Step off the plane at Bergstrom Airport on your first visit to Austin, and you come face-to-face with the boast: Live Music Capital of the World.

Is that the truth?

Perhaps. But true or not, it’s a trademark the city registered in 1991, when a survey suggested that Austin had more live music venues per capita than anywhere else in the US — and by hyperbolic marketing extrapolation, the World. So, eat your heart out Nashville. But allowing for the “marketing license,” it’s not entirely inaccurate. Estimates suggest that there are about 200 live music venues peppered across the city helping to employ the 1,900 or so bands and performing artists who have made Austin their home.

And then, of course, there is the regular invasion of musicians that attend the humongous South by Southwest (SXSW) music festival as well as the lesser but not insubstantial Austin City Limits Music Festival (ACL), The Urban Music Festival, the Fun Fun Fun Fest and more.

So, Is Austin Also The Cryptocurrency Capital of The US?

Of course, it is.

OK, I’m hopelessly biased. I want it to be so because I live here and I work for the blockchain business Permission.io, formerly Algebraix. But we are not alone. There are many other blockchain businesses here — and that should not be too much of a surprise, because…

Austin, if you didn’t know, is quite a large city — the eleventh largest in the US, just behind San Jose, but ahead of San Francisco. It has been a flourishing technology hub since IBM put a major office there in 1967. In those days, Austin was a college town and UT Austin was a major university.

There’s a back story to that. In brief… Texas ranchers got very wealthy twice: first as cattle ranchers and second as oil ranchers. Many of them were firm believers in education. So they bequeathed money to UT Austin and Texas A&M in considerable amounts. Generously funded and determined to compete with the Ivy League, these universities built first-class facilities and hired the best academic talent. No doubt, IBM was tempted here by the availability of graduate talent, and because Texas was, and still is, relatively inexpensive — that is, relative to Silicon Valley, New York, and Massachusetts.

But it wasn’t just Big Blue. By luck or fate, a local company Dell went from startup to tech giant in a decade, and by the time the Dot com revolution arrived in the 1990s, Austin was a hot bed of doomed dotcom businesses. It went from tech boom to tech bust in sync with California. Nevertheless, by the turn of the millennium, Austin had become a patchwork of tech ghettos and since then those ghettos have expanded to accommodate the offices of Google, Apple, Oracle, eBay, Facebook and many others.

Austin became an overflow-city for California tech companies who were experiencing recruitment difficulties on the West Coast, where taxes and property prices are more horrifying than a Texas javelina.

Where There Are Software Engineers, There’s Crypto.

You’ll find Factum, Steemit, Po.et, Arcade City, Blockchain Intel, Coin Clear, Pactum, Titanium, Consensys, and many other crypto businesses aside from Permission.io in Austin. If you want a long list of such companies, visit the Austin Blockchain Collective’s website. The collective showcases Austin crypto companies, through various meet-ups and events.

It was set up by Pete Harris, a long time associate of mine who was prodding me about crypto when Bitcoin was merely a toddler. There were early Bitcoin miners in Austin, in the days when you could mine Bitcoin on an old PC. If you’ve read Blockchain for Dummies (published in 2017) you’ll know that its author, Tiana Laurance, was a co-founder of Factom. The company was founded in Austin in January 2014, when Bitcoin was but a five-year-old.

So, in my view, all Austin needs to do to earn the title “Cryptocurrency Capital of the US,” is for one or two of the local crypto startups to grow like bamboo, and for Austin to register that phrase as yet another outrageous trademark. If we can steal “Live Music Capital of the World” from Nashville, surely we can steal “Cryptocurrency Capital of the US” from San Francisco or any other West Coast pretender.

Robin Bloor Ph D. is the Technology Evangelist for Permission.io, author of The “Common Sense” of Crypto Currency, cofounder of The Bloor Group and webmaster of TheDataRightsofMan.com.