The OAX booth at ETHIS

On Saturday the OAX Foundation team was out promoting the project at another big industry event in Hong Kong. Ethereum Industry Summit (ETHIS) is a global conference that aims to promote communication and cooperation between different Ethereum communities around the world. As such, it was a perfect place for us to be.

This event was pretty unique compared to many other blockchain conferences and meet-ups in Hong Kong, where conversations tend to be dominated by people from the business end of things. By contrast, Saturday was very technical and developer oriented, with focuses on topics such as smart contracts and scalability solutions.

Vitalik Buterin, Co-founder of Ethereum, speaking at ETHIS.

One of the other distinguishing features of the conference was the high calibre profile of the speakers. Vitalik Buterin was definitely the highlight. He spoke to a full house about the importance of striking a balance between scalability and decentralization, describing along the way the many important benefits decentralization brings. Having the co-founder of Ethereum talk about this is a powerful reminder of just how important the issues are that we’re solving through the OAX project.

Also speaking at the event was Antoine Cote, the Co-founder of our development partner, Enuma Technologies. Antoine was on a panel debating smart contract security, a central issue in blockchain development. As he said during the discussion, “In smart contracts, a single mistake can have a huge impact.”

Antoine Cote (center), Co-founder of OAX’s development partner Enuma Technologies, speaking at a panel on smart contract security.

All in all, the topics being debated on Saturday and the people at the event were right at the centre of current developments in blockchain and decentralization.

There was a real buzz to this conference, and not least around the OAX booth which we set up as part of the expo section of the event. Our booth was the busiest of all, attracting attention from many of the delegates — from other exchanges interested in our take on the decentralization challenge right through to blockchain engineers working on exciting new projects.

We even had a visit from a representative of the Ethereum Community Fund. He came over especially to express his appreciation for the non-profit nature of our project, as well as our commitment to building a decentralized exchange platform that will bring transparency and high governance standards to the industry. It’s great to be receiving this recognition for our work, particularly since the Ethereum Community Fund was co-founded by Vitalik himself.

The cream of the Ethereum community was out in force on Saturday and we were honoured to be there with them!