Mainnet is Messari’s flagship crypto event, which kicks off Monday for 3-days of virtual content from the cream of the crop in all things blockchain and crypto. Over 100 speakers will be participating in panels and workshops to discuss the future of decentralized finance and governance.
OH AND 50% of Mainnet 2020 profits go towards COVID-19 relief efforts.
For all that, plus unparalleled networking, go to mainnet.events.
We know three days of conference can be a lot to take in, so we wanted to share with you our list of sessions we think you simply cannot miss (in order of timeline).
1) Panel: Calling Balls & Strikes
Monday, 12:20 – 1:00PM
With Dave Balter; Ambre Soubiran; Nic Carter and Qiao Wang
Since the peak of ICO mania in 2017, much work has been done to help investors better understand the fundamental value drivers of various crypto assets. Our discussion centers around the work some of the top crypto data providers have done to help build trust in the crypto ecosystem and bring transparency to otherwise opaque markets.
2) Panel: Building Institutional Trust in Crypto
Monday, 8:20PM – 9:00PM
With Michael Shaulov; Michael Moro; Peter Najarian and Frank Chaparro
Several of crypto’s top institutional infrastructure providers discuss the leveling up of crypto’s top services, and how they are tackling the tactical challenges of making an institutional crypto investment for the first time by offering more reliable custody, trade execution, and prime brokerage services.
3) Keynote: The Post-Virus World
Tuesday, 10:20AM – 10:40AM
By Balaji Srinivasan
One of the earliest Silicon Valley voices to raise the alarm on COVID-19, Balaji’s keynote covers his in-depth thoughts on how COVID might accelerate the emergence of the Web3 ecosystem, and why our decentralized response to the virus is not just good, but necessary in a world that is otherwise growing more authoritarian by the day.
4) Fireside Chat: ETH 2.0 Update
Tuesday 11:40AM – 12:10 AM
With Joseph Lubin; Danny Ryan and Sebastien Couture
A wide-ranging discussion on ETH 2.0’s next milestones from leaders at two of the ecosystem’s most important organizations, and how ConsenSys and the Ethereum Foundation are organizing for, and communicating about Ethereum’s pivotal, but necessary multi-year transition.
5) Panel: How to Build a Safer DeFi
Tuesday 8:20PM – 9:00PM
With Yaniv Tal; Demian Brener; Taylor Monahan and Hsin-Ju CHuang
A discussion that centers around how to safely build in DeFi, amidst a slew of recent hacks and contract exploits that drained tens of millions of dollars from “unstoppable contracts.” What tools might dapp developers and their communities leverage to ensure they don’t get rekt by a hack? Is this chaos the new normal, or is there any end in sight to the hacks we’ve witnessed so far this year?
6) Panel: Money Legos – Structured Finance 2.0
Tuesday 9:00PM – 9:40PM
With Kain Warwick; Robert Leshner; Greg Di Prisco and Camila Russo
The top three DeFi developers by locked asset value join for the first time on one panel to discuss the “money lego” stack, key trends and opportunities in Open Finance, how they think about threat vectors, and how far DeFi still is from mainstream utility.
7) Keynote: The Anxiety of Influence – The Ideological Contradictions of Crypto-Governance
Wednesday 10:20AM – 10:40AM
By Meltem Demirors
As Karl Marx famously said “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
Over the last ten years, the bitcoin community and broader crypto ecosystem have been built on the premise of revolution – of separating money from state, of disrupting wealth and power, of catalyzing a social movement around the excesses of mis-guided corporate socialism paraded around as capitalism. But now, we’re no longer the revolution. In the pursuit of elusive “institutional capital” – we’re becoming the establishment. This is why the march of Wall Street and Main Street into bitcoin is so dangerous. For a new generation of projects, protocols, and platforms, this ideological tension is wildly confusing — are we actually building something new, or are we simply suffering from the anxiety of influence and an inability to conceptualize and build the new?
8) Presentation: Leading a Decentralized Protocol Upgrade
Wednesday 11:20AM – 12:00AM
With Zooko Wilcox; Peter Van Valkenburgh; Mario Laul and Chris Powers
How did one of the highest profile crypto community figures and his team lead a “decentralized protocol upgrade” (and is that a contradiction)? We cover best practices in the 12-18 month process of managing stakeholder communications throughout a critical network upgrade.
9) Panel: The Economy of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs)
Wednesday 12:00PM – 12:40PM
With Jonas Lamis; Peter Pan; Priyanka Desai and Lasse Claussen
Years after the spectacular collapse of ethereum’s original “The DAO”, decentralized organizations have come roaring back to prominence. This discussion explores how the next generation of DAOs are unlocking the potential for new types of community governed investments….legally, and features some of the top experimental projects in that nascent, but high potential space.
10) Fireside Chat: The World After Capital
Wednesday 12:45PM – 1:15PM
With Albert Wenger and Ryan Selkis
This discussion focuses on how the coronavirus might accelerate the proliferation of freedom-preserving and promoting technologies in areas like universal basic income, personal privacy, and information curation, and builds off the themes from Albert’s phenomenal book World After Capital.