written in partnership with Grit Daily
Image credit: Grit Daily
January has come to an end and with it, one of the world’s biggest blockchain events continues to get closer. Consensus Festival, founded by the top crypto-news outlet, Coindesk, is set to take place in Austin on April 26-28 along with a handful of official satellite events that includes the return of Grit Daily House. Founded in 2015, the event’s latest edition last year gathered over 17k attendees, as well as experts from different industries and celebrities of all sorts.
With crypto winter continuing and the event’s list of speakers including names like Edward Snowden, Brian Quintenz, J. Christopher Giancarlo, and Catherine Stihler, this year’s edition promises to be an interesting one. This is especially true when considering the satellite events taking place this year, allowing investors, entrepreneurs, journalists, and enthusiasts a means to enhance their experience and go deeper with relationship building.
An official satellite event to the Consensus Festival is Grit Daily House, with its ticketed, content-heavy stage and podcast studio that opens its doors every year during Consensus and SXSW and other major conferences in Austin, in close proximity to downtown. This year, the media house will feature partners from outlets Axios, Business Insider, BlockTelegraph, CoinDesk, and CoinTelegraph, as well as investors and blockchain startups and scaleups. Media industry veteran, John Biggs, leads Grit Daily House’s programming.
While the list of speakers is still to be published in full, Grit Daily has just announced that DeFi startup Souq will be joining this year. The startup has recently made waves in the space by announcing the raising of $3.3 in pre-seed funding at a time when raising capital is harder than ever. According to CoinDesk, VC and other investments dropped by 91% during the first month of this year compared to the same period in 2022, a signal that a difficult year might be ahead for crypto startups.
Despite this, Souq has found itself able to catch the eye of some of blockchain’s biggest investors by creating the first DeFi investment management platform that provides users with exposure to an industry vertical of token economies that include reward-generating staking programs. Their first basket, which they call a Liquid Staking Vault, focuses on the Ethereum gaming ecosystem. With the gaming industry having raised over $7.6 billion in 2022according to the Blockchain Game Alliance, and a suite of games slated to launch through 2023-24, this sector represents a great opportunity for retail investors.
A major promise of the blockchain and crypto is that users can truly own a piece of apps and blockchains they frequent, giving them a share in the upside of these new economies. Souq’s Liquid Staking Vault creates a new pathway for users to seek indexed exposure, maximize time-lock weighted staking rewards, and maintain the flexibility to exit time-locked positions at any time through a newly created Semi-Fungible Token AMM.
JonPaul Vega, CEO at Souq, said “Crypto markets are inherently volatile, but we see this as a feature of programmable money, not a bug. To this end we are focused on building a new generation of DeFi native ETFs to better address this challenge for token holders. Souq will enable diversified dApp staking while leveraging the best structured crypto products to create volatility resilient structured market exposure for DeFi users.”
By having Souq join its event, Grit Daily House will grant its attendees a unique opportunity to gain important insights into the current status and future of the Staking, Structured DeFi, and the Web3 gaming industry. With gaming giants like Ubisoft, Electronic Arts, Tencent, and Square Enix already having shown an interest in the technology, the rise of web3 seems inevitable. Combine this with the fact that there are over 3.2 billion players globally generating over $184.4 in revenue and it is easy to see why many don’t want to miss this opportunity. Tickets to the activation are available here.
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