The QEII Centre welcomed the return of large events by hosting one of seven two-day live events for the Cardano Summit.
The summit took place virtually from 25 – 26 September 2021 and welcomed 100,000 delegates from the crypto community and those with an interest in blockchain and finance.
Objective
The QEII Centre was asked to provide a meeting space for 1,000 delegates attending the Cardano Summit. The Cardano Summit is traditionally held in the US with delegates flying in from across the globe to attend. However, with travel still restricted in some regions, organisers Input Output, needed to find a way to bring delegates together without them travelling outside their nations.
It was therefore decided to hold the event virtually, attracting 92,000 attendees, while also providing a live element. This allowed seven locations around the world – London, Wyoming, Miami, New York, Berlin, Cape Town and Tokyo, to each host 1,000 people.
As well as supplying conference and breakout spaces, QEII was required to provide AV support and serve refreshments and lunch.
Execution
The centre’s Fleming and Whittle rooms were set up for the main conference space the delegates could view the same content being delivered to those attending virtually and delegates attending in-person around the globe.
QEII’s in-house AV team, QEII Live, provided the AV support and a bandwidth to ensure virtual content was streamed to delegates seamlessly.
The QEII Live team worked with a gaming company who Input Output had commissioned to provide a gaming component to the conference. Each delegate was offered the chance to each create a turtle avatar which appeared on screen at a certain point in the day.
The client also required a meeting room that could host 100 people for a hackathon, which was held in its Rutherford and Moore rooms.
QEII’s in-house catering team QEII Taste provided refreshments on arrival and lunch on both days from the Britten.
To highlight the global nature of the event, food was themed according to the style of cuisine typically served in the seven live locations. Dishes, which were served from food stations, included katsu curry with steamed rice (Tokyo); hot dogs with sauerkraut (Berlin) and Billingsgate fish pie (London).
Results
Kerry de Jong, senior head of events, IOHK, said: “The location is perfect, and the meeting space was exactly what we needed for the event. Everything was great and holding the London event at QEII improved the outcome as we had enough space to accommodate the attendee numbers we were expecting.”
