AI loves data, the more data it has the more accurate the models are which leads to better business outcomes and better research outcomes. A lot of the data today is locked behind closed walls. To unlock the digital economy and to train AI models, you need to unlock private data, that is exactly what Ocean’s Compute-to-Data is doing. It’s unlocking private data while preserving privacy. Join us and Trent McConaghy, Co-Founder of Ocean Protocol, as we discuss how to unlock data in privacy manner in order to monetize it.

Trent has a background in AI and has been working in the real of blockchains for the last several years with a focus on data.  His initial work was around IP and data, and then on big data with a blockchain database.

 

What is blockchain?

A mundane definition of blockchain is that it is a database with three special characteristics: decentralised immutable assets:

* Decentralised as in, no single entity owns or controls it. If for example you have tens of thousands of people running it then it starts to act and look like a public utility just as a gas company or the internet itself. This public utility records “state”.

* Immutable means once you’ve written onto it, it’s there for good. This is very useful characteristic for tracking provenance whether of financial instruments or of a fruit flowing from a farm in one country to a supermarket shelf in another.

* The idea of assets is if you have the private key, or password, to something then you own it. For example, if you have a Bitcoin private key then you own approximately $10,000.

Since that initial inception of blockchain a few new characteristics have been added:

* Smart contracts which are essentially unstoppable scripts that run on top of a blockchain automatically when they have received the appropriate inputs.

* Blockchains are seen as incentive machines to get people to perform certain actions. Bitcoin for example gets people to add to the security the Bitcoin network through hashing, known as Bitcoin mining. People are willing to expend computational power to do this hashing, add security to the network, in the hope of getting paid in Bitcoins by the Bitcoin network.

 

About Ocean

Ocean Protocol is a decentralized data exchange protocol to unlock data for AI, launched in 2017. Leveraging blockchain technology, Ocean Protocol connects data providers and consumers, allowing data to be shared while guaranteeing traceability, transparency, and trust for all stakeholders involved. It allows data owners to give value to and have control over their data assets without being locked-into any single marketplace.

 

The data economy

In July 2019, Trent recorded his first podcast with Insureblocks entitled “The Data Economy – Insights from OceanProtocol”. He sees that the data economy is already a true economy in that there is buying and selling of data but the key is that it’s really hard to see it. You could nearly characterise it as a sort of shadow data economy, where there's buying and selling data, but it's mostly behind closed doors.

On the one hand it’s visible if you’re buying data feeds from Bloomberg regarding stock prices. On the other a lot of data is bought and sold behind closed doors that you don’t hear about. For example, we don’t hear about the 150 plus organisations that Fa...

Marc Taverner is the executive director of the International Association for Trusted Blockchain Applications (INATBA) since the middle of January 2020. He has been active in the global blockchain ecosystem for more than five years, working across 20 countries, engaging with organisations from core crypto currency companies to governments and financial institutions, through to large corporates and industry associations.

As executive director of INATBA, Marc is committed to positioning INATBA as the only international organization truly equipped to convene public and private industry partners with the credible support of powerful allies like the European Commission and key advisory bodies

 

What is blockchain?

For Marc, blockchain is a type of distributed ledger technology (DLT) where transactions are recorded with an immutable cryptographic signature called a hash. These are added into a chain of blocks, with each block, validating the prior block and creating an immutable audit trail that in turn creates trust.

Distributed ledger technology is a decentralised database managed by multiple participants across multiple nodes.

The reason why blockchain and distributed ledger technology is important is because it finally helps us solve the issue of trust by applying technologies such as cryptography and governance models such as consensus mechanisms.

 

What is INATBA?

To answer the question of what is INATBA, Marc took us on his journey that ultimately took him to INATBA. In the 2014, Marc was introduced to the world of blockchain and bitcoin when he met Valery Vavlivo, CEO and co-founder of Bitfury, who made him Global Ambassador & Markets Development at Bitfury.

Whilst at Bitfury, Marc learned that trying to get large blockchain applications to scale, such as the Land Registry one for the Republic of Georgia or the one the Ukraine’s Government plans to auction seized assets on a blockchain, would come up against a number of friction points. These frictions points weren’t only technology ones but also one of policy and of interoperability both between nations and between technology stacks.

All these applications were interesting for those governments and created a great deal of interest with other governments around the world who wanted to leverage those applications and others. But the friction points were preventing the adoption of blockchain based technologies at a massive scale.

Some of these issues are rooted around the lack of standards and interoperability between technology stacks which would cause governments and large potential customers of this technology to recoil a little from making early decisions for the fear of either putting themselves into a vendor locking position, or a situation where they've made the wrong strategic technological decision.

