We’re less than two months out from Chainlink’s annual SmartCon event, the world’s premier web3 conference featuring groundbreaking leaders in the blockchain space, including researchers, academics, and founders of top DeFi protocols, dynamic NFT projects, and layer-1 and layer-2 blockchains. With pandemic restrictions subsiding, this year’s SmartCon will feature two full days of virtual and in-person events, September 28th and 29th in New York City.
Nearly 100 speakers have already been announced, with more names to be added to the already impressive roster. Here’s a look at some of the most anticipated presenters and their influential thought leadership.
Eric Schmidt
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt scaled Google’s growth, including a $23 billion IPO, from 2001 to 2011. Last December, Schmidt became a strategic advisor at Chainlink Labs, where he’s helping to scale Chainlink’s inter-blockchain communications standard, Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP), to enable a multichain world. In an official announcement, Schmidt expressed his excitement to help Chainlink Labs build a world powered by cryptographic truth and described Chainlink as “a secret ingredient to unlocking the potential of smart contract platforms and revolutionizing business and society.”
Balaji Srinivasan
Former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan was one of the biggest headliners of the 2021 SmartCon virtual event. During a compelling keynote speech, Srinivasan presented his concept of a “ledger of record” which would facilitate the global shift from a broken “fiat information” model based on “argument from authority” to a “cryptoinformation” model based on “argument from cryptography.” Srinivasan described a global information ecosystem where “anything that you’re asserting for the record” is posted on-chain via a decentralized oracle, explaining, “If we can solve the oracle problem for price, we can probably solve it for a lot of other things.”
Anatoly Yakovenko
During a fireside chat at the 2022 Solana Breakpoint event, Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko joined Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov to elaborate on their shared vision for how Solana’s mainnet integration of Chainlink oracles will catalyze the next generation of hybrid smart contracts. Yakovenko believes that the synergy between Chainlink’s industry-standard oracle infrastructure and Solana’s high-speed blockchain will allow developers to build web3 applications that rival the web2 user experience, initiating a “seismic shift” from web2 to web3 where decentralized finance (DeFi) attracts upwards of 100 million new users.
Emin Gün Sirer
At this year’s Avalanche Summit, founder of Ava Labs (a team supporting the development of Avalanche), Emin Gün Sirer, virtually joined Sergey Nazarov to explain how Chainlink oracles unlock key functionalities for next-gen DeFi applications on Avalanche’s novel, low-latency chain. “I think we’re finally at the cusp, where the mainstream is beginning to understand the importance of web3,” Sirer said of the horizon where web3 apps possess “granularities that rival regular web2 interactions” and redefine the “business model behind web services” so that “they’re no longer controlled by a single entity that sells you ads, that builds a dossier on you, that ends up selling your private information to third parties.”
And More
The event will also feature founders and CEOs from some of the 1,400+ projects in the Chainlink Ecosystem. Ecosystem speakers will include Sid Jha, CEO of Arbol – a founding partner of decentralized climate data marketplace dClimate, which brought Mark Cuban on as a strategic advisor last year; as well as Yann Barbarroux, the CEO of parametric on-chain insurance platform Otonomi, which celebrated its Chainlink-powered air freight insurance index joining the Nasdaq Global Index Data Services platform in Times Square last February.
Finally, Chainlink co-founder Sergey Nazarov is perhaps the most anticipated headliner at SmartCon 2022. Nazarov, who recently spoke at Coindesk’s Consensus 2022 festival about how Chainlink’s 1000+ bespoke oracle networks enable a world where trust-minimization is the new minimum standard, tweeted his excitement to interact with many SmartCon attendees in real life for the first time.
To learn more and stay up to date on speakers and itineraries, visit the official SmartCon 2022 website.