From Huntington Place to Chroma, the Michigan Ethereum Meetup Crusades for the Future of Detroit in a Web3 World
I'll Give You a Thin Slice of Bitcoin for a Pizza with All the Fixings
Thursday, December 14th, 2023 at 8:05 AM
Near Elmwood Cemetery and Bloody Run
Detroit, Michigan
The Michigan Ethereum Meetup keeps stepping up their game. The team produced not one but two events in December. In the first event, the team welcomed Alex Tapscott, a blockchain evangelist, head of the Blockchain Research Institute. Tapscott arrived in Detroit to promote two hot selling books on blockchain, Web3: Charting the Internet’s Next Economic and Cultural Frontier and Blockchain Revolution. The evening on November 30th marked Tapscott’s thirteenth and final stop on his sold-out book tour. Showing up at a MEM night takes you places. Tapscott’s tour required a hall at the capacious, prestigious Huntington Place convention center.
The second meeting in December brought us to Chroma, a tech magnet found in the North End of Detroit, named for its location on the north end of Paradise Valley. Upon the west facade of Chroma, one will find, visible for miles, the mural by Sydney James, the Girl with the D Earring.
The reverberations of that mural are endless. For example, according to local lore, Halima Afi Cassells posed for the artist. From what I have learned, the 2023 Kresge Fellow has deep multi-generational roots in the North End. The D earring echoes the D celebrated by the Detroit Tigers logo.
The mural reminds us of the artist who gave us the D for Detroit earring, Yolanda Nichelle Curry, whom we lost to cancer in November 2022. Chroma serves as a base for BLKOUT Walls Street Art Festival led by James. City Walls tends to gather the team at Spacelab Detroit, as a recent exhibition at the lab curated by Stephanie Onwenu revealed to me. Memo to Bamboo Detroit, WeWork Detroit and Tech Town. You really need a mural team recruited for spring painting season, coming soon.
As proof that the Detroit: Be The Change mural spree produced by Street Art for Mankind was not entirely an example of carpetbagger culture, I’ve heard that it’s Bakpad Durden “living his truth” on the east side of the Film Exchange Building. Durden and James collaborate on the BLKOUT Walls festival. We’ll be seeing plenty of nine floor high Detroiters looking into the heart of the New Center in time to come.
Yo, Robert Konsdorf of Facings, a spin-off of Detroit Ledger Technologies, NFT that! As Konsdorf told us in a brief announcement, Facings has an NFT product that will play well with a top-secret game project under development at DLT. Will the game be as much fun as the mural game that amuses Detroiters daily?
Has this discussion gone astray? Hardly. Let’s put it this way. When we’re Unlocking the Future of Fintech, what we’re unlocking is the potential of human beings. In other words, Fintech is bankless, permissionless and stateless, truly global and cosmopolitan. Fintech, hence, is color-blind and equitable. Or so we endeavor to make it so.
Thus, Wednesday night’s meeting belonged to the African - Americans who pulled up at Chroma. Because Afrofuturism is the future of Fintech. To learn more about Afrofuturism, tour the Ruth E. Carter: Afrofuturism in Costume Design exhibit at the Wright. And follow up with dinner at Baobab Fare and dessert at Yum Village. Sincerely, Konsdorf, NFT that Ruth E. Carter exhibit and all of its artifacts.
Bankless, permissionless and stateless? When will Erica Jong demand royalties?
Or better, follow the invitation of Michael Polk to a Black Tech Saturday at New Lab, part of the Michigan Central campus. Polk, the founder of newly launched retail investment platform Stock Pal, is by nature a leader and a populist. A graduate of Bethune-Cookman University, a Historically Black College or University, Polk noticed a link between the upside of a stock and the quality of its social media.
Employing this insight, Polk quadrupled a small investment in a short amount of time. Polk built his insights into Stock Pal, which allows subscribers to buy, sell and hold stocks. Cashed up, Polk must be living the life because the tech-savvy Detroiter made the scene recently at Art Basel in Miami. The panel buzzed with the implications of that city-wide art extravaganza because NFTs of art became a major theme all over Miami. If only Polk would tell us what insights he gleaned from one of the premier art events in North America. Maybe we should pencil in this weekend’s Black Tech Saturday. Konsdorf! Put Polk on retainer! Polk sees the future.
