Some impressions from the first Rootstock Summit at Sans Souci Castle in Buenos Aires

On Thursday, November 10th, the Rootstock community met at the first Rootstock Summit, a side event to the Latin American Bitcoin Conference. The venue was the beautiful castle Sans Souci in the suburbs of Buenos Aires. Rootstock’s co-founder and CEO of IOV Labs Diego Gutiérrez Zaldívar opened the summit with a talk about analogue and digital infrastructure that is built to last. He compared the roads and aquaducts of the Romans to the new digital connections we need today.

The event consisted of several talks and panels about all kinds of topics that are relevant for the Rootstock ecosystem, such as scaling Bitcoin, Merged Mining or Digital Identity. It was also the official launch of the new Rootstock branding, created by the international branding agency Koto.

More and more companies are building applications on top of the Rootstock protocol. Some of them were present at the summit, such as the trading and lending platforms Sovryn and Tropykus, the social network Taringa, the stable coin protocol Money-on-Chain or the decentralised digital identity solution Quark ID, which will be used by the city government of Buenos Aires.

The main goal of Rootstock is to make Decentralised Finance so easy to use that the billions of people who live without a bank account or credit card can benefit from it – Toby Box from IOV Labs called this “Everyday DeFi” in an impressive talk.

Socialising is usually the most important part of every conference. Coffee and lunch breaks were especially attractive as they took place in the spacious gardens of Sans Souci. I met many interesting people from all around the world.

After the summit we took a boat to an island in the river delta of Tigre near Buenos Aires. The opening event of Labitconf happened on the Isla del Descanso that hosted amazing artworks made of light projections and laser shows.

This event was definitely a huge leap forward for the Rootstock community. After several years of working on the technological basis and convincing start-ups to build “Everyday DeFi” apps on top of Bitcoin, it seems that a new phase of growth has begun for Rootstock.

By Aaron Koenig