Singapore is Top for Blockchain

Singapore leads a ranking of the top 10 blockchain cities in the world with London second and the tiny Swiss town of Zug, also known as ‘Crypto Valley’, third.

The ranking has been compiled by Boyd Cohen, co-founder of IoMob and the Blockchain Cities Alliance and dean of research at EADA Business School in Barcelona, and is published in Breaker magazine.

According to Cohen, Singapore scores strongly in both the number of ICOs and blockchain-related start-ups and, he writes in Breaker, that its government is considered “more transparent and business-friendly” than others. It can also boast “blockchain-friendly” regulations.

When it comes to London, Cohen suggests that one “unintended” upside of Brexit may be that it has encouraged the government to throw more support behind the UK capital’s blockchain ecosystem to offset potential lost opportunities in the country’s financial services industry. London also has the second highest number of blockchain start-ups.

Cohen describes third-placed Zug as having taken on “outsize importance” as a tax haven and home to the Ethereum Foundation as well as 450 blockchain-related start-ups and organisations.

Those cities placed from fourth to tenth respectively are New York; San Francisco; Berlin; Tallinn, Toronto, Dubai and Hong Kong.

In the Breaker article, Cohen makes the point that there is much greater distribution of blockchain ecosystems across the globe compared to Silicon Valley dominance of web 2.0. He and his team analysed 11 different datapoints in the categories of blockchain start-up activity, smart city and blockchain leadership and regulatory friendliness. Eighteen cities were identified as potential candidates for the top 10 ranking.

Following online discussion generated by the list, Cohen took to Medium to publish more details of his methodology. Among the data sources used were Token Report’s ranking of top 10 cities based on headquarters of projects completing a token generating event, or ICO, the Global Startup Ecosystem Report 2018 and Cohen’s and his research assistants own work to identify other top cities based on ICO headquarters through the collection of data from Token’s Market’s database.

Survey: Blockchain for smarter cities: Where’s the action?

SmartCitiesWorld is undertaking a global survey which looks at the level of understanding around blockchain and the impact it can have on creating smarter cities. We would love to hear from you. – Smart Cities World