 He'll be moderating a panel this morning that is going to be talking about some of the non-financial industry uses of blockchain technology. Alright, so hello everybody. And by non-financial, every time somebody is talking blockchain nowadays, they seem to be talking crypto. And by crypto, I don't mean cryptography, which would normally be what people mean by crypto at least a few years ago. Yeah, that's what normal people mean by crypto. It's cryptography. The thing is today everybody uses crypto for cryptocurrencies and then crypto mining and then all the things we're not going to talk about today. So let's get this over. Cryptocurrencies, ICOs, trading, cross-border payments, remittances. I've said it. That's it for today. We're going to be talking about a whole lot of different things. So I've asked four panelists to come here with me and discuss their experience in working on projects that are not strictly related to payment using the blockchain. If you're aware of how a blockchain works, you can use that as a database that allows a group of people, entities that don't necessarily trust each other to work in a trusted manner between each other nevertheless. And that trusted manner allows all kinds of interesting applications way beyond the pure financial world. That's what we're going to talk about today. So let me... I'm going to be doing a little bit of reading here. So in no specific order but the one that I wrote the stuff in, the first one will be Shankar Satish and he leads... Where is Shankar? Please come up to the stage. Shankar leads the AI and data science efforts at Manulife's Research Lab in Quantitative Investment Management and Insurance. Insurance is interesting. We're not going to be talking too much about investment, right? Before this he was a computer scientist in academia and at startups where he built AI and machine learning systems for the autonomous robotics and manufacturing industries. So I'm counting on him to share some experiences in particular in the use of AI and things like that and possibly how it links to blockchain. The second speaker panelist will be Vinay Mohan and he is a management consultant by trade and currently leads Consensus in Singapore and in the wider APAC region. He specializes in delivering enterprise-grade strategy and operations and has worked for global clients in a number of locations and industries. I'm hoping a lot of those are not finance industries. And he's a keen admirer of all things decentralized and working to enhance the blockchain ecosystem and economy in Singapore. So, welcome. Next one is Calvin Cheng and he's a full-stack software engineer with a current interest in data science and distributed ledger technology. He helps SG innovate a government-backed venture capital fund with talent hunting using data and software in his own time. He designed and built all kinds of mobile and web apps for fun and profit. Their current work revolves around DLTs. Anybody want to know DLT or not comfortable with the term DLT? We're not talking just blockchain here, right? You know, hashgraphs and things like that. So his work revolves around DLTs like hyperledger indie fabric quarter hashgraph. And I have a microphone. Yeah, but that's one of the four ones of my panelists, so I still have an issue. If we can have one more. We only have four. We will do time sharing with the microphone. If we can only have four, we'll handle, right? We'll do load balancing. Okay, the last one is Jonas from Daimler. So he holds a diploma in computer science and Japanese studies from the University of Bonn. His main focus topics are metadata and data quality as well as neural networks within Daimler where he currently works. He previously was in lead architecture roles for finance systems and various leadership positions. He's taken a keen interest in new technologies and the open source movement. In his current role, he's shaping the blockchain and DLT activities from the technology perspective with Daimler as a member of the governing board of the hyperledger. He's also representing that role internationally. Okay, so thank you very much. So what I want to do, we're not a huge... We're going to try to make this as interactive as possible. Let me first distribute microphones. Jonas probably will share a microphone because I'm sitting next to you. That's okay. All right, so I have a few questions that I wanted to ask the panelists, but more importantly, if you guys have questions, just raise your hand and shout the question. We'll repeat it for recording purposes and we'll tackle that first. But the first one I have has blockchain become a buzzword. Are people doing blockchain because it's blockchain? If I look at the companies that I work with, roughly 80%, they're doing blockchain because everybody else is and they don't really know what it's going to bring them. So that's kind of the buzzword type thing. I have about 10% of the people who are doing blockchain that have a reasonable idea of why they're doing it and they're doing it because they're already doing some existing process, but they want to optimize it. They want to make it faster, cheaper, more secure, disintermediated. And that's how the computer industry has been working for the last 50 years, right? Every time there's been a new revolution when we went from data center, well, mainframe to client server, all the system integrators had a field day moving everybody to client server. Then when we went from client server to distributed, we did that. We had also the workstation phase. Remember workstations, right? They're dead now. And the next revolution is IoT, okay? But right now we're at the blockchain space, which is going to power the IoT world. So that's those 10%. And there's the last group of 10% who are doing blockchain to change the way the world is going. And