UDC 2021 came to a successful end with 65,000 total views and 8,000 preregistrations
[Seoul –September 3, 2021] The 4th Upbit Developer Conference (hereinafter “UDC 2021”) hosted by Dunamu Inc. (CEO Sirgoo Lee), came to a successful end after its two-day-long journey from September 1st (Wed.) to September 2nd (Thu.).
Under the theme of ‘Welcome to the Blockchain World’, UDC 2021, a two-day conference held online, featured an insightful vision for the rapidly evolving and growing blockchain industry. It has solidified its reputation as one of the most influential global blockchain conferences by breaking UDC records—8,000 preregistrations and around 65,000 total views.
UDC 2021, which began with the opening welcome speech by Chi-Hyung Song—Chairman of Dunamu—, touched on 6 themes that are the hottest topics in the blockchain industry nowadays: NFT (Non-Fungible Token), DeFi (Decentralized Finance), Smart Contract, CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency), Payment, and Enterprise Solutions.
###NFT
It was remarkable to see cases of NFT revolutionizing the art field tackled by Jungbong Lee, CEO of Seoul Auction Blue Co., Ltd.. Lee highlighted the great potentials of NFT, he said, “By 2030, NFT metaverse market is expected to be several times larger than the 400 billion won domestic art market”. Jeffrey Zirlin, Co-founder of Sky Mavis, introduced its popular game 'Axie Infinity', which has inaugurated “Play to Earn” trend sweeping the Philippines and emerged as a new power for the economy.
Wes Levitt, Head of Strategy for Theta Labs, took an in-depth look at Theta’s NFT ecosystem, featuring high speed, low transaction costs, and collaboration with various content providers. Sebastien Borget, COO and Co-founder of The Sandbox, presented the metaverse world that is shaping the digital economy and shared his thoughts on the scalability of NFTs.
###DeFi
Qi Zhou, CEO and Founder of QuarkChain, and Soon Hyeong Jeong, CEO of Onther Inc. looked at liquidity issues in different DeFi protocols from various perspectives. Kristy-Leigh Minehan, CTO of NEM, defined DeFi as the 4th generation of blockchain development underlining DeFi's role to improve the difficulties of the existing financial structure, not to replace central financial institutions.
###Payment
Cuy Sheffield, the Vice president and Head of Crypto at Visa global payment technology company, gained traction by providing 5 trends ahead of the advent of a crypto economy that is different from traditional finance: Bitcoin, Stablecoin, DeFi, NFT trading, CBDC. Marek Olszewski, CTO and Co-founder of Celo, examined the payment technology called ‘MoFi’, a combination of mobile and DeFi. Olszewski suggested that MoFi innovation will bring about the faster adoption of DeFi.
###CBDC
Changho Jin, Principal of Kearney Korea LLC, analyzed the progress of global CBDC research, which is being actively conducted from developed countries to developing countries. He said, "CBDC will lead innovation in payment/payment process with the digital wallet and financial products while coexisting with the existing financial order".
###Smart Contract
Ryan R. Fox, Developer Advocate of Algorand, described the smart contract of Algorand that challenges the existing ones. Muneeb Ali, Co-founder of Stacks, delivered how Stacks has pioneered a new path on the smart contract field with the Bitcoin-based smart contract. Arthur Breitman, Council member of Tezos Foundation, shared the vision of the smart contract of Tezos. Breitman indicated that Tezos has preeminent security and efficient algorithm, and blockchain that can upgrade functions continuously without hard fork. Anatoly Yakovenko, CEO of Solana Labs, focused on the Decentralized Exchange (DEX) ‘Serum’ that supports 25 million transactions per day and announced the solution of that Solana smart contract has found in terms of difficulties of speed and scalability.
###Enterprise Solutions
Jay Park, CEO of Lambda256, delved into the importance of ‘Reg tech’ by going through the difficulties that blockchain companies are now facing, such as legal risks related to criminal abuse, differences in regulations by country, and ambiguity of related regulations.
Leemon Baird, Chief Scientist and Co-founder of Hedera Hashgraph, demonstrated the reasons why early ledgers could not be easily applied to enterprises while demonstrating Hedera’s technology that is on the bleeding edge of enterprise solution adoption.
“As the years go by, the prospects of blockchain technology are becoming more promising”, said Sirgoo Lee, CEO of Dunamu, who took on the closing stage. “There’s no doubt that blockchain has become a major trend that no one can deny permeating our everyday lives. We expect curiosity about blockchain technology to become an accelerator for the development of the blockchain industry”, Lee said.
UDC, first held in 2018, is the world’s first conference dedicated to blockchain developers, with programs focused on the free exchange of ideas, in-depth discussions, and community building. UDC has garnered participants from more than 600 companies, 7,000 attendees, and 250,000 views on YouTube for the past three years. UDC 2021 has drawn about 8,000 preregistrations and 65,000 total views during the two days—the highest number ever. All sessions in the UDC 2021 can be replayed on its official UDC YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/udc_official.