Sensei guiding the Way
into the Odyssey Momentum: a virtual hackathon experience
Odyssey is a non-profit online collaboration environment that connects governmental, corporate, and nonprofit partners with innovative ideas to collaboratively address complex 21st-century challenges. On November 13, they opened the doors of the Odyssey hackathon, one of the most important global events in the blockchain space.
This year, the Odyssey hackathon was rebranded and redesigned as Momentum, a unique, purpose-built Online Mass Collaboration Arena, which combines the virtual elements of a video game with meeting design in order to provide a fully immersive 3D experience.
Our social experience — platform, interaction with other participants, jury, etc.
The event happened in an extremely creative and complex virtual space, built for entertainment and functionality. Each team had an individualized space that could be customized and “meme-ified”.This space was intended to be the rallying point for each team to present who they are, what they are working on, and what their solution is. It was also a gathering space for the team as well as others to meet and discuss objectives, solution ideas, collaborations, etc…
Integrated into the Mass Collaboration Arena was an interface providing the ability to enter specifics about the team and solution details. This then linked to a Miro board for a full representation of each team’s goals and accomplishments.
Our Path to Enlightenment — the Odyssey Way
In last week’s blog post we described the challenge and provided a first cut of the solution we wanted to propose and implement for the Compliant Air Cargo Flow challenge as part of the Internet of Logistics track.
Turns out, however, that one of the best parts of Odyssey is not the intense coding and lack of sleep, but the opportunity to “sit down” with industry leaders and Challenge Owners to really try to understand what their pain points and priorities are when it comes to innovation.
Having a better understanding of the problems the Challenge Owners were trying to solve we realized that, even though our solution contained some of the building blocks we still needed to dive deeper into the matter.
The first thing that comes to mind when providing a solution for supply chains is provenance. By provenance we mean keeping track of all the interactions between all the authenticated parties involved and keeping a tamper proof and immutable record of those interactions. Doing this on-chain is not a new problem and solutions have existed since the inception of Bitcoin. In fact, we were doing it for digital art all the way back in 2014 at ascribe.io.
Still, this is one of the fundamental building blocks of any supply chain solution and since it’s part of our work philosophy not to reinvent the wheel, we decided to implement the W3C Provenance specification on the Ethereum blockchain. Bam! Solved the supply chain problem!
Interoperability FTW!
Well…not quite. With that out of the way we set out to solve what we believe was the biggest problem that the Challenge Owners were facing: Interoperability.
A global supply chain includes a large number of entities and participants, from the manufacturer to freighter forwarders and subcontractors, to customs agencies. All counter parties need to work together to make it possible to deliver cargo to and from anywhere in the world in a timely manner. All of these entities along the supply chain produce and require access to certain data for different reasons: for compliance reasons, or to know what type of cargo is being shipped and how it should be handled.
Keeping track of who handled the cargo from point of origin to destination is something that can be solved by a provenance registry, but how do you ensure that the cargo is correctly handled and is not tampered with? And in case something goes wrong, how do we know who was responsible and how we detect the problems in a timely manner so that they can be resolved as soon as possible?
Nevermined to the Rescue
Enter Nevermined, fresh out of the oven. With Nevermined we aim to provide a secure and privacy preserving, enterprise grade data sharing solution.
One of the core beliefs of Nevermined is that the data should not move. Nevermined itself does not store any data. Instead it integrates with existing data repositories and makes the data discoverable between the participants of a Nevermined data ecosystem. When a participant wants to access some data, it first needs to request access from the data provider, giving the data provider a fine grained control on who can access certain data.
With both provenance and data sharing building blocks we started thinking about how our application should look like. For ease of use we decided to build a mobile application in which each entity in the supply chain would scan a QR code on the cargo and discover the data associated with that cargo. A typical supply chain flow would work like the following:
- A manufacturer would create some metadata about the cargo and register on-chain with Nevermined.
- This metadata would contain information on how to access the House Waybill with information about the cargo.
- With this metadata registered on-chain, the manufacturer can generate a QR code with a unique identifier that points to the metadata.
