Female blockchain leaders took the spotlight at the first annual Blockies with Power Ledger’s Anya Nova shocked to be awarded the top individual honour.

“That’s insane!” Nova told Micky after winning Blockchain Leader of the Year, along with Female Blockchain Leader of the Year. “That’s fantastic. It’s totally unexpected.”

Leanne Kemp’s Everledger also picked up one of the major ‘Australian Blockchain Industry Awards’.

The Blockies at the APAC Blockchain Conference

The Blockies winners were chosen from 111 entries across 12 award categories and judged by board members from Blockchain Australia and the Australian Digital Commerce Association (which have now merged).

Anya is helping change the world

Nova is a crypto economist and product leader with renewable energy trading platform Power Ledger, which operates projects across the globe including in Japan, Thailand, the US and Australia.

She joined the platform just 18 months ago and her role has now expanded to encompass product leader for the forthcoming the Asset Germination Events, which will help to crowdfund the construction of new solar, wind or battery projects.

Nova said she was fascinated by blockchain technology and its ability to help drive renewable energy adoption and combat climate change.

“What I’m doing with Power Ledger is really important and satisfying work,” she said. “Any time you help people to invest in renewables, it’s incentivizing adoption.”

Nova said another rewarding aspects of her work, was helping to demystify the blockchain space for other women.

“My experience at some of the talks I’ve given is women come up to me afterwards and said you’ve talked about blockchain in a way I’ve finally understood,” she said.

Founder pays tribute to Nova

Power Ledger co-founder Dr Jemma Green paid tribute to Nova.

“Anya’s work in applying tokenomics to the energy space has been a game changer for Power Ledger, her work has helped to lay the foundations of a clean energy future driven by blockchain technology and peer-to-peer renewable energy trading,” she said.

Stellar field of nominees

Nova beat out a top notch field of nominees for the overall award including Michael Bacina, Nick Byrne, Benjamin Hall, Bok Khoo, Fred Schebesta and Kain Warwick.

Most of the nominees won other awards, including the larger than life Fred Schebesta (Finder.com and HiveEX ) who won Entrepreneur of the Year, Bok Khoo (Gaze Coin/Bok Consulting) who won Community Leader of the Year and Michael Bacina (Piper Alderman) who picked up Policymaker or Influencer of the Year.

Synthetix founder Innovator of the Year

Kain Warwick won Innovator of the Year for his work on Synthetix.io. Formerly the stablecoin project Havven, Synthetix is an experimental Ethereum platform that enables the trading of synthetic assets tied to the price of other cryptocurrencies.

Warwick said innovation was one of the key ingredients for success in the sector.

“Blockchain is an enabling technology, simply adding blockchain to an existing solution is not enough to solve hard problems,” he said.

“You need to rethink the problem from first principles to understand how decentralisation can improve the end-user experience. Synthetix has done this.”

Independent Reserve is top Aussie exchange

Independent Reserve won Digital Currency Exchange of the Year over Cointree and BTC Markets.

IR was the first Aussie exchange to offer insurance for crypto holdings and it partnered with KPMG on a crypto tax calculator.

CEO and Founder Adrian Przelozny said it was a privilege to stand alongside the other winners.

He attributed the award to the hard work and consistent effort the team put in to make IR a top tier exchange.

“I’m extremely proud of what we’ve achieved so far, and I look forward to progressing this further,” he said.

Other major winners…

Till Payments took home two major awards: Startup or Scale-Up of the Year and Blockchain Business of the Year.

Everledger and IP Australia were equal winners of the Government Blockchain Project of the Year while Project Bond’i won Corporate Blockchain Project of the Year.

ConsenSys won Blockchain Business Advisor of the Year for its work on projects including Oxfam/Sempo’s project Unblocked Cash (aid delivery using Dai), Project i2i (tokenising the peso and connecting rural banks in the Philippines) and a partnership with WWF Australia to help fund social impact projects.

Claudio Lisco, Strategic Initiatives Lead at ConsenSys said these projects highlight the company’s strengths and demonstrate how, “by partnering with us enterprise, financial institutions and NGOs can fully leverage the potential of Ethereum to implement new business and operating models, create access to finance and services, and ultimately achieve significant impact.”

For a full list of the finalists, click here.

https://adca.asn.au/finalists-announced-australian-blockchain-industry-award/