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CoinMarketCap’s The Capital in Singapore: Top 10 Highlights

CoinMarketCap’s inaugural conference, The Capital, took place November 12-13 at the Victoria Theatre in Singapore. In case you weren’t able to come to Singapore, here are the top ten things that happened over the two-day conference.

November 13, 2019  by CoinMarketCap

The Capital has ended, here’s what you missed:

1) CoinMarketCap announced a new metric for ranking exchanges — liquidity. The idea is that ranking by volume leaves room for foul play, since exchanges can easily report fake volumes.

2) The Capital’s first act was an anonymous conversation between the secretive CoinMarketCap founder Brandon Chez and proof-of-stake inventor Sunny King. All that viewers could tell about Chez — who spoke through a voice distorter, wearing a mask and cape — is that he was a man holding a smartphone. Everyone knows Sunny King, but he was also disguised for good measure.

3) The second day of the conference the same lunch was served as day one — truffle deja vu! Still delicious though.

Michael Arrington

4) Michael Arrington of TechCrunch and XRP Capital said crypto is a “sick industry.” We asked him to explain what we meant, here’s what he said.

When everything’s going well [in an industry], there’s lots to talk about. I listened to some of the panels today, and people are talking about some of the new staking models, some of the new DeFi products. There are really interesting new things to talk about. 

Our topic was more just about the top 100 coins and what it takes to get there. It’s a bleak topic because everything’s manipulated by the exchanges. Sometimes it’s based on if you pay off the exchange to get on the exchange, or maybe it’s specific exchanges, but there’s a whole game there, personal relationships — but none of it’s really about the fundamentals. 

We need something interesting to happen in this industry. You guys are pretty young, but I had my first computer in 1982, and it was really fun to play games on. But the real use case, the reason why people bought computers back then is because there were spreadsheets, and spreadsheets could do things you couldn’t do with a ledger, paper, pencils. People bought computers just for that. 

That’s what they first started calling a “killer app,” and the fact of that app sold computers, and we don’t have that now. We have Bitcoin’s killer app: money. ETH for a while had a killer app of being able to issue ERC-20 tokens on top of it, and that drove 2017. 

But it’s just not clear to me what the killer app is right now. We’re waiting for that. If I knew what it was, I’d built it, but I don’t know what it is.

5) Circle’s founder and CEO, Jeremy Allaire, said that what many call the 2017 ICO bubble was actually “really interesting” since “we got a glimpse of what internet-based capital markets could look like.” That’s a positive way of putting it, Jeremy! Check The Capital’s exclusive interview with Allaire where he talks about how crypto could make finance work 10x better.

6) Binance held a “super meetup” after day one of The Capital where Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao announced the firm’s partnership with HTC to launch a blockchain smartphone, which will retail for $599. A total of six Binance Super Meetup attendees — sadly, not us — won free HTC phones during the event.

7) Jennifer Ilkiw from Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), Asia Pacific, which both owns the New York Stock Exchange and is the creator of digital assets platform Bakkt, spoke about the cash-settled Bitcoin futures contracts that will launch in Singapore on Dec. 9.

8) A conversation about user privacy sparked a heated debate about the existence of privacy today. Do you think privacy is still possible? Lina Seiche from BTSE thinks it does (see her quote below) while Nimrod Lehavi of Simplex made the comparison that it’s as rare as “unicorns.” Unclear if he meant a specific numerical valuation for a tech company, or an actual horse with a horn.

Samson Mow

9) Blockstream’s Samson Mow didn’t get to say as much as he could have during day two’s mining panel, but he got to expand backstage in an interview.

He said:

“If you talk to any serious computer science person, they will tell you that proof-of-stake doesn’t really work because it is essentially perpetual energy.” 

10) Spencer Yang, head of special projects at CoinMarkcmcetCap, predicted that the specially-commissioned artwork that every conference speaker signed could be worth a lot in 10 years, possibly as an NFT. Check back in 2029 to see if he’s right.

Top quotes from The Capital speakers:

“Digital assets will become successful when my mother is using them and no one at my family dinner table at Christmas asks me what I’m doing at work.”
Jennifer Ilkiw, Intercontinental Exchange, Asia Pacific

Because of [its] position, when the U.S. sneezes, it kind of affects people elsewhere.”
Paul Atkins, former commissioner of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, currently at Patomak Global Partners

“If the statement that there is no privacy gets any traction at all, then you are basically giving your government a free pass to destroy your privacy.”
Lina Seiche, BTSE