INATBA exists to address some of those friction points. They bring a number of parties together from governments and supranational bodies in the public sector to startups, SMEs and enterprises in the private sector, to try and achieve commonality across standards, good governance and interoperability. By reducing those friction points they hope for blockchain to be massively adopted.

 

Interoperability

Establishing standards and interoperability from a technology perspecti...

Caroline Malcolm heads the Global Blockchain Policy Centre at the OECD,  assessing its policy implications & building solutions to ensure governments across the world can access and respond to the opportunities and challenges it raises.

In this podcast she discusses with us the interesting work the OECD is doing around understanding the potential blockchain can bring to the its members, how they collaborate with other international institutions and she also invites you all to participate in the upcoming OECD Global Blockchain Policy Forum 2020 .

 

What is blockchain?

Caroline agrees that there is a wide range of views regarding defining what is blockchain.

For the OECD, blockchain is just one type of distributed ledger technology (DLT) and refers itself to a combination of technologies. These technologies create a digital, shared and self-updating ledger of verified transactions or information amongst parties on a network. These blockchains and DLTs more broadly use various types of consensus mechanisms to validate and record those transactions or transfer of information.

They have various governance systems with various degrees of control for the different parties on the network. Blockchain applications have been developed across lots of different sectors, and is often described as the Internet of value.

 

What is the OECD?

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is an international organisation that works to build better policies for better lives. Their goal is to shape policies that foster prosperity, equality, opportunity and well-being for all.

The OECD is an international organisation with at the present moment 37 members, including Colombia who recently joined. Together with governments, policy makers and citizens, the OECD works on establishing evidence-based international standards and finding solutions to a range of social, economic and environmental challenges. From improving economic performance and creating jobs, to fostering strong education, informing the impact of emerging technologies such as AI and blockchain, to fighting international tax evasion, they provide a unique forum and knowledge hub for data and analysis, exchange of experiences, best-practice sharing, and advice on public policies and international standard-setting.

 

The OECD Global Blockchain Policy Centre

For the last 6 years the OECD has been looking at cryptocurrencies and their impacts and potential for financial markets. In 2017, the OECD launched a project called Going Digital which broadly looked at digitalization across the policy spectrum. Within 18 months of that project being underway the OECD members decided that going forward they would put their focus on artificial intelligence and on blockchain.

In 2018 the OECD Global Blockchain Policy Centre was created and in 2019 the OECD AI Policy Observatory was created.

The OECD Global Blockchain Policy Centre was created to support governments to address the challenges raised by DLT and their applications as well as to seize the opportunities it offers for achieving policy objectives.  The Centre focuses a significant amount of effort on education – capacity building and focusing on what...

For this week’s podcast we had Christina Lomazzo, Blockchain Lead within the Office of Innovation at UNICEF. and Ariana Fowler, Blockchain Strategy within the Office of Innovation at UNICEF, join us to discuss how UNICEF and other UN agencies are using blockchain for social good.

 

What is blockchain?

Christina and Ariana produced a report entitled “A Practical Guide to Using Blockchain within the United Nations”. As per its guide blockchain is a type of software made up of records of digital transactions that are grouped together into “blocks” of information and shared securely across computers on a shared network. When a new block is added, it is connected or “chained” to the previous block, making it difficult to change past information. All computers on the shared network retain a complete record of transactions as they occur, representing the entire blockchain. These computers are called nodes. Transactions submitted to a blockchain can only be added and previous data cannot be removed or modified. This is sometimes referenced as an immutable proof of record.

 

What is UNICEF?

UNICEF, the United Nation’s Children’s Fund, is a 70 years old entity that is part of the United Nations.  UNICEF works in over 190 countries and territories to save children's lives, to defend their rights, and to help them fulfil their potential, from early childhood through adolescence. UNICEF works to serve children and women around the world, in the areas of education, child protection, child survival such as vaccination, health, and water sanitation. Last year UNICEF responded to over 300 emergencies around the world, on gender issues, and supply chain.

The Office of Innovation at UNICEF is a team that looks at emerging technologies and how this will have an impact on UNICEF and the work it performs. A data science team that looks at artificial intelligence and machine learning. A team that looks at drones and how those can be used in a variety of scenarios. Most recently a blockchain team was put together that focuses on a number of areas:

* A venture fund that makes early stage investments into start-ups in UNICEF programme countries. The blockchain team acts as technical mentors to those start-ups working on a variety of use cases

* Support internal UNICEF countries office teams who might be interested in building blockchain applications or exploring where blockchain may play a role in their process

* Running UN courses on what is blockchain and with young people around the world, teaching them about blockchain and Web 3.0

 

“A Practical Guide to Using Blockchain within the United Nations’

The UN innovation network is an informal, collaborative community of UN innovators interested in sharing their expertise and experience with others to promote and advance innovation within the UN System. Under the UN Innovation Network, Christina and Ariana produced a report entitled “A Practical Guide to Using Blockchain within the United Nations”.

