Parity speakers set to light up Polkadot Decoded

Polkadot Decoded returns for its fourth edition on July 11th, visiting Brussels for the first time, in the same week the Belgian capital hosts EthCC. Despite the most competitive speaker selection process yet, a healthy number of Parity engineers have been selected to provide details and insight about many of the technical innovations they are directly involved in.

The two-day event, at the central location venue of Tour & Taxis, a landmark former industrial site on the Brussels Canal, is the third Polkadot Decoded with in-person audiences and the fifth in all. For the first time, the event is managed by Decentered Studio, a collective staffed by former Parity employees with specialist events experience and funded by the Decentralized Futures initiative.

Parity CEO Björn Wagner has the honor of opening the event with the first keynote presentation at 1105 CET. Björn will take some time to celebrate the new teams and initiatives that have formed thanks to Decentralized Futures, many with former Parity team members, while in addition explaining what Parity has been working on through the first half of 2024.

Our founder takes the stage

Following half an hour of Björn, the microphone is passed to Parity and Polkadot founder Gavin Wood for a full hour taking us up to the Thursday lunch interval. As is traditional, the details around Dr Wood's presentation remain a close secret.

On the second day, the event begins an hour earlier, and the first Main Stage slot goes to Pierre Aubert, Parity's Vice President of Engineering, speaking at his first Decoded. Pierre's presentation is titled Building a Solid Foundation: Enhancing Stability & Reliability on Polkadot. He will explain how the second half of 2024 the focus for the core engineering team will be less about rolling out new product launches and more on creating a solid, dependable technical infrastructure for the ecosystem to build on.

Parity's final involvement in a Main Stage appearance will come when interim COO and CLO Chrissy Hill appears in Hey you, is this a regulatory Deja Vu? at 1130. Chrissy will be joined by Angela Dalton, CEO of Signum Growth, and Joshua Klayman, Head of Blockchain & Digital Assets, Linklaters. The familiar trio, who have deep knowledge of regulation and compliance across Web3 - and Polkadot's position within it - are sure to draw a big crowd.

Meanwhile, appearing in afternoon slots on either the Tech Stage or Impact Stage, will be many talented individuals who make up Parity's engineering cohort. They are as follows:

• Cisco Aguirre, Rust Developer, on XCMv5: Aiming for better UX
• Patricio Calderón, Application Security Engineer, on Securing the Polkadot Ecosystem
• Karim Jedda, Senior Tech Lead, on Making Polkadot More Reliable with Real-Time Data
• Dónal Murray, Software Developer, on Agile Coretime Architecture & Pricing
• Maciej Zyszkiewicz, Software Engineer, on Coretime: The first step towards Polkadot 2.0

But that's not all. Chrissy will feature on a second panel titled What's next? Things we'd love to see on Polkadot, where she will be joined by Parity colleagues Alex Bird and Kerstin Larsson, along with Ben McMahon from Galactic Council, the developer of the Hydration project, and Raul Romanutti from JUST Open Source. This panel will be a full and frank discussion touching on aspects of OpenGov, business development, the ecosystem and the perspective of parachains.

Panels in focus

Another important Parity panel is Putting Developers First: Working Closer with the Ecosystem to Address DevX Challenges and Building a More Reliable Network. Moderated by Joyce Siqueira, it will feature her Parity colleague Santi Balaguer alongside Web3 Foundation's Joe Petrowski and Lucas Vogelsang of Centrifuge.

Santi will also appear on a panel introducing the new Polkadot Ledger app, with Juan Leni from Zondax and Ledger's Victor Forgeoux, while last (but by no means least), Pierre Besson is joined by former Parity colleagues Mally Kisubi and Safina Dahou. They will appear on the Venture Pad introducing Chain Giving, an early-stage project focused on onchain fundraising.

Finally, all talks and panels are streamed live, so do sign up now for free if you want to catch your favourite talks and also check out exact times for all speakers.