It came together quickly — only a month-and-a-half between announcement and opening day — but the inaugural Binance Conference still brought together a wide swath of cryptocurrency industry participants.
The overall takeaway from this conference was that the most dedicated members of the blockchain community are undeterred by current market factors, and remain all the more focused on building enduring technologies that aim to outlive their creators.
Bloq was one of the top sponsors of the event, judged the SAFU hackathon, and publicly announced a few new BloqLabs projects. Let’s review.
SAFU Hackathon
Focused on building robust security infrastructures, the SAFU hackathon encouraged the teams to think about how to address scams, hacks, and money laundering. Bloq co-founder and CEO, Jeff Garzik, was one of the judges of the hackathon, providing guidance and feedback to the participants. The narrow focus of the hackathon’s target problem ensured that balanced, well-considered technical solutions prevailed. Several teams ran tests on massive data sets, generating billions of data points, which gave a great platform to battle-test solutions for a scaled market.
Of the teams, Bloq was most impressed with Merkle Blox, who took home the hackathon’s grand prize of $50,000 USD in Binance Coin (BNB). Merkle Blox proposed a unique system of smart-contracts-based insurance products for victims of fraud in the cryptocurrency space.
(Note: Binance posted its own wrap up of the event as well.)
Bloq on Stage
On the second day, both of Bloq’s co-founders, Matthew Roszak and Jeff Garzik, had time on the Binance main stages to discuss the tokenization of our future and the projects Bloq is building, in addition to the ones we’ve already built.
Matthew’s keynote speech gave a broad look at the specific stages the blockchain industry has been through in the last few years, and painted a picture of what the next twelve months look like for organizations like Bloq. In clear terms, Matthew’s address outlined what was on most participants’ minds: “Who will lead this decentralized, token-first revolution?” The answer: hopefully no one. The creators of picks and shovels are seldom recognized for their efforts, and the best systems function because of their collaborative, community-based design and ability to self-regulate and self-improve.
During Jeff’s address, he first took a moment to discuss Metronome, the cryptocurrency that BloqLabs led and launched in June 2018. He told the crowd that the motivations were to build something that would outlast its creators in a fully autonomous way, all while allowing its holders to choose which blockchains will secure their assets. Additionally, he discussed the unique auctions and use of proceeds in the Metronome ecosystem as a sort of decentralized reserve issuing new MET at a constant and predictable rate.
Second — and exclusive to Binance Fair — Jeff’s address lifted the veil on Titan, a set of mining optimization tools that has been in stealth mode at BloqLabs for some time. In summary, Titan will help miners optimize their resources and point them at the most profitable coins and pools at any given time, all while also removing much of the manual process associated with maintaining one’s mining operation.
Jeff announced that the beta waitlist was open and encouraged the audience to sign up. Titan CEO and Bloq engineer Ryan Condron has more detail here.
Titan is only one of several projects BloqLabs is currently building, and we are thrilled to lift it out of stealth mode. There are many more that we’ll be describing here soon enough. To keep up-to-date on this and other news, go to the upper-right-hand corner of this page and subscribe.
Jenna Pilgrim is the director of partnerships and business development at Bloq.