Taken from interview with Simon Cocking - https://irishtechnews.ie/equity-tokenised-ireland-david-gilmore-akasha/
AKASHA Innovation Hub and SORS Digital Assets are excited to host a panel discussion on Wednesday 5th February covering the topic of Tokenisation in Ireland. Quick interview with David Gilmore from Akasha.
How was the last year, what worked well, what didn’t move as quickly as you would have liked?
We set up in Dublin in 2019, this was part of our global expansion having already established bases in Zug, Berlin and Barcelona. There were a number of highlights in 2019 for AKASHA, we solidified our partnership with CERN, presented at the World Economic Forum and at Devcon 5 in Osaka, Japan we announced Ethereum.World, a platform seeking to unify the Ethereum ecosystem by integrating decentralized apps into a simple, delightful social experience. At our Innovation Hub here in Dublin we have a number of Blockchain start ups taking part in our incubation and acceleration programs. I think that the issue of regulation in the Blockchain space in Ireland is lagging behind other countries such as the UK and Germany and it is important to address that issue. For example, the German Federal Ministry has issued a national Blockchain strategy for the Token economy and we need a similar initiative in Ireland at this point.
What are your plans for the future?
It is the goal of AKASHA to continue to develop distributed technologies that enable the creation of new Blockchain backed innovation driven economies and foster the emergence of knowledge driven societies through collective intelligence. Moving from proof of concept to rolling out production is a key target for 2020. We hope to expand to more locations and are currently collaborating with the Isle of Man government about taking an active role in their regulatory sandbox.
What will you be talking about at this event?
The primary topic at the Event will be the Tokenisation of equity in Ireland with specific focus on the Tokenization of Real Estate, Assets, Commodities and Securities. We are delighted that representatives from the Central Bank and the Department of Finance will be in attendance, it will be useful for them to hear from our German partners Black Manta about how regulation is actually working in the Blockchain space in Germany. Our panel comprises of a broad spectrum of the Blockchain industry including developers, legal experts, Blockchain entrepreneurs and venture capital funds looking to invest in the space.
What inspired you to organise it?
We feel that we need to start a conversation among the key stakeholders in the space and that it will be hugely beneficial to bring together the leading industry experts with representatives from the Central Bank and Department of Finance. Also we are determined to continue to increase awareness and education around the Blockchain development and applications in Ireland so we will be holding one event each month on various topical issues.
Which influencers and websites do you follow to keep up to date with the latest developments?
Obviously irishtechnews.ie continues to be a great resource for Blockchain information in Ireland. Other than the usual Twitter, Linkedin and Reddit sources, we like to go to as many meetups and conferences as possible, we find this is a great way of keeping our ear to the ground and find out all of the goings on that aren’t necessarily in the public domain. This was one of the reasons we become proud sponsors of the BlockW event in Dublin.
How can people find out more about what you are working on? Anything else you’d like to add / we should have asked?
We have just launched our new website, www.akasha.ie and are always happy to have visitors drop in for a coffee in our offices in Dublin City Centre.