Coindesk’s Consensus 2018 event, which took place from the 14th to the 16th of May at the Hilton Midtown hotel in New York was the biggest gathering of those involved in the blockchain tech from around the world. With over 250 speakers and over 4000 attendees, the Consensus 2018 event was home to some big announcements as well as a number of standout speeches.
Due to the size of this event, several announcements were made over the three-day period which might have gone unnoticed. However, here’s a quick recap of the second day of the Consensus 2018 event - highlighting all the major announcements from the day.
Awesome weather for Day 2 @ #Consensus2018 pic.twitter.com/73H4mbrC6u
— Dave Chapman (@IamDaveChapman) May 15, 2018
Highlights from Consensus 2018: Day 2 (May 15, 2018)
One of the biggest announcements of the day came from Coinbase as the platform announced their new set of tools specifically aimed for institutional investors. Among these were Coinbase Custody, Coinbase Markets, Coinbase Prime and Coinbase Institutional Coverage Group. These products are created keeping in mind the specific need of institutional investors who invest large sums of money into cryptocurrencies.
At the event, Coinbase particularly focused on Coinbase Custody - which is their cryptocurrency storage solution. Users wishing to store their cryptocurrency with Coinbase Custody need to deposit minimum $10 Million. The company claims to have secured over $20 billion worth of cryptocurrencies. This announcement comes just days after Xapo was revealed to be storing 7% of all Bitcoins in circulation in blast-proof vaults.
In addition to the announcements made by Coinbase, another big announcement came from Amazon’s AWS (Amazon Web Services). AWS and Consensys have teamed up to make it easier for organizations to make use of blockchain systems. This project has been named ‘Kaledio’ and it would help increase global blockchain adoption!
Amazon just announced a partnership with Consensus to reduce friction to blockchain tech for all developers.
— Pomp 🌪 (@APompliano) May 15, 2018
The big companies are getting behind the virus. No one can stop it 🚀
Deloitte presented their findings from a recent survey conducted across seven nations at the Consensus 2018 blockchain event. The findings indicate that 74% of large companies in these nations find blockchain technology to be quite impactful. U.S., China, Mexico, the U.K., France, Germany and Canada were the seven countries involved in this survey.
Rob Massey #Deloitte leader discusses Tokens and Taxation @ #Consensus2018 pic.twitter.com/NDM2dYVWET
— Bhadra Gordon (@missbhadra) May 15, 2018
Founders of the cryptocurrency exchange Circle took stage at the Consensus 2018 event, announcing their latest cryptocurrency token pegged to the US Dollar - the US Dollar Coin (USDC). Circle recently raised funds worth $110 Million from Bitmain in a Series E round and is now evaluated at close to $3 Billion.
Another major announcement that took place on the second day of the Consensus 2018 blockchain event was that of Ripple’s Venture Capital fund Xpring. With Xpring, Ripple aims at improving the adoption of their XRP cryptocurrency and to project it as a platform for decentralized app development!
Enigma, a project which is working towards building privacy-focused blockchain tech and decentralized applications announced that they would soon be demonstrating their ‘Secret Contracts’ privacy technology. However, it appears that this announcement didn’t really help impact the ENG cryptocurrency as the prices of ENG fell by over 10% on that day.
Day 2 of #Consensus2018 was another #GreatDaytoBlockchain with plenty of fantastic conversations and presentations all around. We can’t wait for tomorrow! Here’s our recap so far: https://t.co/gcGfpQQtDu pic.twitter.com/Iolvz4oIof
— IBM Blockchain (@IBMBlockchain) May 16, 2018
These are the highlights from the second day of Consensus 2018. You can also check out our reports from Consensus 2018: Day 1 and Consensus 2018: Day 3.