BBW25 - Day 1 - Opening Remarks & Welcome

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Boston Blockchain Week 2025. Please join me in welcoming to stage co-founder and executive chairman of Cubic Labs, Ian Kaine. [Music]

Welcome to Boston Blockchain Week 2025. This is a year that we are able to bring together many different organizations and partners to bring the best event for you yet. So, I'm really here just to express gratitude. First, I want to express gratitude to our sponsors. I'm going to go through that extensive list.

the city of Quinsey, who's been our host sponsor since the start,

the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, XDC Foundation, Fox Rock Properties, Figment, Wolf & Company, Coinbase, Goodwin, Silicon Valley Bank, Bentley University, The Digital Innovation for America, Arrington Capital, A100X, Flip Side Crypto, BDO, Dash and Terraash who just came in last minute. Thank you very much for making this event possible. Uh everything that you see here, all the partnerships that we've been able to make, the side events that are going on later are all because of you. Can we please give them a round of applause? I'd also like to thank the team from Gain Ventures.

Uh these guys are all over the world doing events like this. So it's unbelievable for them to come to Quinsey and to bring Boston Blockchain Week, this nice add-on event to bring the startup community together, to bring them connecting to capital and to investors. And that's really the heart of what we do here at Cubic Labs and through Boston Blockchain Week. It's to bring the ecosystem together. Over the past few years, we have unfortunately seen a lot of people leave this area for other areas like Miami, New York, and this is always our opportunity to make us shine.

We have natural competitive advantages here. Talent, capital, we need to use them. And we need to also prop ourselves up. We've had some unfortunate representatives in government who have made us look bad. And I think that might turn people off, but we have some of the best and the brightest.

So, we need to diminish those voices, let them know that they're not welcome, and keep shining. So, we have a packed agenda for the next three days. Uh, so, you know, hope that you keep coming back to see people speak. We have 100 plus speakers from all over the world who have joined us. Uh, covering every part of the blockchain ecosystem that you could think of.

And you know this is a special topic that we've come up with this year where blockchain meets AI. As you know these two technologies are becoming much more integrative and applicable and usable. So we're going to have many conversations around that. And uh tonight please stick around. We've got two events.

There is an event at Alba Restaurant across the street which is hosted by Silicon Valley Bank and XDC Foundation which is hosting an event at 16C. Um I also want to thank our collaborative friends. We've got the Boston DAO. We've got Dside Boston and the Boston Blockchain Association. Uh so this is actually a five-day event.

This is the first time really for Boston Blockchain Week. We've got three days here in Kilroy Square. We've got two more days ETH Boston and Soul Boston on Thursday and Friday. So if you've purchased a ticket or have a ticket for this event, that is also good for those events. So just make sure you should be receiving some emails from them about how to access those tickets.

I also want to thank our media partners, Bitcoin.com, Blockchain North, who you'll see outside here. They came down from Montreal, and Crypto.NET. I do also want to recognize the Crypto Mondays team who put on a great event last night that was hosted at Groma in Boston.

Ivan Dimoffs, who's here, Luke Kerner's Crypto Mondays, Julie Lamb's been awesome, and Jandra Molly. I want to thank them as well.