Is Brooklyn’s blockchain industry becoming a real business?
Certain parts of Brooklyn these days feel like a version of what you might imagine the early days of Silicon Valley were like while the internet was being born. Excited developers and entrepreneurs are leaving behind the suits and briefcases and glass towers of Manhattan for startup T-shirts, jeans, book bags, and renovated factories. This time around, the tech set is working around the clock to produce what they think will be the new internet: the blockchain.
Last week many of them gathered in the Williamsburg Hotel for a conference called Brooklyn Tech Week, hosted by the hotel’s Brooklyn-born and based owners, Heritage Equity Partners, and featuring many speakers from Brooklyn’s (and maybe the world’s) largest blockchain company, ConsenSys.
In the last two years, blockchain technology, and the tokens based on it, cryptocurrencies, have been both the hottest and the most overheated subjects in the technology world. East Williamsburg-based ConsenSys, which develops applications for the Ethereum blockchain platform, was founded in 2015 and already has about 1,200 employees around the world.