Philippine Blockchain Week highlights: How blockchain can improve Filipinos’ lives

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The Philippines continues to make its way as one of the blockchain hubs in Asia, and the Philippine Blockchain Week (PBW) held at the Marriott Grand Ballroom, Newport World Resorts in Pasay City pushed that initiative with its five-day event in November.

Different personalities and global leaders all gathered to discuss the importance of blockchain technology in digitizing the Southeast Asian country—even local celebrities, athletes, filmmakers, and government officials were present during the week-long discussions.

One of the main speakers and moderators during the event was NFT.NYC’s Co-Producer and Co-Founder Ian Utile, who CoinGeek’s Claire Celdran interviewed on the sidelines of the PBW. Utile believes that the Philippines can lead Southeast Asia to blockchain adoption because the young population are already invested in play-to-earn games.

“You have all the technical connection, the young people…[who are already] doing play to earn,” Utile said. “It makes me feel there’s a lot of promise about the future of blockchain here in Manila as a city, the Philippines as a country, and Southeast Asia as a region.”

nChain’s Product Manager Gareth Roberts also joined the event as a speaker on Day 1 of the Blockchain Week, discussing how the country can adopt the technology and take it to the mainstream.

“I think the key point we agreed on [the panel discussion] was that we need to build useful and easily looking to use applications,” Roberts answered when asked regarding the first panel he was on.

“It’s really cool here because we have this great blockchain to work with. We’ve got Bitcoin SV. We’ve got great data capacity, so we’re really well positioned to build apps that actually enable people’s lives,” he added.

In terms of what nChain can do to help drive the Philippines to become a blockchain hub, Roberts has this to say:

“nChain pretty much has the full capability for an IT project life cycle, and we kind of have the visionary kind of people onboard to help our partners…to kind of work out what they should be transitioning to the blockchain and how it can deliver them value.”

Social media influencer and one of the brains behind Project Nightfall Philantrophy Agon Hare also joined CoinGeek on the sidelines of the event and shared their plans to build headquarters in the metaverse.

“So metaverse is not a good word today because a lot of people are skeptical, but we believe that it is the future,” he said. “On the blockchain, every single transaction is tracked. That is why we are so passionate with our philanthropy about it because we have nothing to hide.”

BSV thought leaders including nChain’s Country Director and BSV Blockchain Association’s Ambassador for the Philippines, Nicholas King, also attended the blockchain week. He expressed how the event proved that education is one of the key solutions to the blockchain adoption in the country.

“Education is really one of the main functions of the Bitcoin Association. We’ve been talking to a number of educational establishments [here]. We’ve been talking to Ateneo; we’ve been talking to Enderun; we’re talking to people like Mapua. And these organizations are very keen to engage with us, so we would give them all our educational material that they can map onto their curriculum and offer it [to] the students as a way to educate themselves into blockchain,” King revealed.

“The job opportunities with blockchain that we’re going to create here are absolutely massive, and we have to train the people because this is a leading-edge technology,” he added.

Elas’ Co-Founder Mohammad Jaber also traveled to Manila for the event, where he said he’s glad to find new people to connect with and talk about the country’s digitalization efforts.

“We [want] to understand how things operate here in the Philippines with legacy technology. What are the pain points with the processes and systems that they’re using, and how we can leverage blockchain technology to provide bespoke solutions,” Jaber said.

“The ultimate goal is that we’re gonna be improving the lives of people in the Philippines without them realizing that they’re necessarily using blockchain technology,” he noted.

In closing, the Philippine Blockchain Week Co-Organizer and Founder of SANCTUM, DreamsMaker, and UNITY Rico Pang thank all of the attendees for their warm welcome.

“Being the first Philippine Blockchain Week, I think we did a pretty marvelous job in such a short time,” he said.

“We are so excited about the Philippine market because there’s so much talent here. And they are not aware of the potential in this industry yet. So we want to educate and create more awareness in this industry both to the government sector and also to the private sectors and, of course, to the general public about this technology that can actually learn and use them in upgrading their skills and using them into real life usage and solving their problems,” Pang ended.

Watch: Blockchain Social Manila: Digitalization through blockchain will turbocharge Philippines growth