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IDunion is a new European decentralised identity management platform that is promising to bring user centric digital identity with privacy at its core. In this podcast we had Adrian Doerk – Product manager at Lissi and communication & Public relations at IDunion, walk us through IDunion.

 

What is blockchain?

For Adrian, blockchain is just a data structure. When you expand its definition from a DLT (distributed ledger technology) perspective with multiple nodes on a network what makes it interesting is whether the rights to writing on the network are permissioned or permissionless. This is determined by the type of consensus that exists on the network who determines who and what is written into the network.

 

Present challenges with digital identity

History of the digital identity on the internet:

* Isolated siloed identity where users would login and authenticate themselves with the provider of a digital identity for accessing a service

* Federate identity where multiple companies and institutions got together and agreed on a single sign on for multiple sites. However, the challenges of this model is that the identity was still focused on a central operator and not all companies and institutions where comfortable with this approach

* User centric identity where a classic example is login with Google login or Facebook login. Whilst this is very convenient for the user it does lock up the user in a proprietary ecosystem which is very dangerous since these providers live from user and behavioural data which they resell to third parties.

The next generation of digital identity will be designed with privacy by design principles. It will be a user centric proposition that is both convenient but also gives the user more control around their identity for authentication and identification purposes.

* Identification asks: who are you?

* Authentication asks: is it you again?

 

IDunion vision

IDunion is a consortia, whose aim is to build an open ecosystem for self sovereign identities controlled by its user. Whilst the platform can be used everywhere it is based on European values, laws and regulations.

Everyone (including natural as well as legal persons and things) has the possibility to manage their identity information by themselves and to decide when they want to share this information with whom. The sovereignty over one’s own data is tremendously important, especially when it comes to very sensitive and personal information.

Users can choose one of several wallets, which are used for storing and presenting credentials to third parties as required. This is helpful for a wide range of use-cases and enables a new way of identity management. Thus, technology companies are no longer acting as a central identity manager, but the user himself! The user can decide where the information can be seen, which program is used to manage information and with whom this information is shared. We call this concept the self-sovereign identity.

 

IDunion platform

Source: IDunion

IDunion uses Hyperledger as a kind of technical umbrella for their multiple implementations:

* Hyperledger Indy for the implementation of the network

* Hyperledger Aries for the agents which communication with the network

*

Jim Nasr, is the CEO of Acoer, a software development company whose vision, and work is all about building useful, usable, real time technologies that are fundamentally targeted at the healthcare industry. Jim was the former chief software architect at the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in the United States. In this podcast we discuss how NFTs and blockchain can be used to empower individual’s consent.

 

What is blockchain?

Blockchain is a public infrastructure that should be used within the public context. Blockchain provides transparency, auditability and accountability. Blockchain is a layer of trust that can be used to impute trust between parties who don’t trust each other.

Jim is keen for blockchain to move past the world of cryptocurrencies and proof of concepts. He wants to make blockchain as practical as possible with real practical solutions.

 

Challenges of consent

Consent is an element of compliance.

In the healthcare industry, when you go see your GP, you fill out paperwork to essentially give them consent to your medical health information for all time. For Jim there are a number of issues with that. It’s wrong that the patient doesn’t always fully comprehend what they’re signing, the process is complicated, it has to be done multiple time and the patient has no rights to say they’ve changed their mind. Jim gives the example that “if you're my orthopaedic surgeon, you should not have access to my mental health information”.

There is a double challenge with regards consent. On one side individuals who sign consent forms have no idea what they have exactly signed, what data is shared and where that agreement is. On the other side organisations have limited idea on who signed what agreements, what data was covered and where the agreements are stored. This creates repetition of the process where the individual is repeatedly asked to sign new consent forms.

Dynamic consent is the recognition that consent is not a and done concept, it is more dynamic with potential multiple phases for providing consent with the ability to revoke the consent, where the consent may expire after a certain amount of time and where it could be renewed.

Dynamic consent is digital which gives it properties to be tracked and monitored.

