State of the Ledger 2018

Offshoot Organizations

With the ceaseless effort to make an impact in the decentralized community, our members have founded various organizations this past year to offer additional blockchain and crypto-related services.

• Dekrypt Capital: Dekrypt Capital is a leading investment firm founded by former B@B members Jon Allen, Ronen Kirsh and Howard Wu. The firm is focused on blockchain infrastructure, privacy-preserving technologies, and early-stage ventures. They invest in, mentor, and accelerate teams developing novel solutions to address the core issues of scalability, privacy, and interoperability for decentralized protocols and applications.
• She(256): A nonprofit that is breaking down entry barriers and increasing diversity in the blockchain space. Started in February of 2018 by four B@B members (Alexis Gauba, Medha Kothari, Sara Reynolds, and Mashiat Mutmainnah), She(256) held their inaugural conference last Spring, recently launched a mentorship program (she256.io/mentorship) with 400+ people, started the #HowDoYouShape campaign, and lots more exciting initiatives coming soon!
• Mechanism Labs: A set of open source research experiments currently focused on distributed consensus and scaling founded by Alexis Gauba, Zubin Koticha, Maaz Uddin, and Aparna Krishnan.
• Autocomm I/O: Griffin Haskins and Eric Hou are building a secure IoT execution platform that allows companies to deploy their IoT applications directly to their edge devices instead of to the cloud. This platform ultimately saves companies with edge deployments up to 80% of their recurring costs per year in network, cloud, and infrastructure fees.
• The Blockchain Campus: A global academic network of blockchain organizations founded by Blockchain at Berkeley members, Annie Yi Chen and Anthony DiPrinzio. The initiative currently seeks to provide educational resources as well as professional advisory programs to entities ranging from student organizations to well-established blockchain labs. Ultimately, TBC aspires to gather the best university research institutions in blockchain and drive forth innovation in this cutting-edge industry.
• Argus: An ICO and Smart Contract Auditing service by developers Collin Chin, Ali Mousa, Raymond Chu, Howard Wu, and Pranav Gaddamadugu.

Conferences and Hackathons

We members helped organize major blockchain conferences, hosting speakers from cutting-edge blockchain and governmental organizations:

• SFBW: San Francisco Blockchain Week was a week-long event including ETHSF, Epicenter, and Cryptoeconomics Security Conference (CESC) that brought the world’s blockchain community together for educational events focused on consumer adoption, technical innovation, and insight from blockchain leaders in academics and industry.
• She256 at UC Berkeley: This conference highlights existing diversity and opportunity by breaking down the entry barriers in the blockchain space. It featured women at the forefront of blockchain academia, industry, ground-breaking research, protocols, and specific applications of blockchain, especially in projects that are led by women in the space.
• BuildETH: An Ethereum Developer Conference for Building Decentralized Applications. The goal of BuildETH is simple — inspire developers to build decentralized applications by bringing together the best speakers and sponsors for a single day of talks, introductory workshops, and expert sessions. Organized by Wesley Graham, Cliff Ahn, and Maggie Valentine.

In 2018, our members were invited to speak at blockchain conferences near and far, sharing the stage with industry figureheads like Vitalik Buterin, Joseph Poon, and Brian Behlendorf:

• SFBW: B@B members Anthony DiPrinzio, Wesley Graham, Alexis Gauba, Akash Khosla, Aparna Krishnan, Howard Wu, Ronen Kirsh, Jon Allen, and Sunny Agarwal were speakers, panel moderators, and workshop presenters at San Francisco Blockchain Week.

Many of our members took their blockchain development skills to hackathons in the blockchain and general tech community.

• ETHDenver: The largest Ethereum based #buidlathon in the world for Ethereum enthusiasts and developers. Gillian Chu and Brian Ho built a chrome extension plugin that would allow people to submit bounties in cryptocurrency for answers to their Stack Overflow questions and posts.
• unBlock Hackathon: Alan Lai and Leland Lee built a smart contract that allows individuals with only DAI in their wallets to transact on the Ethereum network. The project, Pay-with-Dai, won third place at the hackathon.
• Consensys MBA Blockchain Ventures Hackathon: Some Blockchain at Berkeley members partnered with Berkeley Haas MBA candidates to compete and advance to the second round of this hackathon.
• Ethereal Summit and Ethereal SF: Two Blockchain at Berkeley projects placed in the top three at Ethereal Summit, and were invited to present at Ethereal SF in front of Joseph Lubin and Bryan Johnson.
• CalHacks: Many Blockchain at Berkeley members participated as hackers and mentors at the world’s largest collegiate hackathon held at UC Berkeley.
• EthWaterloo: Gillian Chu worked on a project called CitETHzen, a way for undocumented immigrants to commit their tax payments to an escrow smart contract account.