RightMesh at the India Blockchain Week
Author’s note: This is my account of an event that happened several months ago, and because of other priorities, this half-written post never got around to be being completed, until now. That week was so good, though, that it really needs to be recounted.
In late-September of 2017, I was fortunate to travel to Mumbai, India to attend the ‘India Blockchain Week’ organized by Somish and Fintech Worldwide Ltd. While RightMesh team members attended, and presented at, numerous blockchain events around the world during that time (in fact, there were 2 other concurrent events in Dubai and London attended by our team at that exact same time), I personally was really excited to attend this event to explore the state of blockchain technology in an emerging market such as India, while spreading awareness about RightMesh and gathering community feedback about our platform. Undoubtedly, India is an important key market for RightMesh.
The event itself did not disappoint — it was a well coordinated five day program that started with a blockchain hackathon on Friday evening until Sunday, followed by a full two day conference on Monday and Tuesday.
The Hackathon
Because we’re are a team of people that thrives on challenges, we of course had to participate in the blockchain hackathon (challenge accepted!). I was joined by my talented colleagues from Khulna, Bangladesh to be a part of the ‘Hack The Block’ hackathon, and it was hosted at a great venue — Rise Mumbai.
The hackathon problem statement: to design a blockchain-based ID system that would transform the way organizations interact with consumers.
While we thought the statement was a bit abstract, we went ahead and narrowed it down to a specific yet monumental challenge — to design a global identity system that would include the 1.5 billion people in the world today who have no documents whatsoever to prove their identity. After all, blockchain technology is a technology that is all about inclusion, and we believe that to be its real true power!
Our prototype was designed using a trust-based system for creating and establishing identities and relied on the mobile device and mesh networking to allow users to create and establish their identities to another individual or organization.
While our solution and demo was well appreciated by the rest of the teams, it unfortunately was not what the judges expected. The judges (who came from banks and VCs) were more interested in private blockchain / DLT-type solutions that their financial institutions could adopt. At that point, I had to laugh to myself thinking about the sheer irony of all this.
Banks are so interested in how this technology can help them to be more efficient and profitable, when this is the very technology that could potentially wipe them out in 10 years time.
Nevertheless, the hackathon was a lot of fun, and our whole team really enjoyed it!
The Event
The conference started on Monday at the Leela Mumbai, and it indeed was a refreshing change to see an engaged audience participate in most sessions, unlike a lot of other conferences that end up being more networking and less learning from others.
The moderator of the first panel discussion set the tone right by asking the audience of their background in blockchain: approximately 5% or less understood blockchain very well; 70% had a bit of an idea of what blockchain was and were trying to figure out how they could use it (if at all); the rest just wanted to understand what the buzz was all about. Based on who I talked to at the conference, I would estimate that the audience was a healthy mix of developers and executives from financial institutions and service companies.
It was great to be a part of an accomplished panel of individuals on day 1 to discuss the ICO craze. Along with Max Kordek from Lisk, Anirudh Rastogi from TRA Law, Brad Yasar from KrowdMentor, Ish Goel from Somish, we had an interesting panel discussion talking about the types of ICO projects that exist today (including the scams), what it takes to have a successful ICO, the difference in a security token vs. protocol token, the confusion surrounding regulations around ICOs especially in India, and what projects need to do post-ICO. I thought it turned out to be a well balanced discussion that got a variety of perspectives and proved to be an entertaining one as well! Thanks to Ish and the IBW’17 team for inviting me to represent RightMesh’s upcoming ICO project as a model of one that is doing things right!
While the overall event was well managed, I was a bit disappointed with the keynote and panel discussion themes. One cannot argue that the use of blockchain is beneficial in areas of supply chain, governance, and financial services — and these are most likely going to be the first real applicable use cases of the technology.
Yet, there are much more far reaching implications of blockchain and cryptocurrencies — especially for emerging countries — that were not being looked at or discussed.
I had the opportunity to do so on day 2 in my talk on the “Future of the Sharing Economy” — and specifically why it needs blockchain. Instead of talking for 20 minutes about RightMesh exclusively, I felt it was more important to provide a high level view to the audience on one of the real benefits of blockchain — enabling true peer to peer economies.
One can only hope the benefits of the sharing economy would be looked at as a viable way for emerging economies to leapfrog developed nations, not only in terms of reducing the digital divide — which is what RightMesh intends to do — but across other sectors as well. Interestingly, right after my talk, I was part of a lively discussion outside the conference hall with a group of individuals talking about how solar energy could be produced and distributed in a peer to peer sharing economy — such a great idea and opportunity to solve a major problem that exists in many emerging markets today!
It was encouraging to receive a lot of good feedback post the talk, and it seemed that many people who really did not get the concept of blockchain started to understand the benefits the technology could bring. The more people who begin to really appreciate blockchain — from both technical and business standpoints — the greater the ecosystem will grow, and the greater the positive impact will be.
A Great Week
In summary, it was a superb week in Mumbai! It was certainly great to see all the activity taking place in the blockchain space in India. As in any new and nascent technology, the initial work that is being done will be all around the edges and not in the actual core, until people can figure it out. I’m confident, though, that countries like India will be at the forefront of blockchain protocols and applications. It is a technology that will drive inclusion of all classes of society — in ways that no technology has before.
Here’s hoping the work we are doing with RightMesh will inspire a new breed of entrepreneurs and driven individuals to create the next wave of sharing economies.
