Scaling blockchain technology itself remains a matter of intense debate and strong opinions. In the meantime, we’re proud to say the Bloq team handily scaled to meet the demands of NY Blockchain Week.
There, Bloq showcased the two complementary sides of its business — Enterprise solutions and BloqLabs innovations — at Consensus and Token Summit. Here’s the highlight-film version:
Supporting the New Enterprise Customer
Speaking on the Construct stage, our co-founder and CEO Jeff Garzik announced BloqCloud. BloqCloud is a platform that delivers blockchain-agnostic services to offload the tedious infrastructure considerations off of builders and businesses. We will have more detail on this over the summer.
“BloqCloud is set of five services, Insight, Nodes, Proof, Compute, and Storage… The goal is to have wide support on many blockchains… We want to connect the world to these decentralized networks.” – @bloqinc cofounder and CEO @jgarzik discusses BloqCloud at #Consensus2019 pic.twitter.com/Hb8H8FNWyJ
— Bloq (@bloqinc) May 13, 2019
Following Jeff: Ryan Condron, co-founder and CEO of BloqLabs project Titan. Titan is a plug-and-play mining optimization software suite and hashpower marketplace, aimed at making mining easier and more profitable. (Here’s an early video demo.)
“Mining should be easy, automated, with clean UI/UX…” @Titan_Mining cofounder and CEO @ryankcondron says, “That’s where Titan comes in. It will be easy to understand… Optimize your rig. We’ll take care of it.” #Consensus2019 pic.twitter.com/udPk211LcT
— Titan_Mining (@Titan_Mining) May 13, 2019
What has become abundantly clear is that the blockchain era has created a new kind of “enterprise customer” — one that is eager to enjoy the service and reliability that conventional IT services provided with the speed, scale, and reliability that the blockchain era requires. The language of managed services and hardware management tools is a familiar one for the Fortune 50, and now the Crypto 50 has similar demands.
The BloqCloud public launch is targeted for late Q2 (with a waitlist currently in place for early access) and Titan is targeting beta in Q3.
The Business of Blockchain
Matthew Roszak, co-founder and chairman of Bloq, participated in two panels during Consensus. In the first — “Before the Pitch Deck” — he shared his opinions on how developer teams and startups can best build meaningful relationships with investors… and each other.
“Relationships matter. We trust certain people… That’s how we determine who to give time to, and I think that’s an important part… It’s a good start, especially when whispers of [crypto] summer start to get noisier.” – @MatthewRoszak on investor relationships #Consensus2019 pic.twitter.com/GvkIN1T2GB
— Bloq (@bloqinc) May 13, 2019
The second panel — on enterprise tokenization — Matthew predicted that the adoption curve would follow a trickle-to-waterfall arc. In other words, enterprises will ultimately use these new protocols for a variety of reasons, but they’ll crawl-then-walk before eventually breaking into a run.
“It’s really important that enterprises build these internal systems first to learn how to swim. They’re not going to do a triathlon right away, they’ll step in the water, get wet, and learn how to use this new technology“ says @bloqinc cofounder and chairman @MatthewRoszak pic.twitter.com/4DDLeOg1Ak
— Bloq (@bloqinc) May 15, 2019
These discussions demonstrated a shift in sentiment from previous Consensus conferences. “The tourists have gone home” (as our CCO, Phil Gomes, is fond of saying) and only the serious projects are left building the future — free from the distracting noise of imaginary Lamborghinis revving in the background. Matthew echoed these observations in his interview on NASDAQ TradeTalks following Consensus.
.@bloqinc cofounder and chairman @MatthewRoszak talks #blockchain with @nasdaq‘s @jillmalandrino on #tradetalks: “Coming out of this crypto winter, you see a lot more dedicated builders, more pragmatic investors trying to figure out what the next stage is going to look like.” pic.twitter.com/OCN5acw3v4
— Bloq (@bloqinc) May 16, 2019
Binance Charity Event
Bloq gathered 150 founders and close friends at the Soho House on Tuesday for the Binance Charity Foundation (BCF) event. BCF co-founder Helen Hai delivered opening remarks, explaining their mission in rural Uganda.
Matthew surprised the crowd by matching all existing donations — USD$110,000 in cryptocurrency — bringing the final fundraising total to USD$220,000.
During the @BinanceBCF event, hosted by @bloqinc, $200k was raised for children empowerment. cc @MatthewRoszak @jgarzik @binance @HelenHaiyu – https://t.co/umgsieSj6C
— Bloq (@bloqinc) May 15, 2019
This event underscored Bloq’s commitment to philanthropy, in pursuit of a shared future where all charitable donations will be able to be tracked from donor to recipient, improving delivery, and accountability. Ultimately, this was not just another cocktail party, it was a group of builders coming together in the name of something greater.
A Tour of Metronome
Metronome’s principal engineer Manoj Patidar joined Jeff for our first guided showcase of Metronome’s code to a room of developers and enthusiasts during Consensus Construct. Attendees received paper wallets preloaded with ETH and MET, which allowed them to interact with the Metronome system’s various components.
“This [#cross-blockchain #portability] is the new, novel design principle that makes Metronome the #cryptocurrency that can last for hundreds of years” says @MET_Token chief designer @jgarzik during his #Consensus2019 code tour with @manojpatidarr cc: @coindesk pic.twitter.com/AcD4s09GT7
— Metronome Token (@MET_Token) May 15, 2019
The ways that contracts interact and operate, as Jeff mentioned, are actually “DeFi, even before ‘DeFi’ was a thing.” DeFi – or Decentralized Finance – describes financial systems and products that operate independently of third parties and provide unique value to their users. (Sound familiar?) As a fully autonomous, blockchain-enclosed, and decentralized financial tool, Metronome ticks all the boxes – and always has since it launched in June 2018.
Around the Corner: Vesper and Token Discovery
Following Consensus, Jeff presented Vesper at Token Summit. Vesper, an AI-driven resource discovery and allocation engine for tokenized assets, sparked the imagination of the crowd. Many of conversations following the presentation – in addition to conversations at the Vesper booth – focused on the search and discovery aspect of Vesper. This feedback also is telling for just how many tokens there are out there, and the difficulty associated with navigating, and evaluating them.
With a high quality of conversations this year versus the sheer insanity of the previous conference, the Bloq team is confident going into the second half of the year, and thrilled to see how our industry grows and accelerates.
Dariusz R Jakubowski is Bloq’s head of community