Insureblocks

Gleb Dudka is a Blockchain analyst at T-Systems and author of the Blockchain Infrastructure Thesis. In this podcast we discuss opportunities for financial services to work with IT service provider in securing the Web 3.0 and exposing themselves to numerous revenue opportunities. We also discuss the differences between proof of work and proof of stake and the role T-Systems play in providing public network infrastructure to the Web 3.0.

 

What is blockchain?

Gleb looks at blockchain from a technical, business and economic standpoint.

From a technical standpoint it’s a combination of three key parts:

* A distributed database that stores information with multiple parties working together on synchronising and keeping the ledger up to date.

* Smart contracts - scripts and if then functions which allow for executable business logic that sits on top of a shared ledger.

* Digital assets – tokens which sit on top of blockchain. They play a critical role in incentivising trust-less parties to synchronise and maintain public blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum.

The second dimension or standpoint in which to look at a blockchain is as incentivisation machines. Each blockchain is designed to fulfil a certain goal or a certain value. In order to fulfil that purpose the blockchains rely on some form of infrastructure providers such as miners which need to be rewarded. Incentives are their support the blockchain for it to fulfil its goals.

 

The opportunities public blockchains have for digital assets and cross company collaboration

In Gleb’s opinion, what makes blockchains really unique is the digital asset layer. Distributed database and smarts contracts aren’t particularly unique to blockchain. The digital asset layer provides the ability to transact value for a trusted digitally scarce asset.

Digital assets enable to bootstrap public blockchain networks by creating incentives for people to participate in these networks. Without these incentives it’s very hard to get people to participate and use a blockchain network. This is a main advantage public blockchains have over private ones as it provides participants with the incentives to join the network and for it to scale.

Gleb believes there is an opportunity for public blockchains to help interconnect private blockchains which effectively sit in different silos. The jury is still out with regards which public blockchain or application specific blockchain could do this whether it’s Ethereum, Polkadot or others.

 

Enterprise blockchains

Gleb believes they are quite interesting from an innovation standpoint. However as most enterprise blockchains only use distributed database and smart contracts without digital assets, it makes very hard to argue what is the benefit of that technology compared to a centralised database. He would recommend that enterprise blockchains need to develop a digital asset strategy to ensure the long term feasibility and return of their initiatives.

 

Proof of work and proof of stake

Proof of work

Proof of work is a consensus algorithm used to make a public blockchain secure and to ensure that you don’t have situations where double spending is possible. This is achieved by having

Genevieve Leveille, Founder and CEO of AgriLedger, a blockchain solution built on  R3’s Corda which has been used to support fruit growers out of Haiti. In this podcast, Genevieve shares with us how their solution enables supply chain through the use of value chain – value transfer and value retention throughout. She also shares how AgriLedger has helped farmers in Haiti get a 750% increase in revenue per kilo of quality mangos sold.

 

What is blockchain?

For Genevieve, blockchain is an infrastructure technology. Blockchain is a mechanism to allow different parties, with different needs, to collaborate and create information exchange. It’s about capturing data in a fashion that is known to be true at the moment of capture.

Genevieve is interested in the application of blockchain technology for the food industry. She explains that having food poisoning is usually due to the fact that you don’t know where the food came from, if it had the right refrigeration and other factors which blockchain could address.

 

Challenges of the Agro-Food Industry

Source: Stock image - iStock/Getty

According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN (FAO):

* “An estimated 30% of the food produced for human consumption globally is lost or wasted somewhere along the food supply chain.”

* the world’s population is predicted to reach 9.1 billion by 2050 and this will require an increase of 70% in food availability.

* “Smallholders provide up to 80 percent of the food supply in Asian and sub-Saharan Africa.”

At the Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development in June 2012, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon announced a new global challenge for world leaders and individuals from all sectors: create a world where no one is hungry. He emphasized that there is enough food in the world to feed our population, so the challenge comes from making sure that everyone has access to the food they need to live happy, healthy lives.

Ban called this initiative the Zero Hunger Challenge.

