Social encounters

In July 2019, the Cardano Foundation team visited Singapore and Hong Kong to attend World Blockchain Summit Singapore and SPOT conference. From both of these fantastic cities, the Foundation held community meetups to meet with the Cardano communities. Special thanks go to the local organisers, Jose, Jiten and @cliff for their support.

On 24 July, with the support of their partner SGInnovate, they welcomed their participants from the venue located in the heart of Singapore IT industry. Jose, kicked off the meetup with a quick introduction of the Singapore community and the special guests of the day; Nathan Kaiser, chairperson of Cardano Foundation, Ken Kodama, CEO of EMURGO, Manmeet Singh CFO & CIO of EMURGO, Hugo Hellebuyck, VP of Sales and Partnership of Tangem, and David Kim, CEO at Blue Block.

(Special guests, from left, Jitendra, Jose de Castro, David Kim, Ken Kodama, Manmeet Singh, Hugo Hellebuyck, and Nathan Kaiser)

One by one, the special guests introduced their organisation and updated the community with the latest news about their projects and products. During the talk, the participants submitted their questions to the speaker through the Pigeonhole Live 1 Q&A board.

During Nathan’s talk, Nathan introduced the audience to the Cardano Ambassador programme 2 and the Foundation’s vision for future projects. The Foundation launched the Ambassador Program in December 2018 and appointed their first group of ambassadors in January 2019 1. The goal of this programme is to give recognition to the contribution of dedicated community members who help the community to grow in a healthy and educative way. As of August 2019, they have 45 ambassadors who are actively contributing their talent for the community from 4 different categories. The Foundation is working on developing the ambassador programme as well as designing new community support programmes. Nathan said decentralisation and democracy are the keywords they are focusing on, to foster Cardano communities.

Manmeet took the stage next. He introduced the official commercial arm of Cardano, EMURGO, and its latest education programme in India — EMURGO Academy 1. EMURGO has been designing education courses for various targets from university-level developers to professional blockchain talents and also recently signed 3 MOUs with local Indian universities to train students & faculty. EMURGO Academy focuses on ‘creating an army of blockchain intelligence who can fuel the industry.’ You can find more information at EMURGO Academy 1’s website.

Manmeet also shared the news of the latest partnership with Tamura restaurant 1 using the Yoroi ADA Wallet developed by EMURGO. Their community manager Niels also visited Tamura restaurant last month to experience their Ada payment system 2. If you have a chance to go to Osaka, Japan, don’t forget to visit Tamura BBQ restaurant and pay with Ada!

Their last two guest speakers of the day were from outside the Cardano ecosystem. David Kim, CEO of BlueBlock, talked about security coins. With this hot potato, the debate was heated, and the community enjoyed discussing this topic.

Last but not least, they had Hugo from Tangem. He presented Tangem’s latest product range (including Anti-counterfeit Tags) and introduced Tangem’s service mechanism. The Foundation team distributed Cardano branded Tangem cards along with Cardano T-shirts and stickers to the attendees.

Find more from Tangem website 3.

A week after in Hong Kong, the Foundation had a networking event with Hong Kong Cardano community. They had lots of Cardano fans from various industries for their Hong Kong meetup. The event started with Nathan’s welcoming remarks and people mingle with each other to discuss Cardano and Blockchain in Hong Kong over a Cardano music mix that David Kim had specifically chosen for the event. If you are interested in hearing David’s playlist, check it out here 1.

Community Content

If you are not already part of the conversation, you’ll find a hive of activity over at the stakepool Best Practice Telegram. With over 2,200 members and loads of engaged users, this is a great resource for anyone interested in contributing to the program or with a more technical interest. Here’s a video from community member, Carlos Lopez de Lara (aka Crypto Carlos). It’s a video explainer of the Ouroboros Chronos protocol, and one of a number of very nice videos over on his YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQ8ZUhSIZDc

This video marks the start of the second season of the Cardano Blackboard Series.

SPOT conference

At SPOT conference, Nathan Kaiser of the Cardano Foundation is talking with Angie Lau from Forkast.News, about the migration of blockchain talent and jurisdiction in Asian countries. Lau moderated the panel discussion: Fiat champions — Mastering the on- and off-ramps.

During conference, Nathan appeared on a panel talk, and was also interviewed by Matthew Lam, talking in depth about blockchain governance and Crypto Jurisdiction.

Cardano Foundation attends the World Blockchain Summit in Singapore.

Asia-Pacific is set to become the largest blockchain market in the world, according to Mohammed Saleem, Chief Executive Officer of Trescon. In his opening remarks at the World Blockchain Summit in Singapore, he highlighted the region’s increasing importance in the industry and how it will significantly grow during the 2020s. Blockchain is now considered to be the next generation’s enabling technology, with the number of use cases across many sectors worldwide expected to rise.

The Summit was organized in line with the Singaporean Government’s “Smart Nation” state initiative that represents a large-scale effort of the island city-state. This initiative will combine the efforts of Singaporean citizens, businesses and government to support better living using technology, by having smarter ideas, apps and solutions that support the key pillars of: Digital Economy, Digital Government and Digital Society.

Nathan Kaiser, Chairperson of the Cardano Foundation, delivered a keynote speech at the 13th edition of the World Blockchain Summit global series focusing on blockchain industry in Asia and beyond.

Governments in Asia are optimistic about blockchain technology, according to the Foundation Chairperson. The region’s states are continuing to issue policies supporting the adoption of blockchain across various sectors. In Singapore, the Government is working on connecting the National Trade Platform with other countries through the means of blockchain. The Chinese Government is also gearing towards adopting the technology into a charity donation tracking system, while the Korean Government has launched a regulatory sandbox for the FinTech industry with blockchain.

“Now it is time to think about the politics of blockchain society” — Nathan Kaiser from his keynote speech

“Freedom, Privacy, Decentralization and Democracy” — From Nathan’s memo for the keynote speech

In his keynote address, Nathan explained the etymology of the word ‘politics’ that derives from the ancient Greek ‘politeia’ — ‘community of citizens’. Thus, we are all politicians in the blockchain society, and we are on a long journey of building the ecosystem, according to the Cardano Foundation Chairperson.

Differences across Asian countries can sometimes cause difficulties in building Pan-Asian systems that connect industries and cities. These obstacles mainly arise from a lack of shared trusted method situation. Blockchain can be key to decrease this friction between the region’s states. A blockchain health records system for the medical tourism industry in Asia is one of the possible use-cases for the region, according to Nathan. Supporting Singapore to be the hub of Asia blockchain-based supply chain can also be one of the potential use cases. The outlook for the blockchain industry in Asia is bright as the region tries to adopt the technology and amend its existing regulatory framework.

To share more background story after Nathan’s keynote speech, he met with Trescon team for an interview off-stage.

Upcoming events

On August 19 Manuel Chakravarty from IOHK will be speaking at ICFP2019 about functional programming for blockchains. He will use both Cardano and Plutus as running examples of how and why we should use functional programming.

Below are the new Cardano Meetup groups:

See also: