Two weeks ago, on April 3rd and 4th, the MIT Bitcoin Club held the 8th annual MIT Bitcoin Expo. Over 2,000 people attended from around the world, and I was its director. That wasn't the plan.
Not the Plan
I joined the Club when I moved to Boston because I wanted to meet like-minded people. It is run by students and blockchain enthusiasts, and its mission is to increase the awareness and use of cryptocurrency. Every year since 2014, it has also organized the Expo, a two-day conference focused on all things blockchain.
This is my last year at MIT, and with a master's to wrap up, I wasn't planning on directing the Expo. Then it turned out that if I didn't direct it, it wouldn't happen. So I did both.
The New Normal
Last year's Expo happened as COVID was hitting, and the feeling that the world was ending was palpable. A year later, the world hasn't ended, but it has shut down. So this year, the Expo was held fully online and was completely free to the public.
Our theme last year was Building the Stack. Since then, Bitcoin and Ethereum have reached all-time highs, marking the end of the crypto winter we've been in since 2018. This year, our theme was The New Normal. Part of that is the world we are all living in now, but mainly it is about adoption.
First, Guggenheim Partners, MicroStrategy, MassMutual and Tesla have all bought Bitcoin. Institutional adoption has changed the narrative around Bitcoin, and more is coming from the likes of Visa, MasterCard and BNY Mellon.
Second, the explosion of DeFi last year and Robinhood's trading stoppage of GameStop and other stocks have changed the narrative around Ethereum and DeFi.
Finally, governments. The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston partnered with the MIT Media Lab's Digital Currency Initiative to research central bank digital currencies (CBDCs). The Ukrainian government hired the Stellar Development Foundation to develop its CBDC, and China air-dropped digital yuan to its citizens to test its own.
All of this doesn't even touch the technology. Taproot has been merged into Bitcoin Core, and Ethereum 2.0's Beacon Chain has launched.
The Weekend
The agenda followed the theme. Neha Narula, the director of the Digital Currency Initiative, opened Saturday with a keynote called "Bitcoin 2107: Did we make it?" SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce joined us for a fireside chat on regulation, Valerie Szczepanik took questions on the SEC's FinHub, and Anders Brownworth presented the technical research the Fed and MIT are doing on CBDCs.
On the technology side, Danny Ryan answered the question in his own title, "Ethereum's Beacon Chain Launched... What Now?", and Pieter Wuille, Gloria Zhao and John Newbery covered the recent developments in Bitcoin Core. Peter McCormack brought What Bitcoin Did to the Expo, talking Taproot with Andrew Poelstra and the Lightning Network with Lisa Neigut.
On Sunday morning, I got to open the day with a fireside chat with Michael Saylor, an MIT alum whose company is the second name on that list of institutions. I was really excited for that one, and I started by telling him that MicroStrategy owns over 9,000 Bitcoin. "90,000," he said. "More than 90,000." I was off by a factor of ten before I finished my first question.
I asked him why he puts so much effort into education instead of just buying and holding. His answer was that if you wanted to bring electricity to every home in the world, you would start by explaining what electricity is and how to handle it safely. I also asked him what he means when he calls Bitcoin a thermodynamically superior asset, since someone who is just learning about Bitcoin would have no idea. He compared sound money to a swimming pool without a leak. If the pool leaks and you wait a day to jump in, you break your neck. Gold, by his math, leaks 2.5% a year. Bitcoin is capped at 21 million.
We closed the Expo, as is now tradition, with the Henoch Argaw Memorial Award. Henoch was a member of the Club who is no longer with us. His parents described him as "always kind and willing to go above and beyond to help others," someone who "never expected appreciation from others." The award honors someone who brings those same qualities to the Club's community. Nate, the Club's president, presented it this year to Vedantha Venkatapathy, who went above and beyond to help organize the Expo, and we held a moment of silence for Henoch.
Every talk is recorded and available here.
Court Adjourned
The hard part of an online conference is giving people a place to run into each other. Our solution was a Virtual Killian Court. We built it in Gather, a video chat platform where your avatar walks around a map and your video pops up when you get close to someone else. People could join between sessions and chat the way they would have in person.
It worked, until we tried to make the space smaller while the Expo was live. That crashed it for a couple of hours. It turns out you shouldn't move the walls while people are still in the building.
Thank You
What I'll remember from that weekend is the community coming together to make sure that the longest-running university blockchain club didn't die.
Thank you, Vedantha, Nabeel, Thomaz, Gabriel, Joseph, Lampros, Sathya, Trey, Manish, Ilya, Sacha, Hugo, and Manasi. We had been working on this since November. You hosted the sessions, ran the green rooms, fielded the audience's questions and moderated panels on NFTs, mining and institutional adoption. The Expo happened because of you. Thank you as well to our sponsors, who made it possible for the Expo to be free.
That makes eight Expos in eight years.