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We headed to Melbourne for Blockchain APAC and this is what we found…

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by

Liam Fitzpatrick
in

“The doers will win”.

A rallying-cry, that felt more akin to the opening of a concert than a #Blockchain event, but for local-Melbournian Steve Vallas, it was more of a promise. Just 10 weeks after deciding to go through with his idea, Australia’s largest enterprise blockchain event was here and packed out.

Blockchain technology is big business. But what happens when big business gets serious about the blockchain?

There was a lot of education throughout the sessions as Vallas had ensured there were plenty of use cases for how the technology is affecting industry today.

A need comes before the solution

Aussie champions, Katrina Donaghy and Louise Mercer from Civic Ledger and Everledger respectively, were on hand to talk about their experience with Optus’s Cindy Nicholson.

Louise Mercer explaining “yes we do want to work with corporates”

Donaghy spoke of the need to focus on the customer first. Working together with the Queensland Govt, Civic Ledger discovered a market and had the problem validated first, then “we built out our focus on registry and marketplaces”.

Mainstream success needs collaborative consortiums like ANB

One of the biggest announcements came from Data 61, IBM and law firm Herbert Smith Freehills. As iTNews reported: “The CSIRO’s Data61 research and development shop is set to pilot a new blockchain-based, internet of things (IoT)-enabled platform to streamline the way Australian businesses exchange data, cement deals and work together”.

Business Insider reported Herbert Smith Freehills stating: “The ANB will enable organisations to digitally manage the lifecycle of a contract, not just from negotiation to signing, but also continuing over the term of the agreement, with transparency and permissioned-based access among parties in the network.”

So how do you develop a Proof of Concept (POC) for Blockchain?

Gendry Morales — CEO at Flight Plan, ran attendees through the 4 key steps on how to get your POC up and running.

Flight Plan CEO Gendry Morales

Her biggest pieces of advice were to:

– Drill down into the key customer problems you’re trying to solve and create customer profiles to really ensure you understand their needs.
– Ensure you really understand the reason why you’re using blockchain. Is it for disintermediation? Maybe it might be due to authenticity, permanence or scarcity? It’s crucial you work this out during you planning phases.
– Use a Blockchain Product Canvas (see below) to help you clearly address each element of your POC.

We’re just getting started

Elsewhere a number of speakers compared the situation with blockchain with where the web was in the mid-90’s. “We’re at 1.0”, said Louise Mercer, “so look at where the tech needs to evolve”. There’s a lot of opportunity.

The Red Cross showed its latest collaboration with TypeHuman and FlexDapps for using blockchain to sign up volunteers and authenticate their credentials.

And the energy from both streams was palpable — especially from Jason Lee who spoke about NEM, the non-for-profit platform, which had a couple of startups spruiking its appeal in the shape of Rocket Shoes and Copyright Bank.

Proof of Location on the way….

We were blown away by the knowledge and expertise of Kiersten Jowett, a researcher and blockchain educator.

Talking on the panel ‘Applications and SAAS Use Cases’, Kiersten spoke passionately about a range of topics from Proof of Location and how the Blockchain is more reliable than GPS — through to ways corporates can experiment with the fast-paced tech.

Joined on the panel by Steve Dyso — Partner at Deloitte, Scott Ni — Senior Director at Alibaba and Apurva Chiranewala — Strategy & Growth Lead at Sendle, Kiersten encouraged corporates to get involved in supporting blockchain projects. Her advice: ‘invest in a startup that’s disrupting the market and send your clients to them and then once the market matures absorb them’.

But can Blockchain help humanity?

Well according to Lina Lim — Director Blockchain Philanthropy Foundation, Head of Technology NSX, Chris Zhong — Digital Industry X.0 Blockchain Lead at Accenture and Rose Thompson — Project Manager at ConsenSys APAC it already is.

According to the landscape, Blockchain for Social for Impact is growing pretty quickly:

Rosa Thompson also spoke passionately about the connection between data ownership and the current concentration of power by oligopolies and monopolies.

The ConsenSys Project Manager spoke about how the potential of blockchain could help to distribute power from these multinational corporations by way of data sovereignty.

Rosa Thompson— Project Manager ConsenSys APAC

What comes next?

Murray Galbraith hosted Stephen Alexander from ConsenSys to wrap up proceedings with advice on how to implement what people had learned during the course of the day:

– Jason Potts, professor at RMIT Blockchain Innovation Hub opened the event with a keynote, and Stephen Alexander noted that his offerings contributed to making this one of the most comprehensive, intelligent and insightful blockchain events for applied business blockchain he had experienced. It included observations like “the fulfilment of trust accounts for 35% of the cost and effort across all supply chains today”. Alexander added that when the value of this is captured and tokenised then the tradable market value of trust within that sector alone will amount to billions of new value-based tokens.

– Cindy Nicholson of Optus raised the key question — what is the business value of adopting blockchain? Alexander, said that if you cannot predict, create, capture, validate, tokenise and then trade meaningful value — then it isn’t value, it’s just a vague benefit masquerading as value.

– The future trends of DApp development has been articulated by Joseph Lubin and the future can be summed up in one word…Coexistence.

– He noted that we are just at the beginning of deconstructing legal instruments and embedding them into the DNA of the next generation Internet such as the ethereum. He also explained that we would only need three of these instruments to be in use to aggregate the entire demand chain and for the first time in human history, match that with the existing supply chain via blockchain based exchanges. The era of search would be over. We couldn’t agree more!

– Embrace blockchain yourselves, become sovereign individuals and you can aggregate your collective tribal power says Alexander — in that way we can avoid next year’s event becoming a Groundhog Day.

This article was first published on the Beam Medium page.