- A ground freight forwarder, at pickup would scan the QR code and this action would authenticate both parties during the handover as well as present the freight forwarder with additional information about the cargo.
- After analyzing the data, the ground freighter can accept responsibility for the shipment.
- This would trigger a new event on-chain on the provenance registry that is digitally signed by all parties involved.
- Moreover, the freight forwarder can append more data associated with the cargo through Nevermined, like for instance, a Freight Waybill.
- This process repeats itself at each step of the supply chain until the cargo reaches the intended recipient or something wrong is flagged at one of the steps.
Fast forward 49 hours of intense coding, sore eyes, coffee, memes and a fair amount of other ✌️non-✌️alcoholic drinks, we were ready to demo our solution.
The final solution was built entirely in TypeScript and integrated into Nevermined using the Nevermined JavaScript sdk.
This flow demonstrates how a freighter would interact with the app in order to accept shipment responsibility for some cargo: a) he would start choosing the respective cargo from a list; b) it would get access to some information about the cargo; c) it would scan the QR code on the cargo to make sure it’s picking up the right shipment and optionally append some more information; d) if accepted the status of the shipment is updated and registered on-chain.
Bonus Round — Decentralized Data Analysis
It’s typical for parties involved in the supply chain to add data catalogers to the cargo while it is in their care. This is extremely important when the cargo contains medical supplies, like for instance, Covid-19 vaccines that need to be maintained in a certain temperature range.
The process of how the temperatures are checked at the time of handover between two freighters is mostly manual. The freight forwarder taking over the cargo will check the temperature at the time of arrival and this gives only a very narrow view of the way the cargo was handled.
In order to make this process more reliable and efficient, we decided to extend our solution and use another feature of Nevermined that we call Data In-Situ Computation (DISC). DISC was created for data providers that don’t want to allow access to the data per se, but want to allow third parties to run computations over the data. Nevermined enables this by providing all the tools necessary to bring the computations to the data.
Our use case assumed that a Covid-19 vaccine manufacturer would include in their cargo containers temperature sensors, thus becoming a data provider. A freight forwarder, before accepting the cargo, could request (or pay for) permission from the manufacturer to run some computation over that data, that would check if up to this point the cargo had been maintained at a correct temperature. If the result comes back negative, the freight forwarder would flag the shipment for further analysis to determine if there is an issue with the shipment. Ultimately, the might result in the freight forwarder deciding to not take responsibility for the shipment.
This flow is similar to the previous one except that after scanning the QR code we learn that this is a temperature sensitive shipment, and have the option to run a temperature analysis over the data provided by one or multiple data providers.
This can be done in a privacy preserving manner such that the freighter requesting the analysis does not learn anything other than if the temperature went above or below a certain threshold.
Key Takeaways
Odyssey is an important event for two main reasons: it enabled us to talk directly with industry leaders and understand in detail the problems that they are trying to solve; and it enabled us to network with like minded people and organizations.
It also gave us a chance to battle test Nevermined. This was great given that it’s such a new product, the learnings we took home will allow us to further our product market fit.
Moving forward we will continue to improve Nevermined. And having learned about all the unsolved challenges of the supply chain industry, we will continue to improve on the work we did during the Odyssey hackathon and make the supply chain example a showcase for Nevermined. So, keep an eye on our repo on Github, where all the action is!
We would like to give a big shout-out to G Boccadifuoco for keeping track of everything Odyssey related, organizing, and herding the team to make sure everybody was where they were supposed to be at all times (seriously how do you do it?)
Also to our demo presenters Don Gossen with his shady internet connection and Jernej Pregelj for taking one for the team and get on camera to present our solution (he wasn’t given a chance to refuse).
Oana for forcing me to write this.
And all of the The Keyko Dōjō sensei.
Keyko is a Web 3.0 solutions provider offering integrated decentralized solutions and advisory for enterprise and startups. We thrive on providing organizations and individuals insights into this emerging digital world where capitalism and ownership are being profoundly rethought.
If you would like to know more about our services or are interested in having a chat please reach out to us on info@keyko.io or visit our website here.
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