The Crypto Scene in Amsterdam
Recurrent Meetups and One-off Events — March 2019 & Beyond
Despite recent bearish markets, the blockchain community in the Netherlands is going strong, organizing various meetups and workshops to increase awareness and adoption of DLT throughout many industries and potential use-cases.
I’ve spent March trying to visit all the recurrent and some of the one-off meetups in Amsterdam and here’s the recap on what’s been going on in the most progressive and blockchain-friendly city in Europe.
Recurring Events (by day of the week)
BlockDAM Co-working Tuesdays
Every Tuesday (10am-5pm) blockchain enthusiasts, businessmen & women, entrepreneurs, and developers meet at Meet Berlage to discuss recent blockchain topics and experiment with the Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). Unofficially, Blockdam serves as a mini-incubator and a mastermind group where we share the latest discoveries in the blockchain niche and give each other, and our guests feedback on their project or business ideas.
Food Integrity Blockchain (Tuesday evening)
The second Tuesday of each month you can join Food Integrity meetup and find out more about the blockchain use-cases in food and agriculture, including provenance tracking, fairtrade, and supply chain.
Food Integrity collaborates with The Fork, Fairfood.nl and Waag Society to help bring a ‘farm to form’ solutions and global awareness.
In March meetup, Paul Adrien Genet presented AgOS aimed to empower agricultural supply chains. You can catch the latest Food Integrity lectures on youtube.
Bitcoin Wednesdays
Every first Wednesday of the month, you can join Bitcoin Wednesday (Coinfest) for exquisite and in-depth lectures, panel discussions, and Q&As by a variety of experts.
Bitcoin Wednesday, organized by an early adopter and long-time bitcoin activist Richard Kohl, is the longest operating meetup in Amsterdam and it has featured many famous entrepreneurs and unique personalities including Andreas Antonopoulos, Craig Wright, Tone Vays, Michael Jackson (ex-CTO of Skype), late Bernard Lietaer (economist), Phil Zimmermann (cypherpunk), and many more.
The most recent event introduced:
Aleksandar Kuzmanovic, Founder of bloXroute Team and his zero layer solution for scalability.
Martin Kuvandzhiev, Core Developer of Bitcoin Gold explained bitcoin security challenges and their new solutions for notarized blockchain.
Michael Pinkus, CFO of Bitbond told us about the first official STO organized in the EU, in Germany.
Frans Kempen (IBM Benelux) and Firat Sertgoz (IBM Lead Blockchain Developer) talked about the IBM solutions for enterprises and equal Plainfield consortia.
Jenna Pilgrim, Business Development Manager at Bloq introduced Metronome, the cross-blockchain, self-governing cryptocurrency.
Galen Evans, CTO of Konfidio, explained their blockchain solution for contract management platform.
Blockchain Talks (Thursdays)
The second Thursday of each month you can join a Blockchain Talks community for a few themed lectures and an opportunity to network and discuss blockchain governance, tokenomics, and adoption over drinks (or Beer-2-Beer).
You can catch recent Blockchain talks lectures on their youtube channel.
This month Blockchain Talks featured:
Daan Masson, the co-founder of Infloat talked about the Netherlands as a new hub for tokenizing company’s equity. Infloat helps companies with legal and practical issues related to STO’s.
Jana Petkanic, the co-organizer of Blockchain Talks, and an advisor to EthicHub shared her favorite root project, La Bitcoineta, which aims to educate people in Latin America face-2-face about the benefits of cryptocurrencies wherever the native currency is highly volatile.
David Moore talked about KnownOrigin, a new platform for artist to digitize their artwork and sell it to a new generation of digital art connoisseurs.
Myself — Natalia Nowakowska, talked about the psychology of influence applied to white paper writing and marketing of the crypto projects.
Hyperledger NL Meetups
About once a month, Hyperledger NL together with Blockchain Netherlands organize meetups to discuss more blockchain use cases and open source projects in the Dutch ecosystem.
This time, Vikas Pandey introduced us to various tools within the Hyperledger ecosystem, and Pieter Haasnoot, the co-founder of Publicism, explained new blockchain solutions for Journalism and Media.
Publicism is currently testing virtual, decentralized newsrooms to solve some of the industry problems, including censorship and persecution of journalists, keeping sources’ identities confidential, lowering publishing costs, and allowing high-level, unbiased and fact-checked articles to compete with clickbait, advertorials, and fake news.
