CoinGeek Conversations

For James Belding, the co-founder and CEO of Tokenized, the launch of his desktop app just days ahead of the London Blockchain conference in June was the fruit of years of work, ever  since he appeared at a CoinGeek conference with his self-funded team in Toronto in 2019. 

Described as a “self-custodial and enterprise-grade digital wallet …for issuing, managing and holding digital assets including Bitcoin SV”, Tokenized boasts an elegant interface, an easy sign up process and an impressive range of functions.

Sure, it’s taken a while, James admits, but that’s because he wanted his product to be more than just “the hundredth wallet that wasn't that good and that didn't distinguish itself at all from anything else.”

Tokenized’s distinction lies in the wide range of what James calls “instrument types” that it supports. So in your wallet, you can have an eclectic mix, including bonds, tickets, coupons and loyalty points as well alongside fiat currencies. 

Despite the name of the business, James plays down the tokens themselves, partly because he thinks people have a distorted idea about them from the hype around dodgy NFTs. The tokens are just “tiny, tiny pieces of the puzzle,” he says. “You just make a token on chain. Maybe it's a five, or twenty percent improvement over current things”. 

It’s the rest of what blockchain can do that is key to what he wants to achieve with Tokenized: “the real unlocking of value - and where all the hard work is - in the smart contracts and all the implications that arise from those”. 

On this week’s CoinGeek Conversations, James talks about the journey from initial idea to product launch, and explains why he thinks users will agree that Tokenized was worth the wait: 

“We really put our blood, sweat and tears into it to make it as compelling as we could, as simple as we could. But right now anyone can download the app and they can use it as what we think is probably the best Bitcoin wallet or even crypto wallet in the whole industry.”

Part of that claim rests on the thinking that James and his team have put into security. By reducing Tokenized’s own custody of assets, they have put their users in a more direct relationship with the blockchain: “we saw a non-custodial approach [allowing] users to connect directly with the DLT [digital ledger technology] as intuitively very compelling from a security point of view.”

That has an additional benefit when trying to sign up customers, big business especially: he can tell them that they don’t need to put their faith in Tokenized being around forever - although he is confident it will be! But if the company were to disappear, the Tokenized protocol, which is open source, would still exist and continue to operate, and users could access their assets through alternative interfaces. 

“I think that resonates very well” in discussion with potential customers, James says. “It's a really powerful message and we get a lot of positive feedback for it.”

So what are the prospects for signing up big business users? James is cautiously optimistic: “we're in active discussions with a lot of big players that are getting their heads around it. I wouldn't say we're at a stage where one of the biggest players is ready to drop everything, but we're basically at the point where I think a bunch of pilot projects are going to start rolling out quite soon”. 

From BSV entrepreneur to start-up enabler, Kirsty Barany-Gibson is no stranger to the Bitcoin SV community. Prior to taking on a position at global investment firm Scale Facilitation, she was known to the BSV community as the founder of Clear Sparrow, an online dating app that utilizes Bitcoin SV technology. Today, Kristy heads Access New York, a program by Scale Facilitation, offering start-ups and small-medium enterprises access to New York City resources.
 

On this episode of CoinGeek Conversations, Charles Miller catches up with the BSV entrepreneur who passionately shares her thoughts on Blockchain technology, its most promising use cases and how she enables innovative start-ups and SMEs through Access New York.   

“We have a very much diversified portfolio. We're looking into companies in biotechnology, healthcare, obviously blockchain, so essentially anything that is a high disruptor in established industries,” she says. 

As an entrepreneur in the blockchain space, Kristy firmly attests to the countless benefits blockchain technology brings to a business. “You need it, otherwise you are going to be at a massive disadvantage,” she asserts. She points to blockchain’s ability to enhance process efficiencies through transparency while allowing companies to reduce liability and cost. 

Thanks to Clear Sparrow, Kirsty speaks from experience. Her platform is unusual among dating apps in that it uses blockchain technology to store users’ information. It verifies a user’s background through checking government records as a precondition to the access of potential partners. 

Kirsty is also keen to point out the superior power of BSV’s technology saying “the only blockchain that is able to handle the speed and the volume is BSV”. As head of Access New York, Kirsty is enthusiastic about onboarding companies that utilize blockchain technology. As she explains, “I see the BSV blockchain as a way of future proofing the companies that we invest in” she says.   

