This is now exactly half a year old and so I wanted to take a moment to memorialize this talk and some notes on the history of #CryptoPH here on Speculations.
In November 2022, I had the privilege of presenting a keynote on the first day of the Philippine Web3 Festival, the first major global crypto conference that our PH crypto community has held.
This was an exciting event, the first of its kind, and represented a major sort of welcome to the world on behalf of our ecosystem.
Normally I don’t like giving talks, I’m lazy and scatterbrained and prefer the improv style of a panel or fireside to a solo talk with boring slides. That said, I do think that a lot of my professional heroes, great minds with important stories or insights to share, have a great track record of this kind of keynote or history.
The Philippine crypto story has a rich tradition that goes back to the days of 90s Cypherpunk literature and stretches through to now emerging as a very unique center of global web3 adoption in the 2020s. Given my own background working in Philippine crypto for so many years, I felt that I was in a special vantage point to participate in and now tell this story - and that the world might want to finally hear it.
So given the occasion, I did think it was important to switch up my normal wing-it style and try to tell that story. I was excited for the first time to have something meaningful to share and felt that I finally had the right audience willing to hear it.
It was a great honor to be able to get in front of this crowd and tell the story of our community, but more than that, it was a nice way to preserve the foundational story of our space as it continues to grow so rapidly.
Something that would have been a dream to us all those years ago had finally come true: the PH crypto ecosystem has now gotten larger than any one person or group or company can fully track or record (though Bitpinas will continue to make an excellent attempt, I’m sure).
So before the space slips completely out of our hands, it was nice for us veterans to have a moment to share the many years of work that led to this current moment.
May our efforts be an honorable prologue to the roaring #CryptoPH decade ahead.
Talk: A Brief History of #CryptoPH [Colin Goltra, November 2022]
Additional Coverage for the Philippine Web3 Festival
Manila Bulletin: Philippine Web3 Festival strengthens ties to global ecosystem
Rappler: Philippine Web3 Festival takes place November 14-18
Cointelegraph: Filipino founders launch Philippine Web3 Festival to bring global attention to homegrown talent
BSC News: PH Web3 Festival Halfway Highlights
-Colin Goltra, May 2023