The ultimate guide to Vancouver – Cointelegraph Magazine

Vancouver hosts a massive mural in honor of Polkadot, and entire city blocks here are heated with Bitcoin mining. The site of the first Bitcoin ATM, the city has also hosted a blockchain wedding overseen by a “Doge Preacher.” Home to Dapper Labs and other blockchain projects, there is also a share of mystery, like the crypto exchange CEO who allegedly died in India.

Fast facts

City: VancouverCountry: CanadaPopulation: 2.64 million (Metropolitan Area)Established: 1886Languages: English and French

Overview

Situated on Canada’s west coast in the province of British Columbia, Vancouver makes up the country’s third-largest metropolitan area. Consistently rated among the world’s most livable cities, Vancouver is notable for its ethnic and linguistic diversity brought on by waves of immigration, and less than half the population speaks either of Canada’s official languages, English and French, as their first language. Nestled between mountains and the ocean and aiming to become the world’s greenest city under an urban planning philosophy called Vancouverism, it rates among the most expensive cities in the world in terms of housing.

Downtown Vancouver is surrounded by water, so land is scarce. (Source: Pexels)

Originally settled by indigenous peoples over 10,000 years ago, the modern city grew around a tavern on the edge of a sawmill built in 1867. Its prominence grew with the introduction of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Very close to nature and various climates, it is a major tourist hub offering whale watching, skiing, old-growth forests and other outdoor activities. It is today a major port city and travel hub, serving as a gateway to the far east both via Vancouver International Airport and in terms of culture, with people of Chinese ethnicity alone making up 27% of the population. The city hosted the Winter Olympics in 2010 and is sometimes called “Hollywood North” due to its notable film industry.

Compared to the more business-like Toronto, which is a 4.5-hour flight away, Vancouver takes after the United States west coast with a more casual atmosphere — perhaps helped by the far milder weather, which makes Eastern Canada with its freezing rain seem a world away. Despite its relatively small population of 38 million, Canada is an outsized contributor to the blockchain industry, perhaps most notably as the birthplace of Ethereum.

Crypto culture

“In an inconspicuous storage unit below street level in a major west coast city, there exists a cult-like underground hacker’s collective that not only operates entirely via a blockchain application but features a prominent and intricate ‘altar of plenty’ set before a mural of DOGE. This altar is piled high with collective offerings of thousands of dollars of paper cash and marijuana, both of which are ceremonially burnt according to a cryptographic algorithm.”

That’s a passage from my book Blockland, which records the strange story of the crypto industry. The city in question, of course, was Vancouver, where I lived for a short time at the “Decentralized Dance Party HQ,” whose other residents organized Vancouver DogeCon, the first-ever Dogecoin conference in 2018. Later, the DDP spun off the Million Doge Disco, a Dogecoin project headed by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s brother Kyle Kemper, who comes across as a hippie evangelist spreading “Doge-consciousness” around the world.

The weirdness doesn’t stop there. Vancouver’s CoinFest 2019 blockchain conference featured the first mass blockchain wedding, which saw three couples get married on the blockchain — the ceremony also being recounted in the book:

“A flower girl delivers a specially prepared USB stick, which the bride inserts as Doge Preacher directs her to enter the password. Lines of code appear, buttons are clicked, and the ENTER is pressed to sign the transaction… ‘Blockchain official!’ declares Doge Preacher, who is wearing a Doge shirt under his tieless suit jacket in such a way that an eye of Doge peers from the center of an upside-down pyramid on his chest.”

Three couples got married on the blockchain. Watch the whole wedding at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbOJPjCGN3M

In 2021, the underside of Cambie Bridge was transformed into a 1,765-square-meter blockchain-based augmented-reality art installation called Voxel Bridge. It is a visual representation of the Kusama network, a blockchain built as a “canary” chain to Polkadot. Unlike most major cities, there is even a Meetup group dedicated to Polkadot and Kusama.

The metaverse under the bridge (Source: Inside Vancouver Blog)

“This installation transcends the enjoyment of art into a unifying and experimenting effort that enables blockchain technology, AR and public art to examine new ways of interaction,” noted the artist Jessica Angel.