Insureblocks

Richard Brown is the Chief Technology Officer at R3. He leads the team that has invented, designed and brought to market the Corda blockchain platform. He now also leads the team that’s building out their second major product line, called Conclave a platform to securely share and analyse data using confidential computing.

 

What is blockchain?

Previously Richard gave Insureblocks a definition of blockchain from an enterprise perspective. A blockchain like Corda is all about allowing multiple firms in a market to be in sync with each other about facts, they care about such as loans and trade deals. Documents which are shared between firms such as notification of loss for an insurance policy, will invariably evolve over time. The claim gets reviewed, processed and authorised. All those business processes are executed within a firm.  Other firms across the ecosystem that have a stake in those documents need to be in consensus about their status.

For Richard, blockchain is all about ensuring that all the participants in an inter firm business process are in sync and remain so. The key value proposition being that “what you see is what I see”. Since our last podcast together in April 2019, Richard believes that his original definition of blockchain has been mostly validated by projects R3 has successfully run such as Spunta, by ABI (the Italian Banking Association). Spunta is about ensuring Italian banks are in sync with each other, that their balances reconcile and all the details are correct.

 

Security on the web – the padlock on your browser

We rarely think about how computers work or what promises they make. This can lead to some unexpected or often problematic outcomes.

When browsing the web, including going onto social media sites like Facebook, we are trained to look out for that padlock next to that URL within our internet browser as it gives us a sense of security. What that padlock tells us is that the connection between ourselves and Facebook is secure. That we are talking to the real Facebook.com and that connection is with servers controlled by Facebook.com.

This means that whatever data you are exchanging with Facebook is protected in transit as it leaves your computer and goes across Facebook servers.

However, what it doesn't say is what Facebook will do with the data, it simply tells you that they are the ones who will receive it. Once Facebook receives that data they can do whatever they like with it. Something which of course has led to some press scandals as the Cambridge Analytica one.

Social media sites today haven’t deployed any technological measure to constrain or control how they use your data. As consumers we rely entirely on social and legal measures to constrain what they do with that data.

The padlock in the browser effectively gives us a false sense of security, because whilst it gives protection to the data as it moves it doesn’t do anything about how the data is ultimately used by the receiving party.

This problem of course isn’t just for consumers but also for businesses. Banks will route client orders to exchanges to buy or sell shares. Insurance companies will send data to government agencies or third party credit agencies.

David Palmer is the Blockchain Lead and IoT at Vodafone Business, In this podcast we discuss the convergence of blockchain, 5G, AI and IoT (Internet of Things). In addition, we discussed the evolution of internet of things to internet of value and some of the exciting work Vodafone is doing in this space from Smart Cities, to supply chain and to the Energy Web Foundation.

David has been working in the telco sector for the last 20 years. He has worked on broadband, ADSL rollout, satellite broadband and for the last 10 years on IoT including combining it with blockchain for the last 4 years.

 

What is blockchain?

Blockchain is a distributed ledger that is shared between different parties. When you combine that with transactions you get to the basis of the first use case of blockchain which is Bitcoin. Bitcoin demonstrated how you can build trust by having transactions written on a shared and distributed ledger where different parties validate the transactions and provide its security through their combined computational power.

David notes that this is a simple definition of blockchain. Over the last three years there has been an evolution of blockchain. On one end you have public blockchains such as Bitcoin, Ethereum versus private blockchains with permissioned access formed by consortiums. Issues of interoperability arise when you try to bring those different blockchains together. In addition there are different protocols and consensus mechanisms that come in to play from DAG (Directed Acyclic Graph), proof of stake and proof of work.

Blockchain is a continuously evolving technology, but at its core it is a technology about trust. David mentions that there is a lot of friction today in everyday process. These are essentially processes built to establishing trust. The real power of blockchain is in providing a trusted shared platform to automate those process to remove that friction. Blockchain’s role in digital transformation is in the removal of the trust issue, it’s in the automation of processes which will give rise to a new evolution of automated business models and processes.

 

Explosion in IoT devices

Source: Statista

Statista is forecasting end-user spending on IoT solutions to reach $1.6 trillion by 2025 from 21.5 billion IoT devices. These are staggering numbers! With the increase adoption of 5G these IoT devices will be able to provide large amounts of data within nano-seconds.

