2.0); it is now the time we gain it back (Web 3.0), and IPFS is striving for this.

Winnie Law, General Manager of Genesis Block, introduced her company and business as a leading OTC trading center of digital assets in Hong Kong. Coming from their original business in cryptocurrency mining, they currently run over forty commercial-scale mining farms throughout Asia Pacific beside their OTC trading platforms. They were also very keen on spreading the knowledge about crypto to the general public and have set up various bitcoin ATM’s throughout Hong Kong, where people could purchase crypto more easily.

In the panel discussion, Clarence, Kevin Wong, and Clement Ip from Genesis Block discussed how community building drives business opportunities. It was obvious that community is essential to the projects, and each of them were striving to expand their community. While it is more direct for the Genesis Block to derive business from the community it built, the role community plays for Elastos and IPFS could be more profound.

The meetup was one of the initiatives of the Hong Kong CR Region. There will be one more meetup soon, together with promotion and marketing campaigns.