Dante Disparte, is the Vice Chair and Head of Policy and Communications at the Libra Association. Dante returns to Insureblocks to share his experience of being at Libra and what the insurance industry can learn from that experience.

It is worth nothing that Dante is the Chairman of the Risk Cooperative, a member of the FEMA National Advisory Council and a Forbes contributor. He has also participated in two podcasts on Insureblocks: Blockchain vs. the insurance trust deficit in April 2018 and A retrospective look on blockchain for 2018 in Feb 2019. We are absolutely delighted to have Dante back on our show in 2020.

 

Insureblocks’s 100th episode!

I’m Walid Al Saqqaf, your host. Since the 19th of March 2018 we’ve produced weekly podcasts on blockchain in the insurance, pharmaceutical, supply chain, banking and many other industries from case studies, PoCs, pilots and production grade roll outs.

We’ve also covered topics around the convergence economy, how AI, IoT and blockchain converge. We’ve covered the subject of diversity, blockchain for social good, digital identity, tokenisation and much more. Today’s episode is our 100thone! We all can’t believe we’ve just reached this milestone. It feels like just yesterday when we recorded our first episode with Gary Nuttal.

We want to thank all our speakers and all of you, our listeners, for making this show such a success!

 

What is blockchain?

In last year’s podcast, Dante had defined blockchain in a slightly philosophical way, using words like trust, decentralisation and self-sovereignty. Whilst he believes those ideals very much still matter he now sees a growing wave of enterprise blockchain efforts and investment and adoption that are starting to give the technology a real opportunity, not in its own, but together with other emerging technologies to drive real change in the market.

 

What is Libra & the Libra Association

The Libra Association is an independent, not-for-profit membership organization, headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland that was first announced on June 18th 2019.

The goals of the Libra Association are threefold:

* Develop a blockchain based payment system that would support low friction high trust payment on a peer to peer basis. Today there are 1.7 billion people who are on the margins of the formal economy. Libra is developing a blockchain based system that can help support pulling more of them into the formal economy

* Building a payment system that supports competition and innovation.

* The third objective of the Libra Association is to reach the above objectives in a regulatory compliant manner.

The fundamental promise of blockchain and cryptocurrency technology is with notion of financial empowerment. The Libra project is a consortium of member organisation who have a common cause, with a wide range of enterprises, public sector actors and stakeholders to effectively address the insidious issue in the global financial system. 1.7 billion people who are unbanked, 1.3 billion who are under banked who to send a cross border payment or remittance costs on average 7% worldwide.

Roughly a billion people have access to a mobile phone. In a world where the mobile phone can become a payment endpoint,