Yesterday, influential representatives of the Web3 community gathered at the third Cornell Blockchain Conference in New York. This year, the conference was attended by prominent thought leaders of the blockchain world such as CEO and founder of Ava Labs Emin Gün Sirer and Ava Labs’ president John Wu, CEO and founder of Arbitrum Steven Goldfeder, chief scientist of Chainlink Labs Ari Juels, founder of Compound Finance Robert Leshner, founder of Gauntlet Network and CEO of LayerZero Labs Bryan Pellegrino.
One of the most notable events of the Cornell Blockchain Conference was the appearance of Gün Sirer with his presentation on "A New Generation Of Blockchain Protocols For The Next Billion People."
The founder of Ava Labs believes that there is still a long way to go before the crypto space can be considered mature. In his opinion, Web3 regulators lack basic technical knowledge of blockchain and need to know how to read and audit code. "Regulators are nowhere near that stage now. They are busy doing other funny tricks," Gün Sirer said at the conference.
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He also believes that cryptocurrency needs significant improvement to attract the next billion users. The main areas that require changes are usability, scalability, and adaptability. At the same time, he expressed skepticism about zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) as a means to increase the scalability of cryptocurrencies.
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"ZKPs are fantastic tech but for scalability, they are completely unproven. I have friends who are working on this, and I wish them the best. But if it does work, the latency will always be greater, and I worry about the user experience," Gün Sirer believes.
Other conference events this year included John Wu's Web 3: FROM WWW TO WEB3, Steven Goldfeder's discussion of Zk-Rollups as well as the workshop on the innovative decentralized protocol Panoptic.
The Cornell Blockchain Conference also featured leading regulatory experts Rebecca Rettig, CPO at Polygon Labs, Samson Enzner, chair of Cahill's Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Group, Professor Donna Redel, co-founder of the Fordham Law Blockchain Symposium, and others. Representatives from DeFi projects, venture capital firms, and institutions, as well as Web3 marketing experts and Zero Knowledge technology specialists, were also present at the conference.
The conference is hosted by the Cornell Blockchain Club, which was founded in 2017 by students at Cornell Tech, Cornell University's graduate school and research center. The original goal of the club was to "democratize Web3 awareness and help catalyze real-world use cases of blockchain technology," when formal blockchain education was preserved for graduate-level students with a deep understanding of computer science and technology in general.
"Ultimately, Cornell Blockchain Club was formed by a few undergrads who had a deep-rooted motivation to democratize blockchain education and awareness for all people. The early motivations origins of Cornell Blockchain serve as the North Star and continue to reside in everything that Cornell Blockchain does today," the Club's official website explains its philosophy.
Today, the Cornell Blockchain Conference is one of the most important events in the blockchain world with a long list of sponsors including Avalanche, Block Convey, Nibiru, Ripple, dYdX, Starkware, and Fintech at Cornell.
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The Cornell Blockchain Conference is also a place to network and connect with recruiters from influential Web3 companies. This year, recruiters from Avax, NiburuChain, UpTo, and Block Convey were eager to discuss career opportunities in the Web3 sector.
Two more key Web3 events are planned for this year as well. On April 22, immediately following the Cornell Blockchain Conference, the two-day MIT Bitcoin Expo 2023, "the longest-running collegiate conference about blockchain," will start in Cambridge. It will already be the 10th anniversary of the event.
Next, CoinDesk will host "the most influential conference in the cryptocurrency and blockchain industry since 2015" on April 26-29 in Austin.
