The annual Blockchain Summit London was held on June 26th and 27th at the Olympia, a 131 year old venue. The event attracted over 2,500 business leaders in the Blockchain space. Delegates had access to 60 sessions, with the option to focus their time into one of three conference tracks. Over 50 companies set up exhibits to market their product or service.
Topics touched on everything related to the blockchain space, which is almost every industry – travel, banking, social impact, social media and property. Major aspects of the technology like adoption, energy use, regulation, ICO strategy, developer-focused tracks and smart contracts were omnipresent, but the general feel is that the biggest industries for blockchain will be security tokens, gaming and supply-chain.
Security Tokens
A highlight here was Bankorus CEO and Founder Greg Van den Bergh speaking on the potential for security tokens to be the next big thing:
“Innovation normally goes in threes, if you look at social networks, Friendster… MySpace… Facebook, Facebook being multiple times bigger than everything else. In crypto, you first had Bitcoin, then you have Ethereum and the ICOs which is much bigger than the whole Bitcoin ecosystem and then after that we believe the third wave is going to be security tokens which is going to be exponentially larger than anything you have seen before in crypto.”
Gaming
Another opportunity for huge growth was described by Jared Psigoda, CEO of blockchain gaming platform BitGuild. After working in the gaming industry for over 20 years, he identified a massive opportunity in blockchain for providing a seamless gaming experience and virtual item trading – essentially tokenization of unique aspects of games.
“Gaming is a 100 billion + a year market, it’s got a lot of young, tech-savvy people that are quick learners, game designers are great at building experiences for new users that have a little friction as possible for them to get to try something out. So we think games will bring a lot of new people to this industry if we’re able to create these blockchain games that are actually fun and engaging for the user.”
Supply Chain
Amit Varma, CTO of Citibank, expects major adoption of blockchain technology to global trade via supply chain, from manufacturing to shipping to distribution.
“We expect to see a reduction of 70 percent to 80 percent in costs on supply chain management by using blockchain.”