Following a week of bombshell developments in the industry, from the SEC classifying the DAO Tokens as securities to the arrest of Alexander Vinnik for allegedly laundering 4 billion dollars through BTC-E, the inaugural Blockstack Summit kicked off on the morning of July 27th with an eye toward innovative layered protocols that can exist on top of existing blockchains.

Hosted at the Computer Science Museum in Mountain View, CA, the conference began with a discussion of transitions between the "terminal model" of computing and the personal computer over the course of digital history. In their talk, Blockstack co-founders Muneeb Ali and Ryan Shea discussed how recent moves toward cloud computing and storage take away the data privacy and security guarantees long afforded by personal computing. In response to this problem, Blockstack and other decentralized applications built on top of various blockchains aim to give consumers the ability to control, manage and streamline their own digital lives.