The London Blockchain Conference 2024 was packed with insights and exciting announcements. From entrepreneurs revealing new tools and products to technical debates and policy discussions, there was much food for thought and many memorable moments.
The following are five memorable moments you may have missed out on!
Lean into the New
For those in the U.K., Steven Bartlett needs no introduction. The entrepreneur is the host of the nation’s biggest podcast—The Diary of a CEO. In fact, it’s one of the biggest podcasts in the world, ranking in the top 10 on Spotify in 2024.
At #LDNBlockchain24, Bartlett shared insights derived from his early foray into social media in its early days and drew similarities to the blockchain industry today. His key message was simple: lean into what you don’t understand and master it, because disruptive technology is where the future lies.
Bartlett himself is building on the blockchain. In addition to his multi-million dollar Web 3.0 studio, he hinted at an upcoming announcement. To have an entrepreneur of this calibre working in the industry is exciting indeed.
Universal Plastic is Harnessing the Blockchain for Good
One of the most important things about blockchain technology is how much good it can do in the world. From increased transparency in governments and financial decisions to new efficiencies in supply chains, blockchain tech can shine a light on some of the darkest corners of the world.
Universal Plastic CEO Alvaro Bravo explained how his company is using blockchain and AI to incentivise ocean cleanups. Having built an app that connects companies who would like to fund cleanups with conservationists who want to do the work, they’re using the blockchain to verify everything has been done according to the agreed terms.
Making everything peer-to-peer, from payments to the sharing of media, and using the time-stamping mechanism of blockchains to prove every step along the way, typifies how blockchains can be used to change the world.
Scott Galloway on AI, TikTok, and More
Scott Galloway is a professor of marketing at the New York University Sterm School of Business, and he’s become somewhat of an internet legend for his insights on how the American economy is rigged to favor the older generations at the expense of the young.
In his London Blockchain Conference keynote speech, Galloway talked about how AI peak valuations will likely occur this year, how lonely young men will increasingly turn to it to escape the real world, and how TikTok is being used as a weapon to influence the American people.
While Galloway didn’t delve too deeply into the use cases on blockchain in his speech, it’s easy to imagine how it could be used to mitigate some of the issues he discussed. Creating a transparent and verifiable trail of where taxes go and who benefits most from the current setup would be a good first step in changing things, and having a verifiable record of exactly what ByteDance does with the data it collects on TikTok would play well with the lawmakers trying to decide what to do about it.
Transparency is at the heart of what blockchain is all about. There are very few problems in the world today that radical transparency and the incentives it creates couldn’t go some way toward solving.
Trading Carbon Credits on a Scalable Blockchain
That this or that blockchain is the ‘future of finance’ is a well-known meme in the industry. However, Tokenovate CEO Richard Baker showed how that concept is moving from an industry in-joke to a real-world concept.
His firm, Tokenovate, is using a scalable public blockchain to facilitate the trading of tokenised carbon credits. Companies need to buy these credits to shore up their environmental credentials and mitigate their carbon footprints.
Using scalable blockchain technology and smart contracts, Tokenovate is building a distributed platform that automates the process of trading carbon credits. Once again, we see that the sharpest entrepreneurs in the industry are skating to where the puck will be rather than where it is today.
Women in Blockchain Celebrate Their Presence in the Industry
Meanwhile, some of the most powerful women in the blockchain industry got together to both celebrate their success and call for more diversity in the industry.
An invitation-only event, this one saw powerful players like nChain’s Christine Leong and Women in Blockchain Talks Founder Lavina Osbourne discuss what they have been working on and why women are important in the industry.
One of the things that leads to so much innovation in the blockchain space is diversity; men women, and people from all sorts of cultures and backgrounds come together to create disruptive companies, innovative apps, and much-needed change.
The women of blockchain called for even greater diversity in what is still a male-dominated industry. Hopefully, we’ll see more female founders, investors, and movers and shakers in the years and decades to come.