these people are really exploring blockchain to create new ways of doing business, new business models, new applications that are not possible without a blockchain, right? And these people sometimes they're doing this project on a blockchain just because they know that they'll get funding for it because of the buzzword aspect. But I like to ask my panelists if they see that as well and how they feel that. So I'll start with Jonas and give him the mic. So the short answer would be yes. The long answer is a little bit more complicated. So usually as we started with the blockchain thing usually you're very alone in the beginning. And you say, there is a technology and you can do stuff with it and I don't know how far it can go, but we can do something. And people would say, ah, nobody needs that. And then it's a buzzword and then everybody comes to you and if you have a little bit of knowledge in it and says we have to do something with blockchain. And you're like, okay, what do you want to do? We don't know, but it has something with blockchain. And then there are these cases where you engage in discussion and they have even an idea, you know, I want to have one central database where I can store people that's not the right case. There are also the cases where I think, yeah, that's definitely a use case for blockchain. And then there are these cases where I first thought and even thought that topic and thought, yeah, stuff. So stupid, you cannot do it. And then after a few discussions and a few days later I thought, wait a second, there's a thing to it and I learned something and maybe you can also apply that topic to it. So it's a very interesting time at the moment and it's a buzzword, yes, you can do a lot with it, yes. Will it save the world? Maybe in some parts, will it change the world? Probably. Will it change all processes? Coming? No. So I have it, having lunches with old friends. Actually, I just had lunch with them. And in this lunches, we have a lot of techies, a lot of technical friends. And a lot of them are building apps, of course. And they are building communities and marketplaces. And a lot of them are interested to continue building the app on blockchain. And when I ask them why, they say, oh, we need a token for our own marketplace. And when I say, do you really need a token for your marketplace? They'll say, well, that's one way of raising money. Because we can raise money easily through ICO. And I think people, they were adjusted by the way that they are approaching their marketplace token through different utility rationale. But at the end of it all, the bottom line is, why don't you just accept IAC? Why do you need IAC to be converted to a token in order for it to be used in your marketplace? There will be a lot of complicated answers given to that question. It's always interesting to have lunch with friends and just talk carefully. And the conclusion is always, hey, actually it is an interesting use case to use token in our marketplace. And we see it as a way to raise a cheap or free funding. And we are not out there for cashback, unlike the rest of the people out there. But after enough lunches, I'm wondering who are the ones that are going for cashback? Because everybody says they are not going for cashback. So, yeah. Hello. Is blockchain and the main ground in the first world and in the first, as the code certainly is, the key difference is I think we, as they justify it, and it is far more understandable to have first and only one set of paradigms than a lot of others before it's time for a couple of reasons. First of all, look at how mainstream blockchain is evolving, right? And even though BLP is continuously computing and Apple has been an evolution, a linear model for the last 20 years or so, Bitcoin, which really kicked off this whole bunch of mainstream blockchain adoption, came from a pseudonymous party called the Pagoshir on the motor. They orbit whatever, whoever that wants. And it seems to sort of solve a very foundational social construct or social problem, or the technological problem. So as opposed to machine learning or AI or other paradigms which are more linear, I would say blockchain is more foundational. So the buzz that you see today is extremely palpable and I think it's quite understandable because it touches so many facets of civilization as not just about financial services but about efficient marketplaces. It is about solving the problem, because it is a 7,000-year-old problem in the history of human civilization which is about to be addressed. So I would say that it is probably understandable and partially justified in my view. And there's always going to be four more ideas. You always have this theory of missing out to be in blockchain, be in robotics, be in new ways of investment and in automotive security, whatever it is. Human greed is always going to follow this. We are always constantly going to the next steps that we can set up. But with blockchain, I think there's a far more far-ranging implication with the sort of buzz. Go. Yes, it most definitely has become a buzzword. And for me, a buzzword is a word which starts out as a technical term and eventually loses that meaning and then it begins to simplify a whole umbrella of things and I think blockchain is certainly easy. However, I do think it is an intimately important innovation that we engage in and for many of the same reasons that you just mentioned, actually. And so the foundational and I think more under-appreciated factor when we discuss blockchain technology is often the economic incentive that plays. And that is how we have now managed to turn human greed towards sort of in our favor collectively. And that is kind of why I'm not a huge believer of having blockchain products succeed if there is not money involved, right? And that's one of the