9th Annual Expo
This year, we are excited to announce that the 9th Annual MIT Bitcoin Expo will be held in person at MIT on May 7th and 8th.
The theme for 2022 Expo will be Breaking Through.
First, Bitcoin adoption is breaking through many historic barriers and ushering the world of crypto into the mainstream. Major financial institutions, such as Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, have created crypto desks for their private wealth clients. Two Bitcoin Futures ETFs have already been launched in October. El Salvador has made Bitcoin legal tender. Zimbabwe is thinking of following suit. Twitter has integrated Bitcoin Lightning payments into their platform. Coinbase, the largest US cryptocurrency exchange, went public. The incoming mayor of New York has vowed to take his first three paychecks in bitcoin. The city of Miami has announced a ‘Bitcoin yield’ for citizens from staking its cryptocurrency.
Second, DLTs are making significant progress and established projects are breaking through important technological barriers. Most significantly, Taproot, the first protocol upgrade to go live on Bitcoin since Segregated Witness (SegWit) in 2017, was activated on Sunday, November 14 at block 709,632. This upgrade, which will improve privacy, scalability, and security on the network, allows for simple, complex multisig, and Lightning Network transactions to be treated equally on the network.
Third, the DLT space has finally engaged in a passionate and highly-consequential debate with legislators and policymakers around the world, paving the way to potential regulatory breakthroughs in the way cryptocurrencies are understood during the coming months. It will be very interesting to see how the pendulum will swing and what landmark decisions will be made at the end, including by SEC Chair Gary Gensler, a face very familiar to the MIT campus.
Ultimately, we believe that Breaking Through encapsulates the continuing penetration of Bitcoin into the technological and economic zeitgeist of our time, as well as the motivations it has inspired across the entire DLT space today
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