Manchester hosted the second edition of CoinFestUK on April 7 and 8 at Manchester Conference Center. Adam Rizvi organized the event through the Crypto Bates Group, drawing speakers from BTC.com, OpenL
Manchester hosted the second edition of CoinFestUK on April 7 and 8 at Manchester Conference Center. Adam Rizvi organized the event through the Crypto Bates Group, drawing speakers from BTC.com, OpenLedger, and other projects. The agenda included 19 presentations spanning Bitcoin's legal landscape, electronic voting, and blockchain gaming applications.
The conference structure mixed presentations, workshops, and exhibitor areas. Teams from BTC.com, Cashaa, Aureus, Radix, OKCash, and Beyond the Void participated.
"We had an amazing response from attendees with more than 210 attending over the two days, travelling from as far as Russia and India," Rizvi said.
Five workshops spanned specific areas. Portsmouth Crypto delivered Bitcoin education. Greg Walker led the mining session. Glynn Bird taught blockchain fundamentals, smart contracts, and distributed databases. The HackerHouse team demonstrated their cybersecurity training modules.
Rizvi discussed the event's origins in a recent interview. "Seeing cryptocurrency development happening all over the UK but the media focus being on London, I wanted to put Manchester on the map as a hub for development and bright minds," he said. "Manchester has an amazing history and is an ideal place to get people together to discuss and collaborate. I saw partnerships being formed at CoinFestUK 2016 and this inspired me to make CoinFestUK 2017 a bigger and more diverse event."
He elaborated on the workshop approach: "As always with CoinFestUK, we aimed part of our event at a beginner level and this year expanded that to an intermediate level with our workshops."
Sponsors enabled the conference's reach. Rizvi stated: "CoinFestUK isn't possible without the financial support of its sponsors and this year we had an amazing group of awesome sponsors including BTC.com, Aureus, Bitcoin Chaser, BittyBot, BlueLab, Beyond The Void, Einsteinium, Radix, Spectre and SuperiorCoin."
A raffle following the event benefited the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. The prize package includes a custom engraved bracelet from Bitcoin Engrave, a Bitcoin Snapback Hat from Bitcoin Store, a CryptoSteel cold storage wallet, a custom qrypto mug, and a Bitcoin Whitepaper poster. Tickets cost 0.001 BTC each. The draw closes April 30 at 6pm. Last year, the conference raised 0.213 BTC for the organization.
