On Sunday we were in Shenzhen presenting before Vitalik Buterin

Over the weekend, we were in Shenzhen China for the APAC Ethereum Community Conference. It gathered a good mix of Ethereum developers and researchers, founders from notable Ethereum projects, investors, as well as Ethereum community representatives from China, Korea, Singapore and the United States. Even though it started early on a Sunday morning, we were thrilled to see a full house from beginning to end.

It started off with a few sessions of tech trainings with topics including: sharding and scalability, Parity wallet and consensus. It was followed by use case discussions from some of the most innovative blockchain companies, including Consensys, Kyber, OmiseGo and more. I was on stage to speak about data storage and management on blockchain. Right after me, Vitalik Buterin who closed off the night with a keynote about privacy on Ethereum.

Blockchain interest in Asia is heating up fast. The enthusiasm of Chinese people on blockchain technology seems not defeated by the ICO ban in September. It was exciting to see that the local community has grown substantially from 100,000 to 500,000 in the past 6 months. Korea has topped the world in terms of the volume in cryptocurrency exchanges. They also owned 3 of the world’s 10 largest exchanges.

In the past year, many people talk about “banking the unbanked” — helping more people get access to financial services with blockchain. Now an old topic came back: “unbank the banked” with blockchain — going decentralized across a number of services.

Lowering the entry barrier for end users to access cryptocurrencies is also a key factor to drive blockchain adoptions. Projects like Kyber (a decentralized exchange) & Bluzelle are striving to make blockchain and crypto integration more seamless. In the future, with better interface design, people may not even know they are using any cryptocurrencies while they are enjoying a safer internet.

It was a fruitful one-day conference and great to see how much this space has achieved so far. So after ICOs dominating talk in 2017, what’s next in 2018?