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With Its First-Ever Blockchain Week, New York City Aims To Become Global Epicenter Of Crypto (forbes.com)
In a bid to dethrone Silicon Valley as the king of emerging technology, New York City is announcing its first-ever “Blockchain Week,” which will run from May 11 through May 17. Research and media company CoinDesk and the New York City Economic Development Corporation—a non-profit that serves as the city’s job-creation arm—are organizing it.

Blockchain Week’s centerpiece will be Consensus, the crypto industry’s marquee annual event hosted by CoinDesk, and it will also include a job fair and hackathon.
Anthony Hogrebe, senior vice president at NYCEDC, wants to see more crypto in New York.

“The goal is really to plant that flag and send a very clear message that we want to work with you, want to support you, and we ultimately want NYC to be the global capital for blockchain,” he says. “We think there’s already a tremendous presence here in New York, but it’s also a nascent community. If we don't plant a flag and make strategic investments, New York could lose that critical mass.”Demand for blockchain-related jobs is currently higher in New York City than San Francisco’s Bay Area, according to job analytics firm Burning Glass.

That wasn’t always the case—in 2015, the Bay Area had 250 openings compared with New York’s 93. But as of November 2017, New York had 745 openings compared with the Bay Area’s 662. 


The global orientation of the cryptocurrency industry makes the battleground much larger than New York and San Francisco, with other major hotbeds in places like South Korea, Japan and Europe. London hosted its own Blockchain Week last month. “I don’t know that any one area really has become the center of gravity yet,” says CoinDesk CEO Kevin Worth. “I think New York has just as good an opportunity to attract meaningful innovation as anybody else.

More than 100 companies are sponsoring the Consensus event, and Worth expects all of them to attend the job fair, which will be held on the afternoon of May 16 and will be free to the public. That includes organizations ranging from crypto platform Dash and crypto exchange Shapeshift to Deloitte and Accenture. Accenture will be recruiting for developers who have experience in distributed ledger technology like Corda, Fabric and Sawtooth Lake.

The consulting giant will also look for business strategists “who understand DLT and can drive strategy, consulting, and transformation work with clients,” Accenture Managing Director Sean Conway tells Forbes. 
This year’s Consensus will be the biggest ever—Worth expects it to draw between 4,000 and 5,000 attendees, roughly doubling in size from last year.

The event is the largest and most well-known crypto industry gathering in the world, Worth says. 
Crypto big-wigs like Ripple and Stellar cofounder Jed McCaleb and BitMEX founder Arthur Hayes are slated to speak, as is Twitter and Square CEO Jack Dorsey.

Square recently allowed users to buy and sell bitcoin through its peer-to-peer payment app, and Dorsey “has some interesting things to say about building a more democratized system,” Worth adds. The CoinDesk CEO expects a similar number of speakers compared with last year, about 250. 

Follow me on Twitter @JeffKauflin or email me at jkauflin[at]forbes[dot]com.