PS: Pieter is looking for more developers and solutions to implement into their newsroom so don’t hesitate to contact him.
New and One-off Meetups
Cardano Meetup (5th March 2019)
Cardano Foundation launched a new meetup in the Crypto Amsterdam scene to welcome a growing Cardano community in the Netherlands. This first event was initiated with a speech about the Plutus platform by Manual Chakravarty.
Amsterdam Economic Board (7th March 2019)
By an invite-only (available via Crypto Canal), Amsterdam Economic Board together with Amsterdam Startup organized a meetup about blockchain education in the Netherlands, followed by a matchmaking session between companies and projects and the talented people working in the niche.
We kicked off with Aik van Eemeren who introduced us to Digital City Agenda as blockchain becomes a hot topic at the Amsterdam city council.
Tina van der Linden shared her successes and challenges in organizing blockchain technology and regulation courses at the VU Law Department.
Sam Wouters explained more about the blockchain courses offered to businesses and entrepreneurs by Growth Tribe.
Eleonore Blanc (Crypto Canal) and Rudolf van Ee (Blockchain Talent Lab, Blockchain Netherlands) shared their ideas about spreading awareness and bringing the community together through better organized and coordinated meetups.
You can read the event recap here.
BCH Meetup (15th March 2019)
At the Bitcoin Cash event organized by Alejandro De La Torre and Laurent van Engeland, you could meet the Amsterdam BCH community and exchange ideas about peer-2-peer payments over drinks.
Corda Meetup (21st March 2019)
This month Corda launch their community in Amsterdam with help and support from Axveco. Corda is an open source distributed ledger platform for business, designed to record, manage and automate legal agreements. Developers and companies can join and build within the ecosystems, and the Dutch community is invited to participate in future educational and networking events (still to be announced).
MibleWimble Meetup (26th March 2019)
This month, Grin Amsterdam organized a highly successful Mimblewimble meetup which saw over 100 people at a unique Amsterdam Central Station venue, networking over drinks and learning more about the Miblewimble protocol.
Mimblewimble, describes a blockchain that uses a completely different transactional construction method than Bitcoin, and supports confidential transactions, while allowing full validation of the blockchain, without the need for new users to view the full transaction history
Following the Blockchain Scene in Amsterdam and the Netherlands
1) Crypto Canal — Keep track of Meetups in Amsterdam.
2) Blockchain Netherlands — Add your projects and meetups within the Netherlands.
Add your company, meetup, or project to the Blockchain Map of the Netherlands.
Follow Dutch Meetups
Interesting Venues (in alphabetical order)
A Lab — hiding behind the Eye Museum and the Lookout building, in the Amsterdam Noord (take the Buiksloterweg Ferry), is a beautiful brick building full of modern urban laboratories, coworking spaces, and event rooms. Alab hosts social impact creatives, entrepreneurs, and technologists.
Fashion for Good — new venue slash interactive exposition (free entrance) on sustainable fashion would see you naked more often. It also offers spaces for rent in the heart of Amsterdam (Rokin 102).
Meet Berlage — is a historical building of the old Dutch stock exchange 2 min walking distance from the Amsterdam Central Station. Centrally located, Meet Berlage offers well-prepared coworking space (via Seats2meet), a beautiful cafe/bar with an exceptional view, and various meeting and event rooms for rent.
Seats2Meet — is a coworking space search engine which offers social capital based office options for freelancers and entrepreneurs as well as venue spaces for rent.
PS: It’s hard to attend all the meetups taking place in Amsterdam, let alone the whole of the Netherlands. You can catch many of the missed events on youtube.
Bitcoin Wednesdays (only streaming during the events!) https://www.bitcoinwednesday.com/ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCt-Po2gFQxiUngwJXh6s04w/videos
Blockchain Talks https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAfRuIK6p6x31xpeUS1MEcQ
Food Integrity — The Fork https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsyBw9YNtg9KVm_XUgjW6jA/videos
Disclaimer
This article does is not constitute any kind of investment advice. Information and opinions contained herein should not be considered an endorsement, solicitation, or offer to buy or sell any securities or other financial instruments or provide any investment advice or service.
This article expresses the authors views and experiences. Before taking any action, always do your own research and due diligence.
