As many of our readers are well aware, Mousebelt, one of the top P-Reps in the ICON Republic, regularly hosts the REIMAGINE virtual conference series aimed at educating the masses about blockchain. Their most recent conference, the ninth so far, took place on June 20.
It was also their first conference sponsored by ICON.
“ICON had been a part of our events in the past, but we weren’t really pushing for sponsors at first. It’s self-funded. We just did it by ourselves to test and push ourselves to deliver good quality content and interviews,” Adam Leon said of REIMAGINE. Leon manages corporate innovation at Mousebelt Labs and hosts many of the conferences’ prerecorded interviews. “We had two early-on sponsors and then others kind of caught wind of it. The last two events, V8 and V9, had our most sponsor participation with around 6 sponsors. We’re just growing organically.”
ICON will also be a sponsor of the upcoming REIMAGINE 10.0 conference, which will take place in August. Next month’s conference will also be REIMAGINE’s one-year anniversary, something the team is very excited for.
Being sponsored helps Mousebelt put out a better production all-around, with the entirety of funds raised going straight into production quality and Mousebelt’s university program. The P-Rep team doesn’t take a cut.
Prerecorded for convenience
REIMAGINE was born as a reaction to COVID-19 social distancing and lockdowns. “These conferences are a place where we can promote blockchain and education through video content,” Leon said. “While everybody was stuck at home, we felt like we could make a difference by highlighting all of our partners and projects and leaders in the space.”
By prerecording all the interviews instead of streaming them live, Mousebelt’s goal is to put out the best quality production possible, free from technical errors and edited to remove any loud noises, pauses, etc. It also allows them to be flexible for their speakers by accommodating for all time zones.
And really, as Leon put it, “Does anyone even care if it’s live? It’s cool to do AMAs, but not everybody can take time out of their day to watch it.”
REIMAGINE V9 highlights
June’s REIMAGINE 0.9 featured interviews with Min Kim of ICON, Scott Smiley representing Balanced DAO and Rob Cannon of Geometry Labs, as well as an ICON panel featuring Lisa Verheul and Peter Denholm from Parrot9, Dan Brehmer from ICONOsphere, and Galen Danziger from MouseBelt.
You can check out the video interview with Min Kim below, followed by a few quotes from the other interviews and the panel with links and timestamps for the good parts. The clips are a couple of weeks old, but if you haven’t seen them yet, we can’t recommend any better weekend viewing than this. 😉
(3:02) “We’re finally hitting the strides of interoperability. We are still at the very, very early stages of seeing … value transfer between different public blockchains in general.” … (31:49) “We are positioning ourselves as an aggregator chain, which means that we want to be the plug and play solution for any blockchain or private chain that wants to be interoperable.” — Min Kim, ICON Foundation council member
(12:19) “We’re essentially creating digital nations. That, I’ve always felt passionate about. Laying down the financial infrastructure, the governance infrastructure and having a strong community that’s actually going to participate is critical.” — Scott Smiley, co-founder of Balanced Network and ICON strategist
(10:56) “There’s a lot of complexity that your average user wouldn’t be able to understand, which means that it’s preventing a lot of adoption. I mean there’s the user, the interface, there’s the product, and if they can’t use the interface they can’t use the product.” — Lisa Verheul, Lead Content designer at Parrot9
(15:52) “I think what we need to do in general, in blockchain, is focus on the developer experience. If we make it easier for developers, adoptions are just going to go through the roof.” — Rob Cannon, CTO of Geometry Labs
Promoting innovation for a less complicated future
We can expect to see REIMAGINED 10.0 air around mid-August, and we are proud to say that The Iconist will be among those being interviewed this time around.
The Iconist makes a good fit for REIMAGINE as we share similar educational goals, which Leon summed up quite well: “Blockchain technology is kind of complicated, but how we plan to use it is something that everybody can understand in their daily lives. We’re just promoting innovation here, and that’s pretty simple and straightforward.”
