NEM at the World Government Summit
February 13 2018, Dubai — The 2018 edition of the World Government Summit has just recently concluded in Dubai. It was a 3-day summit attended by policy makers and government leaders all around the world.
First appeared on medium
The World Government Summit is a global platform dedicated to shaping the future of government worldwide. Each year, the Summit sets the agenda for the next generation of governments with a focus on how they can harness innovation and technology to solve universal challenges facing humanity.
The World Government Summit is a knowledge exchange center at the intersection between government, futurism, technology, and innovation. It functions as a thought leadership platform and networking hub for policymakers, experts, and pioneers in human development.
The Summit is a gateway to the future as it functions as a stage for analysis of the future trends, issues, and opportunities facing humanity. It is also an arena to showcase innovations, best practice, and smart solutions to inspire creativity to tackle these future challenges. (www.worldgovernmentsummit.org/about)
In one of the sessions of the summit, NEM Foundation President Lon Wong was invited to take part in a panel discussion regarding the future of cryptocurrency in the world economy. The panel was moderated by CNBC host Arjun Kharpal. Other panel members were Lawrence Wintermeyer Co-founder of Elipsis, Jesse Powell CEO of Kraken and Nick Spanos Founder of Bitcoin Center.
Lon Wong emphasized more on the growing interest of the society in blockchain technology as one of the main driving point of price increase of cryptocurrency, particularly XEM in the previous year. In regards to the risk of price manipulation in cryptocurrencies, Lon stressed out that price manipulation is evident even in mainstream market and these things are unavoidable, however as it has been a culture of NEM supporters the community generally focuses on promoting the technology behind NEM rather than hyping the price of XEM tokens.
It is the technology that will dictate the price of XEM and not the speculation of the market. When regulating was brought up, there are two parts that Lon explained. First was regulating the blockchain technology itself. When using the blockchain technology, it should not disturb the regulatory policies of the government bodies and can be used in parallel to the current system. Blockchain is a very powerful tool to manage funds including auditing as displayed during the tracking of the hacked funds. Secondly cryptocurrency regulation is always discussed because it is argued that it can be used for money laundering.
Lon mentioned that in terms of money laundering, the amount of problems in money laundering using fiat far exceeds the laundering issues using cryptocurrency. Regulation of cryptocurrency should happen in the exchange level and to lessen the risk, Lon suggested that security should be the minimum and number one requirement for regulation. As the panel closed, is the future of cryptocurrency gold or dust, for this year, Lon pointed that the direction that cryptocurrency will go to will definitely be up.
A lot of media outlets also approached Lon during the summit asking Lon’s expertise regarding blockchain, fintech and cryptocurrency. Such media outlets included CNBC, Dubai TV, and Emirates News.
Southeast asia regional director Stephen Chia was also present during the event. He was present during the sessions and met with some interesting personalities during the event.
