We continue our overview of enterprise blockchain presentations and panel discussions of early summer with this recap of day one of the BSV Global Blockchain Convention in Dubai at the end of May 2022.
Our short summaries give you an overview of the content, while the video links give you a chance to catch up on the ones that are relevant to you.
A better world with the original Bitcoin protocol
Founding President of the BSV Blockchain Association, Jimmy Nguyen kicked off day two of the Global Blockchain Convention in Dubai reintroducing the question of his opening speech: ‘What kind of world do you want to create – with blockchain in particular?’
Answering for the BSV Blockchain Association, he stated that they do not want a world where thousands of cryptocurrencies are created simply for speculative trading on centralised exchanges, digital assets offering no real utility due to exorbitant fees, or coins created to fuel illicit trades.
Instead, the BSV Blockchain Association wishes to see a world where the original Bitcoin protocol’s potential is unlocked to create a better world, including an improved Internet – web3.
BSV for retail payments, remittances and rewards
In the first session of the day, Centbee’s Co-founder and CEO, Lorien Gamaroff illustrated how BSV’s ability to offer low cost digital payments has enabled them to offer a wallet that lets people in most countries around the world spend BSV at participating retail stores to buy from top brands.
Gamaroff also went into how BSV’s micropayments enables Centbee’s Honey Programme, a way to incentivise people to use and engage with the wallet, and onboard new users. People earn Honey (satoshis, or BSV cents) instantly for actions like logging in, checking their transactions, looking at all the products available in the store, changing their theme or adding a profile photo – and completing their identity verification.
The Honey Programme was launched with great fanfare through a competition in partnership with the Bitcoin Association for BSV. Given the sales growth they’ve seen so far, Centbee is considering relocating its marketing budget from often ineffective and excluding online advertising campaigns to their Honey Programme, so wallet users can earn for their effort.
Panel – Better payments with BSV
Moderator – Patrick Thompson – Associate Editor, CoinGeek North America
Panellists:
- Lorien Gamaroff – Co-Founder and CEO, Centbee
- Kumaraguru Ramanujam – Founder and CEO, MoneySwipe, BSV Blockchain Association Amb. India
- Bernhard Müller – General Manager and Chairman, Centi Ltd.
- Rafa Jiménez Seibane – Co-Founder and CTO, HandCash
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Moderator, Patrick Thompson (Associate Editor, CoinGeek North America) referred back to the Bitcoin white paper’s title, ‘Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System’ to justify the importance of the topic of ‘Better payments with BSV’.
On the new opportunities and business models enabled by BSV’s ability to send as little as a cent with negligible fees, Seibane pointed to how Haste Arcade’s instant leaderboard payout system that can split small payments (paid per play) between up to 1,000 participants changes how gamers interact with a game – not for money, but to compete on a leaderboard. Additionally, HandCash’s wallet lets any gaming app integrate with it so gamers only have to fund a single wallet to participate. While this offers gamers tremendous convenience, it also frees gaming companies from needing licences to store user funds and securing these.
Müller pointed out that micropayments are just as valuable for more traditional business cases, like content paywalls for which credit card payments are only feasible within a subscription model and loyalty programmes that are traditionally siloed. By implementing BSV’s micropayments and Paymail addresses, Centi enables pay-per-use content models and interoperable loyalty programmes.
Also participating in this panel were Lorien Gamaroff (Co-Founder and CEO, Centbee) and Kumaraguru Ramanujam (Founder and CEO, MoneySwipe, BSV Blockchain Association Ambassador for India).
Better invoice management with blockchain
Muhammad Salman Anjum, Chief Mate of InvoiceMate, Head of the BSV blockchain Hub for MENA and South Asia took to the stage to talk about how InvoiceMate solves the real world business issue of inefficient invoice processing and how this results in saving professionals much effort, time and resources.
InvoiceMate is targeting three problems in three different areas:
- Digital transformation in the corporate world including data silos, a lack of integrity, overly centralised workflows and a broken architecture.
- The blockchain ecosystem where there’s a disconnect between digital assets and blockchain technology and a lack of production-grade blockchain applications.
- The current invoicing model that suffers from fake invoicing, under invoicing or over invoicing, insecurity and inefficiency, reconciliation and supplier management issues and the unavailability of integration with cryptocurrencies and lack of Islamic Invoice Financing.
InvoiceMate addresses these pain points by using blockchain to provide a trusted layer to solve the trust issues of the other two sectors.
