“Made in Berlin” meets Miami

Publish Date:  January 27th, 2023

On the 15th of December 2022, Berlin Finance Initiative (BFI) in cooperation with Berlin Business Office, USA and Berlin Partner for Business and Technology GmbH hosted the last key event of the year: “Made in Berlin” meets Miami.

What makes Miami stand out as a location?

Miami has been named the “crypto capital” of the United States. Miami Mayor Francis Suarez is pursuing the goal of turning the city into a global crypto hub and is working to bring the industry’s biggest players to Miami. What San Francisco was to Web 2.0, Miami wants to be to Web3 – an effort reinforced by the Covid pandemic, which drove young entrepreneurs and investors to South Florida because of its favorable weather conditions and relatively few Covid restrictions.

Blockchain.com, for example (one of the world’s largest crypto wallet providers), was based in New York until the pandemic, when it decided to relocate. CEO Peter Smith explained that the decision ultimately fell on Miami, in part because the mayor was able to lay out a long-term vision for crypto companies in the city. The city thus represents an important center for Web3/DeFi in the US, and the mutual exchange between GermanyDeFi hub Berlin and Miami is also in the interest of both cities in the longer term (in terms of regulations, etc.).

We are very proud that we could win true experts of the Berlin Web3/DeFi scene for our trip and bring them as speakers for the respective panels of the event. Likewise, on the Miami side, we were able to recruit the key-players of the Web3/Crypto scene as speakers for our event.

The event agenda:

After welcome remarks from Andreas Siegel, German Consul General in Miami, James Kohnstamm, Executive VP @ Miami-Dade Beacon Council, and Achim Oelgarth, CEO of BFI, we got a detailed insight into the Berlin FinTech/Web3 landscape by Alexander Daamen, Head of BFI, and Jakob Zwiers, Innovation Manager @ Berlin Partner.

Our first panel focused on how NFTs and Web3 are enabling new business models. We were lucky to have Ralph Quintero, NFT & Web 3.0 Investor and Founder of Daily Ralpha, moderate the panel, along with these amazing speakers: Lena Hannah Nussbaum, Founder & CEO, YES MY LOVE, Michelle Abbs, Founder & CEO of Web3 Equity, Julian Grigo, Managing Director @ Solarisbank, and Gianni D’Alerta, Co-founder of Miami NFT week, FOAM Venture, and JPEG Morgan NFT community.

Christian Busch, Investor & Ex-MP US German Accelerator, and Christoph Iwaniez, CFO & Managing Director at Nuri, summed up the wild crypto year of 2022.

Finally, the second panel focused on how Web3 can successfully shape the idea of decentralized finance, moderated by Christian Busch, with these expert speakers: Peter Grosskopf, Co-Founder of Ultimate, Carly E. Howard, JD, LLM, Crypto Lawyer @ K&L Gates, Martin Quensel, Co-Founder of Centrifuge, Patrick Hansen, Director, EU Strategy & Policy @ Circle, and Christopher May, Co-Founder & Co-CEO @ Finoa.

The event was sold out with over 150 registrations and was also a great success because we were able to secure the Solana Embassy (Solana is one of the largest cryptocurrencies in the world) as the venue, which gave the event the perfect setting.

We look forward to continuing bridging the Berlin and Miami ecosystems! ? ↔️ ?️

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This project is supported by the Berlin Government, Senate Department for Economics, Energy, and Public Enterprises and funded by the European Union´s Corona recovery program #ReactEU!