The purpose of producing this guide was to give an introductory resource in what blockchain is. It helps to identify if blockchain is the right technology for a use case.

Emmanuelle Ganne is the Senior Analyst at the World Trade Organisations’ Economic Research Department. She is an international trade expert with over 15 years of experience in international trade, trade policy, global governance, and diplomacy. In this podcast we discuss whether or not blockchain can revolutionize international trade.

via GIPHY

Her blockchain adventure started at the WTO in 2017 and it was ‘love at first sight”. Because her direct colleagues at the WTO didn’t quite understand the technology and its transformational opportunities for international trade, she decided to author the book "Can blockchain revolutionise international trade?". The book tried to build a bridge between the private sector and the IT community on the one hand and trade officials on the other.

Emmanuelle’s journey over the last two or three years has been to help people understand this unique technology and to create an enabling environment that allows it to be deployed on a large scale to make a difference for international trade.

 

What is blockchain?

 

Emmanuelle took the interesting approach of defining blockchain from the perspective of how she explained it to her teenage niece. At that time her niece’s school had a Pokémon craze going on. Every day, she would bring to school a big box of Pokémon cards that she would trade with her friends.

To explain blockchain Emmanuelle, asked her niece to try and imagine if she had an app on her mobile that would store digital twins of all of her Pokémon cards. Having such an app meant she wouldn’t need to bring her big box of Pokémon cards to school. She could digitally trade them as each card has its own unique digital twin like a fingerprint of that paper card.

Normally you can make copies of digital documents very easily but with blockchain you cannot. The mobile app can thus also allow her niece to trace the history of the card including which one of her friends previously owned that card.

Blockchain is like this mobile app. It’s like a giant repository of digital records stored in a specific order that ensures transparency and is highly secure as it also provides the guarantee that the information hasn’t been tampered with. This is achieved because everyone has a copy of the transactions. What you see is what everyone sees. These factors combined provides an environment of trust which means Emmanuelle’s niece can trade with not just her friends but with other individuals knowing that the digital twins of the cards aren’t fake and that all transactions are real and recorded.

Emmanuelle’s explanation of blockchain has some similarities to how Bettina Warburg explains what is blockchain to a 5 year old, a teen, a college student, a graduate student and an expert.

 

Can blockchain revolutionise international trade?

In November 2018, Emmanuelle published a comprehensive report entitled “Can Blockchain revolutionize international trade?” and then a year later in November 2019 she published the report “Blockchain & DLT in Trade - A Reality Check”. Whilst both of these reports are WTO publications, Emmanuelle clarifies that the opinions expressed in these publications are hers and are not meant to represent the opinions of the WTO and its members.

Dr. Jemma Green is the co-founder and chairman of Power Ledger. Power Ledger is a four year old technology company, with 20 power projects in over nine countries, that facilitate two things - the trading of electricity and the trading of environmental commodities using blockchain technology. In this podcast we discuss with Jemma how their platform is revolutionising the power industry and how it is being used to democratise power.

 

What is blockchain?

Blockchain is a like a database that can be used in many different ways. It is a common record keeping system which creates more efficiencies in the transaction process between counterparties who in the past would have had their own record keeping system. Using a blockchain enables an entry in a ledger to contain both the payment and the physical statement of a digital asset. This reduces the settlement risk or the need to reconcile and settle payments which can be very costly for the transacting parties.

With smart contracts, which sit on the blockchain, you can also perform complex commerce transactions.

 

The Energy Industry

For the last century or so electricity markets have remained relatively unchanged. It is characterised by large power stations, typically, coal and gas fired power, bringing electricity to people's homes brought by transmission and distribution networks, the grid.

In the past 15 years, a new paradigm has begun to emerge as citizens and business have installed rooftop solar panels on their homes and office buildings. More recently, battery storage is being installed inside homes and businesses, as well as large scale solar and wind farms.

Technology can help facilitate the dispatch of electricity via virtual power plants to stabilise the grid which historically has suffered from volatile prices creating significant problems in the market. Surplus rooftop solar power can be stored in batteries, and that market mechanism, facilitated by Power Ledger’s technology, can help the grid deliver low cost, clean and resilient power.

