Datum recently attended Ethereum DevCon3 conference in Cancun, Mexico — arguably the largest gathering of Ethereum developers. We sent a total of four people; Lead Developer Florian Honegger; Cynthia Lo (forging ecosystem partnerships); Chris Miess, one of our trusted advisors and myself.

Legal compliance, oh yeah, sexy :)

The red area shows what may fall under security classification by SEC

In the light of growing ecosystem, before Vitalik’s keynote talk, organizers set up a brief talk on the legal aspects of Ethereum Tokens. We highly recommend this talk to anyone, it is the most concise and precise overview of what may qualify as Utility or Security Token under US law that we have seen so far. The fact that this was essentially the first talk of the day also highlighted the importance of legal compliance. We can all build decentralized blockchains that are unregulated, but at some point many projects have touch points in the real world and need to ensure that they are compliant with regulations, whether we agree with the current status of regulation or not is another question.

At Datum, we chose to be legally compliant from day one, working with KPMG Switzerland as our Legal Counsel to structure our Token Sale and interact with regulators and authorities in Switzerland, and requiring full KYC during our Token Sale.

You can watch the full Devcon 3 Day 1 stream here, with the legal compliance lecture coming first:

Ethereum Devcon 3 Day 1 Stream — you can watch the whole eight and a half hours here.

It’s all about location

We had a beautiful view at breakfast, but that was all we got to enjoy of Cancun, given our accelerated road map there was no time for R&R and no Datum team toes touched any sand, we’ll have to leave that for another time! Instead we spent four fully packed conference days attending talks, discussions, meetings and networking.

The Future

There was lots of discussion and talks on security of Smart Contracts, a very important aspect, as the recent Parity MultiSig Wallet “bug” showed just a few days ago. Datum is not affected by the said errata, e.g. bug. We also enjoyed talks about scaling of Ethereum, many new features and improvements in the developer tooling, something we very much welcome. If you have done any DApp development so far I think you would agree that documentation and tooling is still very much in flux at the moment and any improvement is most welcome.

Conclusion

DevCon3 was all it promised to be, we met many old friends and made many new ones. The Ethereum ecosystem is still relatively young and going into 2018 it will be important for projects to collaborate, as no end user will want to deal with 1000 different tokens. As such, we are starting to forge partnerships with many other projects to integrate with each other and the meetings at DevCon3 lay the groundwork for this initiative. Expect announcements soon.

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