From Beijing to San Francisco, and back again.

December has been a hugely exciting and busy time for Saito. Not only has this month seen huge progress from the core development team on our forthcoming Eames Testnet, which will run on our first software release theoretically capable of supporting terabyte-level scale, but we’ve also been much more active at events on both sides of the Pacific — ranging from presentations at universities to dev workshops and hackathons.

The month began with an invitation from the Tsinghua International Blockchain Association to present at their December 5 meeting. It was a privilege and a pleasure to be able to share what we are up to with such an engaged crowd, and we’re happy to note that it was standing room only for those hoping to catch Saito’s co-founder David Lancashire, and his presentation on blockchain economics, and our project’s unique fundamentals.

Thanks must also go to our guest panellists who joined us that evening: Jack Liao from Bitcoin Gold and LIGHTNINGASIC; John Gordon from INBlockchain; plus Richard Bensberg from epiapi and the Beijing Bitcoin Meetup. This diverse triumvirate delivered a lively discussion on the Hash War, forks, and crypto markets — the audio of which we are planning to release as a future episode of our podcast series ‘The Saito Social’.

The week after our Tsinghua University event it was a quick hop across the Pacific for Team Saito to run a dev workshop in San Francisco, followed by a hackathon in partnership with Binance and DoraHacks. Our core dev Stephen Peterkins had a great time meeting a new community of developers for us in the Bay Area, and conducting one of our first public tutorials dedicated to building on Saito.

Thanks to all those who turned out — both those who came to our workshop, and to those who took on the Saito challenges at the hackathon itself. It was fun for us to meet so many new people interested in the project, but also extremely useful in terms of getting fresh feedback on how best to onboard people with Saito. We plan on using what we learnt from our time in San Francisco to run another dev workshop in Beijing some time in early 2019. Look out for further announcements on that as we enter the new year.

Stephen has now flown to Canada for the winter (feel free to email us if you are in or around Ottawa and interested in discussing blockchain and/or Saito), and Christmas is soon upon us. But there is still time for one more Saito event. Our co-founder Richard Parris will be speaking on a TechNode panel in Beijing tonight. The event kicks off at 6.30pm (local time) and sees Richard join Sarah Zhang from Points, and Rohan Malhotra from TokenInsight, to take a look at what lies in store for blockchain in 2019.

Please do join us if you’re in Beijing. If not then tune in to the livestream here.