Berlin Blockchain Week 2019

In my last blog post I interviewed a fellow CEMSie, who heads partnership advisory at ScanTrust by day and co-runs BerChain by night, about the potential focus areas for blockchain in supply chain and one of the world’s most impressive blockchain ecosystems: Berlin. We learned that due to the ecosystems varying focus areas, the many communities rarely get together under one roof – which is what BerChain looks to change, with their mandate to connect and promote the Berlin blockchain scene.

In the last portion of the interview, that you can read more about here, I asked when we could expect all the communities within blockchain to come together again, and it was here that I discovered that Berlin Blockchain week was just about to begin. This made me curious, so I thought I’d learn more about it and share my findings with you.

This blog post will be about Berlin Blockchain Week 2019 and you can expect to learn about 3 items:

1. The history of Blockchain Week and how it all began
2. How Berlin’s Blockchain Week has evolved since its inception
3. What happened at Blockchain Week 2019

1. The history of Blockchain Week and how it all began

Every May, since 2015, a conference called Consensus runs in New York City. Consensus is a global conference that brings together entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs, developers and people who are interested to debate, collaborate and learn about the future of blockchain and cryptocurrency. In 2018, during the week of May 11 – 17, the first ever blockchain week was introduced alongside Consensus NY, including events, a hackathon and a job fair.

Many major cities around the world took inspiration from this week and decided to organize their own blockchain week.What’s interesting to note is that the Berlin blockchain week, in contrast to most events, started as a decentralized movement introduced by the community itself. Last year, a group of Ethereum enthusiasts wanted to organize a hackathon for Ethereum in Berlin called ETHBerlin, and while planning decided to organize a couple more side events. When the blockchain community heard of this, they excitedly started to add to it, organising their own events, which ultimately took up an entire week.

Today, there are blockchain weeks happening in NY, LA, SF, Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, Zurich, Shanghai, Toronto, HongKong to name a few.

2. How Berlin Blockchain Week has evolved since its inception

What’s again very interesting about the Berlin blockchain week this year, is that there was zero marketing budget allocated to promote the week and almost zero communication on social media about it. This is almost unheard of, for an event that takes up an entire week, which gathers thousands of people from all over the world and grew more than 4x the size compared with the year before. Most of the communication happening in this space and about this week is through word of mouth. Meaning that if you’re not in the space, or have connections who are, what you hear about the community and the events it organizes sounds like white noise. But when you’re in it, it spreads like wild fire.

Outside of WOM communication, this year, announcements went out on Twitter on two main pages:
1. #berlinblockchainweek
2. #departmentofdecentralisation

The first twitter # was started last year and maintained to communicate its happenings this year. The second twitter # was started and is maintained by a group of Ethereum enthusiasts who organized the hackathon. Every other event outside the hackathon and a few side events, was self-sponsored, self-organized and started organically, meaning no submission was necessary and no ideas got denied. Due to this, the pace at which it evolved is worth mentioning: 1 hackathon, 3 main conferences and 65 side events! Berlin is showing no sign of a crypto winter.

3. What happened at Blockchain Week 2019

First thing to note is that the event received so much interest that it got extended to next week. So if you missed what I’m about to write about, there’s still time for you to check out other events.

Blockchain week was made up of:

• 1 main Hackathon
• 2 main conferences
• 4 side conferences
• 65 side events

ETHBerlin Hackathon – running from Friday – Sunday

This is the hackathon that started it all last year. The 2018 hackathon’s focus was ethereum solutions while 2019’s focus was blockchain agnostics, if it had decentralised applications. There was a vetting process to ensure all participants share the same motivation: a decentralised web. There were 3 main ways to get involved:
1. You become a volunteer
2. You become hacker
3. You become a sponsor for the hackathon

In 2018 it was bootstrapped and run by volunteers, there was no sponsorship. This year they accepted sponsorships to allow it to scale.

2 Main Conferences

The first conference went by the name of Web3Summit Conference and it started at the beginning of the week on Monday and ended on Wednesday. It was organised by the Web3 Foundation, a non-profit that aims to promote web3 development and application. If you don’t know what web3 stands for, this is how it was described to me:

• Web 1 = what was happening in the 90’s, normal webpages where people consumed information
• Web 2 = what we use today, where one company owns all data of the application ie. Facebook, Uber etc.
• Web 3 = a decentralised web that’s more fair, where users control their own data

The main purpose of this conference was to bring people together that have a strong interest in the latest and state of the art blockchain technologies, to discuss how the space should evolve. This conference was created so that both business and tech minds could participate.

The second conference went by the name of Dappcon and it ended on Friday. It was mainly organised by Gnosis, you can read more about them here: https://gnosis.io. This event was focused to bring the developers together and it attracted attention from some well known blockchain celebrities. For example, Vitalik Buterin – Founder of Ethereum and Joseph Lubin – Co-founder of Ethereum, CEO of ConsenSys both showed up.

4 Side Conferences and 65 Independently organised side events

Here is where it got impressive. You had the biggest possible selection of blockchain events to choose from and there was something for everyone. For example, there were coding workshops, yoga, informal networking, canoe rides, exclusive SOHO parties, boat trips, brunches and more. If I didn’t know about this website https://www.blockchainweek.berlin or have access to the BerChain flyer, I would have been overwhelmed by the sheer volume of events. Here is a photo of the flyer:

I hope this blog was informative and left you with a slight case of FOMO, enough to get you to join next year’s Berlin Blockchain Week.

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