Developer Spotlight: Kryha
A highlight of some of the projects being built on the Oasis network today.
This week, for our second Developer Spotlight, we’re showcasing the exciting work BASF and the blockchain experts at Kryha are doing on the Oasis Network. Hear from BASF’s Alexa Smith, along with Tobias Disse and Deniz Yilmaz from Kryha.
Read more to find out what they’re up to and how you can get involved.
Tell us a little bit about yourself.
Kryha is a blockchain studio located in Amsterdam. We actualize the potential value of blockchain technology for our clients. We help companies like BASF, Shell, KLM, and Daimler in exploring and developing meaningful use-cases, strategizing the approach and iteratively building the software and ecosystem. Most of our time is spent on concept & business model design, ecosystem development and iterative software development using blockchain/DLT protocols. Basically, we’re there to help those that are responsible for changing their business!
BASF creates chemistry for a sustainable future. We combine economic success with environmental protection and social responsibility. The approximately 122,000 employees in the BASF Group work on contributing to the success of our customers in nearly all sectors and almost every country in the world. Our portfolio is organized into six segments: Chemicals, Materials, Industrial Solutions, Surface Technologies, Nutrition & Care and Agricultural Solutions. The BASF Blockchain Lab was founded in 2018 with the goal of providing educational, advisory, and development resources to BASF innovators interested in learning about and experimenting with blockchain technology. Kryha has been a key partner for the Lab’s development efforts.
And a bit about your project?
Kryha and BASF are working together to build out a decentralized calculation platform that incentivizes companies to share operational and supply chain data without compromising on confidentiality. The platform in turn uses the data to complete social and environmental impact calculations. Some of the key challenges around impact measurement today involve the lack of incentives for corporates, both for their actions and for providing their data. This solution can address some of those problems by providing financial rewards to both the companies carrying out positive impact-creating activities in real-life as well as the third-party partners that provide necessary data and parameters for the calculations. We believe that solving this key problem can lead to more interesting and novel uses for these impact metrics.
When and why did you first get excited about blockchain technology?
We each have our own story that’s really converged with Kryha. Tobias got actively involved in blockchain during his time at UC Berkeley, where he co-founded Blockchain at Berkeley and spent most of his time building out the consultancy. After returning to the Netherlands and graduating at dutch consulting, he co-founded Kryha together with Thom Bergman and Haischel Dabian.
Deniz found out about Ethereum early 2017, read the whitepaper until 04:30AM and has been fascinated ever since. Its significance was immediately apparent to him and nudged him into writing content about the topic and getting involved in online communities. Through active participation in Amsterdam’s Meetup community, Deniz got in touch with Tobias and joined Kryha shortly thereafter.
Alexa has been working in the blockchain space since early 2016 on both the corporate and startup side. Before joining BASF, she was a founding team member and the Director of Market Development at Xpansiv, an early-stage startup focused on the use of blockchain for the differentiation of commodities based on environmental and social impact. She joined BASF’s digital innovation team in 2017, which helps connect BASF’s business units to opportunities to explore emerging technology through engagements with startups, universities, and corporate co-creators. Alexa quickly realized that the traditional approach to corporate innovation was not working for blockchain, and as a result, she founded the BASF Blockchain Lab. Over the course of one year, the Lab has evaluated 40+ use cases, introduced the community to cutting-edge projects and technical concepts, run several design sprints for outside-the-box use cases, and built out several PoC solutions, including this collaboration with Kryha and Oasis.
What made you interested in building on the Oasis network?
Looking at the protocols available, Oasis just seemed like the best fit for this project. Confidentiality-preserving computation is a big requirement of the platform that we intend to build and the use of secure hardware made a lot of sense. There are a couple of other projects out there that seemingly meet the requirements, but the Oasis team seemed like the most credible and accessible. We got great support during our development and Oasis was always open for feedback or even giving us access to code (that was unrealized) to try and test. This allowed us to keep our customer happy and ensure a high degree of quality.
Any big milestones coming up for your project that our readers should know about?
For the next few months, we plan to build further iterations of the platform, based on the learnings of our initial PoC. As we go, we plan to leverage any additional functionalities that the Oasis team implement. We will be working on a pilot recruitment effort to test the solution with supply chain partners and data providers.
How can others try out your product? Learn more about what you’re up to?
For those interested in learning more about this particular project, please contact Alexa Smith at blockchain@basf.com.
If you want to learn more about Kryha and their services? Get in touch with Tobias directly via tobias@kryha.io, we’re happy to hop on a call!
For more info on Oasis Labs go to www.oasislabs.com or email us at info@oasislabs.com.
