Best wishes for a healthy, happy and sustainable 2018!
2017 has brought a year of exploration, research, outreach and coalition-building for the team at BLOC as well as our partner organisations throughout the maritime and energy industries alongside our blockchain and IoT technology providers. In the Maritime sector we have been busy completing our feasibility study sponsored by the Danish Maritime Fund to critically investigate and educate the industry around the realistic opportunity space of blockchain in the shipping sector. Rather than a hands-off research approach, we have been conducting active and open design research together with the industry in order to assess the feasibility of various use cases for blockchain technology that hold the most opportunity for impactful and sustainable change under the umbrella of ‘Blockchain for Inclusive Trade’. In the energy sector, we have been completing a feasibility study sponsored by Climate-KIC to investigate the various use cases and ways in which blockchain can be utilised to ensure verifiable, accessible and sustainable financial metrics under the umbrella of ‘Blockchain for Inclusive Finance’.
This year we conducted and contributed to cutting edge scientific research, explored new business models for value creation and have held various workshops, talks, seminars, webinars and education series. All of our work has been focussed around deep diving into the different problem areas of the maritime and energy players as well as the technology itself in order to source industry problems and bridge the gap between needs and solutions. It is through this process that we have sourced, researched and designed the industry applications we will focus on funding and building in 2018, stay tuned for more information!
Who we are:
We have also solidified who we are as a team and a community. Our mantra is to build technology to solve for real world problems and sustainability challenges while still demonstrating a profitable business case for those involved. Our agenda is to build ethical technology that contributes to the redistribution of concentrated power relations and creates value for both the supply and demand sides of technology. This has lead us to a more long-term, cautious and thorough approach to scientific research and application development which has proven valuable for building stability and trust into our partnerships and for basing them upon shared values and integrity.
As a result in this very hyped and often oversold emerging technology space, we have managed to build a community with dedicated partners that are willing to truly explore the potential of sustainable and transformative innovation to solve for the problems created by an archaic, centralised and monopolistic global trade market. We and our community fundamentally believe that with global collaboration, collectivity and resolution combined with the advent of blockchain, decentralised technologies, communication technologies and IoT, a new era of opportunities to reshape and redefine these industries to become more inclusive, transparent and frictionless is ours for the taking.
Our Impact in 2017:
Free education and community building
In the analogue world we have directly reached out to more than 1500 people in the year of 2017 with 40 industry talks, 6 conference keynote speeches, 5 panel discussions, 4 workshops and dozens of partnerships. In the digital world, we have reached out to tens of thousands with 5 published articles, 2 hackathons, 10 deep dive digital seminars and 4 general audience webinars. We have also established presence, partners and remote hubs in Singapore, New York, DC and London!
Documentation, Validation and Testing
We have carefully chosen projects this year that have contributed to bridging the physical and digital divide and will name a few. We documented, tested and wrote a whitepaper for Marine Transport International for the first real application of blockchain in the shipping industry with their solution SOLAS VGM, aimed at providing a digital solution for the verified gross mass, safety of lives at sea regulation and to create an interoperable communications system for the maritime industry. We have also lead a project between the City of Copenhagen, various technology providers and the citizens of a neighborhood in the north end of Copenhagen called EnergyBlock which is aimed at developing decentralised infrastructure, financing tools and trading mechanisms to empower prosumers, or producers and consumers, of renewable energy.
Scientific Research:
We onboarded our first industrial research PhD, Karim Jabbar, who among many areas is researching towards a “framework for building a Blockchain-based infrastructure for the maritime industry: Industry drivers, strategic alignments, and business model re-design”. Additionally, we have established partnerships and ongoing research projects with Copenhagen Business School, Danish Technical University and Copenhagen University, some of which has also been funded by Copenhagen FinTech and have contributed to or established several masters thesis’ projects and PhD case studies.
Crowd-Sourced Use Cases:
Through our industry workshops we have gathered more than 300 participants across the sector to deep dive into the intersection of technology and new business models within the themes of anti-corruption, decarbonisation, standards and certifications, smart contracts, supply chain finance, electronic documentation and freight forwarding for the shipping industry and sustainable finance, crowd financed grid infrastructure, distributed energy resources, peer-to-peer energy trading and new governance models for prosumers. We also brought our cases into this year’s Blockchain Summer School as well as other hackathons.
Event Highlights
Rainmaking Transport Applied Tech Innovation Day
In the end of November, our CEO Deanna was asked as one of the select three start-ups to present to the Danish Prime Minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, and the Danish Embassy in Singapore for an applied tech day where dozens of big corporates got together with the emerging innovators in the maritime sector to discuss new business cases and forms of collaboration. Presenting directly to the prime minister, building momentum around trust and transparency and forming an industry coalition around open digital infrastructure and collaboration were only some of the highlights of the trip, for more here’s a clip of the day.
The Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, World Bank Innovate for Climate Forum and COP23
In the roles of keynote speakers, lecturers and panel participants, Deanna and Maurice were invited as an experts and innovators in the area of blockchain and energy, climate and sustainability for the most notable climate forums of 2017. Taking on honest discussions, posing and tackling critical questions and challenging the status quo was at the top of our agenda. This proved to position us as thought leaders and create relationships with key stakeholders, governments and partners that we will continue to build on today and into the future.
Singapore Fintech Festival 2017
In November Karim and Kristoffer joined the Singapore Fintech Festival, together with companies from Copenhagen Rainmaking Loft as part of a Danish delegation for creating relationships between the fintech industry in Singapore and Copenhagen. We see a lot of potential in collaborating with the industry in Singapore, and we will be keeping a close eye on blockchain developments coming from one of the busiest port cities in the world.
Our Key Takeaways Amidst the Pandemonium
However hyped we thought blockchain was before, this year blew everything out of the water. ‘How to buy Bitcoin’ has now surpassed ‘Donald Trump’ in google searches, Ethereum has conspicuously proven with their million dollar ‘Crypto Kitties’ that value is whatever society deems it to be and everyone seems to be in a bubble of mass pandemonium filled with get rich quick schemes and speculatory high risk investments in cryptocurrencies. We have to admit that navigating this space has been challenging at best but we do believe that honest steps have been taken towards a collective effort in redefining our broken system and building the decentralised economy of the future. We are just getting started, folks!
Here are 3 of our key political and technical takeaways and focus areas going forward:
- Centralisation, monopolies and cybersecurity are the biggest threats to our technological and societal progress. Value creation is currently one sided; those that stand to benefit are the 1% of the digital unicorn corporations and elites that define and build the system solely for their gain. In this new digital age, we need to redistribute power, prevent it from being taken back and ensure that value is created for both sides of platform and technology users. We must build the commons as the foundation for a decentralised and inclusive future — this means distributed and sovereign digital and physical infrastructure accompanied by open and free knowledge bases and value-added applications for society.
- Playtime is over, it is time to truly understand and apply blockchain before we miss the hype train and the powers that be label this movement as nothing but a phase. Blockchain is not the only tool in our toolbox but it will be an important one. Instead of using bitcoin and blockchain as speculatory investment vehicles, let’s focus on understanding and meaningfully applying these voluntary and bottom up governance models, the power of a community in creating systemic change, the decentralised technology, protocols and practices that are uprooting our global financial system and the incentives (and de-incentives) we need to build into our future systems that encourage continual adaptation, evolution, growth in a direction that serves all who contribute.
- We need sovereign regulations as drivers for change and good governance in these new complex systems we are trying to build. The Silicon Valley libertarians would have us believe that government regulation is out to get us when it is them, the tech-giant-lobbyists, who in fact control these governments and regulations in order to perpetuate and serve their monopolistic and rent seeking practices at the expense of the middle and lower classes, or the other 99.5% of our economy. We cannot reject the fact that efficient and impartial regulations, standards, best practices, frameworks and compliance tools are the key drivers in creating inclusive adoption, participation and engagement. As messy as it might get, we need to find ways to collectively and independently define these these factors on our own terms going forward.
A Tragic End to a Beautiful Beginning
It is with heavy hearts that we formally announce the sudden passing of our co-founder, advisor, sustainability trailblazer, guiding star and dear friend, Maurice (Mossy) Meehan. While there are no words that can express this kind of sorrow, we can express the legacy he leaves behind in us, Carbon War Room, his fellow industry comrades and his family and friends. Mossy has forever imparted on us his vivacious lust for life and playful imagination, his unwavering morals and values and his quest to make the world a better place than he found it. He taught us that net neutral contributions to society and our planet are not good enough — that it is our imperative to create a net positive, no excuses, full stop. He was a man of action who wasted no time, who took no one for granted and who left nothing unsaid. Even in his untimely and tragic passing he brought those he believed in together, each of us representing a crucial piece of the bigger picture that he had figured out long before the rest of us. We are now intimately and collectively bound by his greater purpose and the focus and resolve to carry on his decarbonisation work as a means to create systemic, progressive change and build a legacy for his daughters and wife to be proud of.
Splash247 also wrote a beautiful obituary for Maurice which can be read here
In November Karim and Kristoffer joined the Singapore Fintech Festival, together with companies from Copenhagen Rainmaking Loft as part of a Danish delegation for creating relationships between the fintech industry in Singapore and Copenhagen. We see a lot of potential in collaborating with the industry in Singapore, and we will be keeping a close eye on blockchain developments coming from one of the busiest port cities in the world.
Best of Our Publications, Interviews and News:
Our CEO, Deanna, interviewed for the hit Danish technology show ‘So Ein Ding’
Blockchain for Development: Katherine Foster at UNiTAR on Digital Infrastructure for SDGs
Blockchain System Successfully Deployed to Revolutionise the Logistics Industry
Shipping Giant Deploys Blockchain to Combat Industry Cyberattacks — Cointelegraph
The Implications of an Interoperable Shipping Data Platform are Immense — Splash247
Token Gesture? Article in FutureNautics Issue #5
Men in Block — an investigation into use cases. FutureNautics Issue #16
