. He said the city’s crypto scene is “decentralized,” aptly reflecting its community favoring source code and core infrastructure over big centralized exchanges or custodians.
“There's … the Berlin Blockchain Week, by far the biggest conference, but even that is very decentralized. It's not one main event, but it's like hundreds of events that take place during the same week,” Hansen said. According to its website, “is a decentralized community-organized initiative. There is no single owner. It is an agnostic movement based on the premise that self-organization is the backbone of the ecosystem.
Aside from the flagship event, in Berlin, there is something for any kind of blockchain aficionado with opportunities for diversity and growth, Santiago Abraham, association manager at“The community is really decentralized,” Abraham echoed Hansen, adding that in any given week, there’s a myriad of blockchain-focused meetups, events and your pick of spaces to work from or hold friendly gatherings over drinks – called “Stammtisch.
This national sentiment may be one more factor that allows projects that call Berlin home – from regulated DeFi platforms like Swarm to privacy-preserving portfolio tracking app Rotki – to thrive, and what helps to draw talented developers from all over the world to Berlin-native conferences like, organized by GnosisDAO, which builds decentralized infrastructure for Ethereum.
"Why Berlin and not Munich or Frankfurt? After all those are the German financial centers, right? Frankly ... I don't think this could have happened there," Lefteris Karapetsas, the creator of Rotki, said. Karapetsas, who says he was at the Ethereum office on Waldermarstr street in 2015 when the mainnet was launched, added that"Berlin has the unique combination of talent, crazy, passion, dirty and even ugly stuff that combined together make it the capital of crypto for Europe.