Working with Odyssey to build the architecture for Momentum 2020
And Keyko’s participation in Odyssey Momentum 2020
What’s the Odyssey Momentum hackathon
Odyssey is a non-profit online incubator that connects governmental, corporate, and nonprofit partners with innovative ideas to collaboratively address complex 21st-century challenges. They are the organizers of the Odyssey hackathon, one of the most important global events in the blockchain space. This year, the Odyssey hackathon evolves into 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.
Since earlier this year, Keyko worked hand-in-hand with the Odyssey team during the conception and definition of Momentum and supported Odyssey during their analysis phases. We provided consulting in decentralization and technical definition of the Momentum architecture. Now, as part of the Odyssey Momentum 2020 hackathon, Keyko is keen to participate, along with other companies such as Gimly, Log Sentinnel, EonPass8 and Sensefinity in the Internet of Logistics Track to help KLM & DHL tacke issues related to data provenance in the context of air cargo.
Internet of Logistics: The Compliant Air Cargo Flow challenge
This year, Momentum is partnering with several players from different industries, like Merck, KLM and DHL to try and solve some of the issues they are facing in conducting everyday business. One of the most interesting tracks of Momentum for Keyko is the Compliant air cargo flow challenge and this is what we chose to collaborate on.
“Fake and counterfeit medications kill tens of thousands of people around the world each year, with profits funding other criminal activities.
While this has always been a hot topic, the COVID-19 vaccine has really put it in the spotlight: imagine the first batches of vaccines arriving after being compromised, tampered with or not kept cool throughout their journey.
How would that affect global trust in a COVID-19 vaccine?
COVID-19 has revealed the crucial role of the supply-chain within the global economy. In addition to security, speed and flexibility are now more critical than ever.
Within the context of COVID-19, effective data sharing and transparency are the way forward to improve collaboration within the supply chain. If you want to be fast while mitigating risks, you need to be a team-player. You cannot afford to wait a week to release your data, even towards a competitor.”
What’s the problem that KLM, DHL, etc. are trying to solve?
“Currently, every supply chain stakeholder maintains their own data silo and there is no transparent, trusted and secure way to share data. This creates a lack of consistent data (timely, complete and accurate) and actors are unable to recognize or stop transportation of counterfeit, dangerous goods on their own. The result is delay and uncertainty.
The various parties understand that more regulations, compliance and data hoarding won’t work. What is needed is transparent collaboration and validation through solutions such as a virtual twin protocol or decentralized identifiers for products and parts. These solutions cannot add to the costs, as COVID-19 vaccine production and distribution have very low margins throughout the chain.
The problem detailed here described a complex Data Ecosystem environment where independent organizations with different problems, technologies and business processes need to cooperate to achieve the common goal of delivering the cargo in time, perfect conditions in a secure way.”
How is Keyko going to help?
Keyko specializes in building Digital Ecosystems. For us, helping a supply chain ecosystem with dozens of independent organizations cooperate with the same common goal of delivering vaccines in a secure way in an untrusted environment is an incredible motivation.
Primary Challenges
Some of the main challenges identified in a typical air cargo flow are:
- With multiple isolated and unrelated systems everywhere, there is no unique source of truth. There is no complete provenance record that can be trusted
- The associated product can be tampered with or replaced with a counterfeit during transportation
- The custom office needs to know upfront that some goods are going to need to be validated
- The supply chain lacks transparency. If something goes wrong, it’s difficult to understand how this happened
- It is difficult to recognize a bad actor and mitigate the impact of their actions
- There is no effective and secure data sharing between parties
- The physical world is badly connected to the digital world
How does Keyko plan to improve this?
During Odyssey we are going to work in an on-chain Provenance registry based on W3C Provenance specifications. The W3C provides a generic and standard way to track the information about entities, activities and people involved in producing data or things.
Our motivation here is to provide a unique source of truth for all the parties involved during the cargo process. Our solution will be based on Smart Contracts and will include:
- A complete provenance record during the whole cargo lifecycle. This will provide a complete lineage of the goods during the cargo flow, since the manufacturing until the final delivery.
- The digital signatures of all the parties involved. To avoid the goods tampering, during the handover of the goods between parties the signatures of the parties involved are collected. In the same provenance record the solution is going to keep these digital signatures to identify the entities involved.
- The integrity fingerprint of the digital assets involved. Any physical good going through the cargo flow has multiple digital files and metadata associated with it. This can include manufacturing details, product specifications, quality controls, etc. We are able to record the fingerprint of these digital assets to flag if any of them are changed afterward.
What are the main benefits of Keyko’s solution?
- In this solution, digital signatures are required for each step in the supply chain process, thus making it possible to identify if an unexpected actor is taking the cargo and at what point happened
- We make an on-chain provenance record available as a unique source of truth, which provides a complete data lineage for the cargo
- Existing and independent Supply Chain Management (SCM) software components used by the different entities participating in the supply chain process can be plugged to the network without modifications to make information available to specific users
- By notifying the customs office upfront, we can facilitate the process of receiving and clearing incoming cargo
- Increased transparency: the complete transaction record is kept in an unique and decentralized place where everybody involved (given the right permissions) can get access to relevant information generated during the supply chain process
- Our solution provides an automatic way of sharing digital assets and metadata related with the cargo ( Such as quality control checks, receipts, customs clearance documents, etc.)
- Analytics and federated learning across all the parties data
Let the collaboration begin!
Momentum is kicking off this evening and we are incredibly excited to be participating. The Compliant Air Cargo Flow challenge that we’re collaborating on is of much interest to us and we’re confident that we are equipped with the best solution for tackling the issue.
And, more than that, we are eager to work on this challenge using a product we have been incubating for some time and are now making publicly available (some clues in this article). It’s going to be fun!