 

The Zero Hunger Challenge has five pillars:

* 100% access to food and nourishment all year round

* Ending stunting among children under two years of age

* Making all food systems more sustainable

* Doubling productivity and income for smallholder farmers

* Reducing food waste and post-harvest losses

In spite of efforts to meet the zero hunger challenge, global hunger has been increasing even before the coronavirus pandemic, the United Nations has warned, putting its Zero Hunger 2030 target in doubt.

An annual study estimates almost 690 million people went hungry in 2019 – up by 10 million from 2018 and by nearly 60 million in five years according to the latest edition of The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI).Across the globe, the Covid-19 crisis could tip over 130 million more people into chronic hunger by the end of 2020, the report predicts.

According to

Marianne Schoerling, Head of Stakeholder Engagement at Geneva Macro Labs in Switzerland, joins us to discuss how blockchain can support reaching the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Recognising that blockchain is not a panacea to all sustainable development challenges, it is though an important tool to consider when looking at its costs and benefits and potential impact to affect the well-being of communities around the world.

Marianne has a wide range of professional experience including working at the UN Environment Programme at with several NGOs.

 

What is blockchain?

Marianne has two answers to the question of what is blockchain. A contextual one and a technical one.

From a contextual perspective she would describe blockchain as a chronologically set of arranged digital blocks that will enable the decentralisation of trade. It will allow peer to peer transactions with a reduced need for intermediaries like companies or banks. It entails an entirely new set of preconditions and possibilities for participation and membership in societies and communities.

This is why blockchain can be seen as a social transforming technology because blockchain combines three different aspects:

* Decentralisation

* Cryptography for account authorisation and automatic execution

* New social pattern for companies, schools, universities, organisations and governments to participate within the societies they represent

From a technical perspective blockchain is a system that enables the addition of data to it without the ability to change or remove previous data within it. This is done through a consensus mechanism between distributed parties that do not necessarily need to trust each other. Proof of work being one of the most famous consensus mechanism.

 

The UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG)

Marianne introduces the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development as a global framework designed to be like a roadmap for collective action towards a productive, vibrant and peaceful life for all on a healthy planet.

There are 17 United Nations Sustain Development Goals which range from poverty reduction to healthy lives and wellbeing for all, to economic growth and partnerships. They reflect the fact that actors from different levels from communities, to cities to national governments all have to collaborate to provide transparency and accountability of the 2030 agenda.

Progress to reaching those goals are tracked via 232 indicators and 169 targets via the UN’s SDG Tracker.

There are two goals that dominate our current time period because of their conditioning nature for sustainable development:

* SDG-3: Good health and well-being

* SDG-17: Partnerships for the goals

SDG 17 is the most fundamental goal as it’s a process focused goal as it promotes decentralised development, co-operation, and engagement of all stakeholders.

With just under 10 years left to reach the SGDs and in spite of commitments by nations there are massive global challenges that remain in particular with climate change, migration, technology and trade.

Matthias Goessler, CEO of Ritablock and Jean-Pierre Fischer, Markets Director at Ritablock join us in this Insureblocks podcast to discuss their reinsurance accounting blockchain platform called Ritablock and their experience of integrating it into B3i’s recently launched Fluidity Platform.

Matthias has been working in the insurance industry for 25 years and has been Ritablock’s CEO since October 2019.

Jean-Pierre has been working in both the insurance and reinsurance industry for the last 35 years.

 

What is blockchain?

Jean-Pierre defines blockchain from a non-technical standpoint. For him the block is the digital information that can be reinsurance accounting information or claimed information. That block can be stored in a public blockchain or as in the case of Ritablock stored within a private network on a database.

 

Challenges of technical accounting and claims data in the insurance industry

The administration process within the insurance industry has a very high admin costs due to too much paper still being used along with PDFs and unstructured files being exchanged along the value chain.

This creates long processing times along with a lack of transparency, inefficiency and inaccuracy. The slow process leads often to inaccuracy in technical and financial accounting, especially for in-house reinsurance within larger groups.

