What is Station F?

Station F is the largest startup campus in the world. The 34,000 square-meter building in Paris is home to 1,000 startups, along with entrepreneurship programs run by more than 20 of the most prominent tech companies from around the globe such as Facebook, Microsoft and HEC. Founded by telecoms entrepreneur and venture capitalist Xavier Niel, Station F includes event areas, a maker-space for engineers, a coffee shop, restaurant, and an additional on-campus housing extension currently in development.

Station F officially launched in June 2017, four years after Niel had the idea to buy the Halle Freyssinet train station from the government and turn the building into an entrepreneurial hub. In June 2018, they introduced a mentorship-based program specifically for blockchain startups run by ChainAccelerator — an independent company composed of international blockchain experts and a portfolio of companies.

French President Emmanuel Macron spoke at the opening, encouraging entrepreneurs to turn to Station F as a valuable and reliable resource to utilize for building their startups. Macron has made supporting tech entrepreneurship and investment in France a central element of his administration.

CryptoMondays

CryptoMondays was initially launched in New York City in 2018 by Lou Kerner in an effort to gather like-minded individuals from within the cryptocurrency space on a weekly basis every Monday. Whether they are developers, enthusiasts, entrepreneurs, etc., participants who attend these events share the mutual goal of advancing the industry as a whole. Kerner explains why his organization started CryptoMondays in this blog post.

These meetups are usually meant to be casual environments, with no organized panel discussions or structured itinerary for the participants to follow. It is meant to be simply an enjoyable evening where passionate individuals can exchange ideas, discuss hot topics and potentially contribute to one another’s success.

They now have almost ten-thousand active members from around the world who all share similar passions. Although CryptoMondays was founded in NYC, these Monday-style meetups are now held in over 30 different cities all across the world including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Toronto, Tel Aviv, Moscow, Shanghai, Mumbai, Hong Kong and Paris.

CryptoMondays Paris

CryptoMondays touched base in Paris on August 27th, 2018, but this specific event was relatively unique in its nature. For starters, it was held at the Station F facility, so there was an increased incentive to dedicate this event to ICOs. The meetup was also organized by Kerner to be more structured than the six previous CryptoMondays that were held in Paris, which followed a more casual style.

The event was sold out due to the high publicity circling around it because of its dynamic nature and its emphasis on ICOs — there were 600 inquiries in just a few days. Many people who were interested in attending could not receive tickets because of the capacity issue, which is not very common for CryptoMondays. There were approximately 200 attendees.

Amongst the scheduled activities was an organized ICO Pitch Competition, where pitches were evaluated by a panel of judges consisting of Kerner, Lee Wilson and Nicolas Cantu. The idea was to aid entrepreneurs in delivering their pitches in real-time by criticizing their weak points and appraising their strong ones.

There was a huge demand from ICO projects to participate in this competition and organizers responded by increasing the number of participants from four to six, selecting the most promising projects to present in front of the judges.

In a striking turn of events, the judges could not reach a consensus and decided to name two winners — Arianee and Wesep. The judges loved both projects and concluded that Arianee utilizes the blockchain in a very innovative way which can significantly impact the luxury industry.

It’s really these small victories that remind us how hard we’ve been working on Arianee and continue to push us to work even harder to provide the world with the best possible solutions to counterfeiting, ownership, and authenticity.