These power technologies, along with the connectivity of blockchain to bring communities together, serves as a kind of citizen utility which provides a certain level of empowerment that has the potential to drive the next wave of innovation to democratise power.

There are numerous drivers towards the democratisation of power. For some it is about getting a better price for electricity whilst for others it is their concern regarding air quality and the potential to electrify transportation in their city.

Jemma believes that overall people are very engaged in the topic of electricity and becoming much more sophisticated in what they understand of the markets and what they expect of them.

 

Power Ledger introduction

Power Ledger is a technology company that uses blockchain to facilitate trading of electricity and environmental commodities. Their vision is leading the global democratisation of energy movement. To give people access to energy and to participate directly in energy markets and improve their lives and the lives of others. Power Ledger would like to be recognised as a major contributor to transforming energy markets and sustainability globally and positively impacting the lives of 1 billion people. That’s Power Ledger’s big ambition that makes the, want to get out of bed every morning and do what they do.

 

Power Ledger the Uber / AirBnB of electricity

Blockchain enables buyers and sellers to transact with each other directly without the need for an intermediary. In the case of electricity, households with rooftop solar panels could sell its surplus electricity to its neighbours in much th...

 

Welcome to the Insureblocks first Blockchain Bistro. Blockchain Bistro is a new show that we are adding to our range of podcasts. It's a live webinar on Linkedin Live where we aim to discuss interesting subjects with a panel of experts. For this first show we had the pleasure of having Patrick Schmid, Vice President of RiskStream Collaborative.

Patrick was recently on the podcast to discuss "COVID19 and the economic downturn’s effect on P&C insurance: An opportunity for technology?". For this first Blockchain Bistro, Patrick was joined with two Insureblocks partners: Mark Simpson and Rory Unsworth.

Together we discussed whether or not if COVID19 and the economic downturn’s effect on P&C insurance is an opportunity for technology? We also took a number of questions from the community live in the webinar.

We hope you’ll enjoy this new format and feel free to reach out to us on Linkedin or on Twitter or just add a comment below to give us some feedback or suggest some themes you’d like for us to discuss.

 

 

Patrick Schmid is the Vice President of The Institute's RiskStream Collaborative a risk management insurance blockchain consortium. In this podcast Patrick discusses with us the impact of COVID19 and the economic downturn’s effect on P&C insurance and whether or not this represents an opportunity for technology.

What is blockchain?

Blockchain is a distributed ledger that maintains a constantly growing list of chronologically added records in the form of blocks. Blocks contain data such as transactions or smart contracts. They’re verified and confirmed through a decentralised consensus process. This process is why blockchain is often seen as providing the decentralisation of trust without the need for an intermediary or a centralised party.

In this period of economic downturn, due to COVID19, Patrick believes that blockchain can provide the much-needed operational efficiency at a time when privacy and security are of high concern.

 

Medium article: COVID-19 and the economic downturn’s effect on P&C insurance: An opportunity for technology?

A board member of The Institute challenged Patrick and his team to think about the impact COVID19 would have on insurance and how to think about RiskStream’s strategy for the remainder of the year. This prompted, along with Patrick’s concern about the economy to write the article: “COVID-19 and the economic downturn’s effect on P&C insurance: An opportunity for technology?”

The article analyses the economic impact of the outbreak of COVID19 and the lockdown is having on the US economy and the fallout it will have on the P&C insurance industry. It looks at how it will strain underwriting profits and the impact a decline in interest rates and financial markets will have on net investment yields.

 

40% estimated fall in US GDP

In the first quarter of 2020 GPD was estimated to have declined by 4.8% with JP Morgan predicting an estimated 40% fall in GDP in Q2. According to the US Department of Labour US unemployment rate rose to 14.7%, an increase of 20m in April, representing the highest unemployment rate increase since the Great Depression. Some economists are predicting that the unemployment rate could increase to 30% before this pandemic peaks. This has led to an unprecedented rise in unemployment claims with an additional 3m claims on the 14th of May bringing the total to 36m.

Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics

A perfect storm?

Whilst the P&C industry as a whole has taken these events in its strides it isn’t insulated from the economic fallout.

The impact on business activity is expected to be felt in commercial lines and the effects from declines in residential activity and consumer activity in general, are expected to show up in personal lines.

The effects are expected to impact the P&C combined ratio through changes to premiums, losses and expenses.

A combined ratio above 100 indicates the industry is paying out more money in claims then it is making from policies. Due to effects on policies and losses the industry should expect an increase in the combined ratio. Adding to industry stress,

Peteris Zilgalvis is the Head of Unit, Digital Innovation and Blockchain, Digital Single Market Directorate at the European Commission. In this podcast he walks us through the European Commission’s approach to blockchain by listing out a number of the key bodies and initiatives that are furthering the development of blockchain across the EU.