Vodafone has a Global IoT platform called Global Digital Services Platform (GDSP). This platform is at the very heart of the IoT offering to Vodafone’s customers, and is also offered as an IoT platform to other Telco’s. The GDSP provides all the management facilities for customers and channels to manage their individual IoT SIM estates.

Vodafone has been a leader in IoT for the last 10 years as recognised by

Sarah Downy is the Managing Director of FINPRO and co-leads the DART, Digital Asset Risk Transfer, team. In this podcast Sarah shares her insights of the crypto insurance market for 2019 and 2020 along for the need for more education of insurers on the opportunity to serve the need of companies who build blockchain technology and of companies who hold or interact with digital assets.

 

What is blockchain?

As an insurance person, Sarah defines blockchain technology as a technology that stores digital information on a public database with a number of interesting features such as immutability, transparency and traceability. The way blockchain works is that it stores transactions on blocks that are verified and assigned a hash.

She also notes that insurers often confuse blockchain technology with crypto and illicit behaviour. A perception that Sarah and her team are working very hard to change.

 

Overview of the Crypto Insurance Market in 2019

Sarah, describes the crypto insurance market in 2019 as very hesitant and uncertain. The cost of insurance was very high and coverage was very limited. The process for clients to get coverage was both complicated and a lengthy one. Marsh’s clients were mainly focused on two types of insurance:

* D&O insurance

* Commercial crime and specie market coverage

D&O insurance, director’s and officer’s liability insurance protects the individuals running the company. It covers claims brought by investors, shareholders, regulators, against the directors, officers and employees associated with things like a breach of a duty, securities violation, regulatory investigations, or proceedings.

Commercial crime is the coverage that reimburses companies for loss due to theft, disappearance or destruction of property. In the case of digital asset, it protects warm and hot storage wallets as compared to the specie market coverage provides coverage for the loss of digital assets from internal and external theft, damage or destruction of private keys.

A hot wallet is a digital wallet that is online whilst a cold wallet is one which is completely offline. The specie market is insuring vaults that custodians are using to store the private keys.

Sarah notes that if a company is building blockchain technology the pricing should be more favourable and the insurance capacity should be more readily available as opposed to a company that holds a large amount of digital assets or is working with digital assets.  However unfortunately companies that build blockchain technology are not being treated in a similar manner to a normal company building legacy or well known technologies as insurers still think of blockchain technology as crypto and elicit behaviour and they can't separate them out.

However 2019 was also a year of innovation for Marsh as it is the year they launched their Blue Vault facility.

 

5 key trends evolving in the crypto insurance market in 2020

In spite of COVID19 five key trends have emerged in the crypto insurance market in 2020:

* More regulatory certainty

* Transitioning market

* More insurance purchasing

* Crypto maturity

* Testing of an untested market

 

More regulatory certainty

In the insurance industry we are seeing a desire for more regulatory certainty around the digital asset space.

Oliver Oram – CEO & co-founder of Chainvine & Dr. Rajiv Mathur – CTO and co-founder of Chainvine walk us through a use case they worked on with HMRC and a number of other participants to reducing friction in international trade. We also discussed in some detail the key challenges around consortiums, IP and openness. A must listen for blockchain initiatives debating through those various points.

 

What is blockchain?

Oliver answers this question by explaining why from a business perspective Chainvine uses blockchain as an engine for its platform whose fundamental principles were to have solid identity, self-sovereign data and security.

Rajiv reminds us that there are many different types of blockchains or distributed ledgers. The best examples of blockchains are public ledgers like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Distributed ledgers also come in many different forms with many not actually being blockchains but more as shared ledgers and some who are hybrids between the two. Chainvine takes an agnostic point of view to blockchains and distributed ledger technologies and utilise the most relevant one depending on the use case and problem they are trying to solve.

 

About Chainvine

The name Chainvine is derived from blockchain and vines. The background of Chainvine is in enterprise and supply chain whose original focus was on fine wine. However, since then they have worked with many other commodities from steel to fair trade coffee.

