Fishcoin Team At The Singapore Blockchain Summit

Talking with the crypto community in Singapore about our seafood focused blockchain project along with Dr. Darian McBain, Global Director of Sustainable Development at Thai Union

Typically the events our team attends are not so much focused on blockchain or the crypto community, but either the seafood industry or mobile technology. While Fishcoin is definitely a blockchain project, our long term success is far more related to aligning with the interests of those who can scale Fishcoin within their own enterprises. In fact, while writing this several of us are actually heading to the Hong Kong Seafood Expo to meet with partners and to speak at the event about Fishcoin — and after that we are headed to the GSMA’s Mobile 360 event in Bangkok to connect with mobile operators who can likewise benefit from the Fishcoin ecosystem. With that said, it is interesting to connect with the blockchain / crypto community from time to time, which is what we had the opportunity to do at the Singapore Blockchain Summit this past week. Below are a few takeaways:

1. Start with a problem, not a technology — This is the typical scenario… teams start with blockchain and then find industries to apply the technology. This is actually a similar pattern to the .com era or other times of technological shifts. Companies find that a new technology represents an opportunity so they start with the technology and search for a use case, rather than starting with the problem to be solved. Fishcoin is very different. With Fishcoin we started with a problem we had to solve (lack of incentives for data sharing within fragmented seafood supply chains) and found that blockchain was well suited to be part of that solution. We weren’t looking to use blockchain, we were looking to capture more data and we found blockchain was a means to get there.
2. Industry focus is critical — Our booth at the Blockchain Summit had a constant stream of people coming to ask questions and learn more about the project. During that time we had numerous people remark to us that ours was the most credible project at the event. While we couldn’t speak for the other projects one way or the other, it does seem like in the blockchain space there are a great many projects that are essentially solutions looking for problems across a wide spectrum of industry verticals. The challenge is that many of these solutions become a mile wide and an inch deep as they try to equally address a wide range of unique challenges, but only at a high level. Not that we have everything figured out, far from it in fact, but in our experience it is hard to get industry adoption at 30,000 feet.
3. Partnerships make all the difference — We were extremely fortunate to be joined by one of our partners, Darian McBain from Thai Union, who was also speaking at the event. In fact, Darian was one of the primary reasons we were at the event. In addition to being an incredible speaker she is also someone who believes in the necessity of incentives and therefore a supporter of Fishcoin. Naturally with all the blockchain projects represented at the conference people had questions about their relevance or scalability, but with Fischoin we had Darian, representing one of the largest seafood companies in the world, who could provide answers.

Just prior to Darian’s talk I had the privilege of giving a 20 minute talk about how we are applying blockchain to the seafood industry. If you listen carefully you can hear some not so subtle Baywatch references in both of our talks.

Below are my slides:

Interested in becoming a Fishcoin partner?

Companies and organizations throughout the seafood industry are signing up almost daily to be rollout partners in the Fishcoin ecosystem. If you would like to know more about joining our community of partners please read through our white paper, and contact our team.