Half the fun of attending a MEM meeting comes from the special announcements. Marsai Matchett. Matchett leads the Women in Web 3 community in Detroit, a program designed to introduce women to Web3 technologies and guide them through the process of starting a company, building a team and generating a Web3 product or service. Matchett guides members in the program through the process until they’re ready to meet investors at a pitch night. Matchett invited the women in the audience to join the journey as the next cohort gathers for the winter.
Matchett knows the territory from experience in senior roles at several Detroit blockchain giants, EOS Detroit, Detroit Blockchain Center and Facings, Inc. Her welcoming of women into Web3 even includes helping find candidates for entry-level tech programs at the Durfee Innovation Center, home of Life Remodeled and a host of community organizations. One wonders how soon Matchett will help Detroiters find free programming classes from Grand Circus and the Austin Foundation at the east side location of Life Remodeled. The new campus will open after renovations to the former Dominican campus of the Winans Academy for Performing Arts.
I’m sorry I don’t have Marsai Matchett’s Instagram. The influencer might have tagged the brand of her smashing frames in an Instagram post.
Elizabeth Hansson and Amy Hang love to develop talent on the team, and so Holly Weckler handled the MC duties for the evening. As Weckler promised, more events produced by the MEM team will be announced in the new year, so there’s room to grow at the top.
Adam Zientarski, CEO of Detroit Ledger Technologies, must have taken Simon Sinek’s course on leadership by storytelling and maybe read about Plato in college. To paraphrase, we were led through a series of questions. “How many people, in general, understand how the blockchain works?” Plenty of hands went up. “How many people understand how the U.S. system of clearinghouses clear transactions? How many people know how the Federal Reserve takes action to manage the money supply?” Less hands went up.
Apparently, that’s by design. Very few are allowed into the inner sanctum of the American monetary system to see how the cogs and flywheels work. In Blockchain, every transaction shows up in a transparent ledger although we still don’t know the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the creator of Bitcoin.
If Nakamoto still lives, we can be sure the inventor has custody of the keys to his or her wallet of crypto. As the panel chanted as a mantra, “Not your keys, not your crypto.” Know the difference between a custodial and a non-custodial wallet. And never forget your seed phrase!
The secrecy around Nakamoto’s identity characterizes the past of crypto. The openness and transparency of crypto will characterize the future of Fintech, assured Zientarski. That said, the top secret game at DLT will not be dropped to the public before its time. Despite the credit worthiness of the panelists, stories of credit denied by the banking system were easy to find. In the Future of Finance, permissionless liquidity will be unlocked in many ways Peer to peer lending might become more important than bank lending. If one owns a rare pair of kicks, or tennis shoes, one might put the pair into storage as collateral.
Imagine you have two friends, and each friend has mad programming skills and a true entrepreneurial spirit. You can meet people like that at every MEM event. Andy Mazzola and Eric Poliner both started writing Point Of Sale solutions for easily accepting Bitcoin or other crypto at the register. Mazzola began working on a service called Indie Future. Poliner began working on MI Lightning Rod. The two took turns showing off their software to the gathering. Thanks to the meeting, the two friends discovered :”Hey, you’re working on a crypto point of sale too?”
Poliner already has an early adopter of his system, built on top of a business enablement software called Odoo. In October 2023, Five Star Pizza in Colon, Michigan accepted bitcoin for a pizza, thanks to Poliner’s software. It’s hard to over-emphasize the intellectual weight these two founders bring to the table. Mazzola also writes smart contracts and blockchain software for Teller Financial. Eric Poliner, Phd, has at least twenty academic papers on biotech and related subjects to his name.
In the end, Elizabeth Hansson made the scene to award five happy guest a door prize, a copy of Alex Tapscott’s recent book, Web3: Charting the Internet’s Next Economic and Cultural Frontier. And we all returned to our networking and our enjoyment of Amy Hang’s food and beverage excellence. How long until Hansson and Hang are honored with a nine-floor high mural with their likeness on the side of a Detroit skyscraper? Would Detroit be ready for the Web3 world without their programs?