 

The challenge of paper in supply chains

On 15th September Lord Holmes publishes a new report, “Reducing Friction in International Trade” (RFIT).  Oliver, resumed the challenges of supply chain to one word, “paper”. As part of the research into the writing of the report, it was identified that 80% of the cost of importing grapes in the UK is down to paperwork. The COVID crisis has demonstrated that that the physical way of doing things in trade, in the usage of paper is actually a critical failure in our supply chains.

For Oliver, it is imperative for the UK, to adopt new technologies whether it is blockchain, DLT, AI or machine learning, to become resilient and sustainable to trade internationally.

 

Intelligent Wine

Chainvine was invited to participate at an event organised by HMRC, where Oliver and Rajiv presented the tale of the ‘intelligent wine” that had travelled with them across Europe gathering intelligence through different data mechanisms, such as distributed ledger, the Chainvine platform, and internet of things (IoT) devices.

This story essentially showed to the HMRC attendees that Chainvine is able to demonstrate where a good is as it moves across borders, how much it’s worth, what condition it is in and with whom that good is. This wasn’t about talking about blockchain this or blockchain that, but about how it was being used in this particular use case.

For Oliver this isn’t about tearing down regulations or standards, it's about making them easier to comply with, and making it easier for government to absorb that information and ensure that compliance and regulations are being met. It isn’t either about tearing down standards but ensuring that they are better met with this type of technology than it would ever be with any sort of paper system that is being used at the moment.

David Behrends, Founder & President at Farmer Connect and Managing Partner and Head of Trade at the coffee trading company named Sucafina, joins us along with Diana Kaliff, Business Development Manager at Farmer Connect to discuss coffee on the blockchain. In this podcast we get to learn about how Farmer Connect is helping to not only to digitise their industry but also in bringing transparency and traceability to all players within the coffee supply chain industry from farmers to the end consumer.

 

What is blockchain?

Diana describes blockchain in how they use the technology at Farmer Connect. For them blockchain is a secure database that enables to both securely store and share data between different business partners.

 

For Dave, blockchain is like the arteries in our bodies:

* Arteries have thick, strong walls, that make them resistant to high pressure that exists near the heart. This is similar to blockchain’s cryptographic level of security.

* Each major organ in the human body has their own special kind of artery that delivers the needed supplies. This is similar to blockchain in the sense that you have public blockchain, private blockchains, permissioned blockchains each one of them with their own specific use case.

* Arteries take oxygen away from the heart and distribute it very efficiently to all the body's tissues. This is similar to a blockchain that has lots of complex data, standardising it and allowing it to seamlessly flow from one participant to another.

 

Challenges of the coffee industry and its level of digitisation

The coffee industry is characterised by a large amount of smallholder farmers who are facing a lot of issues around traceability and sustainability.

Consumers on the other hand, especially with millennials and post millennials really want to know two things:

* Has the coffee been responsibly sourced and has the farmer been paid a fair price

* Are the farmers themselves sustainable? Do they take care of social and environmental issues on the farm?

Being able to track both of these points is very difficult and to some degree impossible in the past. However, with the arrival of new technologies such as satellite imagery which can be used to measure deforestation. Soil samples analysis allows farmers to understand how much fertiliser is the right amount to be used for their farm. This kind of precision agriculture allows farmers to use less fertiliser and lower their environmental footprint. Both of these examples produce a lot of data.

In addition you have companies like Starbucks who have announced their intention to go resource positive - storing more carbon than it emits, eliminating waste and providing more clean freshwater than it uses.

All of the forementioned bring up lots of challenges and opportunities around how data is captured? How is it integrated? How is it stored? How is standardised? However, Dave believes that the biggest challenge is concerning the ownership of data. In the past many of the small farmers had zero technological capacity. In the past firms would send an agronomist to the field, they would “harvest” data of the farm, enter it into a table, hop back into a jeep back to the office and upload it into the company’s database to share the data with...

Dale Chrystie is a Business Fellow and Blockchain Strategist at FedEx who has been in the transportation industry for over 30 years. He also serves as chairman of the Blockchain in Transport Alliance (BiTA) Standards Council, and is a member of the Blockchain Research Institute. In this podcast Dale walks us through the work FedEx is doing in the blockchain space and his view on why he believes the future of blockchain is an open source one instead of a consortium one.

