Following a successful ETHIndia, the Kyber team visited Germany for Berlin Blockchain Week from 19–25 Aug. This was the 2nd year that Kyber attended the blockchain festival, and oh Berlin, once again you did not disappoint!

Participating in Web3 Summit, DAOfest, Dappcon, and ETHBerlin, as well as many other ancillary events in between, we had a power-packed time sharing about Kyber’s liquidity protocol to some of the world’s best blockchain builders!

Some of our key takeaways from the week:

DeFi remains a massive trend in crypto, and is only getting more popular

We are seeing more creative composability in emerging DApps

A revival in DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations) interest

The developer community is getting bigger, and more diverse

We had the privilege to meet developers, marketers, and entrepreneurs from over 40 countries, and the passion and talent of the global blockchain community never ceases to amaze us.

Here we share some highlights from our Berlin adventure!

Web3 Summit

Kyber attended Web3 Summit held at the Funkhaus Berlin. There were many interesting subjects and speakers, including a talk by Edward Snowden (via video conference), but a big topic this year was on DAOs.

Luis Cuende from Aragon One spoke about Manifesto-based organizations, Ryan Zurrer, previously from Web3 Foundation, shared an Anthology of DAOs, and Yalda CEO of Autark showed everyone a DAO demo. The main stage highlight was a DAO panel comprising representatives from Aragon, Maker, MolochDAO, Digix, and Democracy Earth. One major lesson we gleaned from this panel was that for DAOs to be effective, the off-chain governance aspect is equally important, and we have to provide a conducive community platform (such as a forum) for critical discourse.

DAO panel: Shaun from Digix, Luis from Aragon, Mariano from Maker, Cassandra from Moloch, Santiago from Democracy Earth

Apart from the main stage presentations, participants could join small group ‘nodes’ with lightning talks and intimate fishbowl discussions about specific topics. We participated in #dgov (distributed governance network)’s group sessions, where we were able to hear diverse perspectives on DAOs within a short span of time, and learnt that there were in fact many organizations beyond Ethereum or blockchain that were interested in the concept of distributed governance. The various case studies reminded us that identity and dispute resolution remain key problems to address in this space. Thanks Max Semenchuk for hosting us at these sessions!

Between talks, we cleared our mind and re-energized by having coffee at the gorgeous lake next to Funkhaus Berlin.

We met Ana, DAO enthusiast who created DAppWall, an IP Firewall for Aragon, and Grace (not pictured), who was kind enough to give us a DAO handbook that she co-wrote.

DAOfest

Fresh from our governance discussions at Web3, we attended the inaugural DAOfest, initiated and organized by the DAOstack community as a grassroots effort, with support from the team. Ilan, Senior Engineer, and Shane, Marketing Manager, were invited to speak and present about our lessons from our own KyberDAO experiments #1 and #2, which used Aragon and DAOstack respectively.

The main outcomes and lessons of our experiments were shared, especially how conflict was inevitable in any complex governance system, and the importance of understanding your DAO community needs. We explained our strategy regarding how we plan to grow the Kyber community moving forward, and talked about how proud we were of our active community supporters such as Jacob, Felix, c slyr, littleboy, DidYouSayBitcoin, M L, Luan Ho, Venson, Helpful Brother, Chomsky, CryptoNerdJunior, as well as the KyberSquad (who helped organize a Kyber T-shirt contest and meme factory)! We also got to meet Phil who wrote a Hackernoon article on DAOs, and Adrien, one of the top contributors in the Genesis DAO.

Post-DAOfest party at Fullnode Berlin, Gnosis’ office

Thank you Felipe Duarte, Pat, Adam Levi, and all the DAOfest organizers for inviting us! We enjoyed sharing our KyberDAO experiences and we learnt a lot from the other governance talks.

Dappcon

Dappcon (Developer conference for Ethereum DApps and Infrastructure) by Gnosis was held at the Technical University of Berlin, and hosted over 600 attendees, with 20 interesting speakers from Aave, Argent, Aragon, Ethereum Foundation, DAOstack, Golem, Maker, MolochDAO, and more! Developers preparing for the ETHBerlin hackathon also attended Dappcon for the 24+ technical workshops conducted by various projects.

The Kyber team had a sponsor booth, which gave us a great opportunity to connect with many developers and industry professionals. We shared about Kyber’s recent ecosystem growth, our experiments with cross-chain swaps, as well as KyberSwap’s new features!

Of course, we had the coolest Kyber SWAG for visitors to our Dappcon booth!

ConsenSys, DeFi Saver, Synthetix, and Tornado Cash were at Dappcon too!

ETHBerlin Hackathon

To round up an awesome Berlin Blockchain Week, the team attended the ETHBerlin hackathon at The Factory, Görlitzer Park. This year’s edition was massive, with 730 attendees, 88 hack submissions, 61 speakers, and 36 judges! The atmosphere during the opening ceremony was absolutely electric, and we could tell that the hackers were eager to start building from the get go.