collective things that we all realize is that we can design and have money and we can achieve some really amazing things. The other result of this blockchain explosion has been that now public blockchains are the world's largest department of cryptography. But with cryptography, it's been mostly restricted to research and limited development is a real burden to things that are sophisticated and so on. But that's kind of been the extent to which we deploy in actual cryptography. But blockchains are now our chance to have massive development of cryptography. And as a result of that, a lot of the mind-share and the formation is now moving towards cryptography and security. And you know, security is one of those areas of what it has always been. If you work in security, it's kind of a time-to-job where if you do your job well, nobody notices you. And you're at the end of the line that it gives you to work. And now because people are buying cryptocurrencies and storing them, there is now something to do for the public for the public to know how important security is. And you know, losing money is the fastest way to learn. And that's kind of what's happening at a massive scale right now. And I would say sort of the blockchain in part is now acting as a way to promote the of a lot of cryptography and diversity concepts which are sort of very nice to hear in an academic setting but did not sort of have a place in sort of practical everyday use and in big amount. So for me, one of the signs that slowly out of the buzz phase is when people stop using that name to justify or sell a project. And just to give you an example, because that's kind of my segue into looking at non-financial applications for blockchain. There's another buzzword at this time which is really strong in Europe by the way. It's called GDPR which is the general data protection regulations for all entities doing business or having presence in Europe. So it impacts the whole planet that's trying to deal with Europe. And so everybody is doing GDPR now. And I have a customer that came to me that said, we want to build a GDPR solution. Okay, that's fine. And we want to do it with a blockchain. So, you know, I take a step back and I say, so okay, a blockchain is interesting because we can use it to track all of the transactions which will be events happening on the private data. So for example, when an employee has, I don't know, their passport number that changes, they have to be able to modify that wherever it's being used because there's a right to modifying your data part of the GDPR. So when you want to modify that data, you make a request to the privacy officer, to the data officer, to the HR person, whoever is your contact and that request should be logged and then tracked. So you should know when that request has been sent to whoever needs to process it, when it's been processed and then you should be told that and if somebody needs to audit it from the outside, they should be able to look at all those transactions and check that they've happened in the right kind of timeframe. And that's a very nice use case for a blockchain but honestly, you know, it's an event tracking system. People have been using event tracking systems since we have events to track, so decades, and we've been doing that with databases. Actually two years ago I built an event tracking system for a bank in Switzerland and they were using Cassandra to do the event tracking between entities, right? So I look at them and say, I mean, you can do this with a blockchain. A blockchain is a nice and elegant way to do it but you don't have to use a blockchain for that. So why do you want a blockchain? And they look at me and say, well, because our companies, investors want the company to look at the tip of modernity and we will get funding if we do a blockchain project. Okay, so we'll do blockchain, right? But that's because it's still in the buzzword phase, right? You wouldn't hear this if somebody came and talked to you about doing a Java project. 20 years ago, people would do a Java project because it was the buzzword of the day and another 20 years ago it was AI and, oh, wait, it still is now. People are still, it's again, right? But we have these phases. So what I'd like to explore now using that example of a GDPR solution is what kind of uses of blockchain have you seen out there that are not related to ICOs and getting money or transacting money, but more on using the blockchain as an infrastructure for doing trusted interactions between... Unfortunately... Examples. I have a very big company and this big company has a lot of use cases. I can give you, not all of them I can give you, but one I can maybe explain is it's a thing of trust again. So in the world where maybe I sell you something and I sell you something and give you the invoice for it and you should pay me by means of going to the bank and tell me, okay, this bank, this bank account number and eventually I don't get the money. Why is it happening? Because somebody is actually getting this kind of invoices and fortifying or counter-finding the bank account number. So this is fraud. And since a lot of the invoicing nowadays is still very, very manually or it's automated with AI but the AI is more or less just reading the number and just giving you the money then doing a transaction. And the question we had is how can we, what can you do about it? So think about an open ledger that has my name. I sign it with my personal crypto key. I say my name. This is my bank account number, maybe on a company scale and it's open. Only one has the truth and it's distributed and everybody shares the same view on it because you want to have it distributed. You want your bank account number rightfully recorded and then if you are going to be to give me the money or other way around then before