At Blockchain Week San Francisco, the Cryptocurrency Space Grows Out of Lambos & Gucci’s

• This week, cryptocurrency enthusiasts from around the world will storm into San Francisco for Blockchain Week 2018.
• As cryptocurrency prices continue to dwindle, the conference’s focus shifts from rooftop parties to hackathons and coding.

Over the next week, San Francisco will experience its own cryptocurrency boom: thousands of visitors will converge in the city for Blockchain Week 2018.

Held between October 5th and 12th, 2018, San Francisco Blockchain Week is a week full of blockchain events, talks, seminars, and of course, parties.

The three major events are: ETH San Francisco, SF Blockchain Week Epicenter, and Crypto Economics Security Conference.

As Blockchain Week San Francisco comes to a boil, the events show how much the cryptocurrency space has matured.

While crypto-conferences in 2017 were all about lambos, yachts, and Dom Perignon, 2018 shows that after the money dries up, the developers must get to work.

Bitcoin, the leader of the cryptocurrency space, has dropped from $20,000 all the way down to $6,500. The entire market has gone down with it, which means that development teams can no longer afford the lavish lifestyle they previously enjoyed.

As prices of assets drop, the rubber meets the road. Teams must focus on creating and delivering a product - in order to satisfy their investors.

The focus has switched away from the money, and back to the technology. As Perkins Cole partner Michael Didiuk explains, "they understood that this technology is real and is going to be transformative.”

Christian Laang, CEO of Tradeshift (a supply chain management platform) states that: "blockchain is an extremely powerful idea, but it's very far from being a mature technology.”

Despite the freshness of the cryptocurrency space, some big players are making big moves to grow their technology from a speculative investment into a useful product...

Ripple Leads The Way

Last week, Ripple held their own conference, the SWELL conference, as a warm-up to San Francisco Blockchain Week. Held October 1-2, 2018, featured speakers included:

And many more, including a special performance by the band Counting Crows.

During the conference, Ripple unveiled many advancements in their XRapid technology.

In addition to launching the final version of XRapid, Ripple announced developments with their banking partners. They even confirmed that one credit union and two payment processing firms to have signed contracts to use the XRapid technology to facilitate cross-border payments.

Cross border payments is $27T market, according to Boston Consulting Group, and Ripple hopes to capture a large share of this.