Whilst there are global standards such as ACORD, their implementation on the primary insurance side is very costly leading to a limited adoption of it. This creates problems for reinsurance companies who don’t always get standardised data from the primary insurer.

Jean-Pierre mentioned that there have been studies that showed that by digitising this process and using standardised data formats would lead to a drop of 30-40% of running these admin processes.

Matthias mentioned that one of Ritablock’s clients mentioned that using their system allowed them to run admin processes that typically would take 2 weeks down to a few seconds.

 

Differences between primary insurer and reinsurer

Jean-Pierre mentioned that the primary insurer isn’t incentivised to send data to a reinsurer in a standardised digital format as the reinsurer will take accounting data in any format today. However, Jean-Pierre believes that as new tech savvy university recruits continue joining primary insurers there will be a push to digitise their processes.

Primary insurers have two issues for sending accounts: (1) they’re not incentivised to implement digital standardised formats and (2) the price of using such standards.

Ritablock’s proposition to primary insurers is for them to send their existing form to Ritablock who will convert it into a digital standardised format when delivering it to the reinsurer. This is done for the primary insurer at a low yearly fee within four digits.

 

Who is Ritablock?

Ritablock was founded in 2019 by Consurance, a consultancy company and Inveos, a software company.

The idea of Ritablock was born over 4 years ago during a project with a client who wanted to build a flexible interface into their system. When starting this project and developing the software they reached a point where it became too complex due to the need to develop too many interfaces for all th...

Susanne Somerville is the CEO of Chronicled, builders of enterprise blockchain solutions for the life sciences and healthcare industry. In this podcast Susanne introduced us to both Chronicled and to MediLedger whilst sharing some insights on how they are tackling some of the inefficiencies in the US healthcare system.

You will also hear about some of her learnings about the differences of launching blockchain solutions based on regulatory compliance compared to one of ROI.

Susanne’s prior experience is in the life sciences where she ran supply chain for pharmaceutical and biotech companies like Genentech and Hoffman LaRoche.

 

What is blockchain?

Blockchain is a decentralised ledger that can keep record of transactions or data exchanges. Because of its decentralised nature, no individual party can change the data of the recorded transactions or the rules that blockchain is enforcing. For Susanne it is the magic in this decentralisation and immutability that makes a lot of things possible for enterprises that weren’t possible before.

 

What is the state of US healthcare industry and how digitised, connected and standardised is it?

Photograph by Robert Kaufmann

According to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the US National health spending is projected to grow at an average annual rate of 5.4 percent for 2019-28 and to reach $6.2 trillion by 2028.

In comparison to many other countries the US healthcare system is private, which has spurred on a lot of innovation. Due to that a lot of the innovation was done on an individual level, creating many disparate systems across the country. Susanne’s experience is that US healthcare companies are analogue native instead of digital. A lot is still being done on paper and on fax machines. All of this has contributed to create a disconnected US healthcare industry.

A recent report mentioned that even in exciting technology such as AI (artificial intelligence) there was only a 2% adoption rate of it in the US healthcare industry.

 

Chronicled & MediLedger

Chronicled is based out of San Francisco and it has been tackling connecting the physical to the digital world since 2014. They were looking at a variety of industry use cases and found a sweet spot in the life sciences. In 2017 they launched the MediLedger project to bring together industry leaders to see how blockchain could play a role in meeting regulations and fixing a lot of the issues in their industry.

Since 2017, the project has morphed into the MediLedger Network. Chronicle is the builder of the software solution and is the custodian of the network. The consortium members of MediLedger run the infrastructure and the solution so that they have control over how the network grows.

 

Building the MediLedger consortium

Susanne recognises that building the consortium at the beginning wasn’t easy but they did benefit from a couple of key points:

* Credibility: The Chronicled team had both the deep industry expertise and the technological capability

* Regulation: the Drug Supply Chain Security Act that requires an electronic interoperable system by 2023 to m...

