Crypto is here to stay. It walked the Silk Road, catapulted Bitcoin into popular culture, and cemented itself in mainstream financial conversations. For this edition of RENDER,  Betaworks Studio’s frontier tech conference series, we’ll shine light on two quickly emerging areas in the crypto space: non-fungible tokens and decentralized finance.

The first half of the day will focus on Non-fungible tokens (NFTs). NFTs are a type of cryptographic token which represents something unique. Non-fungible tokens can be used to create verifiable digital scarcity. As one of our curators Jake Brukhman, Founder and CEO of Coinfund, puts it “NFTs are not just cat pictures that people trade on blockchains. Today digital art, collectibles, and in-game assets are the most visible use cases for these nifty non-fungibles.” 

We’ll finish the day focusing on the broader landscape of DeFi. NFTs are just one element in decentralized finance (DeFi), an umbrella term for a variety of financial applications in cryptocurrency or blockchain geared toward disrupting financial intermediaries. “The core innovation of decentralized finance is that the “trust layer” is now the software and code itself. Without the time and cost associated with a high level of intermediation, the promise of DeFi is wide.” writes Sean Lippel, Principal at FinTech Collective and fellow curator of RENDER: NFTs+DeFi, “broader access to financial products, programmable money, real-time risk transfer, and auditability of financial contracts. Moreover, anyone with a computer or mobile phone with an Internet connection can gain access to more open and transparent financial services”

Join us as we explore the past, present and future of NFTs and DeFi through a day of conversations, demonstrations and explanations. From NFTs gaining prominence and earning millions in revenue as in-game objects and digital collectibles to DeFi’s ability to bring banking-style services to those who lack access to financial systems, we’ll examine the impact of these burgeoning technologies on a variety of industries and sectors throughout RENDER: NFTs & DeFi.