Sotheby’s, the world’s largest art and luxury auction house, is betting on the digital art world by joining a $20 million seed round investment in Delaware-based NFT studio Mojito, joining the likes of Future Perfect Ventures, Creative Artists Agency and NEA’s Connect Ventures.&nbsp;



The investment values the firm at $100 million, according to a statement, and Future Perfect partner Jalak Jobanputra will take a seat on the company’s board. Mojito plans to use the new capital to develop its engineering teams in order to continue building the Mojito platform, and to create more partnerships to launch brand-specific non-fungible token (NFT) marketplaces that work differently from today’s standard of Amazon and eBay-type platforms.



Sotheby’s joins the increasing number of traditional art dealers and collectors adopting NFTs as part of their repertoire, as digital art keeps gaining momentum. But Sotheby’s is taking its relationship with digital art a step further by making its first investment in a crypto company, betting on the success and prevalence of NFTs and other crypto assets as serious marketable goods.



“We believe in the future of using blockchain to expand ownership of digital assets,” says Charles F. Stewart, Sotheby’s CEO. “There is a huge amount of focus and interest in NFTs. We hear about these categories from most of our existing clients and collectors, but we are also engaging with a rather large new audience who is very focused on this category. Sotheby’s mission is to promote access and ownership of exceptional art and luxury objects, so focusing and developing this area makes a lot of sense.”



Sotheby’s&nbsp;<a href="https://www.sothebys.com/en/digital-catalogues/natively-digital-a-curated-nft-sale" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">first NFT sale</a>&nbsp;took place less than five months ago, and it stood as a one-off event. Now, with a new customized marketplace specifically designed to auction NFTs and an investment in the startup behind it all, the auction house seems to be all in. Last week, Sotheby’s launched its NFT marketplace, Sotheby’s Metaverse, along with a new curated sale,&nbsp;<a href="https://metaverse.sothebys.com/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Natively Digital 1.2: The Collectors</a>, that will be taking bids through October 26. A second iteration of Sotheby’s first NFT sale, Natively Digital, the auction features 53 pieces from the holdings of 19 notable collectors including NFT Girl, Steve Aoki, AOI and Paris Hilton. In addition to tracking the assets on the ethereum blockchain, the marketplace lets bidders pay in ether, bitcoin and USDC cryptocurrencies, as well as fiat currencies.



Earlier this year, auction house Christie’s first NFT auction kicked off the crypto luxury goods explosion with the more than $69 million sale of “Everydays — The First 5000 Days,” by the artist known as Beeple. Not long after, Guggenheim Partners’ co-founder announced plans to build the world’s largest NFT museum just blocks away from the MoMA in a skyscraper overlooking Central Park. Over the past seven months, NFTs have been adopted as a way to generate revenue (and get attention) from an entirely new vertical for firms including Gucci, Burberry, and Balenciaga. Total NFT transaction volumes over the same period have increased from just over $52 million to $408 million, according to NFT market analysis platform NonFungible.com.



So, it’s perhaps no coincidence that Mojito is also the first startup to branch out from Serotonin, a marketing and venture firm that helps companies get attention using applications built directly on a blockchain, called Web3. Mojito builds and maintains NFT marketplaces — like Sotheby’s Metaverse — for companies to participate in the booming market on their own terms. Mojito’s marketplaces are compatible with Ethereum apps.



“The crypto space has gotten a bad rap for being inaccessible and hard. We want to help lower the barrier to entry, make it easy, make it fun, and give brands space to make it their own,” says Dan Kinsley, CEO and cofounder of Mojito. “I’m passionate about decentralization in general and helping bring users into the space, and this is a great conduit for that.”



<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/isabelcontreras/"></a>By Isabel Contreras, Forbes Staff

Screenshot 2021-10-22 at 09.18.13

Sotheby’s Makes First Crypto Investment, Backing NFT Startup Using Ethereum Blockchain

How this Tanzanian entrepreneur’s tea startup is weathering the Covid-19 storm.



When Tahira Nizari started her social enterprise Kazi Yetu in Tanzania’s bustling city, Dar es Salaam, with her business partner and husband, Hendrik Buermann, almost two years ago, she didn’t anticipate the sheer scope of her big idea.



But she also didn’t expect that, because of an employee’s exposure to the coronavirus in April, she and her entire team would be quarantining for two weeks, stalling work in a year that she had projected growth for her company. With the pandemic’s onset, she lost most of her customer base in Tanzania, albeit temporarily, and was forced to come up with a game-plan and quickly pivot.



“It’s been an economic recession overnight, more or less,” says Nizari.



With family roots in Tanzania, and armed with formal degrees from Dubai and Canada, and experience in economic inclusion in the non-profit development sector, Nizari aimed to set a benchmark in the agribusiness sector in Tanzania through value-addition and by employing local women in her factory based in Dar es Salaam to produce “a traceable product” for the local and international market.



“Right now, tea is just exported in bulk completely (from Tanzania) and then all the jobs thereafter in that value chain are done abroad. So what we said was ‘let’s redistribute that job creation, let’s bring it back to Tanzania and let’s create a facility in which we can hire workers all locally and have a product that is 100% made in Tanzania’,” says Nizari. After extensive research in multiple target markets, both locally and abroad, building relationships with 250 Tanzanian farmers, setting up a factory exclusively employing local and previously-unemployed women, and many iterations of the seven blends of its flagship Tanzania Tea Collection using local flavors and spices, Kazi Yetu was ready to expand its scope in 2020.



“We were following our business plan… but we were really cautious and risk-averse (in 2018 and 2019). And then, we said, ‘you know what, when 2020 hits, it’s going to be growth’.”



Nizari was planning on reaching up to 4,000 farmers, buy machinery from China, grow the local B2B customer base, permanently employ all the women at the factory and begin to export on a larger scale after the launch of Kazi Yetu’s online store.



<figure class="wp-block-gallery columns-1 is-cropped wp-block-gallery-1 is-layout-flex wp-block-gallery-is-layout-flex"><ul class="blocks-gallery-grid"><li class="blocks-gallery-item"><figure><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="576" height="1024" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/photo_2020-05-11_19-30-27-576x1024.jpg" alt="" data-id="46923" data-full-url="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/photo_2020-05-11_19-30-27.jpg" data-link="https://www.forbesafrica.com/?attachment_id=46923" class="wp-image-46923" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/photo_2020-05-11_19-30-27-576x1024.jpg 576w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/photo_2020-05-11_19-30-27-300x533.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/photo_2020-05-11_19-30-27-600x1067.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/photo_2020-05-11_19-30-27-169x300.jpg 169w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/photo_2020-05-11_19-30-27.jpg 720w" sizes="(max-width: 576px) 100vw, 576px" /></figure></li></ul></figure>



But when the coronavirus hit the local and international markets, things started looking very bleak, especially since Kazi Yetu is currently fully self-funded.



&nbsp;Not only did it lose almost all of its monthly income, but the farmers stopped meeting in groups for the training, so the supply chain was disrupted.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">“In Europe, people are all sitting at home. They’re looking for products to build their immunity – tea is a great solution.&#8221;</blockquote>



The factory also had to introduce safety protocols for employees at work and at home, as well as reduce the number of people working at any given time in order to adhere to social distancing.



An employee’s father also died of the coronavirus, which forced Nizari to ask everyone involved with Kazi Yetu to quarantine at home for 14 days.



“So what we said was, ‘look, we don’t want to risk their safety, but we also don’t want to risk their economic well-being’. So we just paid all of them their full-time salary,” says Nizari.



“Generally, our operational costs have been really hard to cover right now… but it’s okay, because it made us pivot.”



It inspired Nizari to expedite Kazi Yetu’s plans to export, kickstart the online store sooner than anticipated and build up stock to send to Germany, rather than just focus on the Tanzanian market, which is temporarily quite small. Exporting has been an issue, given limited shipping at the moment, but the European market proved to be a pleasant surprise for Nizari.



“In Europe, people are all sitting at home. They’re looking for products to build their immunity – tea is a great solution,” she says.



Slowly, the factory is moving back to normal operations and Nizari is trying her best to ensure a steady income for the employees. Kazi Yetu is also now available on local delivery applications in Tanzania, so people can order tea to their doorsteps.



Looking ahead, Nizari hopes to scale up exporting through the online store and retailers, whether in Europe, or also in markets like South Africa where products from sub-Saharan Africa are popular, and North America where innovative African products are in demand.



“We want our product to be competing with products made in Europe, and for example, Sri Lankan tea, Indian tea and Chinese tea. We want Tanzanian products to be well-regarded,” she adds.



Since the teas are traceable, which is a unique selling point, Kazi Yetu is also working on an app that uses blockchain to allow customers to access data on the tea they purchase, from the farm level, all the way to their cups. This way, they will know first-hand the impact the product has.



In addition, Nizari is working on a farm-hub model to build Kazi Yetu’s supply chain by helping them produce better raw products through a no-interest investment that can be paid back with their final product over time.



“The whole ‘economy versus safety’ debate… it’s something we have to think about moving forward… You can’t just operate as a business that makes money, you have to think about… the well-being of your workplace, the well-being of everyone in your supply chain… And I think this is where social enterprises really come in,” Nizari adds. 



And a hot cup of locally-produced tea can certainly help take forward any such deliberations.



– By Inaara Gangji

C70D-4969

Enterprise And Traceable Tea From Tanzania

Blockchain technology is also revolutionizing supply chains in the pharmaceutical industry, in the process, helping track fake medicines. 



