On February 13th The NYC Cardano Meetup group had its first meetup of 2019.
The meetup coincided with the inauguration of the first group of startups and fellows selected in the dLab/Emurgo accelerator program. Because of this we were fortunate to have the participation of a number of Emurgo and SOSV/dLab luminaries well as Nathan Kaiser from the Cardano Foundation.
From Emurgo we had CEO Ken Kodama, CIO Manmeet Singh, CMO Florian Bohnert, CTO Nicolas Arqueros, Global Digital Media Manager Keisha DePaz, R&D Engineering Lead Sebastien Guillemot, and Executive Assistant Ms. Sumire Ono.
From SOSV and dLab we had Sean O’Sullivan, SOSV Managing Partner, Nick Plante Program Director, Paul Saint-Donat Program Manager, and Isabella Fantini Operations Manager.
The program started off with an introduction of the 4 startups and fellows by Nick Plante.
A full introduction of the companies can be found in the below link as well as a link to a full description of the dLabs/Emurgo program:
Nick also introduced and spoke about the fellowships that have been granted so far but I need to get more information on those details and post about it separately. In general however the fellowships have been given to people who will help provide tools and information to help developers and the community foster adoption of Cardano technology.
Next to speak was Nicolas who briefed the group on Emurgo’s latest technical achievements and gave us an update regarding the Yoroi light wallet and its new mobile implementation on Android. An iOS version will be released soon. Some more information on the Android app can be found here:
https://toshitimes.com/cardano-emurgos-yoroi-wallet-launches-on-android/
Manmeet presented next and he elaborated on Emurgo’s fundamental mission to both increase adoption AND overall value of the Ada token. To that end he said a number of promising opportunities are in development but he did not want to announce them until they were more definite. A partnership that he did elaborate on was the major investment that Emurgo recently made in the Y2X digital bank. In addition to providing capital he said it was a complimentary partnership where Y2X had knowledge and experience on the investment banking side and Emurgo had experience on the technology side. Y2X will be using the Cardano block chain as the tech behind their STOs. Manmeet stated that in the coming years entire aspects of the global economy will be digitized and put on the block chain to create liquidity and investment opportunity in areas that currently are locked up. He mentioned real-estate and natural resources as two areas among many that would benefit from tokenization. In response to a question regarding how Emurgo and IOHK divide responsibilities and business opportunities Manmeet said that at this point all of the different branches of the Cardano project (Emurgo, IOHK, and the Foundation) are in direct and frequent contact with one another and divide projects based on who has the best resources available.
More on the deal with Y2X can be found here:
Next to present was Nathan Kaiser current Chairman of the Cardano Foundation who answered questions from the reddit forum in an AMA format. A video will be out shortly with that content but it was a very exciting part of the evening. For me at least it was a sign the Foundation has reemerged and begun to engage the community. Nathan stated that the fundamental mission of the Foundation has not changed only that the Foundation will now begin to fulfill the obligations it was created for.
More information on the foundation can be found here:
The evening ended with a chance to talk about various aspects of the project, network, and get to know each other better.
On behalf of the NYC Cardano meetup group I do want to thank everyone involved with making the evening a success. It was very enjoyable to meet and talk with those directly involved in the project in person. I left with a feeling of great optimism regarding the future of the project.
If anyone has specific questions about the evening, or different or more complete recollections of the events or people present please don’t hesitate to post them.
Some pictures and video of the event courtesy of Sean Alimov can be found on this thread here:
Thanks!
sounds like a brilliant idea! Fantastic selection of projects overall. I really love the approach of Cardano to pick top quality projects with top market impact/potential to drive up adoption. A little bit of thinking goes a long way.