Blockchain International Show Highlights Practical Startups
By: Genaro Network, Gnx
Tags: Storage, Startup, Blockchain, Data, Bitcoin

London, United Kingdom — On 6 and 7 June Genaro Network’s Luke Sheehan (of the platform’s EU Business Development team) attended the Blockchain International Show at the ExCeL London exhibition center in the city’s docklands. He met with advisors, entrepreneurs, and others from the crypto scene in the U.K. and farther afield.

Startup companies filled out more than half of the exhibition space and shared their concepts over two days while the remaining space and time were set aside for wide-ranging keynotes and panel discussions on the development of blockchain.

Two themes stood out among the projects and the speeches: First, the fast-changing currents in the regulation of cryptocurrencies and ICO fundraising, and second, the question of practical application — how to get useful tools into the hands of ordinary people to allow them to include crypto-transactions in their daily lives.

One startup aiming to make Bitcoin easier to obtain was Cashin, founded in London by French entrepreneur Benoit Marzouk. The Cashin app lets retailers who want to operate in the crypto space work like miniature exchanges for their customers. You give cash to the registered retailer, and Cashin converts the amount to Bitcoin and sends it to your wallet. Despite relying on the Bitcoin blockchain for the model to work, Cashin does not currently utilize blockchain for its own architecture or data storage. Cashin’s Marzouk and other brands at the show expressed interest in Genaro’s proposed solutions for data storage and development of decentralized applications. Among speakers presenting their experiences and projects were several planning to make investing and using tokens and currencies more accessible. These included David Siegel of the Pillar Project (makers of a ‘universal smart wallet’) and Kendrick Nguyen of Republic (seeking to open up crypto to more legally compliant ICO investing for both accredited and unaccredited investors).

Asked by Genaro how Republic would guarantee security and privacy of data, Nguyen replied that the bulk of the entire team was experienced software engineers and that security was a core concern — Republic retaining only a minimum of personal data, to begin with. Neither Republic nor a majority of other new companies spoken with had a data or security model based specifically on blockchain. The majority used tokens as a funding model or sought to give better access to the token economy.

Forbes columnist Naeem Aslam chaired a final panel discussion with speakers like token economy cheerleader and editor Ismail Malik founder of the print magazine The ICO Crowd) and Hayden Jones, founder of the Blockchain Hub incubator. Both Jones and Malik were confident about the power of crypto to make great changes to how value will be shaped and transactions made in the future.

Regulation, while it is ongoing and in many ways desirable, should be a means of helping this change. “The law shouldn’t tell people what to value,” asserted Malik. Following a question from Genaro about the integration of blockchain tech into everyday life, Hayden Jones answered for the panel, stating that crypto had the momentum to either change or sweep away many aspects of the economy we tend to see as deeply embedded in daily life, including even the concept of a ‘Point of Sale’ itself.