MADANA October Recap
Our team visited several fairs, visited key partners and presented MADANA at a Blockchain event. Read more about our events and where we will be in the near future!
October was an exciting month for us at MADANA. Alongside our normal work, we presented our mission and to represented the Blockchain community in several events in Europe. We met with many potential partners, big data and legal experts, political organizations and potential crowdsale participants. At this moment we can’t comment on specific detail but want to share some impressions. We had great feedback and are excited to share the fruits of this month in the near future!
Madrid
Right at the start of the month, our co-founders Christian and Dieter were invited to pitches and events at the prestigious Spanish universities Universidad CEU San Pablo and IE Business School. We met with Vice-Rector for international relations and held presentations in front of many students. We hold the believe that it is crucial to expose our ideas to as many different groups as possible to attain very different opinions. Our future customers on the data producer side will also be young and not very Blockchain educated and thus we had very productive Q&A sessions with them defining the needs of that particular target group.
We also attended networking events where we spent lots of time discussing MADANAs impact and challenges with venture capitalists, as well as entrepreneurship and innovation experts. One of our biggest challenges will be succeeding in a space full of established companies as a blockchain enabled disruptor and judged by the reactions we are on a very well path.
Shortly after, our co-founders joined with the rest of the team and we attended a startup event right here in our hometown.
Meet the Startups — Aachen
The RWTH Aachen University is one of Europe’s leading technological and research institutions. Naturally, Aachen is also home to other great organizations such as the digitalHUB Aachen. An initiative focused startups which are part of the digital revolution that are transforming our economy. We were the last to leave the place and spent every minute talking to potential partners, customers, and ICO participants. The night ended with an in depth discussion with one of our advisors: Dr. Oliver Grün. He is not only the head of the digitalHUB Aachen but also the president of BITMi, the largest German association for mid-sized IT companies. As a startup that is creating an open marketplace where small and medium-sized companies are on an even playing field with giants, this partnership is very important to us.
StartupCon — Cologne
The next step of our journey was the StartupCon Cologne. Germany’s biggest startup conference held in a concert avenue where normally giant concerts are held. We built up our cozy corner booth and already before the official beginning, we met a couple of ICO investors. During the day we talked to a couple hundred of interested people, gave interviews and got great feedback. Besides the startup booth, the event had many talks. Some of them centered around cryptocurrencies. On the mainstage itself, Blockchain was called one of the four main technologies that are disrupting our society. Nothing new to us of course.
European Digital SME Alliance — Brussels
Our next step was in Brussels for a great kick-off talk with our partner, the European Digital SME Alliance. The vision of MADANA is a perfect match with them. Open data economy and cybersecurity are the topics we share. And with something so disruptive as MADANA, regulatory hurdles are certain. We need to ensure that anyone will be legally allowed to participate in our open data marketplace. In regard to the European market MADANA will focus on two things: (1)Providing the right technical tools making MADANA accessible to anyone. (2)Helping the European Commission to understand that MADANA found a technical solution to generate and trade insights whilst completely protecting the data producers privacy.
Only when companies feel legally protected they will join ambitious projects like MADANA. Luckily we are on a good path to ensure exactly that.
Blockchain and Bitcoin — A chance for Aachen?
Our most recent event was also a great success. The event was sold out with well over 200 attendees. The first speaker was Yan Schreier who gave an introduction to Bitcoin and Blockchain. This was necessary as a good part of the audience was still relatively new to the topic. Afterwards, our advisor Max Kordek took the stage to talk about his path from beeing an RWTH Aachen student to becoming the co-founder of one of the most successful cryptocurrency on the market. Lisk has now a market capitalization of over $500 million USD.
Right after our CEO, Christian held a talk where he introduced MADANA to the audience and explained the importance of our mission. After a short panel discussion, we used the rest of the night for networking. For us, it was a fun evening as we were able to catch up with our good friend Max. About three and a half years ago Christian, Yan, Eugen, and Max were sitting not far away to co-found Bitcoin Aachen. We were glad to combine a good catch up as friends with productive talks for the future of MADANA.
