On March 23rd we held the second Member event on the Blockchain technology in the Crypto Valley Lab in Zug as a follow-up event for our first Event we held February 2nd in the Technopark.

After the first event “Crypto Currencies and Blockchain” we sent a survey to the participants, whose results showed us that there is a great interest in current use cases and the desire to get an outlook on where the technology will develop.

Together with our friends from inacta we have put together a very interesting agenda in which the following use cases and developments were presented.

Ralf Glabischnig from inacta started with an intro about the future of Blockchain technology and thus gave a very good outlook where the technology could develop in relation to the financial world. He also presented the Blockchain Competition that will focus in 2018 on the financial sector.

Petar Tsankov from ETH introduced insights and challenges on smart contracts and showed us how so-called hacks can occur with smart contracts. “So-called” because not everything that looks like a hack is always a hack. Petar has shown us with code excerpts how easy it is to change the owner of a wallet or how someone can become a hacker by chance when working on the code.

Roger Darin from the Bitcoin Association talks about the impact of Crypto Currencies on the portfolio management and what it means for the digitization of banks. For that he talked about risk/return profiles and the effects of investing even a small proportion of crypto currencies in portfolios compared to portfolios in which there is no proportion of crypto currencies. Especially for banks Roger could give many arguments why they should deal more with crypto currencies. Find out more on the website.

Daniel Rutishauser from inacta has summarized here what belongs to a successful business case and what you have to pay attention to if you want to approach a case with DLT. The process is similar to the development of classic business cases, but due to the new technology and complexity of the implementation, it requires an honest focus on security, compliance and the goal of the case, because not every business case has to be implemented with DLT, but with completely new approaches to cases that do not yet exist in the classic and/or analog sense, DLT could be the game changer.

Dennis Knochenwefel of Reportix presented the Ricardian Contracts. A big problem of Smart Contracts so far was that Smart Contracts consist of code, which is read and understood by machines, but not understood by other people except developers. Ricardian Contracts are contracts that look the same on the surface as any other insurance contract, they are readable by humans, but can also be read by machines, just like normal code. This could be a big step, which could mean the applicability of Smart Contracts especially in the insurance environment. Find out more on the website.

Mona El Isa from Melonport has presented her case, which deals with technology regulated investment funds. An easy-to-use platform for managing digital assets. Mona also gave us a look into the demo version of the platform. More about this on the website.

Dezos are a very young startup, which has set itself the task of understanding any object that can be lost in analog life, e.g. mobile phones, luggage etc. with a code that can be tracked in a search engine at Dezos. This means you have to register your item first and then provide it with an appropriate code so that you can then search for it. Honest finders can also locate the owner of an item via Dezos and return it. Find out more on the website.

The Equility team introduced Alethena, an ICO rating agency. This gives investors an overview of which ICOs are trustworthy and whether an investment is worthwhile. Technical, business, legal and governmental factors are taken into account. These ratings happen in real time and the more ratings are received, the higher the ICOs can be rated.More about this on the website.

Parallel to the last two cases we organized a shark tank in an adjoining room, where participants of the event could challenge their blockchain ideas with experts. Participants who only came up with a spontaneous idea during the event were thus able to discuss directly where they stand with this idea.

Further events and educational sessions will follow, which will then also be opened for non-members.