August 25^th, San Francisco – 2019 Bytom DevCon was successfully held in Fort Mason, San Francisco, on August 24^th. More than 50 teams from the U.S., Russia, India, Belgium, Brazil, Nigeria and China registered for 2019 dev challenge and six winning teams did demo show at the conference. Finally, Paypaw team from Canada, which developed a BTM micropayment system, won the first prize and got 30,000 USD equivalent BTM tokens.

This is Bytom’s second DevCon, the first was held in China last year. 2019 Bytom DevCon invited many speakers in the blockchain industry including Darin Kotalik, Director of ETC Labs; Naveed Ihsanullah, Head of Engineering at Algorand; Nick White, Co-Founder of Harmony; Mo Dong, Co-founder of Celer Network; Daniel Yan, Founding Partner of Matrixport; Zera Alexander, VP of Engineering at Reserve and so on. They discussed about issues ranging from public blockchains, investment to digital assets.

Updates on Bytom and Bystack

In the opening remarks, Duan Xinxing, Founder and CEO of Bytom, mentioned the reason to launch Bytom. He wanted to create a digital asset internet to support multiple assets and the programmable economy. Duan also shared Bytom’s recent release of Bystack, a blockchain as a service platform with mainchain-sidechain design. One sidechain has been created  for staking service which already has 42 partners now. They also try to make more customized toolkits and integrated them within Bystack framework for Enterprise Applications on sidechains.

Bytom VP of Engineering, James Zhu, released the roadmap of Bystack in the near future. Bytack will launch a developer center and a decentralized ID system. Meanwhile, Bystack will keep iterating and release BBFT 2.0 and Bytom 1.2. In addition, Open Federation Management Framework, Dapp Dev Framework and Decentralized Personal Credit Solution will be launched as well.

BBFT presenter Wei Wang illustrated the high performance of Bystack’s sidechain. By using BBFT consensus algorithm, the TPS on sidechain can reach 20 thousand and confirmation time for a transaction takes only 0.6 seconds with a fork possibility of 0.27%. The combination of PoW, DPoS and BBFT help Bystack break the trilemma theory in blockchain.

MATPool CTO Lei Jin gave a speech about Mining as a service (MaaS). As Bytom’s official mining pool, MATPool provides custody service for miners and it will look for the most profitable tokens automatically. MaaS will connect the demand side and the supply side of GPU computing power, resolving resource isolation.

Insights on Blockchain Industry

Celer Network Co-founder Mo Dong said in his speech that Celer wants to promote adoption of blockchain through games. A mobile APP CelerX has been launched and developers even without blockchain developing experience could use CelerX Gaming SDK to develop HTML 5 games easily.

There are also three insightful panel discussions at the conference. In the panel about trends and challenges of public blockchains, Darin Kotalik thought that education is one of the biggest challenges because people need to have a basic understanding of blockchain. When speaking of future’s mass adoption, Naveed Ihsanullah said that mass adoption will come when many products are used without the underlying blockchain technology being recognized. Nick White thought that gaming is a good start point to attract more users and the compliance issue in gaming is not as serious as DeFi projects.

In the panel discussing value creation in digital assets industry, Anchain Marketing Manager Steven Yang said that in fact many projects have to become centralized gradually due to KYC compliant requirement and users’ preference. Infstone Business Director Sili Zhao thought that many people’s understanding on blockchain is limited in banking and crypto and blockchain insiders should explore more use cases in other fields. Zera Alexander, VP of Engineering at Reserve, pointed out that stable coins will boom in the future because it has not found proper use cases now even though with a high market cap.

In the last panel about investment, Co-Founder of Matrixport Daniel Yan thought that Hong Kong and Singapore are Asia’s best places for crypto business. However, Will Wang, Investment Director of Ausvic Capital pointed out that choosing the location should consider technical talents but the experience of users is more important than technology. Cecilia Li, Investment/Partnership Director of OKcoin, said that any asset can be tokenized but the key is whether the asset has intrinsic value and demand. TF Guo, Founder of Taxa, gave advice to individual investors that building and holding is better than trading.