Polkadot @ Coindesk Consensus

Coindesk Consensus is the world’s largest, longest-running and most influential gathering that brings together the many silos of ambition and innovation across the blockchain and Web3 community. The 2023 edition will bring together 20,000+ people from across the globe in Austin, Texas.

We will be participating at the flagship event in the industry, showcasing our ecosystem, healthy growth of our community, and the quality of our technology. We will gain access to audiences of interest, forming connections with new leads, as well as converting those considering Polkadot. We are also supporting the growth of ecosystem projects and amplifying their adoption efforts.

The funding for this event activation will be submitted to the Polkadot Treasury.

Polkadot will participate as a Block 3 sponsor. This sponsorship includes the following:

  • 40’x42’ Island booth
  • Sponsored emails to attendees
  • Onsite branding, 1 large banner on entrance to expo hall, 2 column wraps inside expo hall

Objectives and Key Results

  • Brand awareness
    • 100 Mil impressions across all marketing platforms and materials
    • 100K landing page views
    • Media reach: 5 interviews with mainstream media/crypto media and influencers
  • Demand generation
    • 800 booth foot traffic/ conversations
  • Lead generation
    • 480 - 540 leads collected at the booth (180 - 240 BD team + 300 ecosystem teams)

Target Audience

Consensus gathers a variety of audiences, a cross-section of the industry: entrepreneurs, executives, Web3 creators, asset managers, individual investors, NFT collectors, brand and marketing professionals, government officials, blockchain developers and more.

Interesting stats: 53% work on a crypto or Web3 project, team or company, over 46% of the audience is director level and above.

The primary target audience are founders, CEOs, CTOs, decision makers. The secondary audience are developers, builders and startups. The third audience focus are institutional investors and media.

If you have feedback on targeted audiences for this event, let us know your thoughts in the comments of this post.

Marketing Activities

To amplify and gain traction at the booth multiple marketing activities will take place in advance of Coindesk Consensus. This includes a social media campaign, a landing page to communicate our activities and presence at Coindesk Consensus, an airport ad to further amplify Polkadot’s presence at Coindesk Consensus, and a series of demand generation activities to generate interesting leads to interact at the Polkadot Booth.

Speaking Engagements

This is currently in motion by the Comms team led by Colleen Murray, developing messaging and speakers for the event from both within Parity/Web3 Foundation and the Polkadot Ecosystem. More information on this will be shared later.

Booth design and positioning

The booth will follow the similar successful style of a pavilion booth where there will be 11 demo stations to feature ecosystem teams and Polkadot representatives.

The Polkadot booth is positioned on a main walkway within the middle of the Expo hall, so we expect to get a lot of foot traffic to our booth

See more booth images here.

Ecosystem teams on booth

So far, we have confirmed the following teams to be represented on booth at Coindesk Consensus:

  • Astar
  • Moonbeam
  • Unique Network
  • Frequency
  • Interlay
  • Watr Protocol
  • Zeitgeist
  • KILT
  • Aventus
  • Gear
  • Phala Network
  • Bifrost.finance
  • Equilibrium
  • Nodle

Consensus x HackerEarth Web3athon

The Web3athon by Coindesk & Consensus is a hackathon organised as part of the Consensus 2023 conference. We participated in this event last year, saw great results and will be repeating our participation this year. The hackathon last year has seen over 5000 registrations, giving Polkadot important awareness exposure with the developer audience and also generated great project submissions.

The 2023 Web3athon will focus on bringing awareness to partner grant/support programs for developers across web2 and web3. This hackathon is laser-focused on builders seeking the right protocol and will showcase various grant and developer initiatives of sponsor protocols and foundations.

As part of this sponsorship we (Polkadot) will:

  • Be recognised on all hackathon web pages, promotional materials, etc.
  • Have a 15 min slot to talk about opportunities in the ecosystem on the Protocol Village Stage at Consensus
  • Appoint a hackathon judge who will choose a winning team
  • Be recognised with logos on signage at the stage and on video screens between sessions on Protocol Village Stage
  • Receive 40 Pro Pass Tickets to the Consensus conference
  • Give out a main Polkadot prize of $25,000 USD
  • Be able to include ecosystem teams to run their own bounties within the Polkadot track

We have reached out to all the ecosystem teams that have confirmed their booth participation to understand if they also want to run a bounty. This work is ongoing, but so far the following teams have confirmed their participation:

  • Astar
  • Moonbeam
  • Unique
  • Interlay
  • Zeitgeist

The list of participating ecosystem teams will likely continue to grow over the next few days.

The timeline for the hackathon looks as follows. It might change slightly, but we don’t expect major changes.

  • March 1, 2023 - Web3athon announcement and opening up registrations
  • April 17, 2023 - Virtual Hackathon starts with team formation and onboarding
  • April 26-28, 2023 - Consensus
  • May 31, 2023 - Deadline for teams to submit projects
  • June 30, 2023 - Winners announced

Further information about the hackathon can be found on their website: Web3athon | Agenda | Consensus 2023 | CoinDesk

Parachain Activities at Coindesk Consensus

We are in close contact with all of our parachains and ecosystem teams and their upcoming activities for Coindesk Consensus and other events. Currently Moonbeam are confirmed to host their own booth at the expo hall. There are plans being formulated by web0 (the parachain events team) to coordinate a side event to Coindesk Consensus, although this is still being confirmed. As more activities from the ecosystem gets confirmed, we will update you and our communications to include their activations.

Should have any feedback or further questions about the Polkadot booth at Coindesk Consensus, please comment on this post.