Kirsty believes that the most successful companies of the future will be those that integrate blockchain technology at an early stage. As for companies planning to integrate blockchain later on, she says it is viable, but more expensive. “If you're able to capture real live data, immutable, you are sitting on a goldmine, that is where the value is, so if you would talk to me and say, well, we can do it today, make a small investment and build it versus well, we'll see in five years, then you're losing five years of these amazing value that you could have been tracking since the beginning,” she explains.

Furthermore, Kirsty alludes to the fact that there is an abundance of talents in the BSV community that can help companies integrate blockchain: “there's a group of amazing developers within the BSV community that have been devoting years to building the building blocks, so they are there - you only have to literally bring them into your business and open a whole new dimension to it.”     

Kristy’s background in technology goes back to her childhood years. Her father was in one of the largest information technology distributor companies in South America. Kirsty also worked at a cybersecurity firm in the United States that serviced some of the largest brands in various industries. “I protected the oil industry, central banks. I was never the builder, but I always understood exactly how it worked so I could implement it in a very successful way,” she says.    

With a deep appreciation for blockchain technology, Kristy continues her journey, hoping to find more use cases that can truly unlock the value of this technology. As she says, “there's a lot of very profitable business models out there that have never been touched just because there's never been that transparency in

The United Nations’ World Food Programme (WFP) has been using blockchain technology to deliver assistance safely and securely since 2017 through an initiative called Building Blocks. It’s a privately managed blockchain network which allows various humanitarian organizations to coordinate efficiently, while allowing people to simply access their essential needs.    

As Houman Haddad, Head of Emerging Technologies at WFP explains, Building Blocks is “a humanitarian blockchain network which aims to, in a neutral manner, bring various actors together as hundred percent co-owners, co-operators and co-governors.”

On this episode of CoinGeek Conversations, Charles Miller finds out how multiple agencies use the private blockchain to enable a cohesive working environment while at the same time, allowing people to receive different types of assistance with less complexity. 

As Houman points out, “by putting the people we serve at the very center, gaining a common visibility on who's assisting whom, we can coordinate that assistance to ensure more equitable outcomes and make the redemption process simpler for the people who are dependent on that assistance.”

Oftentimes, humanitarian agencies serve people who lack digital literacy or don’t have access to phones or connectivity. So how does the system work? As Houman explains, “the way we've designed our system is so that the people we serve don't need any of those things - or don't necessarily need any of those things - but we do need connectivity and a device at the point of distribution.”  

In the current system, the UNHCR, which has a mandate for protection of refugees, collects documents (if any), biographic and demographic data, as well as biometrics from every refugee family who in turn receive an identification card that only contains a pseudonymous code. WFP then creates a blockchain account using the pseudonymous code for each refugee family. WFP’s onchain work begins as they deposit food tokens into a blockchain wallet associated with the family’s blockchain account. In effect, WFP will not have the refugees’ names or birthdates, therefore protecting every individual’s identity.  

As for redeeming entitlements, an individual can go to a supermarket, simply select items and checkout using the UNHCR ID card. WFP then needs to authenticate the transaction through various methods, depending on a country’s limitations. “In Jordan, it's by iris biometrics. In Bangladesh, it was finger biometrics before COVID. But it can be anything. It can be a QR code. It could be a simple pin,” he says.         

Houman envisions a future where individuals take complete ownership of their accounts by owning and controlling their own private keys. “At that stage, we won't simply hand them their private key, they will generate their own private key and we will transfer ownership to them,” he says.

Houman is also keen to point out that the use of a private blockchain ties in well with the United Nations “do no harm principle, at heart.” As he points out, “we store non-sensitive data on chain, although it's private and we protect it heavily.”

While the UN’s humanitarian initiatives make use of private blockchain technology, Houman admits that he favors the concept of a public blockchain for its self-sustaining ability, not dependent to any organization.  

Despite recognizing the advantages of a public blockchain, Houman remains steadfast with the use of private blockchain for WFP. While working on a proof-of-concept initiative in Pakistan, backed by Ethereum technology, Houman and his team quickly discovered issues with speed and cost. He also wasn’t keen on the fact that the transactions, although pseudonymous, are publicly visible.

Times are changing, literally. The Nowatch wearable looks like a watch but doesn’t function like one. Instead of telling the time, the device’s main use is to register its owners’ biometrics. As MintBlue CEO, Niels van den Bergh points out, the watch allows its users to be ‘in the now’: “It doesn’t tell you the time, it only gives you time,” he says.  