 

Data dignity

Data has creators like individuals on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to name a few who create data on those platforms. Essentially, we are implicitly giving those platforms the ability to use this data and along the way we become the product for the “free usage” of that platform. Consumer of those platform are creating content for the platform to leverage in a manner that creates a financial windfall for themselves. The issue is that we as consumers have no say in how that data is marketed and no say on whether firms like Cambridge Analytica use our data and create secondary data markets for themselves.

 

Regulation: GDPR & CCPA

Regulation such as GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) provide an important opportunity for regulators to help regulate consent. GDPR gives EU citizens the right to grant access to their information to third parties, including consent and gives them the right to be forgotten. Crucially this regulation carries some serious teeth where t...

In January 2020, 12 global pharmaceutical companies and 17 public and private entities; including technical, legal, regulatory, academia, research organisations and patient representative organisations, got together to form PharmaLedger, the pharmaceutical blockchain consortium.

Joining us for this podcast is Daniel Fritz, PharmaLedger Industry Project Leader and Supply Chain Domain Architect at Novartis and Marco Cuomo, Manager Applied Technology Innovation at Novartis, a team that brings in new technologies, such as blockchain, into Novartis. Marco is also the co-lead architect at PharmaLedger for the blockchain platform.

 

What is blockchain?

Daniel likes to introduce blockchain with the five A’s:

* Assets, too often blockchain is associated with cryptocurrencies as assets but assets can also be data and medicinal products that can be exchanged on a distributed ledger technology

* Audit, the immutability aspect of blockchain is good for audit.

* Automation, use of smart contracts eliminate non-value adding steps

* Anonymize, especially important in the healthcare care industry to protect the patient’s data by keeping it confidential and protecting their privacy

* Authority, no central authority where authority is distributed amongst the participants

For Marco the real strong added value blockchain provide at its core is the immutability function. Whatever you store on the blockchain, transactions and data are immutable so no one can change it.

 

An introduction to PharmaLedger

PharmaLedger, launched in January 2020 as a public private partnership under (IMI) the Innovative Medicines Initiative, a joint undertaking between the European Union and the (EFPIA) European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations. It’s a three project with over €22m of public private funding. There are 29 partners in the consortium which includes 12 pharmaceutical companies whose goal is to accelerate blockchain adoption. Its aim is to prove that this technology can bring value to patients, increase trust amongst all of the different ecosystem stakeholders and enable new capabilities around supply chain clinical trial and health data. In addition it aims to demonstrate that blockchain can address some of the key challenges the industry has around identity and governance.

The whole idea of the IMI is actually about building consortiums to address problems or challenges that are too risk for any one company or too expensive for any one company and which would benefit from having public partnerships.

 

PharmaLedger use cases

PharmaLedger has launched with 8 use cases broken down into three domains:

* Clinical trials

* Health data

* Supply chain

Within the supply chain domain, you have two versions of supply chain traceability: clinical supply and finished good traceability. There is electronic project information (ePi) which is also known as an e-leaflet, or an e-patient information leaflet. It’s a digital version of the leaflet you find in a medicine box. It contains the latest approved version of that leaflet in a manner that preserves the patient’s privacy. In the future it will have the capability to send out recall notification, if there was a quality issue of that product, to send updated product information and also to apply some additional checks on the provenance of that medicine to help reduce the risk of counterfeits.

On the clinical trial side,

Arnoud Star Busmann, CEO of MineHub and Carl Wegner, CEO of Contour join us in this exciting podcast to discuss their cross blockchain ecosystem collaboration. Arnoud and Carl share their insights on how to identify opportunities for cross ecosystem collaboration based on customer overlaps and data to ultimately build an experience that will delight the customer.

 

What is blockchain?

Carl’s definition of blockchain, within the context of distributed ledger technology, is a way of managing multiple databases and keeping that data where they overlap is in sync. You have a set of consensus mechanisms to manage agreements between the multiple databases, a communications protocol and a rules-based system for them to work.

Arnould’s definition of blockchain is one of a data infrastructure that provides a shared single source of truth that is distributed across an ecosystem. The responsibility for maintaining the shared truth maintained by a neutral, unbiased machine or machines. The data is owned by the data owners but the truth is controlled by none of them. The governance model of data is really the crux of blockchain technology and distributed ledger technology in Arnould’s opinion.

ERP 2.0, it’s the ecosystem resource planning, building the apps and solutions that create value across an ecosystem instead of just one enterprise on the basis of that shared data.

 

Challenges MineHub addresses

In the mining and metals industry there are many parties involved in post trade management of physical commodity transactions and across general supply chains. The multiple parties have a tendency to collaborate and coordinate themselves via email, sending PDFs or couriering paper documents. So, by the time that information is reconciled and acknowledged to be true, the cargo is already discharged or financed.

There are a number of challenges with this approach in the sense that it is easy to manipulate, hard to trust for important business decisions making such as credit decisions, stockpile optimization, purchasing, pricing and compliance. The worst problem according to Arnoud, is that the valuable information has a tendency of being locked up in courier bags or boxes.

World Economic Forum White paper: “digital transformation is estimated to generate more than $320 billion of value in the metals and mining industry over the next decade, including $77 billion”

MineHub ensures that its users have high quality information, reliable information about the most important risks and opportunities in their daily work available in real time

MineHub has developed its platform on HyperLedger Fabric. However, it is on their roadmap to go multi-ledger because they have a requirement to have a single reliable source of truth with data privacy and data residents.

 

Challenges Contour addresses

Contour was previously known as Voltron before they rebranded.

Trade finance is a very paper intensive industry where information is being couriered back and forth. Goods are arriving before the paperwork gets there thus making credit decisions harder to make or slower.

Contour focuses on one aspect of trade finance which is a letter of credit, which is where a buyer and seller have some trust issues between each other. The buyer doesn't want to pay for something that he didn't want, whilst the seller doesn't want to ship and let go of his stock ...

Asset tokenisation has become one of the most prominent use-cases of distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) in financial markets, for assets including securities, commodities and other non-financial assets. For this podcast we had Iota Nassr, Economist and Policy Analyst at the OECD, join us to discuss her recent OECD report on the tokenisation of assets and their potential implications for financial markets.

Iota started working as an investment banker at Merrill Lynch and at Citigroup before joining the OECD for the last 9 years working for the committee on financial markets. The committee has set up an expert group on financial digitalisation which includes representatives of central banks, finance ministries, treasuries and other financial authorities from the 38 OECD members. The group looks into Fintech related matters in financial markets and their policy implications including the area of blockchain in finance.

 

What is blockchain?

Blockchain is a type of distributed ledger technology, that records information in a distributed manner, in an immutable, time stamped and programmable manner that allows for the exchange of value without the need for a trusted central authority or without the need of intermediaries.

This allows for efficiency gains on the back of such disintermediation.

 

Tokenisation of assets and potential implications for financial markets – OECD report

On the 17th of January 2020, the OECD published the “Tokenisation of assets and potential implications for financial markets” report.

Since 2018, the OECD committee on financial markets had been working on blockchain related issues. What kicked it off was the ICO (initial coin offering) hype, which the OECD looked at for their potential for SME financing in a report entitled “Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) for SME Financing ”. With the drop in ICO hype the committee continued to have an interest on the potential of tokens and tokenised markets post ICO, particularly on their potential proliferation in the technique of tokenisation would affect traditional financial markets.

What they were really looking at is a theoretical environment where tokenized assets and market for tokenized assets take off. If that were to happen, how would it affect financial markets? And what do policymakers need to know and think ahead of that? That was the initial objective of the tokenisation of assets report they published in January 2020.

 

What is tokenisation of assets?

The report looks at tokens from two perspective: (1) tokens representing a pre-existing real asset and (2) tokens “native” to the blockchain.

Source: OECD Report

The firsts case has tokenisation as the process of representing in a digital way by using the DLT an asset that already pre-exists. The tokens exist on the chain and carry the rights of the assets that they represent. They effectively act as a store of value for something that exists in the physical world.

Source: OECD Report

In the second case, we have native tokens which are built directly on the chain and live exclusively on the distributed ledger. Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or payment tokens are examples of n...

Harry Behrens – bloXmove co-founder. Harry was until recently the Head of the Daimler Mobility Blockchain Factory where they built a mobility blockchain platform. Harry describes himself as a software guy. Now, along with his co-founder Sophia Rodiger, he has performed a management buyout of the Daimler Mobility Blockchain Platform which is the core of what bloXmove will be bringing to the market. In this podcast we discuss how bloXmove will enable building an open mobility ecosystem.

