IPSX Community Meetup #1 — Follow-up and key takeaways

This week, we started our series of events dedicated to the IPSX community. Those of you who watch us closely might have noticed that we’ve organized some events for the Romanian blockchain community, but on July 2nd it was the first time we met the IPSX enthusiasts and investors in particular.

150+ people, speakers from 4 countries have attended the event in a beautiful venue, in Bucharest, and we’d like to thank them for that. Some of our speakers shared their progress, others their visions on how blockchain will evolve in a couple of years.

We give you below a brief presentation of each theme explored by our speakers on the meetup:

George Bunea, CEO & CO-Founder IPSX: A Distributed Network Layer

You already know what we’ve been doing lately, especially if you follow our weekly updates, but here are some punchlines from George’s intro.

A little bit of history: the whole project started with one of our co-founders who owned a business with domain names; that’s how we came up with the idea;

Product development: we’re on time, following our product roadmap, functionalities, features, MVP ready, challenges;

Community development;

Next steps.

What our guests talked about

James Kim, CMO LIVEEN: Personal Data – Fair Rewards For Users’ Data

James Kim or Jongsoo Kim by his original name is the Chief Marketing Officer of LIVEEN, a blockchain based data-platform that provides fair rewards for users data. To put it in simpler words, it’s a platform where users are rewarded with VEEN coins, based on their reputation when uploading their data and content.

James took the stage and shared details on their business case and product development strategy: why there’s a need to build a product based on real-time data and how the user economy works. LIVEEN’s beta testing phase will kick off on this October, and the official release of the product is expected for January 2019.

Bruce Pon, Founder Ocean Protocol & BigchainDB: A Roadmap for Public Intelligence Networks

We know how busy these months are for our friends from Ocean Protocol, with such a vibrant community around them and many events to attend. That’s why we’re 10x happier we’ve managed to have the founder himself in Bucharest, on our stage. Bruce Pon, the Founder of Ocean Protocol & BigchainDB definitely nailed his presentation and engaged with the audience.

For those who don’t know, Ocean Protocol is a decentralized data exchange protocol to unlock data for AI. It uses blockchain technology that allows data to be shared and sold in a safe, secure and transparent manner. The first step towards this is to decentralize data in a self-sovereignty attribution model. This is how they came up with Bigchain (a combination between “Data” and “Blockchain”). This stands out for an ecosystem that differentiates through immutability, queryability, and the fact that it’s operationalized,scalable, and it provides decentralized control and native assets.

Bogdan Nicoara, Co-Founder Hey, Be Well: Blockchain & Healthcare

Bogdan and the Hey, Be Well! team plan on using blockchain to handle health data records interoperability, identity and reputation and drug supply chain integrability & traceability. All these to help users around the world feel more motivated to achieve their life goals.

To give you a bit of context, the lack of interoperability between healthcare providers costs 150.000 lives and $18.6 billion per year worldwide. 10% – 30% of drugs in developing countries are fake. Yes, this is huge.

Marco Houwen, Advisor IPSX: DAO Leadership

Marco is a blast in our team, to say the least. He is renowned among blockchain enthusiasts as a successful entrepreneur and blockchain supporter. He’s advising IPSX being mainly in charge with the offer side on our IP Exchange platform (corporations and Data Centers). Besides this he’s also the Project Lead of Infrachain, a publicly supported non-profit organization focused on shortening the adoption curve of blockchain by creating a community driven European permissioned node network. But his off stage talk at IPSX Community Meetup was focused on his recently launched handbook on distributed and connected leadership. An exhaustive management book for the 21st century in which Marco speaks about shifting mindsets, and management and communication tools.

If you’re into reading, put this book onto your list and improve your business skills. If you’re more into applicable learning, Marco is up for a workshop in Amsterdam, on 5 – 6th September, a DAO Leadership Workshop we recommend you join. Details about this event at marco@daoleadership.com and grace@daoleadership.com.

Samuel Kurtmann, CEO & Founder Impetus One: The Lifeblood of Blockchain

The lifeblood of blockchain — is there any other better title for a talk about a company that aims at disrupting the online advertising industry?

The team behind this project came up with a new advertising model based on a pay-per-mission principle. Changing the paradigm in online advertising, in this new landscape the customer is not the target anymore, but rather a partner to be rewarded, based on a mission completion principle, for the benefit of the entire ecosystem.

At our community meetup, Samuel Kurtmann, the CEO & Founder of Impetus One, spoke not only about their product, but also about how they envision blockchain in 5 years from now, and

how we can foster the adoption of the blockchain. Here are 3 of the main ideas in his speech:

It should be a lot more than just talking about Return On Investment A better infrastructure based on market feedback A more user-friendly UI, allowing less technical users to join.

Pavel Antohe, CEO & Founder Kuende: Challenging the Social Media Behaviour

As everything else out there, it all starts with an opportunity. Or 6 of them:

Content creation needs new ways to monetize Content ownership needs a decentralized approach Data security needs a consensus and encrypting data People need fast and safe payments Communities want to support upcoming ideas Communities want to work on and for meaningful causes

When all these come up together, a new project arises: Kuende — the first blockchain fueled hybrid online-offline social network focused on real-world gamified challenges. Pavel Antohe, the CEO & Founder of Kuende joined us on stage at IPSX Community and shared all these with us.

Adrian Irimia, Founder cryptoland.tech: A Romanian born blockchain community

Blockchain itself is the proof that communities can change paradigms, can disrupt industries and innovate where no one thought was possible.

Adrian Irimia is the Founder of cryptoland.tech and we’re proud to have him supporting our project and working so hard to develop a prosperous blockchain community in Romania and abroad. Over 100 software engineers and product people are now part of the Cryptoland community, with 2 successful meetups so far, and a couple upcoming.

All in one sentence: it’s been great to connect with all of you and we thank you all for being with us, see you next time! All these meetups are not about increasing our visibility, but more about finding new opportunities to work together, develop new projects and explore the true potential of the blockchain technology.

Until next time, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, GitHub, join us on Telegram and read our weekly updates on Medium.