Last week Neeraj and I had the opportunity to present at NEO’s first Developer Conference held in San Francisco. As our goal is to become the defacto database for all dApps — regardless of the blockchain, this was a great event to show how Bluzelle is made not just for Ethereum. Here are some of my takeways:

Being that NEO comes out of Asia, I was curious to see how many people from San Francisco would be interested. The turnout was way more than I expected. On the opening day, the room was packed to hear the opening keynote by NEO CEO Da Hong Fei. The NEO team told me they had sold out the event and had allowed more people in.

Opening keynote by NEO CEO Da Hong Fei

The crowd was a mix of crypto-currency investors and developers. But it was all about the technology. Which was very good to be part of. A lot of conferences nowadays focus on tokens, ICOs and finance. Technology is usually secondary. All the talks we engaged in outside of the main room was about technological innovations and what each project was planning to achieve.

There are now 28 dApps being built on NEO. The numbers are growing and this gives more people confidence in the platform. After the conference I bet more will be signing up.

NEO gave an opportunity for many different technologies to be showcased. Red Pulse, the first project to do their ICO on NEO, showed off their platform and how tokenizing research can benefit people. Zilliqa did a nice dive into their system on building a blazing fast blockchain.

It was interesting to see NEO was keen on talking about the whole blockchain ecosystem, it wasn’t just about NEO all the way. There was a talk by Fenbushi counsel on Crypto-currency regulations in Asia; a Stanford professor spoke about efficient transaction models using bulletproofs; there talks on AI; and as the video below shows, we were able to present on how blockchain can solve the coming data management problem.

Neeraj and I answering questions about our consensus model during our presentation at NEO Devcon.

With Zilliqa team in San Francisco. The only people wearing jackets here are the three people from Singapore.

Being this was our first event since we finished the ICO, it was really humbling to have people come up before we presented saying how they were huge supporters of us. Many had said they were following us for a long time and believed in the team and product. I know everything is global and we interact online with the Bluzelle swarm, but meeting people in person is a different level of satisfaction. We ended up giving away a lot of T-Shirts.

Thanks to everyone who was in SF and came by to say hi and talk tech.

For those who are interested to watch the full presentation of Bluzelle during NEO Devcon, here it is: