Red in San Francisco

For those eager to get some fresh news from Red, here are some great news items that we are sure you will appreciate a lot. As there are many different topics to talk about, we are splitting the news over several articles that we will publish over several days. This is the first part.

Together with Gregg Irwin, the Red community leader, who joined us from Idaho, we had a memorable time in SF, and the trip was successful beyond our wildest expectations! The goal of the trip was to attend the GoBlockchainConnect conference, the first big conference connecting the Asian and North American blockchain industries. The conference was promoted as bringing together developers, blockchain companies, and investors. More than 1'000 people attended.

Such events are really good for getting the pulse of the crypto community first hand, learning about the state of art in this emerging industry, and connecting with key people, including projects like NEO, and companies like... Google (yes, you read it correctly...more info about that below). ;-)

One of the best sessions we saw was Riccardo Spagni, lead developer of Monero. He had good things to say, and presented himself well. We learned, very quickly, that there is a wide gap in the blockchain space between those who have real substance in product or knowledge, and those who don't.

We had a chance to pitch Red/C3 project to Charlie Lee, Litecoin's creator. He found it promising and asked if Litecoin's VM could be supported. As Litecoin is using an instruction set compatible with Bitcoin's Script, he was glad to hear that such support was already on our roadmap.

We also booked a meeting with NEO (a Chinese competitor of Ethereum, basically) at the conference. When we met NEO's team, including Da HongFei, founder of NEO, and Johnson Zhao, their Global Development Director, it went so well that they asked us to attend the NEO DevCon in SF two days later, and have Nenad on a panel about smart contract programming. That panel was a resounding success for Red. Where NEO plans to support C#, Python, JS, and more for blockchain programming, it was clear that DSLs are what everyone really wants for smart contracts.

Now, about the big "G" company. :-) We were lucky to meet a Google manager and engineer at the GoBlockchainConnect conference, and talked with them several times about Red and our plans for covering smart contracts and Dapp development. They just happened to be the two people in charge of the internal blockchain group at Google, and found Red intriguing enough to invite us for a full demo at Google's HQ in Mountain View! The demo went very well, they were astonished by what Red could do already, and how we leverage dialects (eDSLs) to reduce complexity, especially in the UI domain. It quickly turned into a brainstorming session about the possible applications of Red and /C3 in the blockchain industry, and disruptive potential to traditional markets. This resulted in a further invitation to present Red to a much larger internal group at Google, as soon as we have a working prototype for smart contract coding. Do we need to emphasize the potential of such interest by big G? ;-)

Photos taken at the entrance of Google's offices, taking shots inside is strictly forbidden.

In light of all the new potential in the Silicon Valley, we are planning to open an office in the Bay Area, as soon as possible, and recruit a team there.

Even with the ETH we raised, it's all we can afford in SV. ;-)

It was a long week, with long hours, but well worth it in the end. We learned that Red is in a very solid position, and because we're able to move quickly, our chances of success are good. We have a much longer history than other projects out there, though our blockchain strategy is a new aspect. We have real, solid technology that works today, and that's huge. Our community (growing up over 7 years) is also one of our great strengths, and putting things in motion to make use of RED tokens to thank and reward you is near the top of our priority list.

Next article will be published tomorrow, and will talk about our meeting with Carl. ;-)