The co-founder of the decentralized service TorusLabs, Zhen Yu Yong, was diagnosed with the Covid-19 coronavirus. He participated in several Ethereum conferences with dozens of attendees.

On 11 March, Zhen Yu Yong, co-founder of the decentralized TorusLabs service, tweeted that he was diagnosed with the coronavirus Covid-19. Zhen called on those who he contacted with during the Ethereum Developer Hackathon in London (ETH London) from 28 February to 1 March and during the Ethereum Community Conference (ECC) in Paris from 3 to 5 March to take precautionary measures or undergo testing for coronavirus.

In the comments, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin wished Zhen a speedy recovery.

Zhen also wrote that the symptoms of the disease, such as fever and cough, appeared on 9 March, thus, it was unlikely that he had been already infected when attending events in the first half of February. However, he mentioned those conferences (blockchain conference at Stanford and the Ethereum conference at Denver). Referring to the words of his physician, Zhen wrote that, most likely, he was infected at the conference in Paris.

Zhen is currently in the hospital in Singapore. He informed the organizers of all the events he attended about his illness.

The coronavirus pandemic has not bypassed the cryptocurrency industry. Many of the events planned for the near future have been canceled or postponed to a later date. Thus, the Paris Blockchain Week 2020 was postponed until 9 December 2020 after the French authorities introduced a ban on holding public events of more than 5,000 persons. The Ethereum Developer Conference ECC did not fall under this ban, as it was attended by fewer visitors. The Hong Kong blockchain week was postponed to the end of September 2020, and the Hong Kong Token2049 conference to October.

The upcoming Ethereum EDCON conference has been canceled, and the South Korean Nitron summit has been postponed to an unidentified date.

The coronavirus also made adjustments to the London blockchain week. There were noticeably fewer visitors at the conference compared to previous years, and several speeches were held in the format of webinars.