you look at this open ledger and see, okay, this is a spectacular amount and I don't look actually at the invoice I just use this one. And this would be an application I think it has something to do with trust and it has something to do with like public information that should be anyhow somehow recorded. It's kind of linked in of account numbers bank account numbers that is also trusted. Something like this could be done with blockchain and has nothing to do with a token. So in relation to what Jonas has said I think one of the most interesting project out there right now is called Hyperledger Indeed. For those of you familiar with Hyperledger it's not just IBM's Hyperledger fabric nor bands by the end but there are many variants of Hyperledger. Hyperledger Indeed is actually a identity centric decentralized layer and that's a foundation cost-offering organization that runs these nodes Hyperledger Indeed is you can think of Hyperledger Indeed as an sorry you can think of Sovereign as an implementation of Hyperledger Indeed and what it does is that it allows multiple organizations to run their own nodes and validate identities of individuals without needing individuals to store their identity on a central database or even on the ledger itself so it does that by using zero-knowledge proof cryptography and so that actually changes the entire way identity is being done on the internet right now so to me it's a very promising and a very interesting take on logics all of you should be very familiar with what's happening now with Facebook and Cambridge Analytica so the world of decentralized ledgers and the world of centralized authorities like Facebook and Google which we all depend heavily on for our digital identity is on opposite spectrum and human race is very interesting because we live through cycles and the pendulum now is swinging towards the other end there's no right or wrong I'm not here to pass any moral judgment but it is what it is there are episodes in human history where centralized power is cold and important and right now the pendulum is swinging a little bit back to a decentralized world across the political spectrum so I'm not here to judge where communism is good or that's good I'm just here to illustrate that hey there's a lot of interesting projects on DLT's and hyper-ledgerity is a really good way of implementing centralized identities with a W3C endorse new way of identifying individuals using DID if you're doing centralized database you'll be very familiar with UUID so DID is the direct opposite of UUID you get a unique ID but it is essentially collision resistant as well and it is global it doesn't rely on the fact that your issue UUID that you make ID so that coupled with zero knowledge proof cryptography it's going to change the way that people are able to identify themselves online it's going to change how ANL and KYC is done so that you can safely send money across the world without revealing unnecessary information you then are truly in control of your own information but let's say it is a complicated method to manage your own information which is why people become lazy and work hard that is cumulation and rely on third party services to manage your information for you so whether the the population can actually learn to manage their own information safely that's a different topic but zero knowledge proof for identity is interesting from a zero knowledge proof for identity is also interesting from a GDPR perspective because you're never giving out private data but you are proving that you're not going to be able to manage your own information because you're not going to be able to manage your own information for private data but you are proving your identity be very careful and photography usually the proof is okay but if the implementation is bad then there's still a thing to it and then you still have the law in Europe where the right to be forgotten and if the implementation was just bad so we have to be very very sure about that kind of implementation I mean we have this even with hardware where the implementation I don't know from which company was so bad that nowadays in Estonia they had to like spread all of the systems there so if you look at blackchains they can step back and look at the features of what a good blackchain might look like and for me a good blackchain for all the purposes of the Ethereum even though consensus is a protocol of plastic company that is Ethereum we have moved from a network economy or we are moving from a network economy which the internet facilitated to what is now called a shared economy which blackchains are going to facilitate and three you need a beautiful truth there's only one version of that truth so it's completely immutable it has to be true for all of us you don't need or you cannot rather have central intermediaries we don't want to go back to the 7000 year old system of hardware centralation to dominate and control and power play with arbitrage and that sort of thing and most importantly you need a way to bring adversarial stakeholders together sharing works when we can find a basis to agree with one another that's the key thing that blackchains are trying to solve or that's the beauty of this whole paradigm so those three features considered think of use cases such as governance tracking tracking global assets that run across global supply chains that are highly temporal which means they pass through different stages of time and exchange hands hands that don't necessarily agree with one another shippers, buyers, sellers suppliers, intermediaries, processors all of these agents that drive modern commerce truly for dollars happening every day these agents don't agree with one another and we have banks for example you know to be the intermediary to that so problems tracking is a very interesting