The BSV blockchain helps Nowatch to track a person’s vitals, breathing, heartbeat, steps, sleep cycle among many other measures. Similar to other smart wearable brands, the information collected from its user used to be stored in the cloud. But as Niels points out, “Nowatch really wants to pioneer and push boundaries in this field.”  And so the brand aims to take smart watches to the next level by offering its customers the opportunity to own and monetize their own data with the use of blockchain technology. 

As Niels tells Charles Miller on this episode of CoinGeek Conversations, every Nowatch user will own their own data. “You can do things with it that you can do when you are an owner: you can share it, you can sell it, you can rent it, you own it, you decide,” Niels says. 

There are benefits to sharing your Nowatch data to your service providers. For instance, your doctor can access and monitor your sleep cycle after prescribing you new sleep medication or your gym trainer will be able to access your vitals and see how your body reacts to an exercise routine. With the data-sharing capability of Nowatch, people can receive better service. 

As for monetizing from your data on the Nowatch, Niels says it’s possible, for instance, for a research organization to track hundreds or thousands of people’s heart rates during a football match. “That's cool information that research labs can use well, and imagine the machine learning algorithms that also can be fed with this information, it's truly authentic information that you buy from an owner,” he says.  

Nowatch is one of the many clients of MintBlue, a company that offers blockchain services to businesses. MintBlue’s vision is to create a public protocol spec, not only for Nowatch but for competitor smart wearables that want to integrate the technology as well. As Niels says, “we are like the Yoda to the heroes, we help organizations reap the benefits of Web3, we make it very easy for organizations to just plug and play our SDK and APIs into their backend systems.”  

MintBlue also wants to have all its use cases collaborate using BSV technology saying “the BSV blockchain is one global ledger for everything, for all use cases, so all of the clients that we sign up can interoperate.”   

From a business perspective, Niels says it’s all about finding the right use cases, as well as focusing on marketing and sales. He believes personal connection is everything. As he points out, “business is still people talking to each other and trusting each other.” For Niels, at the end of the day, business boils down to people having a relationship.

For more than two decades, Giovanni Franzese has been working for the telecoms giant Ericsson where he served most recently as Head of Blockchain Business Development. As an engineer, Giovanni liked to experiment with different types of technologies, but it wasn’t until six years ago that he decided to use blockchain technology to develop a product solution.

The product, Ericsson Customer Acceptance is a big win for Ericsson. As he explains, “it's a big product, it's very successful, and we have we have a very vast adoption.” 

As he tells Charles Miller on this episode of CoinGeek Conversations, innovation from within a corporation is extremely complex. “Innovation comes through acquisition, it's much easier: you buy a company which has a brilliant idea,” he says. 

In Giovanni’s case, his idea to use blockchain didn’t happen overnight. He admits that transforming his idea into a viable product was a struggle at first, but he worked  ‘under the radar’ and step by step: “it’s like Lego bricks buildings, the first one and then the second, and then it was a good building at the end,” he says. It also helped that he found an internal stakeholder to sponsor his idea.

Ericsson Customer Acceptance is backed by Hyperledger Fabric, a private blockchain technology. While building the product, Giovanni wasn’t aware of any public blockchain with secured scalability and high transaction rates per second. On top of that, he was wary of proposing the use of public blockchain which he colleagues might fear would potentially expose corporate data.    

As Giovanni explains, the challenge continued as there was resistance to a product that had the word blockchain associated to it. As he points out, “at the very beginning nobody wanted it because it's not a secret that blockchain is still a little bit controversial, especially when we have such scandals like FDX.” 

Despite the roadblocks, Giovanni’s blockchain-based solution was deployed to several Ericsson customers. At the end, he says “the benefits were so evident.”

Giovanni left his position at Ericsson to join nChain where he plans to expand the BSV-supporting global tech company into a consultant service company. Only a few weeks after taking on the role of nChain executive partner, Giovanni had the opportunity to speak at the recent London Blockchain Conference. He highlighted his experience in developing, implementing, and eventually providing blockchain solutions to big corporates. 

In his talk, he shared a significant career-lesson to his audience: “I don't regret what I did and the decisions I took six years ago when I decided to embrace blockchain and use private, but my message to the audience today was, if you have to start now, then don't do it in the way I did with the  use of public, use Bitcoin SV, because that is the right choice today.”

Giovanni is impressed with BSV’s capability to do 50,000 transactions per second and compares it to Ethereum which can only do an average of seven transactions per second, he says. He then compares the two blockchains to modes of transport saying BSV is like a Ferrari while Ethereum is like a little bike. 