Dan Salmons, CEO of Coadjute and John Reynolds, Founder and COO of Coadjute take us through the work they are doing to digitise the real estate industry using blockchain technology. They also explain to us the differences and advantages of using a SaaS (software as a service) blockchain model instead of a consortium one.

Coadjute from Coadjute Ltd on Vimeo.

Dan Salmons is the CEO of Coadjute. His background is a mix of large scale executive jobs in banks, head of innovation and head of strategy and CEO to a number of innovative fintech companies.

John Reynolds is the COO of Coadjute. John has spent the last 20 years working within organisations helping with their digital transformation from Dell, to Fujitsu and Lockheed Martin’s digital arm. What John has learned in 20 years is that digital transformation is partly about technology but it’s really about people’s hearts and minds and business change aspects.

John featured in an Insureblocks podcast on the 30th of November 2019 entitled: “Ep.86 – Real estate on the blockchain – insights from Coadjute”.

 

What is blockchain?

As John gave Insureblocks a definition of what is blockchain in our last podcast, Dan offered his definition of blockchain by using the analogy of the Glass Box Theory.

Dan invites us to imagine that you have a locker room at school amongst others who have their own locked lockers. Imagine you want to be sure that no one has stolen your favourite pair of trainers. The traditional central hub type solution is asking the teacher who has a set of keys that can open everyone’s locker, to go and check if the trainers are still there. As the teacher is trusted you trust that they won’t add or remove items from the locker.

The alternative solution is the blockchain one where you have glass doors on the lockers and you don’t need the teacher to check if anyone’s taken the trainers as everyone can see in everyone’s lockers and verify it. The trouble with that is that everyone can see everyone’s lockers. The alternative solution is a DLT one as the R3 Corda’s where you have two doors, one glass and one metal. In this scenario you can only let certain individuals within your class to open the metal door amongst themselves and you can give them permission to check if the trainers are still there. However, they still can’t access what’s in the locker.

 

Challenges of the real estate industry

Dan believes that the property industry as a whole, in comparison to other industries, is one that spends the least on technology and on innovation. It does have pockets of innovation and digitisation. For example, whilst sectors of the industry such as estate agents might be digitised, it is not digitised on an end to end basis. That’s where the main problem resides.

The challenge is that every player is using their own internal operational systems and their own CRM systems. What this means is that they’re using their core operational s...

Carl Wegner is the CEO of Contour, a blockchain-based open industry platform to create, exchange, approve, and issue Letters of Credit on Corda, R3’s blockchain platform. In this podcast, Carl talks through the challenges the trade finance industry faces in terms of digitisation since 2005 and how blockchain can represent an opportunity to reach that objective.

Carl has been working in the Fintech space for the last 30 years in Asia. Twenty years in large banks such as Bank of Boston, Standard Chartered and Deutsche Bank on transaction banking, trade finance and cash management. Ten years in tech working at GT Nexus, at R3 setting up their Asian operations and now at Contour.

 

What is blockchain?

To define what is blockchain, Carl prefers to take it down a notch and instead define what is distributed ledger technology (DLT). DLT is an opportunity for enterprises to manage their own data within their own database instead of via a central database. DLT participants own their data and have a protocol to share it. In comparison to blockchain where data is broadcast to everyone with a method of consensus, R3’s Corda, which Contour is built on, allows everyone to have their own database with a protocol to share their data in a selected manner.

 

International trade and the trust deficit

In 2018, the global trade finance market was valued at $39.7 billion, according to Allied Market Research. Whilst, an ADB’s (Asian Development Bank) 2019 Trade Finance Gaps, Growth and Jobs Survey found that the global trade finance gap remains at around $1.5 trillion, nearly 60% of respondents expect the gap to increase over the next 2 years.

Source: WTO& ICC

 

In international trade you have a trust deficit between buyers and sellers in far off countries. With the internet that trust deficit has been somewhat reduced. Prior to the internet buyers had to put money down for a shipment that may turn up three months later without necessarily knowing who the seller is.

The challenge for SMEs is related to data. A bank as a lender, a facilitator of credit is looking not to make a mistake. The challenge for SMEs is to have sufficient information to fit the requirements of a bank’s traditional credit scoring sheet.

