On June 24th and 25th, the NEO ecosystem participated in the Crypto Valley Conference (CVC) on blockchain technology in Zug, Switzerland. NEO’s participants included Lili Zhao, Swiss director of Ecosystem Growth, and Dr. Guilherme Sperb Machado, founder of Neow3j, who delivered a presentation and a workshop, respectively. NEO News Today was able to catch up with Zhao and Dr. Machado to learn more about their contributions to the annual conference.

The second annual CVC boasted more than 1,200 participants, over 100 presentations from industry subject matter experts, and numerous panel discussions. The event sought to discuss technology, economics and finance, and regulation amongst a diverse group of attendees from the start-up, corporate, academic, and public sectors.

NEO Workshop

On the first day of the CVC, Dr. Machado hosted a workshop entitled “NEO Blockchain: Concept and Coding,” which covered NEO concepts and an introductory coding session on NEO smart contracts.

Around 40 or 50 event attendees participated in the workshop, which “was a mix of techies and business people.” According to Dr. Machado, “most of the tech participants were interested in the differences of NEO to other blockchain technologies.”

The conceptual portion of the workshop focused on global assets, UTXOs, how transactions work, transaction types, signing, NEO nodes, and the network in general.

In the coding portion of the workshop, attendees were introduced to NEO smart contracts and instructed on deployment. Also, Dr. Machado “presented development tools (i.e., NEO PrivateNet, compilers) so that the audience could get a good grasp of the whole developer environment.”

Lastly, Dr. Machado told NEO News Today that on numerous occasions, people approached him to say that his Neow3j Java library “is very handy for Android development as well as to Java backends!”

Presentation of the Smart Economy

Zhao was the first speaker of day two, opening with a broad overview of the public perception of blockchain and an introduction to blockchain 1.0 and 2.0. Blockchain 1.0 refers to the distributed ledger technology that transacts in a peer-to-peer network enforced through consensus (i.e., Bitcoin). Blockchain 2.0 is based on 1.0 technology, but incorporates additional features such as smart contracts, dApps, and token issuance (i.e., NEO and Ethereum).

The presentation went on to discuss transaction cost theory, which explains the economic choices of markets and firms, and how it applies to blockchain. Zhao went on to ask, “why is this relevant to blockchain and crypto?”

Speaking with NNT, Zhao said, “One of the fundamental attributes of blockchain and crypto is to reduce transaction costs which is the determining factor of whether production choice is carried out by the firm or in the market according to the transaction cost theory.” The transaction cost will affect the dynamic between markets and firms. So, when transaction cost is less in the market, then the size of the firm will become smaller. As transaction costs increase in the market, then the size of the firm will become larger.

The second half of the presentation to CVC focused explicitly on the Smart Economy. Specifically, NEO’s history, dual token model, consensus mechanism, infrastructure, communities, and dApps. Zhao also discussed the US $100 million EcoBoost fund, and its goal to offer life cycle support for developers, dApps, and infrastructure that grows and develops the NEO ecosystem.

Lastly, Zhao identified three economic models utilizing blockchain technology: within an ecosystem, across ecosystems, and beyond ecosystems. Today, token economic models occur within ecosystems (i.e., NEO and Ethereum), but they can also move across ecosystems through interoperability protocols (i.e., Cosmos and Polkadot). When the fundamental underpinnings of global economic processes are powered by blockchain, then the model extends beyond the ecosystem and into traditional industries, which Zhao called her “vision of the Smart Economy.”

Zhao concluded her presentation stating we’re in “the era of the Smart Economy, a paradigm shift of the Internet, [which] reshapes how society is structured and governed.”

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