 

What is blockchain?

Dale believes that to effectively define what is blockchain to as wide an audience as possible you need to use basic language and basic concepts. He boils blockchain down to five words: digital, ledger, permanent, transparent, and shared. Blockchain is a digital ledger that is permanent and uses cryptography. Once an entry is added to the ledger it can’t be changed. It’s transparent to all relevant parties and it is shared which is to say it exists on the cloud.

 

Having said that, Dale is also known for characterising blockchain at conferences as boring and useless. Because blockchain is just a database that sits amongst many other tried and tested databases that are fast, process millions of transactions, are enterprise ready and ruggedised. Blockchain isn’t quite there yet. It isn’t very fast, scalable or mature. However, what it does, it does really well. For example, where authenticity and provenance matter, blockchain will completely change worldwide supply chains.

 

Challenges of the logistic industry and the role blockchain can play

The logistics industry is one where information systems use paper legal documents and electronic data is transmitted via electronic data interchange (EDI) and where documents are often shared via email, fax and courier. In the freight industry or the Less than Truckload (LTL), industry as it is known in the US, has been using paper process with bills of lading, documents and manifests for decades. Dale believes it is ripe for moving forward into the digital world.

In 1978, Fred Smith founder of FedEx, is famous for saying "The information about the package is as important as the package itself." For Dale, Smith was way ahead of his time as that statement still holds true today. He believes that we are at this very unique intersection of the physical world and the digital world. Where on one side you have the physical world and on the other you have a digital twin of it which contains data about the package.

Blockchain is the first technology where companies will be able to share selected data in a peer to peer fashion without the need of middlemen.

For Dale, blockchain has opened our eyes to what is in the realm of the possible. He doesn’t think of blockchain as process improvement. He thinks of it as a breakthrough technology. As he states if you look at blockchain as process improvement you can do this with existing legacy technology. If you look at blockchain within the breakthrough realm then no existing legacy technology could have changed the art of what is possible and the nature of the conversation as blockchain has done.

 

Fedex blockchain journey

Fedex’s blockchain journey started around a process in the dispute resolution area that was causing freight claims for a couple of million dollars a year. Around that time Walmart had a few early use cases in the food safety space which had inspired Dale on how blockchain could be used. The identified issue was for a three party dispute resolution scenario involving a receiver, a shipper and a carrier. The issue was that the receiver was ordering hypothetically 100 items from the shipper via a purchase order.

Ran Zhao is Founder of Blockchain Business Bridge and Innovation Officer at Innovation Centre Denmark, a public organization under Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Higher Education and Science of Denmark. In this podcast Ran walks us through the opportunities blockchain projects have to expand in the Chinese market by sharing her experience of such a project for Danish companies.

The innovation Centre Denmark helps Danish companies to build up their innovation and technology development and connect them to international resources.

The Blockchain Business Bridge is a non-profit platform for knowledge exchange, and business communication between China, Denmark and the world. The project serves as a launchpad for Danish businesses to take their blockchain activities to the next level.

 

What is blockchain?

To define what is blockchain, Ran took us throough a journey across time. From the Stone Age to now trade and transactions have always been the engine of economic growth. Transactions however have become more complicated. Transactions are not just physical goods but services, solutions, stocks and property. The marketplaces themselves have also become more complicated. Technology has enabled trade to move from offline to online as it increasingly becomes more digital. Both the number of participants and locations of those participants has increased, thus complicating trade.

All this complexity leads to one fundamental problem, a problem of trust. To solve this trust issue, we have resorted to the use of centralised intermediaries such as banks, financial institutions and big companies who have excellent credit records.

Big corporates can invade your data privacy, financial institutions have gone bankrupt and banks can deceive us as recently demonstrated in the FinCEN files where major banks like JPMorgan, HSBC, Deutsche Bank and a number of other big banks have defied money laundering crack downs by profiteering from illicit funds from Russian oligarchs and drug lords. Centralised intermediaries are usually inefficient and have numerous points of friction creating increased transaction costs.

