The five-day Unitize virtual blockchain conference organized by BlockShow and San Francisco Blockchain Week ended with the final session on Friday. The event saw appearances from Heath Tarbert, the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission; Vitalik Buterin, a co-founder of Ethereum; and Tim Draper, a serial blockchain investor, as well as other speakers from a diverse pool of market segments both within and outside the crypto space. Blockchain adoption, decentralized finance, central bank digital currencies and the future of Bitcoin (BTC) dominated the conversation in many of the panels. The event also saw speakers chart possible paths forward for …
Benjamin Soh, founder of blockchain development firm STACS, said that institutional players, not business-to-consumer companies, will drive the mass adoption of financial infrastructure built on blockchain technology. During the Unitize virtual conference, Soh said that if they could bring bank institutions to use the blockchain, millions of bank customers will automatically be a part of the blockchain finance infrastructure without them even knowing. Providing bank customers with a blockchain-based wallet while still using the traditional payment gateways will be the necessary first step towards bringing the efficiencies of distributed ledger technology to the financial system, Soh added. Asia is leading …
Crypto.com co-founder and CEO Kris Marszalek unveiled his company's 2020 expansion plan in a talk today at BlockShow Asia 2019 in Singapore. The plans include launching its own exchange, shipping VISA MCO cards to almost every region in the world, and launching a non-custodial wallet. With the motto that “it’s your basic human right to control your money, data, and identity,” Marszalek spoke about Crypto.com’s vision to create an ecosystem where people can manage every aspect of their crypto holdings in one place: pay, buy, sell, trade, exchange, fundraise, and so on. He revealed the entire roadmap to get there …
BlockShow Asia 2019 hosted some big names today for a panel on blockchain scalability. All the speakers agreed: people have to choose between scalability and decentralization. The panel included Max Kordek, CEO at Lisk; Matthew Tan, founder of Etherscan; Saranya Sriram, technical lead at Microsoft Azure; and Xinxi Wang, co-founder of Litecoin Foundation. It attracted a large audience for such a super-technical discussion. Speaking about the difficulties of scaling a blockchain to the next level, Kordek said that “blockchain scalability is a tradeoff. You can’t simply scale a blockchain for free. This is why I always laugh when I hear …
The Festival of Decentralized Technology, BlockShow Asia 2019, taking place in Singapore on Nov. 14–15, has announced its highlights: conferences, fireside chats, meetups and other sorts of activities. Fireside chats and debates First of all, the guests of BlockShow Asia will have the chance to visit a fireside chat, “All That Fintech With a ‘Layer’ of Blockchain,” with Sopnendu Mohanty, the chief fintech officer at the Monetary Authority of Singapore, and Gabriel Yang, the new head of Asia for BlockShow 2019 and the former chief operations officer of Beyond Blocks. BlockShow Asia will also feature an interview with Changpeng Zhao, …