 

What is blockchain?

Harry defines distributed ledger technology (DLT) as way for independent parties to keep a shared set of truthful facts of transactions they conduct amongst each other. It is a peer to peer system that facilitates trusted transactions between trustless parties, where they can trust the distributed ledger to reflect the reality of the business relationships between them.

 

From Daimler Mobility Blockchain to bloxMove

One of the many uniqueness of this startup is that of the four founders, two of them are women with the CEO being a woman named Sophia Rodiger, who also comes from the Daimler Mobility Blockchain Platform.

The Daimler Mobility Blockchain Platform is a blockchain project at Daimler Mobility AG whose aim is to sustainably optimize booking and invoicing processes for mobility solutions.

Non-native electric automakers, where native electric being Tesla for example, are facing serious transformations, in additions to the challenges of COVID19. Daimler for example is doing a form of demerger of all its entities where the truck unit is being separated from the passenger car unit and its financial arm is being split into two. In such times Daimler, like any other business, needs to focus on its core business. Thus, no matter how promising the mobility blockchain platform could be for Daimler or Daimler mobility it isn’t core business.

The platform was production ready and was ready to be “unleashed” as Harry describes it. However, as the platform was built for ecosystem, he believes that any big player with a very strong brand name will never be able to build an ecosystem because it won’t be able to attract the other brands to its ecosystem. For example, Daimler wouldn’t be able to attract Toyota, BMW or Tesla to join the Daimler Mobility Blockchain Platform.

Thus, the only way to do a platform game, to go into platform economics based on software can only be done via a perceived neutral entity.  A platform branded as the Daimler Mobility Blockchain Platform will never be able to become the platform for shared mobility or urban mobility.

It was thus agreed that Sophia and Harry will perform a management buyout of the Daimler Mobility Blockchain Platform via bloXmove with the help of venture capital funding from players such as Outlier Ventures.

“By granting the software license, we want to make it possible for the platform to be used for other areas of application and thus to reach its full potential. I am very pleased that our successful pilot project is now being continued and further developed at bloXmove,” says Carmen Roth-Schäfer, CTO Daimler Mobility AG.

BloXmove being this independent third party is now able to ...

Souleima Baddi is the CEO of Komgo, an innovative platform that powers trade networks. In this podcast we discussed the challenges of bringing blockchain to the trade finance industry. Souleima shared her insights on how to manage the need to bring user value immediately whilst dealing with both tech and user issues for adopting blockchain. How do you manage IT and security departments conventional ways of vetting a new platform whilst gaining the trust of traders accustomed to using email and paper processes for the last decades?

Souleima is a banker, having spent 18 years with Société Générale, of which the last 10 years were in Geneva launching their commodity finance business. She’s also a passionate mum of three kids.

 

What is blockchain?

Blockchain is a distributed ledger. It is a shared and synchronised database across multiple participants, that enables the recording of interactions and transfer of information, such as identity or values like money and securities, between two parties without the need for a centrally coordinating entity.

Komgo uses DLT to create a digital audit trail of documents which strongly mitigates the risk of hampering the document or using the document multiple times for fraudulent purposes.

 

Trade finance industry challenges

One of the main challenges of this industry has been its usage of paper based process for such a long time.

There has been an acceleration of digital transformation that has increased due to COVID. However, transforming an industry does take a lot of time. Individuals are not easily willing to change their way of working, their routines, to invest in change management and put extra effort to adopt new processes.

Komgo has more than 150 companies using its platform on a worldwide basis. Souleima recognises that for companies using any new software is a huge investment in terms of time and energy before it brings added value to the company. Teams within companies are swamped with their everyday job with their execution and it is extremely challenging for them, despite their goodwill, to embrace digitisation on top of everything else.

The good news is that the trade finance industry recognises that digitisation is an absolute must and that it will play a major role in the future of the industry. The players who move too slowly in embracing digitisation will lose their competitive edge to others who are faster at it.