Organisations like ADB and other development banks will step in and provide some support either directly with guarantees, with training to help SMEs on how to present themselves to banks and other actions. Fundamentally though, the challenge is around data. SMEs being able to provide the right data and bank’s understanding on how to use the data outside of just the traditional model. COVID-19 has created a “digital transformation opportunity for banks to use data in different ways to be more efficient with it and offer credit to a wider range of customers.

 

The state of digitisation in the trade finance industry

Carl Wegner from FNian

 

In 2005, Carl Wegner participated at the APEC Paperless Trading Initiative where he produced a set of slides “

Cecilia Chapiro, is the Investment Adviser & Blockchain Portfolio Manager at UNICEF Ventures. Her focus is on sourcing investments across developing and emerging markets, managing blockchain portfolio of investment as well as other frontier technologies. In this podcast she introduces us to the UNICEF Venture Fund and to 3 startups use case studies: OS City, Atix Labs and StaTwig.

Cecilia, is also an entrepreneur, having co-founded Yunus & Youth an organisation working to support the growth of social entrepreneurship.

 

What is blockchain?

Cecilia, chose to define “what is blockchain” by assuming that we’re all at a party and we’re playing the telephone game also known as Chinese whispers. It’s essentially a word game, a communication game within a circle of friends. Let’s imagine that within a circle of 20 friends one person comes up with a first phrase and starts a chain of communication by whispering that phrase to a person on their left. Each person then takes what they heard and continues the chain of communication by whispering this same phrase to the following person.

This continues until it reaches the end of the circle back to the original source of truth. What usually happens is that the message gets distorted either intentionally or unintentionally. But because there's only one source of truth, any individual within that network who receives the message has no idea how truthful the statement that they received, is.

However, on the opposite end, if we think about that first person, the original source of truth, the creator of that phrase. If he/she announces the phrase to the entire group at the same time, then even if one individual decides to distort the message, there’ll be enough members of the group who can attest to the one source of truth. The truth is determined by the majority.

For Cecilia, this is what blockchain is all about. It’s distributed data that allows any member within the blockchain network to have a copy of all the data at all times, thus ensuring maximum security of the data.

 

UNICEF Venture Fund

Source: UNICEF

The UNICEF Venture Fund is a $30 million pooled funding vehicle focused on identifying, piloting and growing technology startups that improves the lives of children. They focus on startups that can impact more than a billion people and lie in $100 billion markets, in other words technologies that can impact large groups of people and be financially sustainable.

Blockchain is one of those key technologies that the fund focuses on. The fund’s main objective is to scale the successful technology solution into digital public goods to ensure open access to these new tools and the benefits that these tools can generate globally.

UNICEF Venture Fund provides startups with up to $100,000 of equity free funding. For this year’s cohort the investment opportunity is a blend of both USD and cryptocurrencies thanks to the UNICEF’s crypto fund that was launched in October 2019. This crypto fund is the first cryptocurrency denominated fund within the United Nations.

UNICEF doesn’t get a financial return on the investment but instead gets a return on the social impact th...

Chris Ferris is an IBM Fellow and CTO for Open Technology and Governing Board Member of Hyperledger. In this exciting podcast we discuss "is open source the future of blockchain"? Open source has increasingly converted enterprises to both use its technology and contribute to its code base. In a similar manner open source in the form of its open governance approach has some important lessons for blockchain networks to analyse and adopt. Have a listen and let us know if you think open source is the future of blockchain?

 

What is blockchain?

At its essence a blockchain is an audit log of successive records where each successive record in that audit log is cryptographically bound to all of the log entries before it. Blockchain can be used as a means of ensuring that there hasn't been any tampering of the contents of that audit log. There are other technologies that are built out around it to give it purpose.

 

What is open source?

The formal definition of open source is that it's software whose source code is made freely available and can be redistributed and it can be modified.

