The East-West Crypto Conference (EWCC) on October 22 and 23 was the main event of the German Blockchain Week in Frankfurt with numerous top speakers from Asia and Europe. This week was created in order to better connect the east and the west — in particular — corporates, incubators, accelerators and investors with technologists and DLT providers.

Notably, there was a wide variety of speakers at the conference whom were partly research-driven such as the Perun Project, and the Quantum Computing talk by representatives of the Technical University Darmstadt, and a talk on token classification by the Host, Prof. Philipp Sandner from the Frankfurt School Blockchain Center. Additionally, finance and investment-driven presentations by Alexander Höptner from Börse Stuttgart and a fireside chat with Christian Angermayer from Apeiron Investments. There was also a Panel Discussion with Iconiq Lab and Chainfunder representatives.

Video of the panel discussion with NEM Solutions Architect István Deák.

The biggest highlight of the conference was the panel discussion on current developments, challenges and solutions in the Blockchain space with representatives from the top DLT platforms like NEM, IOTA & Dash. Unfortunately, Cardano and NEO dropped out shortly before the discussion, but the remaining panel, including István Deák from NEM Europe, provided interesting insights. For instance, István Deák explained that next to Tool Development, documentation, developer onboarding and funding, there are two extremely important aspects in NEM that help the ecosystem and will drive adoption.

1. NEM Foundation has started the NEM Service Partner network which includes training and certification of software integrators in NEM Blockchain development. These established software development companies have the industry and Blockchain know-how needed to integrate Blockchain for any player who lacks the personnel resources or Blockchain knowledge.

2.The features of NEM 2.0 Catapult have been derived from market demand, and are built into the protocol. By utilizing a special transaction type („Aggregated Bonded Transactions“) the behavior of „Pull Transactions“ can be achieved. As a consequence end-users can agree to transactions without paying for the underlying network fee (transaction fee), which instead is paid for by another account (e.g. the company utilizing Blockchain). This enables usage of the NEM Blockchain without knowing there is an underlying Blockchain involved at all.