NFTs: What Can We Do Better?
Miguel Duarte – Product Engineer at Run Interactive introduced their framework that allows developers, entrepreneurs and creators to turn their dreams into reality using the Bitcoin blockchain.
The recent NFT boom where everything from tweets to colours were tokenised proved that people love owning things on the Internet. Although NFTs provided benefits like helping creators to fund their work, they haven’t been able to preserve their value like traditional collectibles, for example, Pokemon cards. Duarte pointed out that unlike a Pokemon card, NFTs generally don’t have any use beyond trading, and lack integration into a bigger ecosystem that people already love.
He then goes on to answer the question of how Run is creating the next generation of NFTs to have genuine utility and wide use.
Fabriik: Powering Markets for BSV, NFTs and Other Digital Assets
Steve Bailey, Chief Operating Officer, Fabriik, started off by introducing the company’s vision that everyone, everywhere to be able to reimagine prosperity in the digital economy. The institutional arm of their digital financial services business, Round Rock, focusses on serving large liquidity customers and its white glove concierge trading services so the Fabriik team can focus on delivering products and services for individual investors.
Among the products and services they’ve delivered, he lists:
- Round Rock’s crypto trading desk
- Round Rock’s trading API that offers a programmatic way of trading digital assets.
- Round Rock’s Market Making service that utilises their proprietary trading system to buy/sell orders 24/7 to boost liquidity for digital assets.
- Fabriik’s Weave API – a super simple crypto to crypto exchange tool that’s used by CryptoFights.
- Fabriik wallet – a self-custodial, mobile-first, multi-currency wallet where you can buy, swap and store top
- cryptocurrencies instantly and cheaply – all in one place. The wallet also boasts competitively priced fiat on and off ramps.
Bailey announced that Fabriik wallet users will be able to buy BSV in the app later in 2022. The company is also partnering with a Tier 1 payment processor to facilitate more seamless fiat on and off ramps in future.
Panel discussion – The future of digital asset exchanges and investment
Moderator – Marcin Zarakowski – General Counsel and Chief of Staff, BSV Blockchain Association
Panellists:
- Armen Azatyan – CEO and Co-Founder, DXS.app (formerly TDXP)
- Patrick Bärtschi – Head of Business Development, Bittrex Global
- Antonio Brasse – CPA, CIA, CFSA, CISA, CAMS, CEO and Co-Founder, BlockQuake
- Valentin Preobrazhenskiy – CEO and Founder, LATOKEN
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Zarakowski opened the floor of the next panel discussion by asking Azatyan about their platform’s use of BSV. Azatyan disclosed that their business model was only possible due to a BSV infrastructure operating under the hood.
Brasse expounded on the company’s progress in listing BSV on their exchange, talking about the technology revamp their undertaking to facilitate listing BSV against almost any crypto or fiat currency.
On Bittrex’s BSV offering, Bärtschi mentioned the crypto and fiat trading pairs available, the exceptional BSV trading volume on their exchange and the demand of institutional lending.
Preobrazhenskiy announced that LATOKEN will list BSV in 2022.
Zarakowski then asked panel participants whether crypto collapses like the recent one relating to stable coin TerraUSD and its sister coin Luna can be avoided, and how investors can protect themselves from market abuse.
Panel discussion – The future of financial services on blockchain: more efficiency and inclusion
Moderator – Naeem Aslam, Columnist at Nasdaq and Founder of Zaye Consulting
Panellists:
- Apollo Eric – CEO and Co-Founder, Bitlipa
- Wojciech Kaszycki – Founder, Chairman and CEO, Mobilum Technologies PLC
- Patrick Prinz – CEO, Monetix, Managing Director, BSV Blockchain Association
- Rafael Schultz – CEO and Founder, Blockchain Punk Labs
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Aslam introduced the topic of NFTs and their place in the financial industry.
On unexplored NFT use cases, Kaszycki said that he believes it could offer functionality such as differential pricing of structured investment products, as a way of signing a contract between a provider and a customer.
When it comes to financial services for the unbanked, Prinz spoke about his partnership with East African countries to promote financial inclusion. One of their projects entails replacing coupons issued by the Ugandan Ministry of Agriculture and Fishing in order to subsidise farming with NFTs.
Schultz expounded on how German regulators have taken the lead in terms of digital assets to speed adoption.
On micropayments and microlending in Africa, Eric expressed his belief that BSV provides the greatest opportunity because of its extremely low cost.
IoT and blockchain
Paul Chiari (CEO, Prime Technology Services of Co-Founder, WeatherSV and Metastreme) opened his talk by relating how their experience in creating and scaling WeatherSV fed into their development of MetaStreme, a set of tools to integrate blockchain technology into virtually any application, device or data source.
MetaStreme removes much of the expense and complexity involved with developing blockchain integrations, as it requires no specialised skill to integrate the technology.
MetaConnect is an API that allows developers to simply integrate applications with the BSV network, facilitate the posting of data and the status of the broadcast.
BSV’s Simple Payment Verification method provides the services with a way to prove the existence and veracity of data without having to keep full copies of the data.
Chiari handed over to Daniel Keane (Co-Founder and Managing Director of Predict Ecology) who challenged the popular concept of IoT devices by indicating how well mobile phones lend themselves to the purpose. He showed an example of how Predict Ecology is using mobile phones for ecological data collection to improve accuracy and longevity of records, while reducing the effort of collecting and analysing data.
Enabling the real world metaverse
Although Richard Baker (CEO and Director of TAAL Distributed Information Technologies) represents a Bitcoin mining company, he feels that the Bitcoin protocol prompted the role of a miner as an enabler of the real world metaverse.
Using the terms ‘digital recreation’ and ‘digital twin’ to describe the nature of the metaverse, Baker hints at the robust infrastructure layer that will be required to underpin this metaverse.
He points out that digital applications are presently siloed, while a blockchain infrastructure unlocks the possibility to unite our digital experiences in the real world while handing people back control of their data.
Panel discussion – Re-inventing business with blockchain
Moderator – Patrick Prinz – CEO, Monetix, Managing Director, BSV Blockchain Association
Panellists:
- Kirsty Barany – Founder and CEO , Clear Sparrow and Kompass Group Global
- ZeMing M. Gao, JD, PhD ABD, MS/2 – Chief Strategy Officer, Toolots Inc., Chief Advisor, Caapable.com, Author, ‘Bitcoin and Beyond’
- Torje Vingen Sunde – CFO, UNISOT, CTO, Abendum
- Kip Twitchell – Executive Director, Sharealedger.org
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On what excites him about the case for the BSV blockchain, Gao revealed that he didn’t have any faith in Bitcoin until he came to understand the technology the BSV was offering.
Looking back at his experience as consultant for enterprises and financial technology, Twitchell sees blockchain as a solution to the financial industry’s lack of machine capacity to bring together all the available datasets. As a shared ledger, blockchain changes the economics of data management systems.
As a serial entrepreneur, Barany spoke of her excitement about BSV’s fast, scalable infrastructure and partner network that allows people to reinvent business.
Sunde told of Abendum’s partnership with the Norwegian Financial Regulator to publish a report on a sandbox project looking at BSV’s capability to function as an evidential record for regulators.
Blockchain for data integrity and business process management
On the question of what nChain can offer business, Hakan Yuksel (CEO of nChain) dives into the enterprise solutions they bring to businesses’ real world problems. The company develops the blockchain infrastructure as well as a platform layer (Kensei) to offer industry solutions to financial services, the gaming industry, supply chain and public services.
In terms of IP, nChain has filed more than 1,000 patents. By partnering with IPwe, they’ve joined a blockchain patent pool that allows companies access to their patents at a tiered-pricing model.
nChain is also working towards realising the promise of the Internet of value in the near future, including connected devices, identity management, tokenisation and peer-to-peer payments.
ArtenRoll: Using Blockchain to Increase Opportunities for Artists
Stephan Nilsson (Co-Founder and CEO of UNISOT) introduced UNISOT as web3 supply chain sustainability platform before handing over to one of their clients, Michal Leszczyński (Founder of ITSEC RandD).
Leszczyński described their ArtenRoll project’s mission of bridging the gap between the digital and physical worlds of art and to provide accurate provenance. Expounding on the problem of provenance in art, he points out that many factors that play a role are undefined with available methods resulting in counterfeits.
ArtenRoll adds a physical tag (that’s not easily removable without destroying the art) to the back of a painting that provides three different ways of authenticating its authentication:
- A unique epoxy pattern that can be validated with specialised equipment.
- An RF chip that can be checked by an RF reader.
- An NFC layer that can be checked with any NFC-enabled devices, including smartphones.
Food supply chain and blockchain
Stephan Nilsson (Co-Founder and CEO of UNISOT) returned to the stage to announce that their application is now live.
Representing UNISOT partner, Amped, Mark Frederiks (Founder of Amped and Local2Local) took over to speak of how he’s been challenging the food system for more than 15 years. For Frederiks, the essence of food transparency is to ensure that partners (from farmer to table) have a connection with each other, which means cutting out intermediaries in logistics and in trade.
Sketching the current scenario, Frederiks tells of a system with countless middlemen disempowering and anonymising the farmer who created the product – resulting in a loss of 10% of farmers per year in the Netherlands. By challenging this food system, we can challenge climate change and ensure that people are fed with good food.
Bioactive natural products and compounds: Blockchain solutions for data integrity
Phil Runyan (Co-Founder, NiftyCo) introduced QNTM Labs, a blockchain solution for data integrity. To illustrate the importance of the solution, he referred to the importance of data provenance in the pharmaceutical industry.
He called to the stage, Justin Ihnken, CEO and Co-founder of QNTM Labs who described the company as a pharmaceutical testing platform designed to bring transparency to the manufacturing process.
According to Ihnken, the world of modern medicine has advanced the element of quality control around the drugs themselves instead of the end user. With 10 to 30 per cent of the drugs sold in developing countries being counterfeit, Ihnken highlights another fundamental flaw of the industry. The commonality in these scenarios is misused trust.
QNTM labs is positioning itself mediating the stakeholder relationship between doctors, patients, regulators, big pharma and politicians by providing the analytical methods and chemistry operations that can deliver high quality data to inform their decisions.
This enhanced data integrity is brought about thanks to the transparent and immutable BSV blockchain.
Live streaming and blockchain
Brooklyn Earick, Chief Marketing Officer of Rad NFTV explained that the company’s name refers to ‘Radical’ (Rad) ‘Non Fungible Television’ (NFTV) and presented a slide to show what the company does.
Rad NFT started off as an immersive video platform, but struggled with the size of VR files. The company tried to address the issue by building a protocol called ARA with peer-to-peer technology, blockchain to verify licences and a token for rewards. Participants who hosted and shared files would be rewarded with tokens.
Although the company received good feedback, the production of new VR content started plateauing so they introduced 2D content to the platform. Although this move brought new users to the platform, they were struggling to find a differentiating factor.
The company started diving into NFTs so creators can set their own terms and get paid faster. With most NFT platforms having very little experience in video and their extreme transaction fees, they started exploring other blockchains, arriving at the BSV blockchain as the one ticking all their boxes.
Making it easy for creators to earn – using BSV blockchain
Morgan Coleman, Co-founder and Co-CEO of LaMint brought to light a pain point of social media content creators monetising their work.
Coleman stated that only one per cent of the 50 million content creators worldwide earn enough from their following to make it their full time job. Yet, the creator economy was worth $104 billion in 2021.
This reality, he says, is ‘the creator economy without Bitcoin’ where people rely on outdated and limited monetisation methods. The main monetisation model is advertising that is unreliable, unpredictable and large Tech platforms benefit far more than creators themselves.
To address the situation, Coleman decided to develop LaMint – a standalone social media platform that democratises the creator economy, wrests control back from Big Tech platforms and puts it back in the hands of creators. The platform empowers creators to unlock their earning potential and turn the content they’re currently giving away for free into a revenue generating asset.
Music and blockchain
Moderator – Marc Scarpa – Co-Founder, DeFiance Media
Panellists:
- Shem Booth-Spain – Co-Founder and CEO, Blarecast Systems Ltd
- Michał Scisłowski – CEO, Soundoshi
- Frames Jenco – Founder, Jamify
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Talking about music and the blockchain, Scarpa introduced the question of how the music industry is broken, with reference to artist fees and payment systems, and how the panellists are addressing these.
Booth-Spain introduced Blarecast, his integrated, fully compliant music distribution platform that ensures that anyone can earn from the music they create, faster and fairer.
For Scisłowski, the music industry’s biggest issue is that streaming services pay artists a flat fee rather than based on the performance of their own music – something that’s only possible through BSV’s micropayments and tremendous throughput capacity.
Frames mentioned the long tail of artists on existing streaming platforms that aren’t getting exposure, despite the quality and marketability of their music. If they should get ‘discovered’, their management will take a large portion of their revenue.
Entertainment, sports and blockchain
Moderator – Marc Scarpa – Co-Founder, DeFiance Media
Panellists:
- Michał Glijer – CEO and Founder, Zetly
- Michael Jacobsen – Co-Founder and CEO, Seventy7 Ventures
- Tony Mugavero – Co-Founder and CEO, Rad NFTV
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In this discussion, Scarpa broadened the previous one to entertainment in general, asking each panellist how they’re solving the problems of the industry.
Glijer spoke about how Zetly is addressing the opportunity of new revenue streams for Sports clubs and federations by providing digital assets like NFTs and utility tokens so they can get on board the digital economy.
Jacobsen said that Seventy7 Ventures is working within the creative sector to digitally accelerate companies through blockchain infrastructure, rather than employing traditional investment strategies.
Mugavera described the need for a more efficient content marketplace on the creator and consumer side. On the creator side, the accounting via traditional platforms takes forever, which results in the requirement of an entire business unit that takes large parts of creators’ profits and pays them with delays of many months. On the consumer side, they don’t own anything, rather renting content for years while platforms mine their data. According to Mugavera, blockchain brings back power to both sides of the marketplace.
Web3 and the BSV blockchain
Moderator – Kurt Wuckert Jr – Chief Bitcoin Historian, CoinGeek, Founder, GorillaPool
Panellists:
- Somi Arian – Founder and CEO, FemPeak
- Errol Hula – Founder and CEO, NOBL
- Dr. Maximilian Sinan Korkmaz – Managing Director, Stabilwerk Bau and P2P Software
- Lise Li – Head of BSV Blockchain Association Hub, China, CEO, Keyi Tech
- Connor Murray – Co-Founder and CEO , Britevue
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Wuckert introduced the concept of web 3.0 by defining web 2.0 and web 1.0. To establish a framework, he explained that the model underlying the Internet as we know it – web2 or web 2.0 – is siloed and farms our data to pay for services. Web3 changes the model to one where we can partake in it through ownership enabled by various aspects of blockchain technology that Bitcoin gives us.
Hula’s NOBL’s social media platform aims at solving the problem of fake news and misinformation. Because they believe that advertisers shouldn’t mine and own your data, they’re using the BSV blockchain as micropayment system to let creators own their data.
Korkmaz’ web3 social media super app, my2cents, combines several apps to build a platform that does not exploit users like mainstream social media platforms do. By using BSV’s microtransaction capability, the platform lets users reward each other with micropayments for good content.
To answer the question of how we can avoid the pitfalls of web2 in creating web3, Somi warned against companies like Facebook that are promoting ‘Meta’ to appear like a web3 company, while it does nothing to empower users to own and monetise their content.
How do we own our data? Hula answered the question by pointing to the empowering nature of letting users monetise their content. He sees web3 as an enabler of peer-to-peer commerce. As an example, he refers to NOBL where the content creator gets to decide what they want to do with their creations and earn from it themselves. The sooner we can get rid of an advertising-based Internet the better we’ll all be off, he says.
Murray said we need to come up with more innovative micropayment solutions to get people to understand its value as the basis for a new digital economy.
Keynote speech: IPv6-Based 5G/6g, IoT and Blockchain
Latif Ladid, Chair of the 5G World Alliance and President of the IPv6 Forum took the audience through the history of Internet protocols (including Arpa’s relationship to the first successful space mission), explained the shortcomings of IPv4 and IPv5 and how IPv6 would address them.
By attributing unique IP addresses to each user and device, IPv6 will ensure more efficient and secure communication, especially in an IoT world where machine-to-machine communications will be the norm.
By pairing IPv6 and blockchain, we can create a scalable and secure peer-to-peer blockchain communications network.
Keynote speech: A Better Internet with IPv6 and the BSV Blockchain
Dr Craig S Wright, Chief Scientist at nChain and creator of the Bitcoin protocol addressed the audience on the topic of Bitcoin by positioning it in a simple way – as a ledger that records things. Because of his vision to make it available worldwide, Wright insists that it should be cheap and bring forth new solutions, like integrating the economically excluded into the global economy, and helping machines talk to machines cheaply so we can implement IoT across the world as an interoperable system that anyone can tap into.
He then took the audience through a series of related topics, from what Bitcoin really is, how to secure the network, IPv6 and the direct exchange of digital assets, IP-to-IP transactions using IPv6, IoT in a world of Bitcoin and IPv6 and controlling the performance of a contract.
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