As for discussions on using private vs public blockchain, Giovanni says, “now is the time to go public.” He supports public blockchain by saying that private blockchains are for the most part centralized, costly and it don’t exploit the full capabilities of blockchain technology.

Former iOS developer Kevin Healy first found fame when he released a video on YouTube called “What is Ethereum?” Published in 2016, in the video, Kevin shows developers how to build on the Ethereum blockchain. Despite thousands of views and some revenue he received from the video, Kevin removed it from his YouTube channel as he was worried about some of the dodgy ads that appeared alongside it. It is now back on the channel, clearly labelled as out of date and “posted for historical purposes”.   

Kevin is now part of the education team at the Bitcoin Association, a non-profit organization that aims to advocate and support the adoption of BSV blockchain technology worldwide. As he tells Charles Miller on this week’s episode of CoinGeek Conversations, his more general concerns about Ethereum grew after the spat between Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin and Dr. Craig Wright broke out in 2018 at the Deconomy Conference. 

In the midst of the controversy, Kevin felt the need  to “pick a side”. Then he release another successful video. Again, it received thousands of views. But this time, Kevin explains why he believes Dr Craig Wright is Satoshi Nakamoto. Despite anticipating some negative responses, Kevin went on to defend the man he believes to be the inventor of Bitcoin.    

At the start of his developer career, Kevin created apps for Apple’s App Store. His exposure to investments and technology while growing up led him to a career in technology: 

“My dad is a wealth advisor - a portfolio manager - and so I've always been comfortable trading stocks. Part of the reason I was obsessed with Apple is because we bought a lot of Apple stock when I was young,” he says. 

Kevin remembers owning his very first iPhone in high school and thinking “how do I learn to program this thing?” This thought process eventually led him to focus his studies on computer science. 

Kevin says that his early obsession to Silicon Valley success stories drove him to use the same business model as Facebook and Snapchat while building apps. Looking back, he says “it was a silly thing to do.”

As the app industry evolved, Kevin realized the chances of making millions as a single developer became slim to none. As he explains, “in those early days there were people that were making millions as a single developer but as the app platform matured, then it was more companies and you needed venture capital, and the labor for building apps became really expensive.”

At present, Kevin speaks of the advantages of Bitcoin technology based on what is written in the Bitcoin White Paper. At the recent London Blockchain Conference, Kevin focused on how to solve problems using Bitcoin. As he points out, the ability of Bitcoin to do micropayments solves many issues we encounter on the Internet today: 

“If you want to do small casual payments, then you can't do that with a trusted third party because they have to be able to reverse the transactions and they have fees. It's just too expensive to do it that way. If we want to do micropayments, then we need to get rid of it [third-party involvement] or we need a model without them.”  

Kevin refers to a valuable takeaway he got from one of Dr Wright’s interviews where the nChain Chief Scientist spoke about mercantilism. After watching the interview several times, Kevin says he realized that “money comes second, it's the goods and services that really is the wealth of society.” He relates this form of economic policy to the Bitcoin economy saying “money gets people's attention and the fact that the other tokens have gotten so much money, they've gotten so much attention and there's something sad about that, but at the same time too, it's also been a great filtering mechanism because now everybody inte

How do venture capitalists make investment choices? There are many answers to this all-important question for entrepreneurs looking to raise capital for their start-ups. 

Tokentus, a German publicly listed VC company is an early stage investor that focuses on the blockchain market. Its Investment Manager, Mona Tiesler says one of the top criteria they look at in a start-up is its founder’s strengths - including his or her background, mindset, commitment, knowledge of the technology - as well as the business use case and the product market fit. Another important aspect is the team behind the founder and whether are complimentary to his or her skill set.

As Mona tells Charles Miller on this episode of CoinGeek Conversations, Tokentus is focused on finding start-ups in the Web3 space. While the term Web3 varies in definition, for Mona it can be explained as a decentralized web with Web3 companies being those that utilize blockchain technology to create efficiencies.  

Tokentus however is not aiming to add all types of blockchain-based companies to their portfolio. They focus on financial services in Web3 related businesses, as well as some consumer facing businesses such as those in retail payments. According to Mona, Tokentus favours infrastructure and applications that will essentially power the future internet.  