Peteris is a lawyer by background having a JD degree from the University of Southern California. Since Latvia, Peteris’ home country, joined the European Union in 2005, he has been the Head of Unit at the European Commission working on blockchain and digital innovation.

Peteris has a strong passion for blockchain since 2012. He is the original co-chair of the Fintech Task Force. From both the financial services side and the digital single market, Peteris has been working in legislation, policy, funding infrastructure, research as well as working with stakeholders and international cooperation.

 

What is blockchain?

From a technical standpoint blockchain is ledger composed of a growing list of records of blocks that are cryptographically linked and managed by a peer to peer network whilst adhering to a protocol for communication between the nodes to validate new blocks.

Essentially it’s a way for validating transactions of data in an immutable and permanent way to ensure that the transaction:

* Hasn’t been tampered with

* Avoid double spending

* Can transfer value

From an EU perspective the EU sees blockchain as a set of distributed ledger technologies which also include Hashgraphand Tangle for example.

Peteris also makes the very permanent remark that decentralisation isn’t black and white. It is a gradient between something that is fully centralised to something that is nearly fully decentralised. This is what makes it so exciting, for Peteris, as it allows for a diverse group of actors to work together whilst preserving their autonomy.

 

EU Institutions furthering blockchain

Digital Innovation and Blockchain Unit

Peteri’s unit is the policy leader on blockchain as a technology. His unit isn’t composed of programmers but instead of engineers, economists and lawyers looking at digital policy.

Within the unit they have the EU Blockchain Observatory and Forum whose mission is to promote blockchain in Europe by mapping existing blockchain initiatives, analysing and reporting on important blockchain themes, promoting blockchain education and knowledge sharing and holding events to promote debate and discussion.

The European Blockchain Partnership is composed of 29 countries, 27 EU member states along with Norway and Liechtenstein, who are building a European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI). The European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI) is a joint initiative from the European Commission and the European Blockchain Partnership to deliver EU-wide cross-border public services using blockch...

Nadia Hewett is the project lead at the World Economic Forum (WEF), in blockchain and digital currency. In this exciting podcast she takes us through her very comprehensive report entitled the “World Economic Forum’s Blockchain Development Toolkit – Supply Chain Focus” that was recently published on the 28th of April 2020.

WEF is the international organization for public and private sector cooperation with a mission to improve the state of the world. It is well known for its Davos event in Switzerland that happens every January.

Nadia is based in the San Francisco at the World Economic Forum Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution where her colleagues and her work on the foundational technologies that will change the world from blockchain, artificial intelligence and internet of things to address governance gaps in those technologies.

What is blockchain?

To answer this question, Nadia takes a supply chain focus. A typical supply chain normally involves thousands of business transactions on a daily basis across a large number of parties. For example, a product moving from raw material, suppliers, manufacturers, factories, through to retailers, importers, and then to the end customer.

As a product travels from its origin point to its final destination in the supply chain many organisations will have been involved with each of them having their version of the truth about that product’s journey with regards to its location on that journey and all relevant and necessary information. That version of the truth about a product’s journey will be recorded in a ledger. The problem occurs when those multiple ledgers, or those versions of the truth, don’t necessarily align across the supply chain.

A supply chain will typically have 30 or more hand over points. These points have numerous blind spots that often leads to errors, fraud, and delays. Manual updates to a ledger will also often lead to errors.

Blockchain, is a type of distributed ledger technology that can reduce these complex bilateral communications and information links by providing a single shared ledger across all the parties. What this means is that “what I see” is “what you see”.

Blockchain also has a set of unique characteristics:

* Immutable / tamper evident – increased trust and transparency in the data

* Transactions in a blockchain are typically confirmed by all participants through a consensus mechanism

* Security and increased resiliency from having a multi-node architecture instead of a centralised server

 

The World Economic Forum Blockchain Development Toolkit

The World Economic Forum accelerated the release of the toolkit after witnessing the need to improve both the pandemic and endemic responsiveness and readiness. But also, to address the weaknesses exposed in supply chains. The toolkit is freely available online for organisations to use when embarking on a journey to improve their supply chain systems.

The toolkit is a gold standard in blockchain deployment. When an organisation has identified a use case applicable for blockchain there are a number of tasks they have to tackle such as bringing their ecosystem together, address compliance, optimization and interoperability issues. The toolkit provides the A to Z of both technical and non-technical factors for success for blockchain deployment.

More than 200 organisations have participated in co-creating the toolkit by sharing the...