Blockchain for social applications

Transcript

good morning good morning everyone my name is Vanessa Grillet I'm an executive director at consensus where I run the blockchain for social impact activity and the blockchain for social impact coalition today I'm going to talk about some of the projects in the social impact space and give you some examples but first I want to answer maybe two or three questions why blockchain for social impacts what exactly is fluctuating for social impact and and how do you affect change so when jerome asked me to talk about blockchain for social impact i wanted to

answer the question why do we speak about doctrine for social impact is it something different then the impact that we have every day in our activity is it something different than just creating jobs who are the the companies that really create just affecting change through the blockchain a few months ago Vitalik posted a few tweets when the crypto market hit zero point five trillion he asked a question that i asked to you guys have we earned it how much actual usage of micro payments

is there in reality how much censorship resistant commerce to the common people have we enabled how many unbanked people have we banked and how many Venezuelans have we actually been protected from hyper-inflation so this is the question that we I ask myself and maybe you ask yourself and his answer to all the questions was that we did take action but maybe that it's not enough there's there's a certain level but maybe it's not enough so I think the what I want to open up to you is what do we do about it

and and before we start the conversation I just want to lighten up the conversation about a few statistics on the world we live in not to depress everyone but 2.7 billion people in the world live on less than two point fifty cents a dollar a day one out of seven people on the planet do not have an identity sixty-five million people are displaced in the world one in every two hundred children are is a refugee forty million people are victims of sex trafficking forced labor or forced marriage one out of seven people are malnourished and malnutrition

causes the death of children under five half of the deaths of children under five in the world that's 3.7 million children every year that's 3.7 million lives too many corruption is estimated to be 1.5 trillion each year that's 1.5 trillion dollars that's directed to assets that should be directed to productive to productive programs and that is allocated to corrupt programs that's 2 percent of the global GDP and 70 percent

of people who'll own who own their land don't actually own their lands or haven't certainty on the ownership of their lands so given that what should we do blockchain and what we do every day is super impactful it's a radical innovation it means that we're gonna create a new manufacturing or processes to enable this innovation its competence destroying its it's gonna render the current competence till the obsolete it's it's an architectural innovation it's going to create reorganization of

businesses the promise that I live for and I hope that you guys live for is that decentralization peer-to-peer exchange of value permissionless systems will allow to accelerate for settlements lowering of costs of transaction cutting out rent taking middleman and lowering barriers to access to capital and information that's what I came here into this industry for but when we look at social impact and when we want to affect the people that I mentioned in the other slide we have to think of the effect of

what the technology brings and as radical as this technology is we have the choice to to go to two routes to do incremental change or to do radical systems change if we do incremental change and do just enhancing efficiency and transparency of existing systems we run the risk of using old frameworks and legacy systems but we have the opportunity to affect the lives of people immediately if we go through radical change we allow for new business models to emerge we allow the opportunity of leapfrogging legacy systems but it's a

it might be a more difficult implementation for a wider scale and sometimes requires the cooperation with actually the actors which you want to leapfrog it might be stakeholders or governments some examples in the social impact of incremental changes are enhancing transparency in the donation systems like what alice is doing measuring impact adding layers of payment transparency lowering fees remittances in radical change thinking about identity Len titles energy if you really want to implement those systems out of very very

large scales it's kind of hard it's kind of hard in the developed world it's kind of hard in the developing world and Sandra Rowe who is here will be talking about this later so if you want to get involved in social impact and if you want to affect the lives of the people I mentioned in the in the previous slides you got to know what you're getting yourself into and you got to know what you want to do and you got to know what type of change you want to bring into this world and how you want to effect that change and how you want to dedicate your time whether you're a technologist whether you're an investor whether you're a mentor whether you're a business person however you are involved

in the blockchain and the social impact space you really need to know and come in with your eyes wide open because it's kind of harder than just building technology because intentionality matters so as you'll see in the examples that I'm gonna show it's important that you know what you're going after so if you really care about something if you really care about the environment if you really care about sex trafficking if you really care about the world hunger and that's your goal and you want to solve this issue you know create the new business and the solution that that solves for that understand the problems

on the ground and work with the people on the ground this is a human centered design approach this is not just about technology this is working with people on the ground there are so many constraints people are so surprised working on these projects how long it takes what difficulties on the ground are just implementing those those projects working with people on the ground partnering with people who know what's going on and and just getting information from other people lowering the cost of access to the technology and collaborating with anyone that wants to work on the same

Jax is really key and measuring your impact is really also important to continue to know what your goal is you know if your goal is decarbonisation measure as much as you can and as precisely as you can what you're going for if your goal is alleviating poverty measure how many families you've worked affected and try to be as precise as possible the blockchain actually allows you to have enhanced tools for that so now Boyd is blockchain for social impact we created at consensus and with other other charities and NGOs something called a blockchain for social impact

coalition and we asked when we created this coalition you know what are the main areas in which you guys are working on in which which area which sectors do you think are the key sectors which have the most impact in the social impact sectors and four sectors came up the first one was identity and vulnerable populations second one was financial inclusion the fourth was fourth one was supply chain and the fourth one energy and environment so identity and vulnerable population is really the cornerstone I would say of everything in blockchain and especially in large and

for social impact as we've seen there are so many people million people 1 billion people sorry don't have identity in this world and this is something that you know governments don't acknowledge their existence they don't have access to assets to bank accounts they don't have access to right so it's just living in another another world and so granting sovereign identity to to these populations allows them to to really get access to education property rights bank

accounts etc Financial Inclusion also piggy backs back on identity and there's a lot of application regarding remittances crowdfunding and and I don't like to use the idea of banking the unbanked but really the idea of creating new systems for the unbanked because why would the unbanked want to use the legacy systems which is excluded them right then we have the supply chain so there's a lot of companies who are really looking deeply into the supply chain applications especially to have a clear and transparent supply chain in

order to track provenance and ethical production and also with the hope that human trafficking and human rights abuses will be tracked on the supply chain or will be able to be avoided it's going to be very hard to do it on the ground and I'll go into the details of that later in my presentation then we have energy and environment with a lot of energy of great energy trading and ground peer-to-peer trading after we identified these four areas a lot of other areas which I think are really exciting popped up with a lot of projects those concerns more human

rights activist democracy philanthropy and equal justice and I think those areas are really ripe for disruption and I think maybe they're also a little bit my passion so in terms of human rights activists a lot of the projects are not public yet but because of issues around security of some of the human rights activists themselves but their needs are the security their personal security the security of the information that they carry their freedom of speech how they're gonna you know transmit the information in order to carry out their

message secure their funding when they're traveling and secure their location in terms of democracy in the Western world we have 200 years old democracies in other areas of the world we have other forms of government I would say that none of them have been touched either by the internet really or the revolution of blockchain yet and I think that's coming I think right now we see applications around building around fake news around movement building liquid democracy but it's not yet matured to really a deep challenging I

would say we haven't reached the moment where were at we're challenging the fundamental the fundamentals of our democracies and our systems so we're still in the incremental changes of what we're trying to do on the democracy side were trying to make the voting better we're trying to make the representation better but we're not challenging what representation is in terms of philanthropy there's increased transparency donations in crypto so here again more a an incremental change

rather than systems change because we're not rethinking about how why we're giving how we're giving but we're trying to give in a better way which is perfectly fine in my in my view equal justice that is also something that is a little bit untouched but I think we'll we'll see more of it the criminal justice system in the US and in international justice system can can be enhanced through the blockchain evidence-based and due process of law is very pall so for disruption and I think

those areas we will see more and more applications of any questions till now nope all right so I'll go quickly into the actual applications and so a little disclaimer I have a few examples I'm not endorsing any examples I think they're interesting examples Suns are not even on the ethereum blockchain but I think for the purpose of social impact they're really interesting examples I think some are still raising money I'm not endorsing that either but I think they're just really interesting use

cases so identity and vulnerable population the first use case is Moldova and vulnerable population Moldova has an issue with the trafficking of children and they are trying to solve that issue because children are exported out of Moldova into brothels and turned into prostitutes outside of Moldova and what they're trying to do is give these children a digital identity based on biometric data and they're trying to combine it with an enhanced monitoring

of the borders and alert system for the missing children so they're hoping that the children wanted to cross the border with a digital identity based on the blockchain won't be able to actually cross the border and be trafficked it outside of Moldova so we'll see how how that that project unfolds but it's supported by the UN and a lot of other countries who really want to take action on this situation another interesting project is blockchain for change to connect the homeless they partner with life Wireless who provided 3000 telephones to people on the streets

and these telephones had an app who had three components a digital ID called changed paths a smart wallet and a marketplace and this marketplace gave them access to all the rights that they actually already had access to but really couldn't connect to and you know when you're homeless and you don't have your telephone you don't have any connections you you know you have all these rights but you don't really you know go out for them and the the the idea here is that you provide them with with the identity you provide them with the connectivity with the telephone and

they'll be able to exercise their rights so it's still in they're still trying to see how that works but it I thought it was interesting because one of the major challenge of course in these all these projects is the connectivity is the access to the smart phones especially whether it's in developed countries or developing countries it's it's really the connectivity which which is an issue so on the energy side there's a lot going on and some of the projects are not usually tagged impact so it's it's harder to navigate so you know you

really have to pick and choose what you think is it has an impact for you or what you think is interesting so we have grid plus with which is a peer-to-peer trading trading markets for electricity Carbon X who is gonna try to do carbon offsets for individuals and then we power which I thought was interesting because it takes a different approach by allowing green energy developers to raise capital and selling future energy production upfront and then create a transparent green energy accounting for distributed open

