Representatives of the blockchain industry’s most promising projects gathered in the German capital to share their ideas and discuss the sector’s prospects.
Waves invited several top industry players to the event, including Polkadot, Cosmos, Centrifuge and Gnosis. These are all projects that have helped the Berlin blockchain community grow and gain its global status, and without them, this wouldn’t have been a true Berlin blockchain event.
Waves founder Sasha Ivanov kicked off the meetup, providing an overview of the most immediate plans and upcoming products — including Waves Matter, a new product that will be the basis for corporate solutions built by Waves Enterprise, as well as for public chains.
“This product will be coded in Scala and Go, so we’ll have two versions,” Ivanov said. “And it will allow users to launch their own blockchain in just 15 minutes.”
He also introduced Gravity Hub, a service aimed at resolving the interoperability issue between different blockchains.
“We want to push forward not only the Waves ecosystem, but the entire blockchain industry to enable mass adoption,” he explained.
Other platforms’ representatives picked up on the issue of interoperability between different chains, discussing their own solutions. Billy Rennekamp, Tendermint Developer Relations Engineer, talked about IBC, a messaging protocol for the interchain — “an internet of blockchains”.
Several Waves team members spoke about various components of our ecosystem and broader blockchain-related issues.
Developer advocate Inal Kardanov discussed the development of blockchain, trying to answer the fundamental question of what the technology’s main goal is. Ride product owner Ilya Smagin’s talk focused on the advantages of non-Turing complete smart contracts and challenges in developing blockchain-based apps.
Parity Technologies’ Joe Petrowski explained the Cross-Chain Message Passing (XCMP) solution, which facilitates cross-chain transactions using a queuing mechanism based around a Merkle tree.
Eric Dvorsak from the Status team introduced the ambitious idea of bringing together a chat app, a wallet and a Web 3.0 browser.
Waves Enterprise CPO Artyom Kalikhov gave an overview of enterprise blockchain solutions in the Waves Ecosystem.
As part of the DeFi Hour, Andrej Ktitarev, co-founder of Deepwork Studio, shared insights on product strategy and design for DeFi solutions, while Neutrino product owner Aleksey Pupyshev gave an introduction to this algorithmic stablecoin. Ioann Voronin, Waves.Exchange’s advisor and product consultant, revealed the new exchange’s plans for 2020.
A panel discussion featuring Gnosis’ prediction market product manager Graeme Barnes, Waves Platform CBDO Max Pertsovsky, Neufund Business Development Manager Alex Mole and Cassidy Daly, who is in charge of token design and research at Centrifuge, focused on DeFi in the digital asset space.
The panelists agreed that the finance industry is steadily moving towards decentralization.
According to Alex, DeFi needs more inclusivity, moving away from being “a swimming pool for traders and speculators”. Max added that lack of insurance and security issues are among the obstacles DeFi is currently facing.
Graeme said he wants to see more regulatory certainty, while Cassidy concluded that real users engaging with products and solving real problems are vital, and regulation will follow naturally.
This years’ event was supported by the Department of Decentralization (DoD), an organization focused on raising awareness about the challenges and benefits of decentralization and open source software.
“DoD is all about collaboration,” said Maria Paula Fernandez, DoD’s founder and managing director. “We believe that the more our ecosystem grows, [the earlier] we can all reach the point where our vision of decentralized tech is realized and in the hands of everyone,” she said. “…And we love bringing the community together, especially with some festive fun sprinkled on top, so we were super excited to be cohosting the party with Waves!”
Videos of all talks and the panel discussion are available on our YouTube channel.
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Waves’ annual event focuses on DeFi was originally published in Waves Platform on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.