Blockchain technology enables stakeholders in a complex ecosystem to coordinate with each other transactions in an efficient and cost effective manner. Blockchain technology has the following attributes:

* Cryptographically secure

* Distributed ledger where stakeholders can keep their own record of their data in a privacy adhering manner

* A consensus mechanism to facilitate agreement between the stakeholders

* Smart contracts to automate transactions based on codified rules

Commercial and industrial applications can be built on top of it to create a whole new ecosystem of digital economy.

 

The Innovation Centre of Denmark

Ran works at the Innovation Centre Denmark in Shanghai, part of the Trade Council of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Ministry of Higher Education and Science of Denmark, whose mission is to help Danish companies and higher education institutions explore possibilities in some of the world’s leading innovation hubs, such as in Shanghai, Silicon Valley, Seoul, Boston and Munich.

On one hand they help Danish innovative companies, start-ups and SMEs to enter and scale up in international markets. They help them improve their business models and polish the business plans and help them research of local industry players and potential partners / investors.

On the other hand, they pull the knowledge and experience from all their innovation hubs to Denmark to keep Denmark’s comp...

Robert Barnes is the co-founder and CEO of TradeIX and the co-founder of the Marco Polo network. TradeIX is the network operator that runs the Marco Polo network a consortium of banks and corporates that transact both domestically and globally. In this podcast Rob, takes us through how Marco Polo is able to drive trade and working capital innovation with blockchain technology.

 

What is blockchain?

Rob, looks at blockchain from a distributed ledger technology (DLT) standpoint because their interest is in peer to peer permissioned transactions.

Rob, explains how there are different types of blockchain from the broadcast model, also known as public blockchain, such as Bitcoin, to the peer to peer model like Corda. A blockchain that has financial transactions, needs a peer to peer network that is highly permissione where only the participants to the transaction have visibility over it.

For Rob, blockchain is a platform that facilitates the sharing of data between different legal entities that are permissioned to have visibility over a transaction.

TradeIX / Marco Polo also use the same technology to run stateless calls. A stateless call is where you’re using the communication protocols of blockchain to call something or to request something that doesn’t need to be written onto the blockchain. By doing this you avoid the use of APIs between the various legal entities, companies and customers. APIs are used to connect into large corporates’ back end systems, ERP systems or underwriting ones to name a few.

 

DLT breaking down silos in trade finance

When you look at the financing part of trade it is about interactions between corporate entities and their bank. This could be as simple as a payment. Whatever the interaction it happens via silos that need to talk to each other. Most of the time this communication happens via emails with PDFs, via API calls or sometimes it requires the entity to join a particular business network to get access to the data within a silo. If they do join a business network the power is usually centralised, owned by a third party and more importantly you get into issues of data residency.

Blockchain / DLT provides the opportunity for everybody to control and manage their own data within their desired jurisdiction and shared with the counterparties that they are doing business with globally. This enables the breaking down of silos as parties start to communicate and transact between each other across the DLT, whilst providing all the permissioned ones with access to this single version of the truth in an immutable manner.

Having access to this single version of the truth enables all parties to avoid the unnecessary cost of data reconciliation and verification. For Rob, blockchain / DLT at its core affords the ability to take risk and cost out of everyday processes that are done today.

 

TradeIX

TradeIX started out its journey by being super focused on the actual financial transaction within trade. As they started working with banks, insurers and corporates their journey evolved into solving problems of communication between businesses, financial institutions, and the various ecosystem participants. For example, it enables corporates to exchange purchase orders and invoices between themselves without having to go through a centralised business network, use paper, or email.

 

Marco Polo

Rebecca Hofmann is Chairman of the Blockchain for Energy Consortium (previously known as OOC Oil and Gas Blockchain Consortium) a collaborative effort of 10 major energy companies to learn, lead and leverage blockchain technology for the energy industry. Additionally, Rebecca is Head of Innovation at Equinor, a Norwegian based global energy company operating in 30 countries, where she focuses on the strategy and innovations dealing with blockchain technology.

 

What is blockchain?

Rebecca looks at blockchain from a business perspective as a back-end technology, with the potential to truly transform how we work. It's a shared digital ledger, that is allowing to have a more seamless way of working with a central source of truth in which business activity can be self-executed, recorded in real time, in a transparent way, with no central point of failure, that's making it more secure.

