Ethereum founder and distinguished Peter Thiel Scholar Vitalik Buterin arrived in India last week to inaugurate the country’s first ever Blockchain Summit hosted by Arifa Khan, CEO of Zero Field Labs, to explore blockchain’s potential in India.

Nearly 150 tech enthusiasts from Microsoft, Wipro, ConsenSys, TCS, Accenture, Synechron, National Payments Corporation of India, and several of India’s bitcoin and blockchain startups attended the summit on December 6 2016 at Shangri La Hotel. Welcoming Buterin to India, Arifa Khan, the Conference Chair, said:

“It is humbling to host, interact and learn from a genius of this magnitude in India, who is toast of town with central banks, regulators and governments around the world, and can dramatically transform the established ways of working of banking and financial system everywhere. We will extend every bit of cooperation Vitalik ever needs in India and other emerging markets to take Ethereum mainstream and to support his research efforts in solving cryptographic challenges.”

Speaking at the summit, Buterin advocated blockchain technology’s transformative potential in India to make smart contracts possible in fields such as agricultural markets, education, healthcare, Identity based transactions, microfinance and financial inclusion.

“I am excited to see the growing interest in Ethereum and blockchain technologies coming from India; the world is finally waking up to the great potential that the technology has particularly in emerging markets, and I look forward to seeing developments with the technology grow in the months and years to come”, Buterin said.

When asked about the possibility of writing smart contracts free of gas (the computational fuel required on ethereum to upload any smart contracts), Vitalik advocated some sort of transaction fees for sending blocks and also incentives for miners so as to prevent the protocol from being jammed by frivolous computational requests. Every economy has to have self-governing self-sustaining market rules, and crypto economy is no different.

Answering Khan’s question on how easy it is to create a new cryptocurrency in India, Vitalik said it is a matter of copying 50 lines of code, but the challenge is in building the value of the new token and a circular economy around its acceptance, according to the official release.

The Blockchain India Summit was sponsored by CryptoCarbon – a new cryptocurrency behind loyalty rewards and Microsoft, the software giant which has introduced Microsoft Azure’s Blockchain as a Service platform to ride on the growth wave of blockchain.

Khan’s Zero Field Labs will host Vitalik in Dubai for the first time in first half of 2017 in partnership with Microsoft, Synechron.