The thing about blockchain, is that it distorts your perception of time. Ideals and prototypes become products months later and it’s easy to forget how quickly infrastructure is maturing. The Blockchain Education Network is no different, so let’s do a recap to see what we accomplished throughout 2016.

January 2016

For many students, blockchain can be an isolating industry to be enthusiastic about. As you begin to push boundaries and run into misunderstandings, there are not many around you who “get” it. Thus, at the beginning of the year BEN acquired free student passes for the North American Bitcoin Conference and rented a large group Airbnb to reduce costs further for the students who came out. More than a dozen of our peers showed up to create a one-of-a-kind immersive blockchain experience. For a few, it was actually their first time being around other enthusiasts. The first experience of being able to talk about blockchain freely without having to explain each concept along the way opens the doors to new ideas and perspectives. In addition, while swapping stories of launching local initiatives, the exhaustion from obstacles faced is overcome through the renewed motivation gained by building a network to lean on.

February 2016

We started the year as the College Cryptocurrency Network yet rebranded in February to the Blockchain Education Network. Since our founding in 2014, we wanted the growth and maturity of our organization to be reflected in our brand. Our goal is to create the first generation that uses blockchain as natively as the internet. To do so, we want to build relationships between ambitious local leaders and companies taking the blockchain leap. By empowering these relationships on the local level, we create hubs of blockchain enthusiasm and immersion. And by networking the starters of these various hubs together, we create the first web of interconnected blockchain cities and activity within them.

March 2016

Shoutout to Purse.io for sponsoring the Madness!

Which university has the best blockchain club? That’s actually a question we get quite a lot so we decided our first BEN initiative was to discover the answer to this question.

Introducing…

Blockchain Madness: the first cross-campus blockchain jeopardy tournament.

We organized 8 schools across the US and Canada to compete head to head and test their blockchain trivia knowledge. Thanks to Purse.io, we were able to make this idea into a reality and created an entire youtube playlist of highlights from the matches.

The teams of Blockchain Madness 2016

You can watch the playlist here. Or just jump to these great moments: