Asoc. Prof. Alex Norta

Blockchain technology has evolved rapidly over the past decade, from the launch of Bitcoin in 2009 to the emergence of programmable blockchains like Ethereum. This keynote speech will provide an overview of the global development trends in blockchain technology. It will cover the evolution from Blockchain 1.0 focused on cryptocurrencies to Blockchain 2.0 enabling smart contracts and decentralized applications. Architectures like directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) have also emerged to address scalability and other limitations.

The speech will highlight major public blockchain infrastructure projects and applications like decentralized finance (DeFi), non-fungible tokens (NFTs), decentralized metaverses, and blockchain games. It will also discuss enterprise blockchain adoption with use cases, Blockchain-as-a-Service offerings, and alliances like the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. Government initiatives around blockchain will be covered, including the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI) and central bank digital currency (CBDC) projects.

Biography:

Alex Norta is a scientist and entrepreneur currently focusing on his blockchain startups while still working on a fundamental Web3 research project with Tallinn University. Previously, Alex was an associate professor at the Department of Software Science at TalTech University until March 2022. He has also worked as a researcher at the University of Oulu’s Secure Programming Group and as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki.

Dr. Norta received his MSc degree in 2001 from the Johannes Kepler University of Linz, Austria, and his PhD degree in 2007 from Eindhoven University of Technology, Netherlands. His PhD research on developing the eSourcing concept for dynamic inter-organizational business process collaboration was partly financed by the EU IST project CrossWork. His research interests include business process collaboration, blockchains, smart contracts, oracles, multi-agent systems, e-learning, e-governance, service-oriented computing, software architectures, ontologies, social web, and generative AI. Alex has published over 116 research papers and from the period of 2018-2022, 10 of his PhD students successfully defended their doctoral theses. Alex also brings extensive research experience in IT and emerging technologies such as blockchain to this keynote presentation on global blockchain development trends. He has worked in the past with many blockchain startup companies in their fundraising efforts.

Address:Tallinn University, , Tallinn, Estonia