Join IBM Developer for our very first Blockchain Developer Summit. The Blockchain Summit is a full day of talks and networking with speakers from Bose, NEAR Protocol, Promise, IBM and others.
Free and open to all - come and learn about Blockchain, distributed ledgers, future of distributed ledgers and how to leverage Blockchain in the enterprise. Bring your questions and appetite for learning.
What's required to achieve mass adoption of blockchain applications, with focus on app usability and infrastructure scalability
Alex Skidanov, Near Protocol
In his talk, Alex will walk the audience through what's required to achieve mass adoption of blockchain applications, with focus on app usability and infrastructure scalability. The talk will highlight how improvements in app onboarding, the way transaction fees are presented, and the use of contract based accounts will lead to every day user being able to use blockchain applications on a daily basis.
When it comes to scaling the blockchain infrastructure across millions of users, Alex will walk the audience through how sharding (technical implementation that allowed databases to scale since 1980s) is critical to scaling blockchains today, and how it will work in 2019 and beyond. Alex will address some of the advanced topics, such as unsolved problems with blockchain sharding today, and potential solutions to them.
Follow the journey of UPGRADED, a blockchain startup that built a unique ticketing distribution system using smart contracts that was acquired by Ticketmaster and now aims to power tickets for the world’s preeminent ticketing company. Learn how the evolution of the idea, the development of the platform, and the requirements for Blockchain in the years ahead.Â
Blockchain in Real Life (IRL) examines how populism, sustainability, and ethics to play out on the blockchain. Is there a right to be forgotten on a public ledger? Is tyranny of the majority an inherent technical problem in blockchain? What governance structures might de-risk unexpected consequences in blockchain? How is the blockchain community to using the technology to support social good? This talk discusses a brief history of projects in sustainability, distributed computing, and personal data autonomy. It explores blockchain's capacity for ethical computing, GDPR considerations, and mobilization using edge technologies and processes to engage users and businesses in projects that are good for humans and the planet.
Accelerator: Achieving 10X Increase in Performance in a Blockchain Network
Kapi Attawar, Chief Revenue Officer at Samsung SDS America, Blockchain Team
Kapi Attawar is Chief Revenue Officer at Samsung SDS America in the Blockchain Team, building enterprise blockchain alliance initiatives for Samsung SDS in the North America Region. Samsung SDS - an IT solutions and services company within Samsung Group - has more than 150 people dedicated to enterprise blockchain practice and has been implementing blockchain solutions for the last three years.Â
Kapi is building a blockchain ecosystem of partners comprising System Integrators, Technology Companies and Developers. Kapi has been involved in blockchain for a few years and is an active member of the global blockchain community. Has been involved in Blockchain Industry Vertical Special Interest Groups around Telecom, Industrial IoT as well as topics like identity.  He holds an MBA and a BTech in Engineering, both from the UK
Most think Blockchain can apply to any industry that is in need of a trustworthy record. It is giving individuals the power of cryptography and removing the requirement for relationships that need transaction authority for something that is typically a "pull transaction". There is a lot of excitement and that excitement leads to dreaming up a multitude of ways to apply it. Learn how to test whether blockchain technology is appropriate for a use case or not.
Blockchain has so much promise, yet is it really reaching it's full potential? Not yet!
An ability to work with a technology should never be the biggest blocker to its adoption. Customers have so many questions on things like interoperability, multi-cloud capabilities, data residency, GDPR, security, architecture and more. There needed to be a way to address these concerns in a way that improved the lives of developers and architects while also helping business managers see what's happening. Seem like a large ask? Well, it's taken IBM over three years to get here. See how IBM has taken the pain out of building, operating, and growing your blockchain network with the release of its latest version of the IBM Blockchain Platform. Want to use AWS or Azure Cloud? No problem! Need help writing chaincode? Here you go! Want to scale across the globe? Join the club! Everything you need for blockchain is right here at your figure tips. Let's get started, you're now out of excuses!
Secure Your Data: Building a Decentralized Storage Network with Storj
Nadine Hachouche, Sr. Developer Advocate at Bose
 Most engineers and companies have used central databases to store data. However, if the data is not encrypted and secure, attackers can intercept and get the data to be used at their discretion. This leaves your users’ private information vulnerable. But what if you can use a distributive or decentralized network to store data? This will be a technical talk that will describe how Storj is building out a decentralized storage network and ways it can benefit your users.
Globalizing the world: Supply Chain and the IBM Blockchain Platform
Lennart Frantzell, Developer Advocate at IBM
Over the past two years, Blockchain has been singularly successful in modernizing the Supply Chain. In fact it is difficult to find any area where Blockchain has been as successful as Supply Chain.
Which comes as somewhat of a surprise since Supply Chain has long attracted successful non-blockchain solutions from many of the world’s largest companies, among them IBM.
In this talk Lennart Frantzell will explain the reasons for the success of Blockchain in streamlining the Supply Chain space. He will demo IBM’s Food Trust product and discuss other Blockchain solutions like Tradelens in search of the underlying reasons for the astounding global success of Blockchain in the Supply Chain space..