 

Komgo

Komgo is an industry initiative with 20 shareholders from corporates and financial institutions who have merged forces to build a solution that matches the needs of the industry from both sides. Komgo is a software development company incorporated in Geneva in 2018 whose vision is to bring workings solutions to clients that helps them execute more trades, faster and in a more secure manner.

Komgo, offers fours solutions to the market:

* Konsole: streamline trade finance – structured and authenticated messaging to issue secure banking instructions

* Market: optimize liquidity & manage risk – harmonized data and transactions to enable better choices

* Check: simplify onboarding & renewal – a single source to accelerate KYC

* Trakk: keep track of document trails – build unique documentary audit trails to guard against fraud and falsification

 

Konsole

Konsole allows banks and corporates to connect together in an authenticated structured exchange around the full lifecycle of trade finance instruments. Souleima provided an example where corporates can discuss between them and agree on the draft of a letter of cred...

Chaim Finizola is the ClaimShare Director and the head of business development for emerging markets over at IntellectEU. In this podcast we discuss ClaimShare’s confidential computing solution built on top of R3’s Conclave and Corda Enterprise platform for the detection and prevention of “double dipping” fraud in the insurance industry which runs in the several billions of dollars each year.

 

What is blockchain?

Blockchain is a technology that allows different actors to collaborate with each other without having to trust each other. Having a database in the form of a distributed ledger you can have not only the data decentralised, but also the way the data is handled in a decentralised manner.

Independent of the discussion of centralised versus decentralised, Chaim reminds us what is important is to focus on the business use case and then determine the best approach.

 

What is confidential computing

Confidential computing allows different actors to perform private computations on specific data sets and process data without other actors being aware of each other and without them being able to see what data is being processed.

The party that is hosting this black box whether it’s a regulator or a network operator they can’t see what is being processed within the black box.

An example of such a black box is the Intel SGX chip which has enclaves where the data can be processed in a fully confidential way without revealing any data to external parties.

Insurblocks recorded a podcast with Richard Brown, CTO at R3 entitled "Confidential computing - introduction to R3's Conclave".

“Double Dipping” Fraud

KPMG has estimated that detected and undetected fraud make up between 5% to 10% of insurers’ total claim payouts. “Double-dipping” fraud a key contributor to fraud, costs the insurance industry several billion dollars each year, which inevitably leads to higher household insurance costs

Double dipping happens when one actor for one loss event goes to multiple insurers to request a same payout. For example, a customer whose had a car accident will go to insurers A, B and C to get a payout from each one of them. This is quite a large problem for insurers which today has been extremely hard to detect. Insurers are usually unaware of this problem as they do not have a way to detect if their customer are insured with another insurer and if a payout has been made on a claim or not.

There has been attempts by insurers to share information via a centralised database but that came up with a number of complexities from a regulatory standpoint and from a GDPR one. In addition, centralised databases run the risk of getting hacked or of leaked sensitive information.

 

IntellectEU

IntellectEU are the developers of the ClaimShare solution. The firm was founded over 15 years ago as an integration company in the payment sector. They have done over 400 integrations, mainly with SWIFT, in addition to other payment rails.

Charles Kerrigan – Partner & Global Head of Fintech at CMS. Charles spends his time looking at what do new technologies mean for the industries that their clients work in from financial institutions to fintechs, crypto firms, and blockchain protocols. In this podcast we take a comprehensive look at NFTs and their impact on the financial industry, on property, transferability and ownership within legal frameworks.

 

What is blockchain?

Charles gives us a lawyer’s definition, where he sees blockchain as both a puzzle and a challenge. To explain that he gave us an example, where is cryptocurrency property as defined under a legal system in English law. Property can be categorised into two buckets:

* Real property, is tangible and is something that can be touched.

* Intangible property: Shows in action, is essentially everything else where you can bring an action in relation to it, i.e. that you can sue in court for it.

When Bitcoin arrived, it wasn’t something that can be touched and thus could be considered as an intangible property. However intangible property has been defined over the centuries as something that you can sue under a contract. Bitcoin thus isn’t either an intangible property nor a tangible one.

The theft legislation talks about depriving someone of property, so bitcoins not property, you can't steal it.

