When we learned that both Vitalik Buterin (the creator of Ethereum) and Jason Hsu (the legislator and “crypto congressman” from Taiwan) were going to be visiting San Francisco at the same time, we quickly started working to plan an event. Thanks to the hard work and tenacity of my co-founder Matt, the event came together beautifully and last Tuesday evening there was a line out the door at Modernist as people tried to get into the private and sold out event.

Westley Kuo, Jason Hsu, Vitalik Buterin, Matthew Liu and Steve Chen

Vitalik and Jason had a fireside chat to discuss the State of Ethereum, governance and the future of regulation. Origin co-founder, Matthew Liu gave a lightning talk with other speakers including Paul Veradittakit from Pantera Capital and Dawn Song from Oasis Labs.

Matt spoke directly before Vitalik and Jason’s fireside chat and talked about the user experience challenges that are hindering mainstream adoption of decentralized applications today. He also discussed some of the solutions to these challenges including our initiatives at Origin around ERC 725, decentralized messaging and sponsored-gas.

Renowned Berkeley professor, Dawn Song gave a talk about how she is addressing the scalability challenges of Ethereum with her project, Oasis Labs which is creating a privacy-first cloud computing platform on the blockchain.

Origin investor, Paul Veradittakit from Pantera Capital gave his thoughts about the state of the industry and shared some insight into how his fund was able to report 10,000% crypto investment returns.

Attendees included Alexis Ohanian (founder of Reddit) Steve Jang (founding advisor to Uber and an early investor in Coinbase), Garry Tan (former partner at Y Combinator) and Paul Davison (Coinlist CEO). Rachel Wolfson from Forbes also attended and wrote a great summary of the event.

We live-streamed the event from Origin’s YouTube channel. Be sure to subscribe to be notified of future events and content like this. Jason live-streamed the event as well on Facebook. We’re embedding his version below because the camera angle and audio turned out better than ours.

Be sure to watch Vitalik’s reaction to Matt’s joke about World Trade Francs (WTF) at the 45 minute mark!

Thanks to Blockchain at Berkeley and GoodPeople for their help in organizing the event and Modernist for providing the venue. And of course, a special thanks to the sponsors who covered the food and drinks for everyone: LYVC, OKCoin, Solana, TrustToken and Cointopia. We were once again reminded of the strength of the Ethereum community and thankful for the chance to be a part of it. We appreciate all the people who helped make this event possible.

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