The World Crypto Economic Forum is taking place next week, and I'm surprised I haven't seen more people post about it. It takes place in San Francisco on January 15-16 and has tons of solid projects speaking. Here's a link to their website which has a full list of speakers.
Personally, a few speakers I'm excited to hear:
Nick Szabo: This man needs no introduction. I remember when I first dived down the crypto hole and immediately learned about "the godfather of smart contracts". I know some people are convinced Nick Szabo himself is Satoshi, I have absolutely no idea...but given his background he's definitely proven himself as a staple in the crypto community. I know he's recently spent time to dismiss Bitcoin Cash, but nonetheless I'm excited to hear what he has on his mind.
Michael Arrington : Michael is probably the person I'm most excited to hear from. He recently launched his $100 million XRP fund so given Ripple's performance over the past month, there should definitely be some interesting input that comes up. I hope he speaks about other things as well since he is was the founder of TechCrunch and is an advisor on a few projects in the crypto space such as Propy, whos CEO is speaking at this event as well!
Vinny Lingham : While I don't hold any, I'm a huge fan of Civic and what it tries to accomplish. It's obviously had a great month, passing $1, and Vinny has always had interesting things to say about crypto in general. No matter what happens, I expect crypto twitter to make this speech exciting.
Shawn Owen : I own SALT, and am a huge fan of SALT. Really excited to see what Shawn has to say, and really hope this directs more attention to a solid project. They just started lending money a few weeks ago, and I'm surprised SALT hasn't received more attention from the crypto space.
Natalia Karayaneva : An Oxford alumni, Natalia has always impressed me and dropped knowledge whenever I've seen her whether it be in an interview with Bloomberg or for an article in WSJ. She's the CEO of Propy, one of the projects I'm most excited for in 2018 and has already started gaining attention over the past few weeks. Given that Michael Arrington and Vinny Lingham are both advisors and will be at this event, I hope Propy really gets some shine during this forum.
Not only are there tons of promising crypto projects speaking, but also people from the finance/investment side as well as the tech side (Microsoft, etc.). Really think this is a great start for crypto to 2018 and think more people should be aware of it.