In November 2019 Sir Geoffrey Vos, Chancellor of the High Court came to the conclusion. That crypto-assets have all the legal indicia of property and are, as a matter of English legal principle to be treated as property. There are two primary reasons:

* First, the novel features of some crypto-assets, such as intangibility, cryptographic authentication, use of a distributed transaction ledger, decentralisation, and rule by consensus, do not disqualify them from being property.

* Secondly, they are not disqualified from being property either because they can be regarded as pure information, or because it might not be possible to classify them as being things in possession or things in action

Taking the above points into consideration for defining blockchain, Charles explains that blockchain identifies value, it establishes certainty of ownership and is able to transfer value with certainty.

 

NFTs – Non Fungible Tokens

NFTs provide the opportunity to identify ownership in a digital context and that has value in itself.

A lot of present and historical legal disputes around commercial law are with regard to disputes over ownership. A person acquires a piece of property from another person, not through a valid transfer, whether it's via theft or mistake, or anything, that means that Person A has lost an asset, Person B has gained an asset in a way that's invalid. So far, we've got an easy case, because Person B should give it back to Person A.

The hard cases come from variations of when Person B, hands it on to person C in exchange for some value. So now you've got A out of pocket, and C out of pocket, and B disappears whether physically or financially where they become insolvent. We've now got a dispute between A and C, neither of whom are at fault. But both of whom are arguing that they should have this asset returned to them.

NFTs provide an immutable, searchable register in terms of who is the owner of a piece of property.

Because NFTs are sitting on their own blockchain protocol such as Ethereum, they transfer their rights of ownership via an executable code. Two questions arise with regards what is being transferred:

Joan Zerkovich – Senior Vice President, Operations at AAIS (American Association of Insurance Services) and Brian Behlendorf, Executive Director of Hyperledger at the Linux Foundation join us to announce that the AAIS' OpenIDL is joining the Linux Foundation. In this episode we get an introduction to the AAIS, OpenIDL, the Linux Foundation and Hyperledger. We also discussed how OpenIDL will leverage the Linux Foundation unique approach to governance.

 

What is blockchain?

Joan: distributed ledger technology is a technology that provides a way to have immutable records in the digital world, in a networked environment. Blockchain is used in a number of ways in addition to cryptocurrency, such as for business applications that require data security, privacy and an immutable record. OpenIDL uses blockchain to pursue a path of data security, privacy and transparency.

Brian: blockchain is a shared system of record amongst participants in a commercial ecosystem. Brian, compares blockchain to the mid and late 90s when a group of folks were talking about free software and working on projects with no justifiable economic basis behind them such as the Apache Software project and the Linux project.

Insurance have been conservative about adoption of new technologies, open source software and blockchain technology. However, Brian now thinks that insurers now see blockchain as solving some real problems, particularly problems created in understanding risk within a regulated environment.

Blockchain helps organise an industry to solve a collective problem. A shared system of record, with automation through smart contracts is an essential part of solving these problems and doing that in an auditable and verifiable and, and regulatable way.

 

AAIS

AAIS is a US based advisory organisation. In the United States, insurance is regulated at the state level. That poses some issues when you’re trying to offer insurance products nationally. The National Association of Insurance Commissioners or representatives from all the states got together and they said we need an organisation that can help them collect data on the insurance market and provide some perspective at the national level. They can use that data to develop products that can be filed in all 50 states to provide a common foundation for insurance companies to add value on top of that with some consistency across all 50 states.

For the last 80 years AAIS has been authorised to collect data from the insurance carriers as an advisory organisation licenced in 50 states. AAIS is allowed to collect data that insurance companies wouldn’t be able to share between themselves due to antitrust concerns. AAIS uses that data to provide reports to the regulators and to develop products that they use.

 

Linux Foundation and Hyperledger

20 years the Linux ecosystem was composed of a number of open source contributors from RedHat, HP, IBM and thousands of other contributors. A consortium approach was set up as a home for the Linux project where the basic sustainability model was companies paying membership dues tiered by the size of the organisation. They weren’t pay for software development but paying for the coordination overhead, or as Brian calls it, the air traffic control function to all the different contributions coming in.

After a few years there was a sense that this model was stable, that it was reliable and replicatable.