Mona points out that Tokentus is blockchain agnostic. She believes that every blockchain is different and that each serves a unique purpose. In her opinion, BTC is the safest when it comes to store of value while ETC offers the biggest community with more potential in adoption opportunities. Mona believes that blockchain will continue to evolve: 

“I don't think necessarily the landscape we see now is going to be the landscape we see in the future, but I do believe that there will be a myriad of different blockchains existing in the future, utilized for different use cases.”

For some, the emergence of blockchain technology is likened to the onset of the consumer internet. Many companies formed during the internet’s early days failed to see it through, in effect, missing the opportunity to benefit from the technology’s success. But with blockchain technology now in the palm of our hands, the opportunity presents itself once again. And so, the question is: which blockchains will survive the test of time and which won’t?  

Mona predicts “there will be some sort of consolidation process. I wouldn't say every blockchain I haven't heard of is going to be weeded out. I don't have a crystal ball.  But there's incredible building going on, so maybe a big winner could be one we haven't even heard of yet.”

You can’t escape debates about AI at the moment. BSV entrepreneurs are as fascinated as anyone else - perhaps more so if they have experienced previous tech revolutions. 

Jerry Chan has gone public with his cautious scepticism about the much-publicised dangers of AI, but in this week’s CoinGeek Conversations, the former blockchain infrastructure developer and Wall Street technologist says he also sees the potential of AI, and that it could have a role in his forthcoming Frobots game. 

“I am impressed,” he says of his experience with ChatGPT, “it is effectively like Google search on steroids …But it doesn't know if what it's saying is true or false.”

It’s been suggested that what’s unique about generative AI (that is, AI which creates its own content in its responses) is the existence of emergent properties - higher order functions which weren’t written into the software but somehow appear, if not of their own accord then at least to the surprise of its programmers.

Jerry believes that these kinds of property don’t mean we need to attribute sentience to AI or to worry that it’s acquiring human abilities. You can think of AI as the “equivalent of saying somebody's brain has massive breadth but very shallow depth - they can know much more about many more topics than any one human brain and sort of overlay layers of meaning and see which layer of meaning makes the most sense. But at the end of the day, the thing that makes humans humans is we have our own internal volition - we don't have a program we're going by.”

To try to define what is unique about human beings, Chan points to Richard Dawkins’ book, The Extended Phenotype, which talks about how our genes are responsible not only for the physical manifestation of our bodies - the phenotype - but also for the ways in which we affect our environment too. That starts with the genes producing cells which act together, each cell ‘knowing’ whether it should be, say, a skin cell or muscle cell. 

When the cells lose this ability to act together and can only behave independently, they become cancer cells, no longer a useful part of the being in which they live. So, says Chan, “we as humans have innately - down to our cellular structure - a notion of self, even cellular self, which aggregates …and AIs are nothing like that”.

Despite his mild scepticism about the dangers of AI, Chan isn’t saying that its developers should be left to do entirely as they please, because there are also potential dangers: 

“Regulation would be good because if something comes out of regulation that says ‘let's put some checks and balances for whatever AI you create …Let's not plug it up into the nuclear launch code system, let's agree not to do that’. That would be a good regulation.”

More immediately, Chan is interested in AI as a part of the STEM education game, Frobots, which he is developing. The idea is to teach players computer programming, but AI gives another dimension to the idea: “humans could write programs to fight and AIs could write programs, and I'm not exactly clear whether it's certain that AI would win, because compared to chess or Go, which we know AI wins …the game is not well-defined. It's an open ended game”. 

Calvin Ayre: Blockchain can make governments look good to their citizens 

The London Blockchain Conference next week will be held at a prestigious venue in Parliament Square - no coincidence because its tagline is “Bringing government and enterprise onto the blockchain”. As conference creator Calvin Ayre explained in this week’s CoinGeek Conversations, the use of blockchain could benefit both governments and citizens:  

 
“Governments can use this technology to manage data in a way that makes them look really good to their citizens. They're saving costs. They're being able to provide unique services that weren’t possible before.” 

 
But the “honesty and truthfulness” of a government will also become more transparent to its citizens, which may not always be welcome, Ayre believes: “it's going to be interesting to see how this unfolds because we do know that a lot of governments don't like things that force them to be honest”. 

 
The conference is “about solving big data challenges in a unique way with blockchains”. And although Ayre is a big supporter of the Bitcoin SV (BSV) blockchain - partly through his Ayre Ventures, which invests exclusively in BSV businesses -, he insists that the conference is not a BSV event: “BSV is just a tool. If someone else has another tool that wants to compete in that space, then the conference is open to them.” 

