TOKEN2049 London Conference Highlights

About TOKEN2049 London

After a successful conference in Singapore in September, TOKEN2049 came to London to reunite the crypto community and the industry’s leaders in Europe.

TOKEN2049 London took place between the 9th-10th November in Magazine London with a view of the River Thames and Canary Wharf.

TOKEN2049 London Had:

• 2,500+ attendees, of which 73% were C-level
• 1,000+ companies
• 150+ speakers
• 100+ journalists
• 100+ sponsors

A Few of the TOKEN2049 Speakers:

• Stani Kulechov – Founder and CEO at Aave
• Kathleen Breitman – Co-Founder at Tezos
• Uri Kolodny – CEO at StarkWare
• Dan Tapiero – Founder and CEO at 10T Holdings
• Max Boonen – Founder at B2C2
• Sebastien Borget – COO and Co-Founder at The Sandbox
• Min Teo – Managing Partner at Ethereal Ventures
• Eric Wall – Blockchain Researcher
• Niraj Pant – General Partner at Polychain Capital

Image credits: TOKEN2049

TOKEN2049 Agenda Summary

The two-day event offered ~80 panel talks, workshops, and hackathons on a wide range of topics, such as Metaverse, NFTs, DeFi, Web3, DAOs, and Global Macro, to name a few.

Image credits: TOKEN2049

Panel Highlights

DeFi: Past, Present, and Future

Stani Kulechov, Julien Bouteloup, and Evgeny Gaevoy held a panel discussion about “DeFi: Past, Present, and Future.” The panel discussion focused on the current and past issues and also the future of DeFi. The speakers engaged in talking about the transparency of DeFi and how it can avoid the existing issues that occur in traditional finance, which was opportune considering the current circumstances with FTX collapse.

Stani Kulechov, the founder of Aave, highlighted that DeFi allows a group of people to come together collectively and set risk parameters based on a wide variety of public information. This will enable them to make better decisions than centralized financial institutions such as Celcius. Additionally, Julien, Founder of Stake Capital Group, commented that DeFi has only partially replicated the existing financial infrastructure in TradFi. The real goal going forward is to create new unique products and services that are easily accessible and safe to use for the general public.

Why Web3 Infrastructure is Epic and Powerful

by Simon Baksys from Google and Mo Shaikh from Aptos.

Simon, Google’s GTM and BD Lead for Web3, stated that Google’s mission is to bridge Web2 and Web3. He mentioned that their focus is now to onboard the first ten million developers rather than focusing entirely on users, a strategy similar to Solana and their efforts to build an active developer ecosystem. Mo, Co-Founder of Aptos, and Simon discussed the Google Cloud x Aptos partnership. The partnership included the following:

• Google as a validator launch partner – with Google staking as a block-producing validator on the Aptos mainnet.
• Aptos data in BigQuery – indexing the entire Aptos chain and making the data accessible through their SQL-based warehouse, BigQuery.
• Pay with crypto – a partnership between Google and Coinbase allowing developers and users to pay for transactions using tokens.
• Accelerator program – Google is investing in builders and other Aptos ecosystem projects.
• Google x Aptos Hackathon – starting in 2023, Google will host a hackathon for Aptos, Google, and third-party developers to come together and build.

Side Events

Each day of TOKEN2049 culminated with networking drinks. In addition, from 7-13th of November, London Crypto Week took place with 70+ side events to pick from.

Image credits: London Crypto Week

Final Thoughts

Despite being amid a bear market, TOKEN2049 London venue was full of thousands of participants. It shows that those remaining in the industry are in it for the long haul and that Web3 is here to stay.

On this note, we would like to conclude our 2022 conference review. Thanks to all & hope you found these insights useful.