Crypto Bahamas Conference Highlights

About Crypto Bahamas

Crypto Bahamas conference took place from the 26th to the 29th of April in the most exotic island nation, Bahamas. Gravity Team had the pleasure of joining the event. This was the conference’s first edition, organized by FTX and SALT. FTX, the 3rd largest exchange in the world by volume, opened its headquarters for more than 1,000 people in the Bahamas just before the event. Many top crypto professionals, enthusiasts, and public figures attended the conference.

Crypto Bahamas Speakers

From ex-presidents and prime ministers to the power couple Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen, the list had much more than crypto-native panelists. According to Illia Polosukhin, Co-Founder of NEAR, “There’s a wide variety of people here, everyone from Bill Clinton to degens with monkey [non-fungible tokens],” according to CoinDesk.

Some of the most prominent crypto figures at the conference included:

• Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO at FTX;
• Matt Boyd from Coinbase;
• Jeremy Allaire Co-Founder of Circle;
• Charles Cascarilla,  Co-Founder of Paxos;
• Nathan Catania, Partner at XReg;
• Frank Chaparro, Director of News at The Block;
• Meltem Demirors, Chief Strategy Officer at CoinShares;
• Roham Gharegozlou, CEO at Dapper Labs;
• Brett Harrison, President at FTX US; and
• Antonio Juliano, Founder & CEO at dYdX.

To know more about who was present at Crypto Bahamas, check out their guest speakers list!

Key Takeaways from Speaker Sessions

Below we present highlights of select speaker sessions given by a few prominent crypto industry figures on the following topics: Layer 1 Pioneers, Effective Altruism, Crypto Mining, and Building a New Financial system.

Effective Altruism

Picture Credits: Gravity Team

Effective Altruism, the panel session had Lauren Remington Platt, Head of Global Fashion & Luxury Partnerships at FTX as moderator, and SBF and Gisele Bündchen as speakers. The key takeaways from this session were:

• The official launch of the new FTX “In On” campaign featuring Bankman-Fried and Bündchen. This is Gisele’s first public appearance as Head of Environmental & Social Initiatives. In this campaign, both share their motivations to be on crypto with FTX.
• FTX Foundation has committed to donating $1 billion to projects working on betterment of the humanity. The company has pledged to invest at least $100 million in such projects this year. The company is keen on investing cash in large, philantrophic projects that can “massively scale”.

During the discussion, Bündchen said, “There are so many things that we can do, and it can sometimes be overwhelming”, but we can all agree this is a generous start.

Ready Layer 1: A Dialogue with Blockchain Protocol Pioneers

Panel moderated by Brett Harrison, the President of FTX US.

Speakers:

• Anatoly Yakovenko, Co-Founder of Solana
• Illia Polosukhin, Co-Founder of NEAR Protocol

Kevin Sekniqi, COO of Ava Labs

• Silvio Micali, Founder of Algorand

Topics covered:

Layer 1 blockchain protocols & what makes each of them unique

Scaling transactions per second

When should we better utilize the blockchain vs. normal centralized database technologies?

Layer 2 protocols & developing standards

The future of blockchain protocols

Favorite blockchain-enabled disruptor

What makes each of your Layer 1 unique?

Illia Polosukhin (NEAR Protocol Co-founder)

“NEAR focuses on 2 things:

1. How do we build something that is really simple to build and use for normal users and developers? and
2. How do we scale beyond what 1 single machine can do with things like sharding, scale-up with capacity to target billions of users.”

Kevin Sekniqi (Ava Labs COO)

• “We view blockchain development as user-centric so we want to develop things that are fitting for most kinds of applications. We’ve built both very fast blockchain architectures but also architectures that can horizontally scale like, for example, with subnets.
• Creating for users a very unified blockchain stack which just works and no one even talks about avalanche, just uses it in the back end and everything is just happening magically.”

Silvio Micali (Algorand Founder)

• “At Algorand we are very proud of having solved the original trilemma of scaling, decentralization and security. We are green, our blockchain never forks, you can rely on a block as soon as it appears. We’ve been producing over 20 million blocks every 4.4 seconds without any interruption of service.”

Anatoly Yakovenko (Solana Co-Founder)

• “At Solana our big dream is to build a chain that can synchronize global information as close to the speed of light as possible and i’d say we’re like 1% of the way there. Use case for this we dreamed of was something like the central limit order books, like Serum. Thus, that there would be this permissionless open platform for price discovery all that information be available to everybody in the world and everyone could be at the same level playing field as Alameda or Jump.”

When should we better utilize the blockchain vs. normal centralized database technologies?

• NEAR, Web3 is about low switching costs. We want to achieve that you can take your data from one platform and move to another (e.g. banking, social media, etc.). Anything that involves multi-party, marketplace, where the user should be owning their data and have the ability to switch with ease.
• Solana – we’re singularly focused on this idea of global price discovery. For other applications, we’d first have to reach the point of driving down the cost to 0.2 cents so that it is cheaper than serving an ad.
• Algorand – If you like fairness, transparency, common knowledge then you should always use a decentralized databases.

Crypto Mining: Maximizing Efficiency and Sustainability

With Adam Jin as moderator and as guest speakers:

• Marco Streng, CEO and Co-founder of Genesis Digital Assets;
• Brian Brooks, CEO at Bitfury;
• Jaime Leverton, CEO at Hut 8, and;
• Mike Levitt, Co-chairman, Co-founder and CEO at Core Scientific.

In this panel discussion, Marco Streng argued that more than ever, efforts are being poured into boosting hashrate efficiency and increasing specialization, and, therefore, optimization in mining centers. Additionally, Brian Brooks added that the amount of energy necessary for Bitcoin to produce $1 billion worth of value is way less than most industries need to produce that same amount of value.

Building a New Financial System: Stablecoins, Banks and Beyond

With Susan Li as moderator and as guests:

• Charles Cascarilla, Co-founder and CEO at Paxos;
• Diogo Mónica, Co-founder and President at Anchorage Digital;
• Odetta Morton, CEO at Deltec, and;
• Michael Moro, CEO at Genesis Global Trading.

In this conversation, guest speakers mainly touched on the current development and future predictions for stablecoins performance and expectations for crypto and blockchain adoption of banks and traditional financial institutions.

Final Thoughts

Gravity Team was pleased to be invited to Crypto Bahamas this year. The event truly presented an opportunity to connect with the industry & feel its dynamic pace and high energy in a relaxed place.

What we enjoyed the most about this event was the variety of networking and learning opportunities it presented with top and upcoming industry players.

Thus, we rank this as one of our top conferences of the year. See you again next year!