Toronto’s Decentral, a blockchain technology hub home of Ethereum and host of 2014’s Bitcoin expo, announces new “Blockchain and Fintech Expo” as well as a move of their home base after a bearish winter.
Anthony Di Iorio, the face and serial entrepreneur behind Toronto’s Decentral technology hub and Decentral.tv, has announced a couple of iconic events for their local as well as international communities.
One of their calls to fame was 2014’s Bitcoin expo which sought to fundraise for the Canadian Bitcoin Alliance and successfully delivered 80 Bitcoin to them for 100% of their profits.
The 2014 Expo included over 50 speakers from around the world and welcomed more than 700 registered attendees, making it one of the largest Bitcoin conferences to date.
Following up last year’s success, the Toronto community has announced the 2015 Decentral Canadian Blockchain & Fintech Expo, which will take place at the downtown core in the second week of September 2015. Di Iorio writes:
"Given the amazing feedback we received from the previous event, it was decided that we'd go for it again this year. Toronto is a great location for events like this, especially since such a large percentage of the Canadian population is within a 5 hour drive of Toronto. It is also such a prominent financial and technology center that it just simply makes sense to hold an event here again."
The early speakers list so far includes:
- Vitalik Buterin, Gavin Wood & Anthony Di Iorio of Ethereum
- David Johnston of DApps Fund
- Matthew Roszak of Tally Capital
- Brock Pierce of ChangeTip
- Tether and the Bitcoin Foundation
- David Bailey of BTC Media
- Joel Dietz of Swarm
- Paul Snow of Factom
- Shawn Wilkinson of Storj
- Jason King of Sean's Outpost
- Jamie Robinson of QuickBT
- Jeff Coleman of Kryptokit
- William Mougayar of Start-Up Management
- Michael Terpin of Social Radius
- Gerald Cotten of QuadrigaCX.
More speakers will be added in the upcoming months.
Along side the conference, a hackathon will take place in partnership with local universities, following their model from last year. In 2014, the Toronto hackathon saw the birth of Amir Taaki’s Dark Market, which was soon after developed into Open Bazaar, the well known and growing decentralized market place.
Stepan Vorobiev, the founder of the university of Toronto’s Decentralized Tech Association and co-organizer of the hackathon, expects inventions and hacks “will range from conventional fintech applications to ‘Dapps’ such [as] smart-contract enhanced IoT (Internet of things) apps.”
With Ethereum being scheduled to launch this year, as well as other amazing Bitcoin 2.0 platforms in development such as Blockstream and the SuperNET among others, hackathons like this one will give participants a sneak peek into the future.
Moving their home base
The second major announcement is a move from their office at King and Spadina in the heart of the finance and tech district, which gave us many iconic events and pictures like this one.
Decentral will now be moving one street north to Adelaide and Spadina 123 as of March 1 Avenue. Though the reason for the move is unclear, locals have reported a noticeable slowdown in meetup attendance, perhaps because of this year end’s bearish Bitcoin market, as well as the arrival of Canada’s unforgiving winter.
Taking a step back and refocusing, the Bitcoin hub is announcing the end of its weekly meetups, and in turn going back to monthly meetups, which will feature both Ethereum and general Bitcoin topics.
However, Di Iorio does not look at this as a setback. “We have secured a much larger space for our events along with a partnership that will certainly help the meetup grow to new heights,” he said.
Adding:
“Looking back over the last 13 months I am proud of the amount we've accomplished while operating out the space at King & Spadina. Over 50 weekly meetups have been put on... and almost 90 in total have taken place since we started bringing together Toronto Bitcoin enthusiasts in 2012.
We brought Toronto its first Bitcoin ATM and assisted hundreds of people to secure their first BTC. Our location also served as the headquarters for the 2014 Bitcoin Expo and Hackathon, and dozens of companies operated under our roof.”
The Decentral team expects their new location will continue to be Toronto’s home for decentralized and disruptive innovations and will also be see a new improved studio for their daily show Decentral Talk Live. Decentral will continue to operate “Toronto's most active Bitcoin ATM”, and companies such as Kryptokit, Decentral.tv, Quadriga, and Ethereum will continue to run operations out of the space.
Di Iorio concludes:
“Looking ahead we're excited to continue to create events that push forward this amazing decentralized tech towards integration in sectors that are sure to be disrupted by the genius of the blockchain.”
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