The Origin Protocol team enjoyed a productive trip in New York City during Blockchain Week. It seemed like the entire blockchain world converged in the Big Apple and it was a great opportunity to meet with our investors, advisors, and our current and potential partners. It was by far the largest event we have attended and we are happy to share a quick recap of our trip.

Ethereal

Our head of community, Andrew, attended Ethereal hosted by ConsenSys. He had a great time hanging out with the Web3 team and learning about the future of the decentralized web. Sid Coelho-Prabhu from Coinbase gave a great talk about the current state of affairs. Our friends from Gitcoin gave a presentation on their project for monetizing open source development. It was nice to see TrueBit’s Doge-Ethereum Bridge art project here after seeing it at ETHDenver earlier this year.

Consensus

Consensus, hosted by CoinDesk, was the largest event during Blockchain Week and it did not disappoint. It was a frenzy of networking, meetings, and after conference events for us. It was very interesting to see the mixture of people and companies in attendance. Wall Street and the financial world is taking more and more of an interest in blockchain technology and huge companies like IBM, Accenture, and Deloitte had a large presence at Consensus. We met a ton of people from financial services backgrounds who are very excited about the potential for blockchain to transform many industries. They echoed the opinion from Goldman Sachs that blockchain will transform the sharing economy and we told them that Origin hopes to lead the way.

Token Summit

There were many amazing speakers at Token Summit, but one of the highlights for us was seeing our friend and investor Jason Fang (Sora Ventures) talk about his approach to the blockchain space in Asia and the US. Asia is a huge market for us and having key opinion leaders like Jason backing us is incredibly important. Tokens and token economics present a new way of doing business and designing incentives and we heard academics from research universities and representatives from the traditional world discussing the potential impact of this.

Coleman, Melody (Spartan Group), Josh, Jon, Stan, and Dave at Token Summit.

Crypto Influencer Summit

Jon and Coleman attended the Crypto Influencer Summit hosted by our friends at Boosto. It was great to spread our message to key opinion leaders in the space such as Chandler Guo, Crypto Bobby, Siraj Raval, and others. Educating the public about blockchain technology and presenting information in an accessible and fun way is key to enabling mass user adoption.

Cosmos Cruise

Josh, Origin’s co-founder, and Stan, our lead blockchain engineer attended a private cruise put on by leading blockchain group Cosmos. Our team enjoyed an intimate discussion featuring Vitalik Buterin, Joseph Poon, Jae Kwon, Karl Floersch, and others on a night time boat ride on the beautiful East River. They discussed ongoing efforts to scale Ethereum, cryptoeconomics and mechanism design, and their broader observations about the blockchain world. It was a great way for our team to cap off a busy week of conferences, panels, and meetings.

Cosmos Cruise panel featuring Joseph Poon, Jae Kwon, Karl Floersch, and Vitalik Buterin.

Thank You

We want to thank all of our investors, partners, and friends that met with us in New York. We had an amazing time hanging out with Pantera Capital, Sora Ventures, Foundation Capital, Kindred Ventures, RocketFuel, QCP Capital, Streami, Kenetic Capital, Coinbase, OmiseGo, Cosmos, Spin/Layer Protocol, Randall Kaplan, our friends from Yang2020, WhalePod, Jeremy Rose (Google), ShapeShift, Polymath, Sam Feinberg (Cypher Capital/Blockfolio), RightMesh, Fragments, AlgoLedge, and many others.

Jon, Yu Pan, Joe (WhalePod), Josh, and Coleman about to enjoy a private performance by Snoop Dogg for Blockchain Week!

We also spend time on recruiting efforts, meetings with our advisors from Spartan Group to flesh out our Asia strategy, conducting a massive T-shirt giveaway, and continuing work on engineering and development during this very busy week. Stay tuned for more exciting updates.

If you’re interested in what we are building at Origin, please reach out. Let us know what events you and cities you will be in and we will try to say hi.

Learn more about Origin: