CCEG SOCIAL VALUE & INTANGIBLES REVIEW as well as financial power, has broken down. This is evidenced in many ways, including the recent political upheavals and indicators such as the Edelman Barometer www.edelman. com/trust2017.
The conference also heard via video link from Ashish Gadnis, Chair of the Financial Inclusion Committee of the Wall Street Blockchain Alliance and CEO of the awardwinning blockchain application BanQu. BanQu is the first ever blockchain Economic Identity Platform that is helping to create long term economic resilience and independence for refugees and people living in extreme poverty. Ashish, who is a senior strategic adviser to many global organisations including the UN on the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, shared his experiences in economic identity and asset registration in under-developed countries where systems of individual record-keeping and land registry are weak.
Mukhtar framed his thinking along three dimensions – citizenship, political systems and economic development. In terms of citizenship he projected forward Ashish Gadnis’s individual identity platform as he foresaw a unified global blockchain ID standards database. In terms of politics, he believes that distributed ledgers can develop into tools for direct rather than representative democracy – and that this could help knock down national boundaries as issues of common international concern could be simultaneously voted on around the world. In his final prediction for the future, he built on this borderless world idea in terms of economic development being based on smart blockchain-based property records which together with the legalisation of crypto-currencies will facilitate global economic development at planetary and local level, but not necessarily at the state or national level.
Democratisation of distributed ledgers Much has been written about the democratisation of the internet, despite the growing dominance of a few companies such as Google and Facebook. What of blockchain? Greg McMullen, Director of the Interplanetary Database Foundation, shared his work on and vision for a shared global computing infrastructure that would enable the distributed ledger frameworks to be truly open source in terms of content, resources and control. He and his colleagues are developing a network of nodes that will together constitute a public blockchain database.
Heady stuff – and a higher order awakening
The future? Trust and a borderless world
All who participated in this conference went away with a deeper understanding of the multiple aspects and applications of distributed ledgers and their ability to disrupt and revolutionise established views and ways of doing things. However, the importance of this conference came from a ‘higher order’ awakening. They also left not only with a wider perspective of the power of blockchain but also a deeper, or better said, higher order understanding of its power to transact and convey intangible social as well as financial value – and the potential far-reaching benefits for a fairer and better society.
Following these reports of current and near term initiatives, Fintech expert Mukhtar Mussabetov gave a thoughtprovoking address on potential medium to long term developments in the blockchain space. Initially looking back in time to the emergence of middlemen who provide trust and transaction management systems, he expressed a common perception that trust in such intermediaries, who have grown to yield significant political
The Internet of Value – can we really make it happen? CCEG’s social value metrics are key to this critical opportunity. We must not squander it. If the mood of this conference is anything to go by the future looks rosy, with many blue skies ahead. Videos of the presenters, together with post event interviews are available at https://www.youtube.com/user/TheCCEG
Working with a series of blockchain entrepreneurs and developers, Greg gave details of the COALA IP working group that is developing the global protocol, which will be based on existing building blocks such as the LCC and IPLD frameworks. They are creating an Interledger Protocol (ILP) connecting many blockchains with the idea of formalising their vision into a planetary blockchain database supporting the COALA IP Protocol (see Coalaip.org)
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