 

Challenges of the Energy Industry

The energy industry has been facing challenges like never before. There has been extreme price fluctuations in a negative way affecting all of the entire industry. This situation has stimulated the industry to work in a new way and to embrace digitalisation to help them achieve that.

Source: Statista 2020

Low energy prices, the threat of companies having to either merge or actually go out of business has helped the industry to push digitalization in a way it would have been uncomfortable doing in the past.

Additionally, it has pushed the industry to collaborate even further to share the cost of R&D, share the cost of development, share the risk and share subject matter experts to create the right solution that all the companies need.

 

Rebecca’s journey into blockchain

Rebecca’s journey into blockchain started off when a colleague of hers at Equinor gave her his ticket to attend a conference at Rice University on this new emerging technology called blockchain. During the conference, Rebecca rapidly realised that this technology was about a collaborative tool that also enabled interacting with external parties.

She wrote an email up the chain at Equinor expressing the need to pay attention to blockchain technology and she wanted to be part of it. Equinor already had started some blockchain initiatives and she was able to bring them together into her team as Head of Innovation.

 

Journey to launching the Blockchain for Energy Consortium

In December 2017, Equinor alongside BP, Shell, ABN AMRO, ING, Société Générale and others launched VAKT a commodity post trade management company. Rebecca describes VAKT as the first real blockchain solution to enter the energy industry in Europe, from which they have gained a lot of learnings from.

After Rebecca’s participation at the blockchain conference at Rice University, representatives from Exxon Mobile and Chevron reached out to her to discuss how they could keep discussing about blockchain as a group of three. As the three of them kept meeting others started joining in and participating in the conversation. As the number of participants grew they decided to formerly start a forum called the US Oil and Gas Blockchain Forum in February 2018.

They met across the year and it rapidly grew to 17 operators. The operators were starting to open up to the idea of collaboration and agreeing t...

Ralph Chami, Assistant Director at the International Monetary Fund’s Institute for Capacity Development, isn't a tree hugging hipster. He is a financial economist whose interest in whales has unlocked a well known fact by scientists but not by the general public. A whale during its lifespan is worth $2m in carbon capture and carbon sequestration services, whilst a dead whale's meat is worth $50,000.

An African Forest Elephant's tusk is worth $40,000 but an elephant's carbon capture and carbon sequestration services as a living creature is worth $1.75m! Today we have a market for dead creatures but we don't have a market for the services rendered, in terms of carbon capture, by living creatures such as whales and elephants.

Join us in this incredible podcast to hear how blockchain can help build a living and regenerative market that not only protects those magnificent creatures but build a circular economy that is a win-win for businesses, governments, local communities and societies around the world.

 

What is blockchain?

Blockchain is an electronic ledger that ensures that all parties in a contract can record their transactions in a transparent, permanent and permissioned manner on an end to end basis. It also removes the need for intermediaries.

 

From the IMF to an article on Nature’s Solution to Climate Change

Ralph works as the Assistant Director at the International Monetary Fund’s Institute for Capacity Development. The institute is tasked with training staff of the IMF which includes over 1500 economists as well as the training of the 189 member countries of the IMF.

Ralph’s hobby is studying the great whales. A friend of Ralph belongs to the Great Whale Conservancy group which operates out of the Sea of Cortez in Baja, Mexico. Four years ago his friend managed to get him an invitation onto a research vessel to study the great whales, including the blue whales, fin whales and gray whales.

For Ralph this was a life changing experience. Shortly after the expedition Ralph had dinner with members of the expedition whose scientists shared with him the role of whales in carbon capture and carbon sequestration – long-term storage of carbon dioxide or other forms of carbon to either mitigate or defer global warming and avoid dangerous climate change. This information completely  changed Ralph’s life as he had no idea about this fact that scientists have known for a long time. It impacted him in two ways:

* First was the immensity of the role whales play in carbon capture. Whales capture carbon on their body and capture carbon indirectly through what we call primary fertilisation, the amount of carbon dioxide that the whales contribute to keeping out of the atmosphere, directly and indirectly, is equivalent to that captured by thousands of trees!

* Second was the frustration that scientists had in their failure to effectively communicate the first piece of information to saving the whales. Nobody was acting upon it.

Ralph realised that the problem in the conversa...