Last Friday, we gathered a group of like-minded Blockchain enthusiasts on the first OriginTrail Blockchain Meetup in Ljubljana. It was a truly regional meetup — 3 great teams from 3 countries (🇸🇮 🇭🇷 🇷🇸). Each team has its own mission, but decentralization is one common point that connects them.

What is so unique about the blockchain technology and what does it take to program smart contracts? How will it impact the business landscape and our lives? Our guests presented their projects and shared their personal experience. We can sum it up in Three Big Ideas.

“Ethereum is going to change the world.”

While this can sound like a buzz sentence in this day and age, Andrej Čvoro from Belgrade-based DeCenter had that thought already in 2013 when he first discovered Ethereum. He was following Bitcoin before, but as a developer, he couldn’t do much with it. Then he soon developed a decentralized messaging system as a proof-of-concept and has been working on programmable smart contracts ever since. Now he is leading a group of developers working on decentralizing all kinds of applications.

“Algos are taking over.”

Algorithms, that is. As it already happened in traditional financial markets where now more than 80% of market volume is automatically traded by algorithms. Algorithms are now bound to make a bigger break-through to more volatile crypto-finance markets as well, said Nikola Jokić, CTO of Digital Assets Power Play. To help match developers of algorithms with crypto investors, this Croatian startup is developing a powerful platform that will enable access to successful strategies. In the days after our meetup, Digital Assets Power Play successfully finished their token crowdsale. Congrats, guys! 🙌

“Trust will be decentralized.”

With the blockchain, trust is not connected to a central authority anymore. Our co-founder and COO Žiga Drev presented the next step of the OriginTrail platform for the first time to the local audience. We have been bringing traceability to food supply chains in the past years and have developed several working solutions with our strong partners. This data is already connected to blockchain with cryptographic hashes that serve as a proof of data immutability.

Now we are planning even one step further — full decentralization of trust. We are developing a global platform that will safely store supply chain data on a distributed network. Furthermore, this will enable development of decentralized apps for showing the origin of products, for managing, auditing or certifying any product supply chain, and much more. Co-founder and CTO Branimir Rakić walked the audience through the technical part of the solution and explained all layers of the system.

The video of all three speakers is available on our Facebook page.There were more ideas on blockchain and decentralization shared at the panel discussion that followed, and later by the snacks and drinks. Huge thanks to our partners Zelene Doline (Celeia Dairy), Ferdinand Wines and Klet Brda winery who provided them!

Did you miss the meetup or have any further question? Join the discussion on our Slack or join our Meetup group to be notified of our next events.