Bitcoin Amsterdam: Rodrigo Carraresi (Ledger) & Luciano Benzadón (Bitnovo) interview
Our team was at Bitcoin Amsterdam, one of the most important conferences in Europe dedicated to Bitcoin, enjoying 3 days of learning, connections and inspiration together with the entire bitcoiner community.
The experience in Amsterdam was useful for us to verify once again what we already knew: the Bitcoin community is united and many projects in the sector have emerged with the collaboration chip in their DNA. We met some very interesting new people, such as Rodrigo Carraresi, Head of Developer Relations at Ledger and speaker at the event.
Rodrigo is Brazilian, has worked for more than 7 years at Google and has lived, in first person, the evolution of the current paradigm from a web2 internet to a web3 internet.
We wanted to interview him to find out how his experience of the event was, accompanied by Luciano Benzadón, Bitnovo Product Manager, who was also present at the conference.
Bitcoin Amsterdam, the event
Bitcoin Amsterdam is a conference organized by Bitcoin Magazine, which brings together recognised speakers and attendants such as Adam Back (CEO of Blockstream), Peter McCormack (Bitcoin journalist), Leopoldo López Mendoza (Venezuelan politician) or Stephan Livera (podcaster) among others. It stands out for its strong networking aim, something that clearly helps the ecosystem to be more united compared to other sectors.
Today, Rodrigo and Luciano tell us everything about this great event:
Rodrigo, how was living the Bitcoin Amsterdam experience as a speaker? Was it your first time?
“It was awesome. We were all super excited to share our project with such a passionate crowd. We have been working on how to help Bitcoiners that have a full node to use Ledger for quite some time and almost 50% of the event attendees have been running one (according to our quick ‘show off hands’ before our talk). This was our best chance to get feedback directly from our users”.
Luciano, the atmosphere in the videos seemed unbeatable. Was it experienced in the same way as we saw it on Twitter?
“The event was amazing, Amsterdam is such a nice venue for this, the content was supercharged of quality with excellent talks. I have been lucky enough to be able to meet most of the speakers. It was very emotional to meet the entire Bitcoin International community. I noticed a lot of emphasis on solutions over the lightning network which shows that Bitcoin has the technical potential to become a global cash alternative over the next few years or decades”.
Rodrigo, apart from networking, what does this type of event bring to a company like Ledger?
“There is nothing like receiving feedback in person, especially when you are trying to get more engagement to an open source project.
Ledger is building an open and tech-agnostic platform. This means that any developer around the world can build his own applications on Ledger’s secure platform. We are hence highly developer-friendly, and built “at scale.” That’s one of Ledger’s key strengths and the key reason for our presence at this event. It is our mission to let everyone build freely on top of our uncompromising security standards. Attending events like BTC Amsterdam puts a face to that platform. The relationship we build here will be functions that will benefit thousands if not hundreds of thousands of users down the road.”
And Luciano, what does it bring to Bitnovo?
“At Bitnovo we had the opportunity to present the new product called Bitnovo Pay, our cryptocurrency payment gateway where any merchant can accept payments in Bitcoin, Bitcoin Lightning, and many other cryptos and stablecoins. We are giving a trusted solution so major brands can expand into crypto smoothly. We are launching it throughout Europe and expanding to other countries in Latin America”.
Rodrigo, how about Ledger’s next steps? Can you tell us something?
“I can’t say anything, but stay tuned on this website: https://www.ledgerop3n.com/ – more updates coming soon”.
Luciano, how do you define the Bitcoin Amsterdam experience in a single word? What next product updates can you reveal?
“Perhaps two words, Networking and Knowledge.
We are working hard on improving the user experience. Soon, the cryptocurrency swap process will be more intuitive and seamless, and we are also working on a smooth navigation that is much more oriented towards solving user needs”.
