For much of August, part of the Whiteblock team was in Germany for Berlin Blockchain Week. This event is a “decentralized community-organized initiative” focused on educating people about the current state of the blockchain industry. We attended a series of events, met up with old connections and made new ones. Here’s a survey with details on all of the things we got into, including Web3 Summit, DappCon and EthBerlinZwei.

WEB3 Summit

The Web3 Summit is an event “organized around a single rallying call: to facilitate a fully functional and user-friendly decentralized web.” This is a worthwhile cause as any, and the Whiteblock team was excited to both observe the stellar speaker lineup, including Richard Snowden, and participate in the breakout sessions.

Zak Cole took off his Whiteblock hat at the Web3 Summit in Berlin and became king shill for ants with a talk titled: P2P System Evaluation. Watch the full talk here and see what P2P system designers can learn from ants, pheremones, antennae, and mandibles. Zak also contributed a panel on making validator services accessible. Reaching out to developers, Rene and Nate were able to give an impromptu Genesis workshop at the venue.

On top of all of the amazing talks, there was great weather and entertainment in the form of protocol roasts — no one was safe!

DAPPCON & ETHBerlinZwei

Filling out the second half of Berlin Blockchain Week were two equally significant events. The first, DappCon, “focuses on decentralized applications, tooling, and foundational infrastructure on Ethereum.” The event was three days of events and workshops, all communicating best practices for developers and builders in the space. We attended several talks there, connecting with developers working on a wide variety of developers and projects. Ben Burns and Nate Blakely also gave a participatory workshop one of the mornings to a group of attendees. Finally, Rene Lubov was on a panel discussing Ethereum 2.0, the slated upgrade for the Ethereum ecosystem. It’s always great to have opportunities to showcase what we’ve been building and demonstrate to people that will use it.

The second, ETHBerlinZwei was the next installment of a 2018 hackathon which blew everyone away. This year was no different, with beautiful weather in a spacious venue ( Factory Berlin), and a range of workshops — all curated by the Department of Decentralisation. The event was part “hackathon, a culture festival, an educational event, a platform for hacktivism, and a community initiative to push the decentralized ecosystem forward.”

Whiteblock was fortunate to be able to sponsor such an event. We had a table that played host to many productive conversations about what Whiteblock does and what our Genesis platform will provide to users. On top of hooking up hackers with some was giving away a ton of tasty German chocolates! Needless to say, it was incredible — supporting community initiatives that onboard new developers is hugely important. Explore all of the amazing submissions here.

During the hackathon, Zak, Nate and Ben worked together with the Ethereum Classic Cooperative, Afri, and the Görli testnet to launch Nazgul: a temporary proof of work testnet ( documentation here) that tested the clients for consensus issues in preparation for the Atlantis hardfork. The testnet launched in Berlin and ran successfully for a week, to the great reception from the community.

After all that traveling, it’s good to be back home, heads down working on Genesis. Check out our website for deeper dives and to sign up for the Whiteblock Genesis beta early access.

Originally published at https://whiteblock.io on September 24, 2019.