From genomics to robotics, technology is truly revolutionizing
the healthcare sector. And while it’s easy to become consumed by exciting,
futuristic trends like artificial intelligence (AI) diagnosis, digitized
patient records and 3D-printed medical tools, technology is also transforming
the pharmaceutical industry. How medication is prescribed, dispensed and
administered is big business with McKinsey predicting the value of Africa’s
pharmaceutical industry to be $65 billion in 2020.



But fake drugs are an ongoing and complex issue – they can
cause death, have unknown side-effects, fail to treat illnesses, and sometimes
even add to the spread of disease. According to World Health Organization (WHO)
statistics, 42% of detected cases of falsified (or substandard) pharmaceuticals
occur in Africa – reports estimate that between 72,000 and 169,000 children die
each year from pneumonia because of counterfeit antibiotics while fake malaria
drugs cause an additional 64,000 –158,000 deaths every year in sub-Saharan
Africa. Both antimalarials and antibiotics sit among the most commonly-reported
counterfeited drugs.



“Fake medicine distribution is rampant because business
processes are siloed between the various industry stakeholders, which puts the
industry at risk of fraud,” explains Heidi Patmore, a marketing consultant
specializing in technology that’s changing consumer behavior. 



“One solution to this would be cross-company process
automation which could easily be enabled by a blockchain data interchange. This
creates an open information system that all players can use to verify the
authenticity of medication because it can track and trace it from when it’s
manufactured to when it is dispensed to the patient.”



Companies such as IBM and SAP are working on blockchain
solutions to weed out Africa’s counterfeit medication network. When medicine is
returned to pharmaceutical manufacturers, for example, it is often re-sold
instead of being destroyed. How can a small local pharmacy ensure what is
returned is authentic? SAP are working with their existing client base – Merck,
GSK, Ingelheim, McKesson and others – on a blockchain project to verify that
any returned drugs are original. 



IBM Research’s solution for Africa (currently in development
in Haifa, Israel) includes a mobile interface and permissioned blockchain
backend that enables each certified and authorized party in the network to
initiate action, finish their transaction, and track its progress. 



“It also includes the monitoring of temperature to ensure
compliance with the proper conditions for transportation and asset transfer,”
adds Inna Skarbovsky, a blockchain architect from IBM Research – Haifa.
“Blockchain ensures full provenance for each medicine package, uniquely
identified with a barcode or a serial number. This makes it possible for all
authorized parties to track the drugs through the entire supply chain and the
drugs’ life-cycle.”



This also allows significant cost reductions by eliminating each participant’s need to manage a separate system for traceability of its components. “It also improves procedural efficiency for change-of-hands, make it much harder for counterfeit drugs to be introduced into the supply chain and to be distributed to end-users,” says Skarbovsky.



<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="768" height="1024" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/IMG_20190927_124217-1-768x1024.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-42537"/><figcaption> Towett Ngetich, CEO of Uthabiti Health, a Kenya-based pharmaceutical company </figcaption></figure>



Towett Ngetich is the CEO of Uthabiti Health, a Kenya-based pharmaceutical company that has implemented blockchain to bring transparency and accountability back to a country where statistics show that 30% of medicines sold are counterfeit. Uthabiti, which means ‘verify’ in Swahili, was started after Ngetich’s first-hand experience with the effects of fake health products: “Back in university, a significant number of students fell victim to unplanned pregnancies and unsafe abortions. With deep research, it was uncovered that there had been a supply of fake contraceptives and backstreet abortion pills into the student market,” explains Ngetich. More findings showed the presence of fake antibiotics, antiretrovirals (ARVs) and non-communicable diseases (NCD) medicines in the Kenyan pharmaceutical supply chain. 



“Pharmaceutical science is the center of healthcare – one
mistake in any drug composition or formulation has the risk of endangering a
significant number of people. The need to access safe, affordable and quality
health products in its simplest form means life and death in diagnosed health complications.
Blockchain gives patients the ability to track and trace products using
attached IDs – it also gives Uthabiti Health the ability to know where all our
health products sit within each supply chain,” he says. Uthabiti Health
procures medicines from different pharmaceutical manufacturers. Once received,
they go to an internal laboratory for quality testing and are then labeled with
the product’s safety lab report – attached in their codes is a unique
blockchain ID. The medicines are then passed on to their partnering retail
points, ensuring that the medicines dispensed to patients can be verified with
something as simple as a text message. 



“This brings in consumers in safe-proofing the supply chain
of pharmaceuticals,” adds Ngetich. 



The proliferation of fake drugs throughout Africa is complex
– on average, medicine changes 30 hands before reaching the destined pharmacy –
but blockchain technology has great potential to help stop counterfeit medicine
distribution because it brings traceability and trackability to the entire
pharmaceutical supply chain, ensuring the immutability of information.&nbsp; 



<h4 class="wp-block-heading">Blockchain ethics?</h4>



<figure class="wp-block-image size-large"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="709" height="1024" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/CandicedC-709x1024.jpg" alt="" class="wp-image-42533" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/CandicedC-709x1024.jpg 709w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/CandicedC-300x433.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/CandicedC-600x867.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/CandicedC-208x300.jpg 208w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/CandicedC-768x1110.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/CandicedC-1063x1536.jpg 1063w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/CandicedC.jpg 1329w" sizes="(max-width: 709px) 100vw, 709px" /><figcaption>Candice De Carvalho</figcaption></figure>



While blockchain is still a relatively niche technology, it is slowly changing how organizations operate. Blockchain promises better security and transparency, but not necessarily for the customer, in the case of drug allocation: “Where blockchain technology could likely increase efficiency and simultaneously decrease the abuse of medicines, customers benefit. The pharmaceutical and related industries are unique however, in that the ‘consumer’ is also a patient – a vulnerable group with special needs and rights,” explains Candice De Carvalho, the founder of Easy Ethics CPD.



Although overall transparency in the supply chain increases
through the use of blockchain, and this confers patient benefits, these must be
weighed against patient privacy and confidentiality.&nbsp; 



“With emerging technologies more freely available, we’ve
observed an interesting shift in patient behavior, where data privacy is
regarded less as an absolute by patients, in favor of a kind of sliding scale,
where privacy itself is a currency that purchases medical benefits along the
way,” adds De Carvalho. “Patients, for the right benefits, are perhaps more willing
to part with some privacy privileges.”



De Carvalho questions the genuine knowledge that patients
have of any exposure they experience through their use of novel medical device
or systems innovations. The key drivers for the business are not necessarily
unified with the total needs of the patient. However, the more the technology
owners protect and balance the patient’s need for confidentiality and consent,
the more they will ultimately see business benefit.&nbsp; 



“In the context of a doctor-patient relationship, the doctor has a positive duty to enhance patient understanding so that the patient enjoys a truly informed consent. Does this then mean that technology providers are now responsible in the same way that medical health workers are?” she ends.



-Tiana Cline

GettyImages-1056482262

Cure For Counterfeit Drugs?

Take a close look at trading activity on BKEX—a cryptocurrency exchange founded in 2018 and registered in the British Virgin Islands—and you’ll see something odd. Compare its transactions side-by-side with those of Binance, one of the largest crypto exchanges in the world, and you’ll notice BKEX’s trading history is a replica, printing the same numbers delayed by a few seconds. 



According to CoinMarketCap, BKEX has $1.1 billion in daily volume, making it the 20th-largest exchange on the planet. Yet it seems to be simply copying Binance’s trade history and passing it off as its own, in perhaps the laziest attempt in history to fool people into thinking it’s a lively place to trade digital assets.   



A new report by Alameda Research, a 20-person crypto trading firm with offices in Hong Kong and Berkeley, California, reveals a clever set of tricks used by crypto exchanges to fabricate volume. 



In the wake of other reports on phony trades, including one by digital asset manager Bitwise indicating that 95% of all transactions are bogus, Alameda felt it could create better research by leveraging its trading data and experience. 



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The startup was cofounded in 2017 by Sam Bankman-Fried, 27, an MIT alum and former trader at high frequency trading outfit Jane Street. Gary Wang, 26, a fellow MIT grad and former Google software developer, is his cofounder. The firm has $100 million in assets, and over the past month it has traded $1 billion a day on average, making it one of the largest crypto trading firms in the world. 



Exchanges make money by charging users to trade, and they have many reasons to artificially inflate volume. More activity means a higher rank on the still-popular website CoinMarketCap, which can attract new users. 



Exchanges also charge fees to new cryptocurrency projects that want to get listed in their marketplace, and the perception of popularity helps them command higher rates. Since an exchange’s place of business is just a website or an app, and many located outside the U.S. are unregulated, it can publish any numbers it wants and call them trades. 



Meanwhile, CoinMarketCap continues to insufficiently vet exchanges’ transaction volume, often taking companies at their word and publishing dubious numbers. 



According to Alameda’s research, another method exchanges use to juice their statistics is sneaking in large, fake transactions amid a flurry of smaller ones. CoinEgg, a Hong Kong-registered exchange that trades $1.1 billion a day reported by CoinMarketCap, recently employed this tactic with litecoin (LTC) trades. 



During a period when Alameda observed 15 different offers to buy and sell litecoin in a maximum quantity of 134 LTC, several trades printed as large as 2,000 LTC, as if a buyer appeared out of thin air. 



Trading marketplaces typically publish their “order book,” showing a list of bid prices at which people are willing to buy an asset, plus a separate set of offer prices where people are willing to sell. 



READ MORE | <a rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label="How Cryptocurrency Scams Work (opens in a new tab)" href="https://www.forbesafrica.com/investment/2019/05/14/how-cryptocurrency-scams-work/" target="_blank">How Cryptocurrency Scams Work</a>



For instance, Bill might be willing to buy bitcoin at $10,000, while Mary wants to sell at no less than $10,050. For a trade to happen, a new buyer must be willing to pay the $10,050 that Mary is offering, and the vast majority of trades that clear will align with orders that previously showed up in the order book, unless two users place offsetting orders at the same exact time. 



Yet on some exchanges, trades get executed at prices and sizes that fall outside anything sitting on the order book. On Digifinex, a Singapore-based crypto trading venue, Alameda observed bids and asks for bitcoin between $8,296 and $8,298, but several trades printed at $8,290 and $8,293, prices lower than what anyone was willing to sell at.



On LAToken, a Moscow digital exchange, Alameda saw bids and offers with a maximum size of 1.6 bitcoin in the order book. Implausibly, several trades sailed through at sizes up to 20 bitcoin. LAToken founder Valentin Preobrazhenskiy says his platform only has a “tiny share” of 20-bitcoin orders and that exchanges use inflated volumes as a marketing tool. 



“The situation would change when large exchange-ranking sites would add a section for trading volumes based on trades reported to regulators,” he says. On Singapore-based ABCC, the best bid and offers Alameda saw were for sizes less than one ether, yet several transactions materialized with sizes of up to 11 ether. 



Among trading venues, there’s also the well-worn method of simply printing transactions that fall in the middle of the bid and ask prices, which Alameda’s research spotted in IDAX and Coineal. In total, Alameda’s report gives examples of fishy trading patterns on 60 different crypto exchanges. Aside from LAToken, none of the exchanges named above responded immediately to&nbsp;Forbes’&nbsp;request for comment.&nbsp;



The methodology behind Alameda’s research was to test each exchange on six different criteria. First, they manually looked at an exchange’s order book and observed where trades printed. If more than 10% of transactions didn’t appear on the order book, it failed on this dimension. Another test involved observing the percent of an exchange’s trades that took place at the best available bids or offers.&nbsp;



A third criterion was to analyze how much Alameda itself traded on a given exchange, since the startup deals in “virtually every cryptocurrency,” considers its algorithms “exchange-agnostic” and estimates that it trades 5% of all global crypto volume. 



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">“If we trade more than .5% of an exchange’s reported volume, we consider that exchange to pass according to this criterion,” the report  reads. For more details on its methodology, see the full report.</blockquote>



Beyond exchanges’ bad behavior, the report has other provocative insights. It claims that crypto—including both “spot” trades of actual digital assets and derivatives, like bitcoin futures—trades $38 billion in real volume a day, and 87% of that happens on Asian exchanges, with just 9% happening on U.S. venues. The strict regulatory environment in the U.S. is likely a contributing factor in Asia’s dominance, Alameda says.&nbsp;



Compared with Bitwise, which released a follow-up fake volume reportin May 2019, Alameda thinks more crypto volume is real. For large exchanges like OKEx and Huobi, which were founded in China, Alameda estimates about 70% of their transactions are authentic. 



Bitwise is much more skeptical, as is the Blockchain Transparency Institute, which has estimated that more than 60% of Huobi’s volume is fake and more than 90% of OKEx’s volume is fabricated. 



A Huobi spokesperson says it doesn’t engage in wash trading, but that it has observed some market-makers doing so on its platform, and it takes steps to stamp them out.



 An OKEx spokesperson says the company isn’t involved in and doesn’t tolerate wash trading, adding, “Recently we have joined the Data Accountability &amp; Transparency Alliance (DATA) led by CoinMarketCap, as a commitment to reveal as much data as possible.”



-Jeff Kauflin; Forbes Staff

Cryptocurrency Mining In Africa As Poor Sheperdherder Proves A Point

The Anatomy Of A Fake Cryptocurrency Trade: How Exchanges Create Phony Transactions

Ask nearly any leading banker or financial executive to go on the record about blockchain, and you are liable to hear crickets. After all, it’s an industry built on trust and stability and crypto’s recent legacy of volatility and even fraud has tainted the topic.



It’s ironic because, behind the scenes, few industries are eagerly working on blockchain projects as feverishly as financial services firms are. Bank of America, for example, has filed nearly 60 blockchain patents. Yet it refused to speak to Forbes about its dive into distributed ledger tech. JPMorgan’s CEO Dimon famously threatened to fire any employee caught trading bitcoin. Today it is developing its own digital token.



The world&#8217;s largest, most centralized and most powerful institutions are now embracing the technology designed to unseat them because they realize that at its, core blockchain is just lines of code that simplify accounting and record keeping. For hundreds of years, bankers have exhibited mastery in ledger keeping and they have no intention of giving that up.



Our inaugural Blockchain 50 list is dominated by financial firms. From BNP Paribas and Citigroup to Nasdaq to Mastercard and Visa, the biggest names in global money are making strides in blockchain testing and adoption. 



They&#8217;re using the technology to speed up settlement times and interbank payments, simplify processes that still rely on paper and fax machines, and improve security measures with the goal of both saving time and money now and creating new ways to make a profit in the future.



Fidelity, which now has 100 employees devoted to digital assets, has launched a digital asset custody service for institutional investors and is already building a trading platform for purchasing crypto. PNC bank is using Ripple’s blockchain software to process international payments. 



Santander is already collecting revenue from One Pay FX, a blockchain-based foreign exchange service that is also built on Ripple technology. Dutch banking giant ING’s dedicated blockchain team that has launched 8 pilots since 2016, and alongside Credit Suisse completed the first legally enforceable securities swap on a blockchain last year.



Even banks that didn&#8217;t make our list, like the Royal Bank of Canada and Bank of America, are testing the waters. RBC has conducted 8 live pilots, and Bank of America has filed the most blockchain patents of any company in the industry.



Notably, these early first forays into the blockchain space have fostered something unexpected among these major competitors: collaboration, especially through industry efforts like Hyperledger and the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. “I remember how different people from different institutions tried to start talking about the common work in this moment,” says BBVA’s Carlos Kuchkovsky, CTO of new digital business, of the early days of those groups. “That’s how we want to collaborate now, to create common new rails.”



Citibank has partnered with Barclays to launch a blockchain app store. ING and BNP Paribas are just two of several big banks that partnered to create komgo, a blockchain trade commodity network, and UBS has partnered with BNY Mellon, Deutsche Bank, and Santander to create a way to exchange digital cash.



Of course, these banks know that there is a long road ahead when it comes to integrating blockchain into their daily processes. Blockchain is not a catch-all solution, and there are sure to be new hurdles ahead, but some banks say they are already reaping the rewards. “You already have tangible benefits but this still is not the end state,” says ING’s program director of distributed ledger technology Mariana Gomez de la Villa of a recent ING pilot. “The ecosystem is growing.”



-Sarah Hansen; Forbes Staff

Aerial View of the Network of the Office Building

Controlling The Ledger: The World’s Largest Financial Firms Embrace Blockchain

It’s a balmy 80 degrees on a mid-December day in Singapore, and something is puzzling Allen Day, a 41-year-old data scientist. Using the tools he has developed at Google, he can see a mysterious concerted usage of artificial intelligence on the blockchain for Ethereum. 



Ether is the world’s third-largest cryptocurrency (after bitcoin and XRP), and it still sports a market cap of some $11 billion despite losing 83% of its value in 2018. Peering into its blockchain—the distributed database of transactions underpinning the cryptocurrency—Day detects a “whole bunch” of “autonomous agents” moving funds around “in an automated fashion.” 



While he doesn’t yet know who has created the AI, he suspects they could be the agents of cryptocurrency exchanges trading among themselves in order to artificially inflate ether’s price. 



“It’s not really just single agents doing things on their own,” Day says from Google’s Asia-Pacific headquarters. “They’re forming with other agents to have some larger group effect.” 



Day’s official title is senior developer advocate for Google Cloud, but he describes his role as “customer zero” for the company’s cloud computing efforts. 



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As such it’s his job to anticipate demand before a product even exists, and he thinks making the blockchain more accessible is the next big thing. 



Just as Google enabled (and ultimately profited) from making the internet more usable 20 years ago, its next billions may come from shining a bright light on blockchains. If Day is successful, the world will know whether blockchain’s real usage is living up to its hype.



Danish researcher Thomas Silkjaer is using Google&#8217;s BigQuery to map publicly available information about XRP cryptocurrency addresses. The craters represent some of cryptocurrency&#8217;s largest exchanges.



Last year Day and a small team of open-source developers quietly began loading data for the entire Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains into Google’s big-data analytics platform, BigQuery. Then, with the help of lead developer Evgeny Medvedev, he created a suite of sophisticated software to search the data.



In spite of a total lack of publicity, word of the project spread quickly among crypto-minded coders. In the past year, more than 500 projects were created using the new tools, trying to do everything from predicting the price of bitcoin to analyzing wealth disparity among ether holders. 



When it comes to cloud computing, Google is far behind Amazon and Microsoft. Last year Google pocketed an estimated $3 billion in revenue from cloud ser­vices. Amazon and Microsoft, meanwhile, generated about $27 billion and $10 billion, respectively.



Day is hoping that his project, known as Blockchain ETL (extract, transform, load), will help even the playing field. But even here Google is trying to catch up. Amazon entered blockchain in a big way in 2018 with a suite of tools for building and managing distributed ledgers. 



READ MORE |<a href="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wealth/2019/02/01/blockchain-startups-showed-no-signs-of-life-in-2018/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label="Blockchain Startups Showed No “Signs Of Life” In 2018 (opens in a new tab)">Blockchain Startups Showed No “Signs Of Life” In 2018</a>



Microsoft got into the space in 2015, when it released tools for Ethereum’s blockchain. It now hosts a range of services as part of its Azure Blockchain Workbench. But while Amazon and Microsoft are focusing on making it easier to build blockchain apps, Day is focusing on exposing how blockchains are actually being used, and by whom. 



“In the future, moving more economic activity on chain won’t just require a consensus level of trust,” says Day, referring to the core validating mechanism of blockchain technology. 



“It will require having some trust in knowing about who it is you’re actually interacting with.” In other words, if blockchain is to go mainstream, some of its beloved anonymity features will have to be abandoned.



A native of Placer County, California, Day got his first computer at the age of 5 and a few years later started writing simple programs. A fascination with volcanoes and dinosaurs turned his interest to life sciences, and he ultimately graduated from the University of Oregon with a dual degree in biology and Mandarin in 2000. From there he headed to UCLA to pursue a doctorate in human genetics and helped build a computer program to browse the genome.



 This Silkjaer image uses data for the XRP cryptocurrency to show the movement of funds across the entire ledger of transactions, culminating in a snapshot of funds in an actual user&#8217;s wallet.



It was at UCLA where Day began relying on distributed computing, a concept that is core to blockchains, which store their data on a large network of individual computers. In the early 2000s Day needed to analyze the massive amounts of data that make up the human genome. To solve this problem he hooked many small computers together, vastly increasing their power. 



“Distributed-systems technology has been in my tool kit for a while,” Day says.



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">“I could see there were interesting characteristics of blockchains that could run a global supercomputer.” </blockquote>



Hired in 2016 to work in the health and bio­informatics areas of Google, Day segued to blockchains, the hottest distributed-computing effort on the planet. But the talents he had honed—sequencing genomes for infectious diseases in real time and using AI to increase rice yields—were not easily applied to decoding blockchain. 



Before Day and Medvedev released their tools, just searching a blockchain required specialized software called “block explorers,” which let users hunt only for specific transactions, each labeled with a unique tangle of 26-plus alphanumeric characters. Google’s Blockchain ETL, by contrast, lets users make more generalized searches of entire ecosystems of transactions.



To demonstrate how customers could use Blockchain ETL to make improvements to the crypto economy, Day has used his tools to examine the so-called hard fork, or an irrevocable split in a blockchain database, that created a new cryptocurrency—bitcoin cash—from bitcoin in the summer of 2017. 



This particular split was the result of a Hatfield and McCoy “war” within the bitcoin community between a group who wanted to leave bitcoin as it was and another who wanted to develop a currency that, like cash, was cheaper and faster to use for small payments. 



Using Google’s BigQuery, Day discovered that bitcoin cash, rather than increasing so-called micro-transactions, as the defecting developers claimed, was actually being hoarded among big holders of bitcoin cash.



 “I’m very interested to quantify what’s happening so that we can see where the legitimate use cases are for blockchain,” Day says. “Then we can move to the next use case and develop out what these technologies are really appropriate for.”



Day’s work is inspiring others. Tomasz Kolinko is a Warsaw-based programmer and the creator of a service that analyzes smart contracts, a feature of certain blockchains that is designed to transparently enforce contractual obligations like collateralized loans but with less reliance on third parties, like lawyers. Kolinko was frustrated with his blockchain queries.



READ MORE |<a href="https://www.forbesafrica.com/agriculture/2019/01/24/ugandan-firm-uses-blockchain-to-trace-coffee-from-farms-to-stores/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label="Ugandan Firm Uses Blockchain To Trace Coffee From Farms To Stores (opens in a new tab)">Ugandan Firm Uses Blockchain To Trace Coffee From Farms To Stores</a>



In December, Kolinko met Day at a hackathon in Singapore. Within a month of the meeting, Kolinko was using Google’s tools to search for a smart contract feature called a “selfdestruct,” designed to limit a contract’s life span. Using his own software in conjunction with Day’s, Kolinko took 23 seconds to search 1.2 million smart contracts—something that would have taken hours before. 



The result: Almost 700 of them had left open a selfdestruct feature that would let anyone instantly kill the smart contract, whether that person was authorized or not. “In the past you couldn’t just easily check all the contracts that were using it,” Kolinko says. “This tool is both the most scary and most inspiring I’ve ever built.” 



Day is now expanding beyond bitcoin and ethereum. Litecoin, zcash, dash, bitcoin cash, ethereum classic and dogecoin are being added to BigQuery. Independent developers are loading their own crypto data sets on Google. 



Last August, a Dutch developer named Wietse Wind uploaded the entire 400 gigabytes of transaction data from Ripple’s XRP blockchain, another popular cryptocurrency, into BigQuery. 



Wind’s data, which he updates every 15 minutes, prompted a Danish designer named Thomas Silkjaer to create a heat map of crypto flows. The resulting colorful orb reveals at a glance more than a million crypto wallets, including big ex­changes like Binance and London’s crypto debit card startup Wirex, which are neck deep in XRP transactions. 



“Google has been a bit of a sleeping giant in blockchain,” says BlockApps CEO Kieren James-Lubin, who is partnering with Google to sell enterprise blockchain apps. 



In addition to Day’s work, Google has filed numerous patents related to the blockchain, including one in 2018 to use a “lattice” of interoperating blockchains to increase security, a big deal in a world where untold millions of crypto have been stolen by hackers. 



The company is also pushing its developers to build apps on the Ethereum blockchain, and Google’s venture arm, GV, has made a number of significant investments in crypto startups. 



The giant, it seems, is waking up.



-Michael del Castillo; Forbes Staff

1130303166

Navigating Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP: How Google Is Quietly Making Blockchains Searchable

Some of the life-changing tech trends the world will see in 2019.



<hr class="wp-block-separator"/>



From automated transportation, to digital pills&nbsp; and social credit algorithms, technological
advancements are growing at the speed of light.



The big question is, can we keep up with the pace?



The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Computer Society, based in New York City, predicts some of the future tech
trends for 2019. 



Deep learning accelerators, assisted transportation, and the
Internet of Bodies (IoB) lead their 2019 technology outlook.



Some local experts weigh in on this from an African perspective and contribute and identify some of the tech trends we can look out for.



<h4 class="wp-block-heading">Assisted automated transportation</h4>



Assisted transportation is already in use in some countries.




The phenomena of self-driving cars has been growing. 



Although many critics fear that it still needs more time to
test and trial, IEEE experts predict that there will be a wide recognition for
fully autonomous vehicles this year. 



“I don’t think self-driving cars would solve a major social
need in Africa at the moment,” says Aatish Ramkaran, who is a Digital Architect
at Nedbank and Co-Founder of Blockchain Entrepreneurs Club South Africa.



“What we really need are better, more affordable mass
passenger transport systems, as the majority of the South African workforce
live significant distances from their workplaces,” 



Ramkaran adds.



This technology in autonomous vehicles is highly dependent
on deep learning accelerators.



Early last month, a robot was struck down by a self-driving
Tesla Model S. 



Electrical engineer Darryn Cornish predicts that it may take
a while before self-driving cars become a trend in Africa, “mainly because we
don’t have a law around it”. 



He currently serves as the chair for the IEEE in South Africa and is pursuing his PhD in high voltage physics at the University of the Witwatersrand.



<h4 class="wp-block-heading">Your social media could reveal your credit score</h4>



The IEEE report states that these are algorithms that use
facial recognition and other advanced biometrics to identify a person and
retrieve data about that person from social media and other digital profiles
for the purpose of approval or denial of access to consumer products or social
services. 



“In our increasingly networked world, the combination of
biometrics and blended social data streams can turn a brief observation into a
judgment of whether a person is a good or bad risk or worthy of public social
sanction,” says the report.



“Using social media to check credit scores could work for
someone who doesn’t have the transaction history that’s built with a bank
account,” Ramkaran says.



He says this method attempts to build a psychological
profile using your social media behavior, rather than your banking history, to
indicate whether you would honor your loan repayment.



“Discovery Bank, which claims to be the first behavioural
bank, is taking this a step further by not only observing, but actually
influencing your behavior,” he says.



At the moment, China has been popular for planning to
incorporate a nationwide social credit system. 



It is due to be fully operational nationwide by 2020.



However, a report by Business Insider critiques this method
of checking credit scores as people with low credit scores in China have been
banned from flying, as well as banning students from certain universities as
they have been considered bad students. 



“Li Xiaolin, a lawyer who was placed on the list in 2015, found himself unable to purchase plane tickets home while on a work trip, Human Rights Watch reported. He also couldn’t apply for credit cards,” says Business Insider.



<h4 class="wp-block-heading">Internet implants?</h4>



We’ve heard of Internet of Things, a buzz phrase that came
with the Fourth Industrial Revolution. 



Internet of Bodies (IoB), on the other hand, is exactly
that; internet activity found within the human body. 



There have already been external self-monitoring
technologies such as fitness trackers and smart glasses. 



IEEE now predicts that “digital pills are entering
mainstream medicine, and body-attached, implantable, and embedded IoB devices
are also beginning to interact with sensors in the environment”.



“These devices yield richer data that enable more
interesting and useful applications, but also raise concerns about security,
privacy, physical harm, and abuse,” the report says. 



Critics, however, are concerned that they could be setting
dangerous precedents and courts and regulatory bodies may not be ready for them
yet. 



“The biggest concern for a while now has been around the
transparency and protection of personal data being collected by devices and
their service providers on consumers that wear or have ingested Internet of
Bodies type devices,” says Lee Naik, CEO, TransUnion 



Africa and a digital and technology transformation expert.



Examples of these are smart contact lenses that are being
developed to monitor glucose levels and could eliminate the daily blood sugar
pinprick for people with diabetes. 



Other devices are the Bluetooth-equipped electronic pills
being developed to monitor the inner workings of the&nbsp; body. 



They could eventually broadcast what you’ve eaten or whether
you’ve taken drugs.



Another emerging piece of technology related to the IoB is
the radio-frequency identification chip that can contain details of a person’s
bank details and identification in a chip implanted in the body.



In a report by The Independent, a company by the name of
Biohax has implanted chips in more than 4,000 people.



“Further regulation will be required to protect consumer
interests in relation to the Internet of Bodies, specifically to deal with the
security of consumer personal data which needs to be effectively protected in
balance with consumers receiving further benefits from innovation in this
space,” Naik says.



Despite some of the concerns around IoB, a recent study
published by Market Research Future reveals that the global smart contact
lenses market is set to thrive at a Compound Annual Growth Rate of 10.4% during
the forecast period 2017 to 2023.



This could potentially change the way personal health is monitored and personal data is kept, connecting the body to the internet forever.



<h4 class="wp-block-heading">Cyber security pre-installed </h4>



IEEE experts suggest that a new generation of security
mechanism is merging.



The traditional method of protecting computer systems looked
at software such as anti-virus.



But now, new software uses an active approach such as hooks
that can be activated when new types of attacks are exposed and
machine-learning mechanisms to identify sophisticated attacks.



Already, cyber security solutions company McAfee announced
at the Consumer Electronics Show 2019 that it would extend its collaboration
with PC hardware giant Dell to provide pre-installed security software for its
PCs and laptops.



According to Techradar, Dell Consumer and small business customers who purchase a new PC or laptop will also have the option to protect all of their devices with McAfee by installing the company’s cross-device software on their smartphones and tablets.



<h4 class="wp-block-heading">Selling your electricity to your neighbor</h4>



According to Cornish, this year, we may see the move from a
concentrated power producer such as Eskom to a micro grid system.



The concentrated power is usually produced in a certain
location and then distributed via transmission lines where it is used by the
consumer.



With a micro grid system, it uses a distributed power
system.



“Little communities have their own little power grids and
can generate power where they use it,” Cornish says.



“In other words, your house would have solar power and
whatever energy you have extra you would sell onto a grid and your whole
community is a micro grid and a system controls who gets power and when.”



Ramkaran says this trend would really work well in Africa.



“The major issue holding back these ‘micro-grids’ are not
technological. We are perfectly capable of building these systems, just look at
Australia and Germany, but regulatory hurdles prevent their implementation
locally,” he says.



Another trend is the emergence of a worldwide power grid. 



According to a Reuters report, the world’s first ±1100-kV
ultra-high voltage direct current transmission line was put into operation last
month in China, marking the project with the highest voltage, the biggest
transmission capacity, the longest transmission distance and the most advanced
in technology in the world, running 3,293 kilometers long and having a
transmission capacity of 12 million kW.



“There are many talks with China, Europe and Asia, to create
a huge high voltage transmission line along the entire continent and possibly
down to Africa. And it would be a worldwide grid that everyone could connect
to.



“If we are suffering with power problems, we could buy power from China or Russia or whoever has spare capacity, so we get rid of that capacity issue,” says Cornish, who predicts this could happen in South Africa in the next five years. 



<h4 class="wp-block-heading">Consumers the new producers</h4>



With the rise of blockchain data, crowdsourcing has become a
growing trend, according to Cornish.



Using a blockchain platform for crowdsourcing helps solve a
variety of tasks through a collective approach.



“We are moving towards a crowdsourced idea instead of having
monolithic entities who create and consumers who consume. We are now going into
the phase where consumers are now producers,” says Cornish.



According to Markets Insider, one of the world’s first
blockchain-based e-commerce verification platform launched a platform by
integrating blockchain, AI and crowdsourcing.



The platform SimplyBrand aims to end online counterfeiting
through a safe and trustworthy digital commerce ecosystem in conjunction with
strategic partner Cobinhood, a leading cryptocurrency service platform
featuring zero-trading-fee exchange as well as an end-to-end ICO service
provider.&nbsp; 



They launched their token pre-sale early last month. 



Within this ecosystem, crowdsourced participants who report
fake products through the SimplyBrand App can “earn token rewards to purchase
brand privileged items or sell them on exchange, while brands can buy tokens
from exchange and purchase brand-protection services,” according to Reuters.



“It would be interesting to see how we will be leveraging
from that but we will be seeing much more of that,” Cornish says. 



Ramkaran says that this trend of peer-to-peer exchange is intensifying.



“With established platforms like Airbnb and Uber, people have become comfortable with buying goods and services from others, however, they’ve also become aware of the high transaction fees they’re charged,” he says.



<h4 class="wp-block-heading">Personal data becomes personal advertising</h4>



Cornish predicts the rise of big data analytics.



Big data is known as extremely large data sets that may be
analysed computationally to reveal patterns, trends, and associations,
especially relating to human behaviour and interactions.



“If you go into big data, you can start telling a lot about
how a person lives. For example, if someone goes every Friday to buy a specific
item, you could tell whether they get wages as opposed to salaries just from
that load.”



“If you had their health data like Discovery does, you could
collect that data and start targeting ads like Google.”



However, Cornish suggests that it would be interesting to
see if Google would go ahead and collect consumer data as well.&nbsp; 



Naik says that businesses will start to invest in data
science and AI to drive insights from their large and growing big data.



“Big Data will be central to helping businesses understand
consumers better and develop products that best address consumer needs. Ultimately,
big data and artificial intelligence will be a big driver of business strategy
in future,” he says.



Ramkaran says that focus has shifted from ‘Big Data’ to
‘Machine and Deep Learning’, as companies have found more value in how
specially trained algorithms interpret and make decisions on data.



“Tech giants like Facebook and Google have mastered the art
of collecting your personal data, for free, which they leverage for massive
advertising revenues.



“People are beginning to realize how they’re being exploited
and manipulated, but based on the sheer numbers of connected users and power
that these platforms have, it won’t be an easy fight,” adds Ramkaran. 



&nbsp;But with big data
analytics as such, the ethics of tapping into personal information may be of concern.




Cornish predicts that it may take two years or more before
big data analytics will trend.

Internet

Internet In Our Bodies?

&nbsp;On a bustling street near the shiny new international airport in Ethiopia’s capital is a small coffee roastery with big dreams.&nbsp;



Nearly 40 Ethiopians &#8211; a third of them women &#8211; sift, roast and package prized Arabica beans for export to Europe under the Moyee brand, founded by a Dutch social entrepreneur.



The roastery, together with the innovative use of blockchain technology to ensure the supply chain is transparent, represents an attempt to keep as much of the profits as possible in Ethiopia, one of the world’s poorest countries.



“It’s the world’s favorite drink. We drink over 2 billion cups a day,” said Killian Stokes, who set up the Irish branch of Moyee.



“The industry’s worth $100 billion and yet 90 percent of coffee farmers in Ethiopia live on less than $2 a day.”



That is partly because most exporters process the beans elsewhere, but also down to price fluctuations and other factors that make coffee growing a precarious business.



READ MORE | <a href="https://www.forbesafrica.com/agriculture/2019/01/24/ugandan-firm-uses-blockchain-to-trace-coffee-from-farms-to-stores/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener" aria-label="Ugandan Firm Uses Blockchain To Trace Coffee From Farms To Stores (opens in a new tab)">Ugandan Firm Uses Blockchain To Trace Coffee From Farms To Stores</a>



To make things fairer, Moyee has created unique digital identities for the 350 farmers it currently works with &#8211; meaning buyers can see exactly how much each individual grower is paid, with prices set at 20 percent above the market rate.



Now the brand, whose slogan is “radically good coffee”, wants to use blockchain to take that to the next level &#8211; allowing buyers to tip farmers, or fund projects such as a new planting program, through a mobile app.



The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said in a recent report that blockchain had huge potential&nbsp;to address challenges&nbsp;smallholder farmers faced by “reducing uncertainty and enabling trust among market players”.



The technology, used to underpin cyber-currencies like Bitcoin, allows shared access to data that is maintained by a network of computers and can quickly trace the hundreds of parties involved in the production and distribution of food.



Once entered, any information cannot be altered or tampered with.



<h4 class="wp-block-heading">‘BIGGER THAN THE INTERNET’</h4>



Siobhan Kelly, an advisor to the Food Systems Programme at the FAO, said blockchain would ultimately be “much bigger than the internet”.&nbsp;



“Within 10 years &#8211; it’ll take probably 10 years &#8211; it’s going to be a major revolution, for everything,” said Kelly.



Fruit farmers in Caribbean nations are also looking at using blockchain to attract better-paying customers, bring traceability and build a credit trail.&nbsp;



“It’s an innovation that is poised to empower local farmers in the Caribbean region,” said Pamela Thomas, executive director of the Agriculture Alliance of the Caribbean (AACARI), a regional network of nearly 100,000 farmers.



AACARI’s project has two components: auditing by accredited professionals to ensure farmers adhere to the Global GAP (good agricultural practices) standards, and a digital marketplace where buyers can find detailed information about the produce.&nbsp;



Global GAP is a voluntary standard required by many European and U.S. supermarket chains.



Vijay Kandy, whose company is building the blockchain platform, said the auditing process would allow farmers to deal directly with buyers &#8211; bypassing the middlemen that many currently rely on &#8211; and make access to credit easier.



“One reason why buyers from faraway places or different countries go through middlemen is because they rely on them to make sure farmers are following these good practices,” he said.



One such buyer is London-based Union Hand-Roasted Coffee.&nbsp;



The company sources its coffee directly from growers’ cooperatives to ensure higher quality, pays farmers more than minimum price set by the global Fairtrade organization, and works with more than 40 producer groups in 14 countries.



“We currently undertake direct interviews to verify farmers have been paid, but it’s very time- and labor-intensive to do that and to record all that data,” said Steven Macatonia, who co-founded Union in 2001.



“So to have a much more simple system where we can get a confirmation that payment has been received and how much that is, that could be hugely beneficial,” he said.



Price fluctuations and the impact of climate change make coffee a particularly challenging crop to grow.



“Large companies’ profits usually increase when prices are low, but the profit for farmers does not, and in some cases it may cost them money to produce coffee,” said Aaron Davis, head of coffee research at Britain’s Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew.&nbsp;



Davis’s latest research shows climate change and deforestation are putting more than half of the world’s wild coffee species at risk of extinction.



Ethiopia &#8211; the birthplace of Arabica, the world’s most popular coffee &#8211; is of particular concern. Up to 60 percent of the land used to grow coffee could become unsuitable by the end of the century, Davis found.&nbsp;



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow">“The more a farmer is paid, the more resources he will be able to devote to climate resilience,” he said.&nbsp; &nbsp;</blockquote>



Both Davis and the FAO’s Kelly however cautioned that blockchain technology was not going to be a “quick fix”, with farmers around the world facing multiple challenges.



“Farmers need access to affordable seeds, to affordable finance and credit when they need it &#8230; and these things are not going to be given by blockchain,” said Kelly. -Reuters



-Thin Lei Win @thinink

952007732

The Coffee Farmers Betting On Blockchain To Boost Business

While 2017 was the heyday for the entire crypto industry, in 2018 things turned a little darker.



Falling prices, fears around crypto regulation, lackluster institutional interest, and concerns over the ICO funding model which had run rampant in the previous year, all combined into the perfect storm of crypto doom and gloom.



While much focus is placed on token prices as a barometer of the heath of crypto, a new industry analysis has found the number of blockchain startups in the sector declined precipitously last year.



Novum Insights—which monitors around 9,000 companies in the blockchain and crypto sectors by tracking token trading as well as &#8220;signs of life&#8221; activity on websites, social accounts and GitHub pages—found over 1,811 companies, or 20% of its sample, stopped showing any such signs in 2018, and many simply vanished entirely.



Reasons for the failures identified by Novum range from outright scams and Ponzi schemes where project creators simply vanished, to the more mundane business reasons of poor capital management, business model failures and shifting regulations.



“A large number of companies were shut down in 2018 after India and China’s announcements of considering cryptocurrencies illegal on their soil,” added&nbsp;Novum’s CEO and founder&nbsp;Toby Lewis.



The failures in Novum&#8217;s sample also affected some verticals more than others, with failures affecting more than 30% of crypto companies working in the manufacturing sector, and more than 20% of companies in the entertainment, logistics and agriculture sectors.



The most promising vertical for crypto and blockchain in 2018 was education and academia where slightly over 10% of companies failed.



Despite the downturn, a total of 1,065 new ICOs raised about $21 billion for crypto and blockchain startups last year, although this figure was skewed towards Q1 and Q2 when crypto prices were between 80% and 90% higher.



Novum’s sample of crypto companies—which isn’t necessarily representative of the wider sector—suggests a contraction of business activity in the blockchain and crypto sectors during 2018, given the high level of failures and lower numbers of companies raising capital.



Time will tell if 2019 shows any better signs of life.



-Oliver Smith Forbes Staff

Blockchain Startups Showed No “Signs Of Life” In 2018

An Ugandan company has started using blockchain, the technology behind virtual currency Bitcoin, to certify shipments of coffee to try to meet growing demand from consumers for more information about where products have come from. 



Carico Café Connoisseur said the move could help to boost farmers’ incomes, as consumers are usually prepared to pay more for goods that can been traced back to their origins.



Blockchain works by providing a shared record of data held by a network of individual computers rather than a single party. Its supporters say this makes it hard to tamper with, and so a secure way to track goods along the supply chain



Carico Café Connoisseur CEO Mwambu Wanendeya told Reuters a blockchain-certified shipment of one of its coffee products, Bugisu Blue, arrived in South Africa last month. He declined to give the size of the shipment, but said it was several tonnes.



Uganda is Africa’s largest coffee exporter followed by Ethiopia, according to the International Coffee Organisation, and has some of the world’s highest quality beans. It predominantly cultivates the robusta variety, but also has extensive fields of arabica trees.



Limited domestic processing capacity means the country exports nearly all of its beans in raw form.



The blockchain certification means consumers can trace the coffee’s journey by using their smartphones to scan the product’s QR codes or via the certification site provenance.org.



Every step of the beans’ journey &#8211; from when farmers drop them off at collection centers to warehousing, inspection by regulators and shipping &#8211; is recorded.



“The idea is to give the consumer an appreciation of what happens on the journey and also to ensure that there’s more linkages with the farmer,” Wanendeya said.



“Traceability is important because people are increasingly concerned that &#8230; farmers get rewarded for their work.”



The process will provide consumers with information such as the type of coffee bean, the year it was harvested, and where it was grown.



Founded in 2016, Carico Café is working with two farmer cooperatives with hundreds of members. Wanendeya predicted the innovation could boost farmers’ incomes by 10 percent.



“Consumers are willing to pay more if they can know where exactly the coffee is coming from,” he said.



Just a phone scan away &#8211; website reveals ethically sourced food



Uganda is keen to increase coffee exports from the current level of around 4 million 60-kilogramme bags per year.



However, a seedlings distribution program it hoped would boost production has yielded modest results, in part because of a decline in interest in coffee among farmers due to often low and unstable prices. -Reuters 



&#8211; Elias Biryabarema

gettyimages-103300178-594×594

Ugandan Firm Uses Blockchain To Trace Coffee From Farms To Stores

Carmaker Ford (<a href="https://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=F.N">F.N</a>), technology giant IBM (<a href="https://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=IBM.N">IBM.N</a>), South Korean cathode maker LG Chem (<a href="https://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=051910.KS">051910.KS</a>) and China’s Huayou Cobalt (<a href="https://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=603799.SS">603799.SS</a>) have joined forces in the first blockchain project to monitor cobalt supplies from Democratic Republic of Congo. 



The pilot, overseen by responsible-sourcing group RCS Global, aims to help manufacturers ensure that cobalt used in lithium-ion batteries has not been mined by children or used to fuel conflict.



Companies are under pressure from consumers and investors to prove that minerals are sourced without human rights abuses, but tracking raw materials throughout their journey is challenging.



The project announced on Wednesday has been quietly under way since December. Starting with industrially mined cobalt in Congo, it is monitoring supplies all the way to lithium-ion batteries for Ford vehicles.



Supplies of cobalt, expected to be needed in huge quantities for electric vehicles and electronic devices, are concentrated in Congo, a sprawling, volatile nation that has been racked by civil war and political tension.



The outcome of elections in December, which had been intended to be Congo’s first democratic transfer of power in six decades, is contested. 



RCS says the IBM blockchain platform could be used to include other minerals and to allow artisanal miners, which analysts say are the biggest issue with regard to ethical sourcing, to join a blockchain-based network of validated participants.



Blockchain, famed as the technology behind cryptocurrency bitcoin, works by providing a shared record of data held by a network of individual computers rather than a single party.



For the pilot project, which should be completed around the middle of the year, cobalt from Huayou’s industrial mine will be placed in secure bags, entered into a blockchain and traced from the mine and smelter to LG Chem’s cathode and battery plant in South Korea and then on to a Ford plant in the United States.



Because minerals are often combined with metals from various sources when they are smelted, they are particularly difficult to track.



The RCS project seeks to enforce best practice by using guidelines drawn up by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.



IBM said it was exploring the potential of chemical analysis using artificial intelligence to pinpoint the origin of cobalt and ensure so-called clean cobalt was not smelted with minerals sourced less responsibly.



“There is no fool-proof method, but you have to keep the ball moving forward, to keep raising the level of accuracy,” Manish Chawla, general manager of IBM’s mining and industrial sector business, told Reuters.



VW and Ford team up



“Blockchain has been proven to be a very effective technology in raising the bar.”



IBM has already worked with retailers including Walmart (<a href="https://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=WMT.N">WMT.N</a>) and Carrefour (<a href="https://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=CARR.PA">CARR.PA</a>) to trace food through supply chains. 



In the mining sector, meanwhile, Anglo American’s (<a href="https://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/overview?symbol=AAL.L">AAL.L</a>) De Beers has begun using blockchain to track diamonds. -Reuters



&#8211; Barbara Lewis

HP1EF1E1203PY

Ford and IBM among quartet in Congo cobalt blockchain project

George Gordon is on a quest to revolutionize the financial system. The director of Africa Master Blockchain Company talks digital currencies, blind risks and board games.