 
Indeed, the conference advertised for participation by supporters of any other blockchain that had what Ayre considers essential to serve this market - unbounded scaling, the ability to make nano payments and a readiness to follow all existing laws - but nobody applied: “nothing came back. Not one person. And I found that shocking actually”. 

 
Ayre draws a complete distinction between the work he supports and the rest of the ‘crypto’ market. He sees no future for crypto and backs the suggestion of a Select Committee of British MPs who recently recommended that crypto should be regulated under gambling laws rather than financial - as it currently is under the FCA (Financial Conduct Authority) in the UK.  

 
“Innovation on blockchains will happen after the crypto nonsense is cleared of the way,” he says. And as a former entrepreneur in the world of online gaming he believes that crypto is “like gambling - only it's like illegal, unregulated gambling”. 

 
On the current media focus on AI, Ayre believes that more important technological developments will be centred on the implementation of BSV and IPV6 - an internet protocol that allows greater scaling of IP addresses than the currently more common IPV4.  

 
“You're not going to solve the challenges that the Internet has with artificial intelligence. You need what BSV does to make the Internet work better, for artificial intelligence to work better. They are things that will actually work together”. The BSV blockchain could provide a record of the provenance of data used in AI - an essential additional component to make its results more trustworthy.  

 
On the question of Dr Craig Wright’s many ongoing court cases, closely followed in BSV circles, Ayre is a huge supporter of Dr Wright on social media, but admits “I'm not a fan of all his court cases. I actually wish that there was a lot less of that and a lot more focus on business.” Nevertheless, Ayre has no doubts about Dr Wright’s claims - “of course I support him because he's right. I just don't think that all that stuff needs to be proven right now”. He jokes that “everything looks like a nail to Craig and he's got a couple of hammers in his hands”. 

 
The London conference will be the first of a regular annual event, Ayre says. From next year, he wants to expand it from this year’s two stages - focussing on business and technology - to three, and to extend th

Tim Malik, CEO and co-founder of Combat IQ, has come a long way since participating in the Block Dojo program in 2022 - the London incubator for start-ups building on the Bitcoin SV blockchain. His Combat IQ, which has since been with company accelerator, Techstars wants to be a game-changer in the combat sports industry with its AI-powered analytic platform.  

Armed with investment, a vision and determination, Tim says his team exceeded their own expectations in completing their prototype and having the opportunity to conduct real-time pilots with sports leagues. The company now plans to scale their operational capabilities as they look to raise a seed round at the end of the Techstars program.  

On this episode of CoinGeek Conversations, Charles Miller and Tim catch-up to talk about Combat IQ, how it uses AI to process data and how blockchain can play a role in resolving disputes in the sports betting industry.   

Combat IQ is about delivering data while providing great benefits to industry participants. Fight promoters will be able to use the data provided to them by the platform to augment community-building on their websites. Rights-holders can maximize value as viewership increases and more sponsors advertise in their league. 

As Tim explains, real-time data delivered during sports broadcasts allows viewers to engage more. “The world of sports broadcasting, sports viewership is changing dramatically. As the younger generations get in, they're changing the way people view sports, how they interact with it, and people are always looking for real time information in convenient ways. Fans want to see data points,” he says. 

In addition, Combat IQ enables real time markets combat sports betting. As he explains, “we send odds to betting companies directly and they would put those odds on their marketplaces for people to bet with”. Until now, betting in play is mostly limited to UFC. With Combat IQ, he aims to enhance people’s betting experience by providing leagues with real-time data using cameras and motion tracking systems. The league can in turn use the data to educate and engage their fans in the same way blue chip leagues such as NFL and F1 do. 

How does Combat IQ apply AI in data analytics? As Tim explains, an automated system works in place of a person who identifies certain components of a fight such as the number of strikes on the ground - which he says is impossible for people to track. Measuring factors such as speed of punches and kicks, which humans cannot do through the naked eye, are also made possible with Combat IQ’s system. Components are analyzed by a system that will determine which metrics have the greatest impact. Combat IQ will then provide the AI-processed data analytics to leagues for their own use.  

How does blockchain fit into Combat IQ? Blockchain is utilized in the sports betting part of the platform. “When we deliver odds to sports betting companies, we actually publish those odds to the blockchain at the same time,” Tim says. “And that's how we create, an immutable record for dispute resolution, conflict settlement.”

Watch the full interview on this episode of CoinGeek Conversations.