Interview: Pillars of Web3 Arriving for Philippine Web3 Festival
BlockchainSpace’s Jen Bilango shared her thoughts about the upcoming Philippine Web3 Festival.
Editing by Nathaniel Cajuday
“The Philippines is the epicenter of GameFi. It doesn’t make sense that we go to other countries to demonstrate PH as the hotbed of the industry.”
– Jen Bilango, Growth Lead at BlockchainSpace
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The Philippine Web3 Festival is set to showcase the country’s web3 industry for the first time on the global stage. That global stage happens to be the Philippines, as Jen emphasized in our interview, as organizers BlockchainSpace and Yield Guild Games (YGG) are bringing the who’s who in the web3 industry in Manila for one week from November 14 to 18, 2022.
“We wanted to invite VCs, builders, and anyone out there internationally building in blockchain to visit the Philippines and get to know the founders and projects here. We believe those conversations will be very important for the knowledge transfer from the people in the international community and the local founders,” Bilango added.
Among the speakers for the upcoming Philippine Web3 Festival are prolific web3 investor Animoca Brands, with no less than its founder Yat Siu arriving, The Sandbox CEO Sebastien Borget, and Axie Infinity co-founder Jeff Zirlin.
As one of the most globally-recognized web3 organizations that started in the Philippines, Bilango shared that BlockchainSpace always gets asked about the state of crypto and blockchain in the country:
“We attend a lot of crypto conferences outside the Philippines. And when we talk there, they were like ‘Oh we have a big community in the Philippines, we’re just finding a reason to visit’ and so we thought we should probably give them a reason to visit.”
The BlockchainSpace executive also highlighted why the festival is going to offer something different from all technology events that are happening in event-heavy Q4 2022 in the Philippines; the organizers – BlockchainSpace and YGG, and their founders have been building in the web3 space even before web3 became a buzzword.
BlockchainSpace, which started in 2018 by Peter Ing, was the go-to place for crypto meetups in the Philippines before it transitioned to the company known today as the “guild hub of the metaverse.”
YGG’s Beryl Li was an early employee of BSP-crypto licensed Coins.ph and helped develop the Philippines’ National Startup Roadmap. Gabby Dizon was previously president of the Game Developers Association of the Philippines.
“[Peter, Gabby, and Beryl] have been around for quite some time and they know the evolution of web3 in the Philippines, and that by definition, extends to the network that they have,” Bilango stressed.
The network of YGG and BlockchainSpace will make Philippine Web3 Festival different, she said. Arriving to the country on November 14 are the companies’ investors including Animoca Brands, A16Z, Crypto.com, among others.
“The quality and the curation of Web3 Festival makes its very special. So it’s much more targeted in terms of the community that you’ll be able to meet,” the BlockchainSpace revealed, adding that builders will find PH Web3 Festival worth attending. “We make sure that builders get to speak to VCs, they get to speak to providers of capital.”
“At the end of the day, we’re targeting the same audience, we want to make sure the Filipino community benefits as creators.” Bilango concluded.
This article is published on BitPinas: Interview: Pillars of Web3 Arriving for Philippine Web3 Festival
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