use case on project and consensus has a very few dozen on-follies concurrently at any point in time one of our most recent ones is a product called bind you can look it up it's a problem tracking solution and there are many others in the market as well basically what problem tracking solutions do is they enable a common in which all of the different parties regardless of what they do or where they stand in the supply chain can reference a common database so you have a single golden source of truth nobody can dispute anything else because in a conventional world where your database and my database are two separate solvable environments you and I can collude or you and I can choose to dispute and that leads to the problem of efficiency it leads to reconciliation issue that delays but with a blockchain with the atomic settlement aspect which is either a yes or a no right now not p plus one or p plus two this dispute mechanism is almost negligible because it's nearly eliminated and the need for reconciliation is nearly eliminated so problems tracking is one you know self-suffering entities is a great new application in the world of blockchain how can you identify yourself and protocols like Ethereum give you the infrastructure to place that beautiful truth and make sure it's scattered across thousands of nodes all over the world making it mathematically feasible to hack because you know the building of the door is sitting right now it's the worst because no one's hacked into it smart contracts are being acted for the blockchain and self-suffering so problems tracking identity systems very interesting end for this one final point consensus just announced two days ago a project called word shoe poker organization for the longest time gambling has been dominated by the house imagine if you can have a truthful way of the four of us playing poker to verify whether it's provably actually correct so completely opposite example it's making ripples around the world so think about any application that means peer-to-peer, immutable truth and golden source of data and if you look at provenance tracking it's the core of the supply chain transparency type of platforms if you take supply chain transparency and add a feature to it like smart contracts you actually get enterprise automation free every time you track an activity on your supply chain you can trigger a smart contract that will trigger activities and sequence your supply chain this can either be used to tap into ERP systems like SAP or replace some of the functionality so that's a game changer it's another area where the disintermediation that blockchain brings is challenging historical ways of doing things right do I need an ERP system now such a complex system like SAP where integration with other system takes years or can I just use a blockchain and have everybody talk on the blockchain and that will trigger operations to for example if I order a batch of 1000 phones that automatically triggers the provisioning of storage in the next warehouse and things like that so that's a way that a blockchain will change the way we do business and interaction between companies consider the fact that blockchains are extremely good at creating a mutable append-only log so you can append anything to a log and you can never change it and blockchains are the best implementation of the best way to provide the guarantee now consider that in light of the principle of the right to be forbidden so if you go and add your customer information into a blockchain and then you receive a letter from a lawyer or even from the customer asking them to erase all of the data from all of your systems and from all of the second party systems that you are using as well and one of those things happen to be a blockchain that you insert into the data and you kind of short yourself in the code so not only is it difficult to use blockchain but it's possible unless you go to some like Accenture use their editable blockchain no please no it is something to bear in mind and what the GDPR is doing is bringing to the forefront what a lot of people who have been sort of deeply embedded into the computational advertising and you know, at the industry sort of knowing their hearts is like a toxic asset so once data gets out of your position it's close to impossible to control who's going to do what with it and who's going to transmit it there and who's going to get sold what's going to happen and then the GDPR quite interestingly written by a group of non-technical people who talk through with a philosophy in the tradition of philosophy that a lot of lawyers have when you read it and then you start to realize that, you know, as a business maybe now you have to start thinking about not just becoming a data-driven or a data science industry but also consider the fact that even if you succeed in your sort of data science endeavor the fact that you are amassing all of this sensitive data and all of that is so the question really is how do you still sort of provide services and do computation while avoiding this liability and let me just sort of hint and stay back after the panel is going to hear more details but you can do things like secure multi-party computation which is essentially a sub-branch of cryptography where what you can do is you can compute functions across multiple parties with that data never leaving said party and each party having no clue about the existence of other parties so, you know there are sort of solutions in cryptography that kind of budding and it requires a lot of thought but a naïve customer data, put it in a blockchain and then you can audit it will probably fail if you end up in the courtroom so that's how I can beat the fact that it's either that open mind and I put that in okay keep in mind that a blockchain while it is a database it's