Decred @ Blockchain Summit UY

Report by @pablito

Info:

site: https://blockchainsummit.uy/
event: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/blockchain-summit-uruguay-en-streaming-hd-tickets-69890565563
Twitter: https://twitter.com/SummitUruguay

People:

Participants: ~200 (estimated)
Decred attendees: @pablito (social media/production) & @camilolwi (speaker)

Swag:

20 shirts
- 10 DCR shirts
- 10 Stakey shirts
500+ stickers

Overall experience

Blockchain Summit Uruguay is a new event that gathers most of the country's blockchain/crypto companies in one place. This was the second edition and audience included many business people, devs, tech entrepreneurs, other crypto projects and even representatives from other industries (online marketing, automation, IoT) that are exploring potential applications of blockchain tech.

The keynote Camilo presented was named "Gobernando Juntos" (Governing together). It was an overview of what Decred is and how it tries to solve the problems that every blockchain faces. Camilo explained PoW Mining, PoS Voting, Politeia, the Treasury and how Decred handles contributors and contractors.

While the presentation gave a high level overview of Decred, it seemed that most participants were new to blockchain, cryptocurrencies and decentralized government. Most had heard about blockchain technology but only as a "magic solution" for making the most out of complex business processes that involve more than one company. We prepared the talk to make Decred stand out against other blockchains, SoV and DAOs but the audience seemed to ignore the problems we are solving. Sadly, there were no questions after the keynote.

On the other hand, we were approached by some devs and journalists that were very interested in Politeia and the Contractor system. How Decred funds innovation and marketing was the most frequent question. While companies do not face the "funding problem", other crypto projects working on privacy issues, decentralized infrastructure and SoV alternatives must find a solution and found Decred's model very interesting.

While the event was held in Montevideo, Uruguay, there were many developers from the Argentine community. Most of them had already heard about Decred but didn't know much about the project; these were, in my opinion, the best interactions we had at Blockchain Summit UY, talking crypto-to-crypto.

Room for improvement

We could use a more general presentation focused on Online Decentralized Government or event Decentralized Organizations. We need to reference known problems that the general public faces and present Decred not as a "different blockchain", but as a solution for some of the new problems that came with over-digitalization. This way, we could reach a broader audience.