Welcome to Berlin’s CryptoZoo

C3 Crypto Conference in Berlin April 5–6. 2018

Late Friday afternoon, I tore myself away from the sun-filled, lofty new offices of NBT at Factory Gorlitzer Park to catch the last hours of a 2-day event called the C3 Crypto Conference, or as a colleague also interested in attending affectionately called it, CryptoZoo. That was her impression of the chock-full schedule online. She was basically right, but I was glad to see it for myself.

As any loyal reader of mine will know, attending an event which combines digital health and inclusive technology brings me joy. C3 met that criteria with fantastic presentations from Iryo and YEAY.

Blockchain Terminal at Expo are of C3Crypto Conference

Navigating the S-bahn route through Kreuzberg during a balmy Spring pre-weekend day is an experience in anthropology. Berlin fizzes a sort of drunken happiness once the sun begins to thaw out the city. Once I reached Gleisdreieck and the entrance to the conference venue called Station Berlin, I received a ‘gold’ Bitcoin for my efforts– chocolate of course.

It was a welcome sign from the C3 Crypto Conference in the heart of Berlin, Europe’s blockchain capital.

Shiny & Gold

‘Cryptocurrencies for everyone’

I made my way through the maze of booths with attractive logos and cute avatars to check out my reason for attending:

I wanted to hear a pitch from Tjasa Zajc from Iryo. Tjasa is an accomplished journalist and the host of Faces of Digital Health. She’s also handling business development and communications at Iryo, the ‘first participatory, blockchain driven healthcare network built on decentralizing access to medical data’.

Iryo is shaping the next generation of healthcare by standardizing health data, utilizing encryption, and empowering big data and medical AI research. Luckily for me, pitches were gloriously behind schedule. So despite arriving late, I caught Tjasa’s whole presentation.

“Earn Crypto Watching TV”: TV-TWO earned the first place award from Paranoid Internet.

After weaving past the “Earn Crypto Watching TV!” signs of TV-TWO, who later won first place in the pitch presentations, and catching some guests resting between pitches (see below), I learned about the intriguing hardware and supply chain specialists, Arxum. They’re providing innovative solutions for new marketplaces in the manufacturing industry using blockchain technology.

Conference exhaustion is real.

Afterwards, Tjasa delivered an engaging and informative pitch about why healthcare is ripe for Iryo’s disruption. She drew a crowd while pacing the floor and passionately conveying why she dedicates her time to Iryo’s success.

Iryo Decentralizes Healthcare

Tjasa explained the context for Iryo: medicine is good for stakeholders; healthcare is not. Doctors are burned out by IT while healthcare app-demand doesn’t follow supply. Iryo believes medical data sharing should be controlled by the patient through permission controls.

In the Iryo system, medical data is stored in three locations: on the phone, in the cloud, and with the provider. Blockchain is used for access control to any of these repositories, which is in the hands of the patient, whose mobile device grants and revokes access.

Iryo is the first company in the healthcare space building on EOS blockchain and they use zero-knowledge data storage. This means data is to be encrypted before it gets to them. ‘Zero-knowledge data storage’ is an encryption mechanism making data safe even from inside attacks. For example: you can have good data protection software but IT vendor administrators can still browse the databases. In the zero knowledge database, even the inside administrators can’t see the data.

Tjasa Zajc presents why healthcare is ready for Iryo’s decentralized network.

“The privacy issue is a lot like health; it’s not a problem until it’s a problem.”- Tjasa Zajc

Iryo wants to build this network from the ground up, rather than try to fix a broken system. Using algorithm training, they seek to build a global healthcare ecosystem that will generate preventative insights. In this new global depository of health data, they aim to enable medical breakthroughs.

Tjasa explains the Iryo token economy’s incentive, stake, and payment tool

They are targeting developing countries in the Middle East, where although families may not have extensive resources, they do have access to a cell phone. Iryo is part of the new token economy, but uniquely including patients in the monetization of data. Their method is consistently patient-centric, with attention to usability. They are planning an ICO in June.

Iryo pursues practical cases of AR for the medical world

YEAY Inspires Future Generations of Entrepreneurs

Directly after Tjasa’s pitch, we heard from Melanie Mohr, CEO and founder of YEAY, pronounced “yay.” Melanie kicked off her pitch by acknowledging that ‘teenagers are your allies and the future of everyone here.’ With her team, she has created a social platform that uses blockchain. It’s a video content space that that uses real word of mouth marketing to create a marketplace for teenagers to share products they love.

Melanie Mohr, CEO & Founder or YEAY

With Iryo’s youngest advisory board ever, she highly recommends involving teenagers at the earliest stage of your product development. Why? Many reasons: They are digital natives, early adopters, self-starters who have ‘no memory of a pre-mobile world nor pre-social world.’ We can learn from how they embrace technology, how they do video magic, know instinctively what’s cool, and what’s the right channel.

YEAY’s solution of organic recommendation engine + GenZ word-of mouth + token economy

It was the teenagers who guided YEAY to move beyond a points reward system to a better way to cater to their needs and reward them: and that was through tokens and smart contracts. It turns out blockchain reflects values the next generation wants to see: authentic, transparent, and seamless.

So far they have 700,000 downloads and are working on YEAY 3.0. They are will be having a private sale later in April.

Chocolate coinage scattered around the venue

It was uplifting to hear these two women share their business and tech expertise. From listening to their pitch presentations, it’s clear they are motivated to enact various forms of social change or a mental shift that is, as they describe ‘seismic’ – moving towards automation, shared economies, decentralized, and trustworthy.

In writing this post, I give extra thanks to hardware enthusiast and healthcare reform advocate, Mike Richardson, who when I asked where the beverages are during the event, brought me a German Fritz Kola so refreshing that I barely slept a wink last night. Was it the excitement at the Crypto Zoo? Who knows, but I’d go again.

Cheers, Berlin.

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