not a general purpose database in which you store everything it's more a database for storing transactions so these transactions can point to data that's stored elsewhere and when you need to delete the data you would delete the data itself and you would put a transaction in a blockchain that data is not there anymore and that resolves the gdpr issue you have a traceability that something has happened to the data and the data has disappeared from where it was stored so it's not accessible anymore but it requires not storing the data in the blockchain itself so we have three minutes for sort of closing comments I would just like to, okay I don't know, I mean like in terms of integrity what's the deal here we cannot change the blockchain but we're going to fork it because the price drop 50% that's just what your opinions are so if I can't speak for the foundation that I represent the community that made that happen but I believe what did happen was a consensus based really stages of the technology and it was done with the spirit of saying look we did not invent a theorem for somebody to walk away with $60 million so there's two things that I think as public perception has been against one is first of all the blockchain did not get hacked it was a poorly smart contract that stalled the current execution of a certain transfer of money which allowed the thieves to walk away with the 60 million unfortunately there was a moratorium of 30 days before which the funds could be taken out of the system and it was hard for within 48 hours it happened through consensus by community personally I'm not really worried about that I think it is controversial because of obvious reasons that somebody says this is decentralized but who gets to choose that you know you can hard fork it but it was a community decision it was not the back of one individual a group of people it was a community-based consensus it then classic still exists as another book you know I'm not I'm not going to try and defend that I'm not going to say that that should have never been done for me this is a fragile early stage it will go through some sort of feeling troubles it is not going to be free of its implications but that remains that we have to look at a larger picture of it I'm not overly concerned about the controversy surrounding that to be honest I mean I find my I find it a little bit weird when you talk about immutability well where is the immutability when you report so maybe that's a little bit sloppy language and you say you can't change the more correct language is to compute the cost of change and that's something that you can compute in terms of dollars compared to any other technology that cost is multiple orders and there's another aspect is that because it's a distributed ledger any change to the ledger is immediately detected by everybody so you cannot change it in a way that it would surprise people and happen without their knowledge and that's also a key element if there's another trail somewhere an admin can modify a record and nobody is the wiser with a blockchain that is just not possible reasonably possible knowledge, there's no such thing as a crack in information flow in the world so as far as people who understand decentralized ledgers are concerned they understand that that's just a small percentage of the rest of the equipment the real problem here is that terminology has present connotation and definition and those terminology are interpreted in a particular context across a particular spectrum so if you say that decentralized ledger is going to take the world and we peer to peer I don't truly buy that because it is a spectrum of governance by the way at one extreme you have authoritarian decisions by singletly everything all the way across to having a community in the side of it but even a community actually is a centralized entity if you think about that it's not registered in any company registry but a community is a fluid definition of a group of people who govern something so is it truly decentralized now if you stick to the strict definition of decentralization well a community is not decentralized I mean there's also a lot of very interesting and philosophical aspect in terms of what is pretty decentralization and do we don't need any intermediaries anymore and so on I think there will still be aggregators and there will still be a lot of people that rely on services of others and don't want to run their own stuff and so on and also you have to think of only a function of time for a certain time it will be mutable so the data is stored somewhere but think of if we would have started a blockchain with any five patches we would probably have some alternative realities right now or yeah of course it's part of what we need there's something to charge to whatever or five whatever then yeah you might also have something there so it's only it's a myth like tool mutability is a myth but at least for a certain period of time okay I guess so one thing is clear here we could continue this discussion for another two or three hours and we still have new subjects to cover and new types of applications to cover unfortunately we're already running three minutes late so thank you first of all to the audience for having listened participated and to my panelists for having provided such insight into applications of blockchain I want to leave you with some homework go google something called the CICDA project C-I-C-A-D-A it's people who are trying to build a government infrastructure on a blockchain think can I trust my government can all the decisions are made by my government being monitored openly on a blockchain with all the citizens participating that's another application have a look at it it's really interesting and I'm not involved in the project at all thank you very much thank you all