The Cardano Summit 2023 started yesterday, 2 November, with a networking soirée welcoming all attendees to the main stage event in Dubai and the Battle of the Builders, presented by the Cardano Foundation and sponsored by CV Labs, Genius X, EMURGO, STORM Partners and FacultyGroup. This thrilling opening night saw guests explore the Cardano Market, which showcases the various Summit exhibitors, along with the NFT Gallery and Pitch Arena.
In his opening remarks to the Battle of the Builders, Frederik Gregaard, CEO of the Cardano Foundation, explained how this new aspect of the Summit intends to support innovation as well as entrepreneurship. Gregaard mentioned that potential investors often ask him how they can investigate a project’s product-market fit, plus the readiness and longevity of Cardano. For the last two, Gregaard provided direct answers: The sheer vitality of the ecosystem’s projects, of everyone present in the room, and the number of Cardano repositories on GitHub provide abundant proof. For the first question, however, Gregaard urged the projects to advocate for themselves.
The final, top 10 contestants of the Battle of the Builders, presented their pitches in front of the jury and Summit attendees. Each project received five minutes to present their project.
- NMKR: Allows users to mint their own NFTs or build a secondary NFT marketplace.
- NEWM: Aims to provide a music streaming marketplace governed by musicians and their fans by giving artists ownership of their creative content.
- Xerberus: Enables users to assess and manage the risk of their digital assets portfolio.
- FiDa: Tokenizes insurance contracts, aiming to address existing industry challenges that result from increasing claim costs.
- Mehen USDM: Looks to create bridges between traditional finance and blockchain via a fiat-backed stablecoin.
- Iagon: Means to provide users with an AI-driven, shared storage platform that simultaneously ensures data compliance, privacy, and security.
- Maestro: Gives users a complete Web3 stack that makes it easy to build DApps, DeFi protocols and others; it also offers a smart contract marketplace.
- zkFold: Offers a zero-knowledge rollups scaling solution for the Cardano blockchain.
- Finest: Presents users with an accessible platform to trade tokenized real world assets (RWA).
- TVVIN: Intends to improve the accessibility of traditional assets like precious metals, minerals, and commodities by leveraging blockchain, AI, and metaverse technologies.
Gregaard highlighted the incredible range and quality of the final 10 contestants, and joined the other judges for the final deliberations, in an expert panel composed by:
- Frederik Gregaard, CEO, Cardano Foundation
- Janis Aguilar, Head of Acceleration, CV Labs
- Sothy Kol-Men, Co-founder, Genius X
- Nikhil Joshi, COO, EMURGO
- Takashi Hayashida, Managing Partner, EMURGO Ventures
- Sheraz Ahmed, Managing Partner, STORM Partners
- Mike Uhliarik, Co-founder and CTO, FacultyGroup
Maestro received the first place, while the second went to NEWM and the third to zkFold. Tracy Trachsler, Jason Gao, and Sheraz Ahmed presented the first, second, and third places respectively.
Today, the first full conference day starts with several workshops and numerous sessions focused on operational resilience and education. Those unable to join in person, can network and watch the live stream via the Cardano Summit app.
Original Source: ’ Cardano Summit 2023: Networking soirée recap’ by David Taylor, published on November 3, 2023.