Benzinga - Image credit: Grit Daily News. Shown (L to R) Nicole Cobler, Axios; Ahmed Reza, Yobi; Dr. Ed Zuckerberg, D.D.S.
March is now over and with it, blockchain and crypto enthusiasts are getting ready for what promises to be one of the biggest events of the year. Self-declared “the most important conversation in crypto and Web3,” Consensus Festival will be taking place at the end of this month from April 26th to the 28th. Souq, a web3 startup looking to revolutionize DeFi investment management, is expected to make a splash during the festival.
Souq announced back in February that it would be joining this year’s edition of Consensus thanks to a partnership with Grit Daily, a media outlet specializing in entrepreneurship, tech, and startups along with sister publication, BlockTelegraph. As host of the iconic Grit Daily House satellite events, which this year became SXSW official selection, the outlet will have one of the biggest presences as part of Consensus this year in support of CoinDesk Consensus.
This year’s edition of Grit Daily House will not only have Souq as this year’s title sponsor but will also see Souq Co-Founder & Head of Product Ken Berkowitz and Souq Co-Founder & CEO JonPaul Vega join an already stellar lineup of speakers. Other names that will be joining the official satellite event include CoinTelegraph’s Rachel Wolfson, Thomson Reuters’s Joseph Raczynski, PreSend.io’s CEO Drew Wolfer, Yobi’s CEO Ahmed Reza, Nodle co-founder Garrett Kinsman, Maple’s CEO Sid Powell, Harpie’s Britt Mier y Teran, Irina Berkon from Metallicus and dozens of other top names in downtown Austin.
As the minds behind the first platform to participate in an investment thesis that liquid stakes a basket of dApp tokens, Ken and JonPaul will be sharing important insights on what the future looks like for Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and web3 gaming. With both ecosystems having passed through intense build cycles, experts now see them becoming the major pillars powering mass adoption of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology.
Souq is getting closer to a full-scale launch after raising over $3.3 million in pre-seed funding last year. Despite the outgoing crypto winter, Souq’s proposal was enough to convince investors like Kickstart, IVC, Operate, Moon Holdings, Elliptic Ventures, Perpetual Value Partners, Himanshu Sahay & Partners, Sterling VC, and Evernew Capital to invest heavily at a time when most VCs were especially wary.
Over the past years, the relevance of gaming in the global economy has become increasingly clear. The global gaming market generated over $184 billion in 2022 according to GameZoo, which despite being about 4.3% lower than that of 2021, was enough to demonstrate the videogames industry’s resiliency at a time when the tech world was hemorrhaging earnings.
Web3 itself has also proven to be more than a passing fad, with on-chain game transactions growing 37% in 2022 and generating over $7.4 billion, accounting for almost 50% of all on-chain activity according to DappRadar and the Blockchain Game Alliance’s 2022 report. With traditional developers like CCP Games raising $40 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz and other investors to develop a blockchain-based AAA game, the verdict is clear: web3 gaming is in fashion.
With the web3 gaming ecosystem getting ready for quite an explosion in popularity, Souq is building an easy button to enable structured market exposure to the ETH gaming ecosystem, by simplifying the process to buy and stake a strategy of blockchain and game tokens.
Grit Daily House will also feature a decentralized infrastructure network, Nodle, which is Polkadot’s 11th Parachain. A smartphone-powered network that is bringing web3 to the physical world, Nodle’s platform uses smartphones as nodes to create a geolocation-based layer one for the hyper connected world. Nodle’s Co-Founder Garret Kingman will be joining CoinTelegraph’s Rachel Wolfson to talk about how tokenization is moving beyond art collectibles to real-life applications.
The crypto space has recently experienced a prolonged bear market that saw its market capitalization drop considerably back in 2022. This has resulted in the topic of crypto regulation being once again in the spotlight, with lawmakers and policymakers in Washington moving to come up with a regulatory framework. Former SEC General Counsel, Dan Berkovitz, will talk about how crypto investors are bracing for more crackdowns from regulators, providing insights into what’s next for the space.
Now, with the Blockchain industry recovering after a deep winter that weeded out purely speculative projects, the hopes are high for emerging winners, like Souq, to truly show what their technologies can do. With Consensus and Grit Daily House being the perfect opportunity to do so, the Grit Daily team has also organized a Speakers & Media Dinner at which attendees will get the chance to network with some of the most influential people in the industry.
Get 25% off Consensus tickets or use the promo code GRITDAILY at checkout. Ticket prices go up as the event approaches, so if you’re going: Get yours now.
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