lender and in that in that category there's a lot of coalition's the UN just created the UN climate change in there's a climate Leger initiative the energy web foundation there's a lot of interesting hackathons in that space and a lot of solutions that are based on Krypton economics and and are trying to incentivize actors to take action and to find market-based solutions so I think I think that's that's one area that's gonna that's gonna be really developing in the future the supply chain so supply chain it's something that is that all

the companies are tackling not only for social impacts but few examples here sustainable fisheries people want to see the the provenance of the fish and see how the where the fish is is coming from that it's been sustainably fished so that violence is one of the consensus spokes that provides this this provenance verification we also have some solutions that provide the same thing for counterfeit pills but the

question is how does the supply chain solution provides a a radical solution for issues such as labor slavery and corruption so in the garment industry the minerals usually if you have if you tag the the the mineral that you track probably the slavery or the forced labor will come either before just at the extraction point and it's going to be very hard to see through the blockchain and it's not

going to show or there will be acts of corruption or what happens if there's you're in a country with prevalence of conflict and the input is done under duress or under the active or corruption it's going to be very hard so yes the supply chain is is a great tool it's gonna be a hard tool to maneuver to to actually guarantee I would say that there was no forced labor or there's no act of corruption in the supply chain so I I just want to be very careful with with with presenting the

supply chain solution for blockchain as a silver bullets for these for these issues human rights and democracy so we have four examples as you see it's my favorite subject we have civil which is sustainable journalism it's a decentralized marketplace for sustainable journalism where people are incentivized to vet creators and and there's a special or governance structure for for the journalists or kids I don't know if everyone is

familiar with orchids but it's really a surveillance free access to the Internet where people can buy bandwidth on an exchange bandwidth and the peer-to-peer transaction so that you you don't have to you can't have access to the internet without having having it being surveillance upon you then we have organizations like democracy Earth who tried to create new governance tools and had an interesting experience with the Colombian peace treaty whereby the expats in Colombia were not allowed to

vote on the peace treaty and they set up a digital process to allow them to at least give their their opinion on that and so they were able to do a blockchain verification of their opinion and so it wasn't a vote but it had some value and it had influence and so we see these new movement buildings and these new forms of semi democracy which are interesting I think and vote is a mobile election voting platform and it's it just raised quite a lot of money and it's designed really to make it easier for the

disenfranchised voters to participate all these voting platforms and all all these solutions have won one purpose is to change the system that is not working and it that is disempowering the less advantaged people in the system and and that's why you know we're all not sleeping at night is because all the systems that are in place right now are creating so many inequalities that we have to find solutions to change that on the Financial Inclusion

of course I'll present a musical and thanking the bank so and bitpay sow these two solutions have the potential to reduce the cost of transactions and remittances so again these are incremental changes and do not I would say address fundamentally the issues financial inclusions but I think there are good solutions Financial Inclusion is a hard nut to crack and and

I struggle to give you a really good example in the Financial Inclusion where I found a very original business model that is completely different and things completely out of the box on how to reach the last mile because all these solutions still needs still addresses people who have certain access to certain either bank account or a certain civil society and it doesn't reach the time last mile so times up do you have any questions

just you presented a lot of things do you have anything concerning the equality between men and women I don't and do you have any idea of something that could go in this way on the blockchain that could help reduce the so I'll give you one statistic so in the in the world of rural farming in agriculture about 50 to 60 percent are actually women and these are single shareholder farmers which ultimately

mean that if you give more money into their pockets they end up having you know they end up feeding their families and then in turn you've seen the statistics from Grameen Foundation and other institutions which show that if you actually give women in those kind of agricultural rural regions more money community's overall tend to do better so that's one place where if you can make a direct impact in the area which I'll be talking about in two minutes then you can actually really actually help lift the entire community so I don't have an answer but it's a great question and we'll be thinking about it thank you very much for presentation

just a question do you have anything ongoing or collaboration about organ trafficking no okay so we will talk hey thanks for much wider consideration needed for some of these issues how much work do you actually do on the ground so we have we work with we work with a lot

of institutions on the ground some of which we can't disclose but most of the clients we work with are in developed countries so we have direct we deal with our tissues on the ground hi thinking about this I'm really interested about the the ID the identity you think and I was talking today with a

friend that she works out for all refugees crisis and we were we were kind of wondering how are we gonna like it's really good thing to identity to help refugees to keep their identity and also to prevent for example the case of the kids in Moldova but we were wondering how are we gonna do to avoid governments to stop refugees moving around like we see many countries in Europe now to trying to avoid refugees coming here so how do we how do you think that it's possible to not turn this this tool against the refugees yeah it's a it's a risk and it's a risk that we see also in

Moldova so in terms of moving refugees for example in Europe it would need a concerted efforts for people to recognize a you know blockchain based identity what we're looking at is more sovereign based identity and not working not working directly with governments but working with NGOs so for example if we work with the World Food Programme it's working with the UN the UN and their their recognition of the refugees and the way they recognized and they identified