<hr class="wp-block-separator"/>



What is this new African cryptocurrency you are offering? 



Where the majority of current digital currencies are based on speculative models, AfriUnion Coin (AUC) and the AfriNational Tokens (ANT)are designed for a transactional purpose allowing international payments, remittances, foreign direct investment as well as day-to-day transactions at local retail stores and other outlets. While the option for speculative trade is available with AUC, the focus is not around that. 



Each African country will have a specially-designed ANT which will allow users to pay for goods and services and bills easily through completely digital means without requiring any bank account. AUC and ANT will be fully interchangeable to one another and there will be no fees for the user.



It’s the natural next step for digital finance from mobile banking which most Africans are accustomed to. The ability to freely have the power to send and receive money locally and internationally will allow the freedom of choice and spending power many Africans don’t have currently. 



What is your own investment philosophy? 



I am a gambler! I believe in taking risks and putting things on the line. That being said, blind risk or whimsical guesses don’t get you very far. Always acquire enough information to understand to a reasonable level what the thing you are planning on investing is or how it works and then trust your instinct and gut feel.



What advice would you give entrepreneurs wanting to invest in blockchain?



First, do some research in terms of what the blockchain technology is being applied for or created in terms of its application to an industry or project. Thereafter, check the white paper for the design of the platform as well as its functionality and applicability to what it is trying to achieve. If it aligns with your personal investment rules, then go for it,however, remember that blockchain is continuously evolving and thus you need to explore outside the usual and standard. 



First cash-less, now card-less. What is the future of online banking? 



If we are looking into what is currently science fiction, I would say the future is digital contact lenses that will be able to connect you to all your social media accounts, internet, news as well as make payments by just looking at QR codes or specialized barcodes to approve and accept payments. 



Now, realistically we are not far off from such innovation and technology, but for the time being, I think the next step is scanning of QR codes at retailers and having the transaction automated from your wallet to the retailers digitally.



What is your most prized investment and why? 



My mind. I believe that the work I have put into developing my mind, and continue to do so every day, is the number one investment that I have ever done. It allows me to look at things in a unique perspective as well as provides me with the tools to push boundaries and create new opportunities.



Money, success, fame? Which is most important to you? 



I would have to say success… because it is most likely going to bring the other two as well, right? But success in the form of starting something and letting it grow and succeed and knowing that something new exists because of your efforts.



What do you spend your money on mostly? 



Board games. I love board games and believe it’s a fantastic way to expand your mind as well as have fun with friends.

George

Cryptocurrency for Africans

Blockchain is being adapted for election usage elsewhere in the world, and could provide the answer to making voting more transparent in Africa.
Kenyan elections are notoriously tricky affairs, usually with disputed results and occasionally with accompanying violence.Other African elections often descend into chaos, as most recently seen in Zimbabwe, but in blockchain, the open, distributed ledger most commonly associated with bitcoin, a solution may have been found.
Earlier this year, presidential elections took place in Sierra Leone. During the vote, Swiss foundation Agora used blockchain to record votes in more than 300 polling centers. As blockchain records transactions in a verifiable and permanent way, it is almost impossible to alter. Therefore, by recording votes on it, elections in theory become more transparent.
This greater transparency could be pivotal to ensuring more effective democracy and calmer elections across Africa, where disputes over votes are common. Kenya looks set to become the next country to test the benefits, with the Independent Electoral and Boundaries Commission (IEBC) Chairman Wafula Chebukati saying it would utilize blockchain in the next elections.
<a href="https://www.forbesafrica.com/entrepreneurs/2018/09/03/building-blockchain-tech-with-the-world-as-their-official-address/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: Building Blockchain Tech With The World As Their Official Address</a>
What impact could it have? Michael Kimani is Chairman of the Blockchain Association of Kenya, and he says that will depend on how it is used.
“From my experience, any deployment of distributed ledger technology could be at one of three points in the electoral system – the main server where voter registration data is held, the national tallying center where all information from across the country is collated, and the tallying centers where group representatives take part in a tallying process,” he says.
Wherever and however the IEBC chooses to employ blockchain, electoral laws would have to be changed to accommodate it. Kimani also says it’s worth keeping in mind that the technology itself is still nascent.
“Beyond cryptocurrency, there hasn’t been any deployment at scale,” he says. 
Nevertheless, Kimani believes the IEBC statement is a positive starting point, and that using blockchain could have a significant impact on reducing fraud.
<blockquote>“The concept of a distributed ledger for processes that were previously limited to a single entity would provide significant improvements for the whole process,” he says.</blockquote>
“The concept of a distributed ledger for processes that were previously limited to a single entity would provide significant improvements for the whole process,” he says.
“I am less concerned about the technology itself. It really boils down to man-made specifications that can be implemented. I see potential problems in setting up the necessary governance structures required to make it a reality. There are some things the technology can do, but the rest of it is really up to humans – the laws we set up, the institutions we set up, the audit processes we set up to check on the technology where it fails, and the dispute resolution structures we set up.”
Challenges remain. Yet, blockchain is being adapted for election usage elsewhere in the world. It has been piloted in elections by the state of West Virginia in the United States, while tech firm Kaspersky Lab has built a platform that utilizes it for voting.
Alexey Malanov, a malware expert at Kaspersky Lab, says it is the next logical step on from online voting, which has been used in countries such as Estonia in northern Europe.
“Online voting can be highly beneficial for modern society – it has the potential to make voting easier, cheaper and more convenient. In the modern, efficiency-driven, mobile world, various limitations of offline voting have become apparent: it’s expensive, time-consuming and often inaccessible – or at least challenging for people who aren’t physically present to cast a vote,” he says.
<div id="attachment_37733" style="width: 210px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-37733" class="size-medium wp-image-37733" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Alexey-Malanov-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Alexey-Malanov-200x300.jpg 200w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Alexey-Malanov-300x450.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Alexey-Malanov-600x900.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Alexey-Malanov-768x1151.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Alexey-Malanov-683x1024.jpg 683w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Alexey-Malanov.jpg 1366w" sizes="(max-width: 200px) 100vw, 200px" />Alexey Malanov</div>
“Online voting can help overcome these challenges, but this brings several uncertainties of its own: how to properly secure the process and how to make sure that the votes aren’t changed or altered by an external or internal party.”
Usage of blockchain technology for general elections, however, is not reasonable at the moment, he says.
“It’s quite a slow technology. A public blockchain processes 10 transactions per second, [which] is not enough to ensure voting for millions of citizens within one day,” Malanov says.
However, Kaspersky Lab is sure blockchain has vast potential yet to be uncovered, with its Business Incubator team exploring opportunities for secure implementation of blockchain for commercial use, and how its transparent, incorruptible and trusted characters could benefit areas beyond cryptocurrencies.
“We saw a great market opportunity and decided to support an experimental and promising project called Polys. It’s a secure online voting system based on blockchain technology and backed by transparent crypto-algorithms,” Malanov says.
“From the user’s perspective, it consists of a web service through which to organize voting and cast a vote, using a mobile phone or tablet. As in any vote, there are several key requirements that would make online voting trusted and secure – transparency of the process, anonymity of a voter and their confidence that their vote won’t be altered in favor of a candidate or option they didn’t choose.”
Blockchain-based programs like Polys provide all this, and it’s surely only a matter of time before we start seeing them used in African elections
&#8211; Tom Jackson

Blockchain At The Polls?

From the mine to your finger, this is how blockchain is helping stop conflict diamonds minimizing its presence in the supply chain.