Here are some pictures from ETHBerlin:

Our friends from Matic Network , Aave, and Torus whom we met at ETHIndia were busy sharing about their technologies to the crowd.

It is important to destress during a hackathon by visiting the foosball table and the famous ball pit! Or you can get some ice cream at the Celo van.

There were plenty of rooms at the Factory to hack and rest, and our Kyber ‘token swap’ sleeping mask is perfect for helping you get some shuteye during the hackathon!

Hackathon projects powered by Kyber

We were glad to know that 5 teams built on Kyber during ETHBerlin. We truly appreciate their support and important feedback about our protocol and widget. What made us even happier was that many devs found our KyberWidget very easy to deploy when using our widget generator, allowing them to accept token payments on their platform within minutes.

Here are more details about these projects:

DitCraft

DitCraft is a project that decentralises the software development experience by empowering and incentivising the community to be involved in the git flow process. They used Kyber to allow their users to convert from Eth to Dai which is then transferred via the xDai chain, all via the DitCraft’s Git command line interface.

Set.Diy

Set.Diy allows users to create a basket of user defined tokens with Set Protocol. The purchase and liquidation of these tokens are done using Kyber. Set.Diy is developed by Timur Badretdinov who also created Dex.ag.

Unisaur.cz

Unisaur.cz is a project that is hacked together by the Akropolis team which allows users to buy tokenised Facebook shares by creating a collateralised debt position with Eth. Chainlink is used as an oracle to get the price of a stock and Eth on chain while Kyber is used to help users open a CDP with any tokens.

FryTheDeFi

FryTheDefi is a one-stop shop for newcomers to DeFi ecosystem with fiat on-ramp. FryTheDeFi is built using many projects, Kyber being one of them. The Kyber integration enables their users to swap from one token to another token without having to leave the platform, thereby embracing the “one stop shop” ethos!

Bearrowing

Bearrowing is a tokenisation layer that is built by the CryptoManics team who are the guys behind 1inch exchange and 1lend (and big winners at ETHIndia!). It allows their users to to tokenise their positions on the various lending platforms like Compound or Nuo, which can then be tradeable like assets on secondary markets. Kyber is used to convert tokens during re-borrowing!

Two other interesting projects that did not build with Kyber were SUDZ by Flex Dapps who won one of the prizes for building a special ETH mixer with Tornado Cash, and LSDai, who won another prize for using Market Protocol and rDai to convert variable interest rates on Compound Finance into Fixed Rates.

SUDZ and LSDai

#WunderBlock Berlin Scavenger Hunt

Throughout Berlin Blockchain Week, attendees attempted a series of bounties on Bounties Network as part of the WunderBlock Berlin Scavenger Hunt.

At the end of ETHBerlin, the top 5 winners on the leaderboard were able to claim a special care package made up of crypto swag from participating projects! Kyber was a sponsor along with other well-known projects in the Ethereum space such as Maker, Aave, AdEx, Bounties Network, Status, StateoftheDApps, and Axie Infinity.

Here’s a picture of 2 of our winners Nadia and Anett claiming their prizes. Congratulations!

Vanina from AdEx, Shane from Kyber, Lenka from Maker, Anett, Rajanie from Status

Meeting New and Old Friends in Berlin

POAP (Proof of Attendance Protocol)

You really see Patricio from POAP everywhere in the world! Glad to receive an exclusive Berlin Blockchain Week 2019 NFT badge as a nice memento.

Thanks to the handy Berchain Events Guidebook and the Blockchain Week Berlin events webpage, we never ran out of meetups and parties to meet interesting people from the blockchain community!

Wei from Streamr, ETHBerlinZwei Opening Party at the Yard, AVA Meetup with Emin, Dappcon Afterparty, Brett from EthereumCatHerders

THANK YOU Berlin!

Deniz, Bo, Simon, Shane

We would like to thank all the developers, organizers, and volunteers for making Berlin Blockchain Week 2019 a success and such great fun! Special mention goes to María Paula from Golem and Anna from Gnosis for your assistance throughout ❤

We will miss the burgers at Burgermeister!

To everyone we met in Berlin, we hope that you enjoyed our time together and managed to learn a little more about Kyber. Please stay in touch! Join our developer community and KyberDAO discussion group, and never stop hacking!

Kyber DeFi Virtual Hackathon

Some of you devs have already heard that Kyber will be launching a DeFi Virtual Hackathon soon with bZx, Chainlink, Compound, Melon, and Synthetix! We are working very hard behind the scenes to make it one of the most exciting online hackathons of the year. Stay tuned for more information in our developer chat :)

Other upcoming events for Kyber

Please contact Shane on Telegram for more information.