Nadine is a senior developer advocate at Bose leading the West Coast. I’ve been doing advocacy and engineering for 4 years, focusing on connected-products and distributed systems. In my previous life, I was doing molecular biology/biochemistry research at St.Jude Children’s Hospital. Nadine attended Mills College and UC Berkeley.
Sandy Khaund is VP of Blockchain Products for Ticketmaster. Sandy came to Ticketmaster as part of their acquisition of UPGRADED, a platform for event tickets using blockchain technologies, where he was Founder and CEO. Previously, Sandy was CTO at InStadium, an ad network of 450+ pro/college sports venues. Sandy was Sr. Director at Turner Broadcasting from 2011-2014, leading the Emerging Technologies office in San Francisco and serving as a founding Director of Time Warner Media Camp, a startup accelerator for tech companies in the media space. From 2008-2011, Sandy was Founder and CEO of Irynsoft, bringing collaborative video-based learning to mobile devices. Before Irynsoft, Sandy was COO at Piczo, a teen social network with over 35M accounts (acquired by Stardoll in 2009). He spent six years at Microsoft as Director of the Community Technologies Team for microsoft.com and has also held positions at Intel, the Boston Consulting Group, and Lockheed Martin.
Sandy has a BSEE & M.Eng from Cornell, a BA in Physics from Ithaca College, and an MBA from Wharton.
Candida Haynes is an avid contributor to the local and global technology community who is passionate about civic engagement and using technology to amplify human potential. Her background includes education consulting, leadership and technology training, social impact investing, and technology product development. She has mentored local technologists at Communities United for Youth Justice (CURYJ), Las Mujeres Unidas y Activas, and LatinX StartUp Weekend and presented tech talks at PyData SF and PyBay. She recently participated in AngelHack's blockchain business accelerator in South Africa after her team won Block.one's Social Impact Award. She is an Amherst College graduate and self-taught developer based in Oakland, CA.
Taariq Lewis is the CEO and founder of Promise, a hardware and software company that designs quantum computer resistant cryptography tools for small business finance. Since 2013, Taariq has launched a number of successful Fintech and blockchain businesses and has helped bring Bitcoin and blockchain engineering to a global audience. Taariq is a leader in the Bitcoin engineer community as the founder of SF Cryptocurrency Devs, a network of blockchain software engineers and developers. Taariq’s financial services background includes successful work at Chase Bank, Goldman Sachs, and Knight Capital. Taariq also worked at American Banknote Corporation, the first official company commissioned by the US government to print stamps, stock certificates, and currencies. Taariq earned his MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management, and his BA, in Philosophy and Economics from Columbia University
Porter Stowell is currently the Head of Digital Strategy for IBM Blockchain. Porter's technology career track is an unconventional one. For over ten years, Porter has worked with a variety of clients on the intersection of business model design and user engagement with emerging technologies such as AI, Virtual Reality, and now Blockchain as an expert in gamification. In essence, Porter has worked diligently to engage audiences towards the adoption new age solutions. Where better to pursue this career than with one of the premiere thought-leaders in tech, IBM!
Porter is a graduate of Lehigh University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for his graduate degree. While originally from a small town in Maine, Porter currently lives in Durham, NC with his family. Porter is a passionate biker, skier, surfer, and strategy gamer. Please be sure to connect to him @porterstowell on Twitter.
Raymond is CTO and co-founder of Oasis Labs, as well as a research scientist, open source software developer, and blockchain lecturer. His research interest lies in building practical systems for security and privacy. He has made contributions in a wide range of areas in distributed systems and security, including creating a networking project that was productionized by Google into Outline. Raymond obtained his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Washington, and graduated from MIT with degrees in Physics (Bachelor of Science), Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (Bachelor of Science and Master of Engineering).
Ashutosh Nath Agarwal (Ash) is a Software Engineer in IBM, starting out working on cloud micro-services in Watson Health, before moving to IBM Developer and now builds code patterns in the Blockchain, ML, and IoT space. He graduated Cornell with his Masters in Computer Science with a focus on Machine Learning. His passion lies in all things computer science, and more recently, has taken a love for bouldering. Talk to him about chess.
Lennart Frantzell, PhD, is a Developer Advocate with IBM focused on Blockchain and AI. A Silicon Valley veteran he has worked in Healthcare IT, Object Oriented Programming and Expert Systems. He spends his weekends at Hackathons and Meetups to avoid doing yard work at his bungalow in Silicon Valley.
 Kapi Attawar is Chief Revenue Officer at Samsung SDS America in the Blockchain Team, building enterprise blockchain alliance initiatives for Samsung SDS in the North America Region. Samsung SDS - an IT solutions and services company within Samsung Group - has more than 150 people dedicated to enterprise blockchain practice and has been implementing blockchain solutions for the last three years.Â
Kapi is building a blockchain ecosystem of partners comprising System Integrators, Technology Companies and Developers. Kapi has been involved in blockchain for a few years and is an active member of the global blockchain community. Has been involved in Blockchain Industry Vertical Special Interest Groups around Telecom, Industrial IoT as well as topics like identity.  He holds an MBA and a BTech in Engineering, both from the UK.