The symposium was organized by UZH blockchain center, it included free entrance, dinner and coffee, quite unusual for a Blockchain conference these days! The talks were all at academic level and went deep into issues and potential of Blockchain use.

The most interesting speech in our opinion was by Prof Bryan Ford of Dedis at EPFL, who talked about Proof of Personhood with people physically walking in a room and receiving some sort of digital token. He also talked about a way to solve Bitcoin scalability issues by using Omniledger with sharding.
Dr. Artur Gervais gave a talk on off the chain transactions, in particular the Lightning network.
Michael Lustenberger (ZHAW) gave a talk on applied research to manage documents and certification of pharmaceuticals on Ethereum. Dr. Massimo Morini spoke on the importance of smart contracts to reduce settlement risk and speed up settlement procedures.

Other featured speakers included:
Prof. Aleksander Berentsen, author of Book in German "Bitcoin, Blockchain and Kryptoassets"
Prof. Roger Wattenhofer, from Distributed Computing Group at ETH Zürich