The Open Source Initiative has ten dimensions defining what is open source and the terms for its distribution:

* Free redistribution

* Source code must be included in program

* Derived works can be modified and freely redistributed

* Integrity of the author’s source code

* No discrimination against persons or groups

* No discrimination against fields of endeavour

* Distribution of license

* License must not be specific to a product

* License must not restrict other software

* License must be technology-neutral

 

History of open source & why are enterprises contributors to open source

In 1983 open source was known as the “free software” movement with Microsoft labelling it as the “enemy”. In 1998 “free software” evolved into “open source”. Microsoft wasn’t the enemy anymore and it along with Red Hat, Intel, Alibaba Group, Google, Facebook and of course IBM became some of the biggest enterprise contributors to open source.

What is important to understand is that whilst open source is free many firms such as IBM, Red Hat or Microsoft offer services to support the software or build commercialised versions of open source software.

Brian Behlendorf, Executive Director at Hyperledger was also involved in the original formation of the Apache Software Foundation. At the foundation they have an expression called Do-ocracy, which is where you roll up your sleeves, you get down and you do the work. From an open source perspective, even from a corporate or an enterprise engagement in open source perspective it really is about the notion of do-ocracy.

Enterprises like IBM, Microsoft, Red Hat and others get involved in open source projects because they’re of strategic interest and/or they’re using that technology as a function of a platform, offering or tools they they’re selling. Their contribution to open source projects is out of self-interest.

Chris gives the example that if IBM is using Kubernetes to power the container orchestration within the IBM Cloud, “..well, then we would be silly not to contribute to Ku...

Mariam Al Muhairi is the Head of the UAE’s Centre for the 4th Industrial Revolution and  Project Manager at the Dubai Future Foundation. She joins us to discuss the UAE’s blockchain deployment case studies and learnings. She also shares some fascinating results of a survey conducted with over 100 stakeholders from more than 60 various governmental and non-governmental entities across the UAE regarding top blockchain implementation challenges and success factors.

 

What is blockchain?

Mariam likes to see things in the form of physical blocks. For her blockchain are blocks, identifiable by a unique code, that stores information, and stores who is transacting with the information. Each transaction is verified through a process that involves miners on a public blockchain which creates great security. This ultimately also helps to avoid blocks being tampered and used in a fraudulent manner.

 

Dubai Future Foundation

The UAE’s Centre for the 4th Industrial Revolution is an initiative under the Dubai Future Foundation. The Future Foundation was established in 2016 with a main mandate across five departments to look into the future of Dubai and identify trends that will benefit both the economy but also the society and other areas within the Emirates. The five departments include:

* Foresight and imagination – development of trends

* Content dissemination – the aim is to fill the gap in the dissemination of scientific and technological content in Arabic to the UAE and MENA region

* Capacity building – an academy where people can take courses but also a platform where experts present to the public

* A platform to facilitate the partnering up of startups with government entities

* Museum of the future is due to open next year as both a touristic attraction but also as a policymaking tool to see how people react to different ideas or different scenarios of the future

 

UAE’s Centre for the 4th Industrial Revolution, which Mariam leads is a collaboration between the World Economic Forum and the Dubai Future Foundation. The Centre focuses on policy development for emerging technologies such as blockchain, artificial intelligence and precision medicine.

 

Dubai Blockchain Strategy & The Emirates Blockchain Strategy

The Dubai Blockchain Strategy, launched in October 2016 by His Highness Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai and Chairman of the Executive Council, was the result of a collaboration between the Smart Dubai Office  and the Dubai Future Foundation to continuously explore and evaluate the latest technology innovations that demonstrate an opportunity to deliver more seamless, safe, efficient and impactful city experiences. Additionally, it was about creating an industry and a market around this emerging technology as well as figure out how it could be used.

The strategy establishes a roadmap for the introduction of blockchain technology for Dubai and the creation of an open platform to share the technology with cities across the globe. The Dubai Blockchain Strategy is built on three pillars of government efficiency, industry creation and international leadership.

* Government efficiency: under this pillar, the strategy will contribute to increased government efficiency by implementing blockchain and ena...