Do you know where your diamonds come from? Ethically-sourced minerals and gems have gained a lot of traction of late. And increasingly, globally, consumers want to ensure that what they are buying is conflict-free.
In 2003, the Kimberley Process (KP) was established to increase transparency in the diamond trade while eliminating trade in conflict diamonds. Two years later, Everledger created the Diamond Time-Lapse Protocol, a high-tech traceability initiative built on a blockchain-based platform for the diamond and jewelry industry.
And in January, the De Beers Group announced that it would be developing the first blockchain technology initiative (called Tracr) which will be made available to the rest of the industry at the end of the year.
If you’re unfamiliar with the term, blockchain refers to a chain of transactions grouped into ‘blocks’ that are not editable by anyone – it’s an incorruptible digital ledger where every transaction is linked to the next. What is revolutionary about blockchain technology is that both people and organizations can transact in the form of smart contracts.
Why use blockchain to track diamonds through supply chains?
“Unlike other commodities – such as oil, copper or gold – individual diamond cuts have unique elements, these can be turned into data attributes that reinforce the immutability of every transaction on the blockchain,” explains Melina Mutambaie Katende, a blockchain researcher from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, currently studying at the University of Johannesburg&#8217;s department of Applied Information Systems.
“In computer science, the word ‘immutable’ comes from object-oriented programming. It means that the state of any object recorded in a piece of code cannot be modified once it has been created. Blockchain is a prime example of immutable records.”
IBM’s TrustChain initiative has already been up and running for a year. TrustChain is a consortium which uses blockchain technology to track and authenticate diamonds, precious metals and jewelry at all stages of the global supply chain, from mine to retailer. With this kind of blockchain, everything is decentralised, which means anyone can go into a ledger and see the movement of a particular stone or set of stones. It’s about transparency, proving to consumers that their purchases don’t include conflict metals or blood diamonds, and are ethically-sourced.
“Richline Group, whose head office is in South Africa, is the manufacturer. Then there’s Helzberg, a jewelry retailer, and Leach Garner, a precious metals supplier, as well as Asahi Refinery, who also do precious metals. It’s from [the] ground to wearing it on your finger,” explains Bridget van Kralingen, a Senior Vice President at IBM who heads up Global Industries, Platforms and Blockchain.
<div id="attachment_37112" style="width: 208px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-37112" class="size-medium wp-image-37112" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Bridget-van-Kralingen-pic-supplied-198x300.jpg" alt="" width="198" height="300" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Bridget-van-Kralingen-pic-supplied-198x300.jpg 198w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Bridget-van-Kralingen-pic-supplied-300x453.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Bridget-van-Kralingen-pic-supplied-600x907.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Bridget-van-Kralingen-pic-supplied-768x1161.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Bridget-van-Kralingen-pic-supplied-678x1024.jpg 678w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Bridget-van-Kralingen-pic-supplied.jpg 1355w" sizes="(max-width: 198px) 100vw, 198px" />Bridget van Kralingen, SVP, IBM Global Business Services.</div>
But this level of transparency isn’t free. Will consumers be willing to pay extra for a digital copy verifying the provenance of the materials used in their engagement rings?
The answer is yes: according to Van Kralingen, 66% of people are willing to pay more for something that’s sustainably and ethically sourced – this number goes up to 73% where millennials are concerned.
“One company can lie. Eight companies are scarcely likely to lie to you. Business is an exchange but you need proof for trust. Blockchain brings proof. With TrustChain – you can prove it and you have an ecosystem which puts its name behind it. It makes your product superior from a sustainability point of view,” she says.
A tamper-proof system, like TrustChain, is needed to track minerals in order for producers to legally obtain them, yet blockchain does have its faults – as a system, it will need to find a way to accommodate small scale and artisanal miners, for one.
According to Nicolaas C Steenkamp, a well-known independent mining consultant, blockchain cannot fully ensure that conflict minerals don’t make it into the market – it just makes it harder for them to enter the market.
“The sad reality is also that if products such as minerals and gemstones are worth enough, syndicates will find a way to influence the system. As the verification of blockchain platforms currently run on a 51% basis, employing ‘boiler rooms’ could be used to manipulate the provenance records,” he says.
Blockchain will only have value for the entire supply chain when you have a majority buy-in from the industry. Considering how often the minerals or gemstones physically change hands, the blockchains will also become increasingly complex.
“There are already rumblings around the increasingly long time the verification of a transaction takes. Mines based in remote areas with limited connectivity may struggle to connect and run these platforms if it takes several hours of even days,” explains Steenkamp.
<div id="attachment_37113" style="width: 210px" class="wp-caption alignright"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-37113" class="size-medium wp-image-37113" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Nicolaas-Steenkamp-credit-Willem-Viljoen-200x300.jpg" alt="" width="200" height="300" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Nicolaas-Steenkamp-credit-Willem-Viljoen-200x300.jpg 200w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Nicolaas-Steenkamp-credit-Willem-Viljoen-300x450.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Nicolaas-Steenkamp-credit-Willem-Viljoen-600x900.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Nicolaas-Steenkamp-credit-Willem-Viljoen-768x1152.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Nicolaas-Steenkamp-credit-Willem-Viljoen-683x1024.jpg 683w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Nicolaas-Steenkamp-credit-Willem-Viljoen.jpg 1365w" sizes="(max-width: 200px) 100vw, 200px" />Nicolaas Steenkamp. Photo provided.</div>
TrustChain is an enterprise blockchain, which means it is secure, scalable and fast. It’s also private and permissioned. Currently, IBM is running 400 blockchain networks across various industries around the world.
&nbsp;
“Technology is not the issue, it’s already good enough for many exchanges and transactions. It’s not going to be as fast as doing high-speed trading in an investment bank, but you wouldn’t want to put that on a blockchain,” says Van Kralingen.
From food safety to trade finance, blockchain is an engine that will change the way the world does business. Its potential to eliminate paperwork, enable new business models and improve transparency and traceability is unmatched.
“The world that we’re going into is one where people want people to be treated fairly… We’ve come a long way from pure convenience. In the supply chain, convenience is a key factor, closely followed by personalization. But then you get sustainability and ethics. Blockchain is made for that,” says Van Kralingen.

Diamond on white background, Illustration

Blood Diamonds To Blockchain Diamonds?

Two entrepreneurs, time zones apart, are working on building cutting-edge blockchain tech and communities in a big office they call the world.

Typical of the times we are in and the digital industry they promote, these two entrepreneurs work closely together, but in separate time zones.
Their work? Creating an open-source blockchain that will change the way we purchase and use digital assets.
We meet Riccardo Spagni in Johannesburg at 6.30 on a cold Johannesburg evening. Spagni, dressed in a pink t-shirt with an imprint of a pony on it, in his Woodlands office, is the lead maintainer of the Monero project. Dialing in for this meeting is his colleague and co-founder, Naveen Jain, who is based in Oakland, California.
This is an everyday mode of communication, in building their open-source blockchain protocol to help businesses and people manage, transfer and use digital assets. And they’ve called it Tari. For the uninitiated, the open-source model is a decentralized software-development model that encourages open collaboration.
<div id="attachment_37103" style="width: 750px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-37103" class="wp-image-37103 size-large" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Riccardo_GL-1024x682.jpg" alt="" width="740" height="493" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Riccardo_GL-1024x682.jpg 1024w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Riccardo_GL-300x200.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Riccardo_GL-600x400.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Riccardo_GL-768x512.jpg 768w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Riccardo_GL.jpg 1985w" sizes="(max-width: 740px) 100vw, 740px" />Riccardo Spagni. Photo by Gypseenia Lion</div>
<blockquote>“I like to see myself as the Elon Musk of South Africa, because I’m from South Africa as well,” says Spagni.</blockquote>
He has had a knack for cryptocurrencies ever since 2011 when he found himself mining around in the ecosystem. In 2013, he founded Monero, which provides increased privacy through encryption of transactional information by using robust and recent encryption tools available to safeguard investments. It basically protects any transaction by offering parties absolute anonymity.
Jain got involved in Monero as a miner and also fell in love with cryptocurrencies.
“So when Naveen said to me ‘wouldn’t it be cool to like put natively digital assets on a blockchain’, I was like ‘hmm why’,” recalls Spagni.
Through research and understanding the advantages, Spagni changed his mind.
“I came to realize there was nothing in the market that fit the needs for a highly-scalable and highly- robust native digital assets protocol. So that’s basically what we set out to build,” he tells FORBES AFRICA.
The Tari project will exist to allow companies transfer assets such as loyalty points, gaming points and tickets from one platform or user to another without losing value.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/cover-story/2017/09/04/bitcoin-blockchain-billions/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">READ MORE: Bitcoin, Blockchain And Billions</a>
“The people issuing loyalty points remain the people issuing loyalty points. And the people writing games remain the people writing games. We are not disrupting any of that. What we are disrupting is them having to provide all that infrastructure on the backend for the issuing of their natively digital assets,” says Spagni.
The team already has investors backing them but they are working two years ahead of the actual launch.
“The real secret of sophisticated software systems is it takes long to build over time…We are doing something that hasn’t been done before, so we are not expecting this to be a walk in the park and our real mission right now is to build the best team in the world that wants to overcome the challenges along the way,” says Jain, on the call from California.
They aim to build a global team able to contribute and work on the project with them, which is one of the stages they are currently at.
“From our point of view, blockchain systems are global systems, they are not geographically focused in any way, shape or form, the network is a global network and so it’s very important that we take a global perspective from the beginning of the project,” says Jain.
Their key focus recruiting contributors has been in Johannesburg.
<blockquote>“There’s an incredible wealth of untapped talent in South Africa,” offers Spagni.</blockquote>
There’s a huge opportunity to bridge the gap and create a Tari lab in Johannesburg where developers can come and work on cutting-edge blockchain tech.
But the developers in Johannesburg will only be a segment of the team. The rest would be scattered around the world creating not only an ecosystem of blockchain but an ecosystem of a working community through online interactions.
“It’s weird because there are people all over the world and there are tons of people in this space that I respect and they are scattered all over the globe so we are constantly talking. It’s like being in a big office with some of the brightest minds on the planet,” says Spagni.
“Sharp people like to work with other sharp people and when you are exposed to that global community of people who are all throwing in and developing this open-source software that’s pretty amazing,” he adds.
One of the biggest industries the team aims to tap into is the gaming industry worth $10.3 billion in the United States alone.
Usually users would buy a game, play it and accumulate points. Once they get bored of the game, they play another and the points they accumulated in the first game goes to waste. But with Tari, the user would be able to transfer their end-game wealth into another game.
“Then nothing is ever wasted and they don’t have to build up infrastructure in one game to abandon it. So that excites me a lot,” says Spagni.
Similar to Bitcoin, Tari’s software will be open-source as well, meaning anyone would be able to have access to it. Jain believes this will allow them to gain the trust of users and businesses.
<div id="attachment_37105" style="width: 650px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-37105" class="wp-image-37105 size-full" src="https://www.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Naveen.jpg" alt="" width="640" height="960" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Naveen.jpg 640w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Naveen-300x450.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Naveen-600x900.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Naveen-200x300.jpg 200w" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px" />Naveen Jain. Photo Supplied.</div>
“The most powerful mode you can build is community so if you have a large group of people that are philosophically and ideologically aligned with your mission, and then you don’t really need to keep the software itself under lock and key,” he elaborates.
“You can open-source it with a highly permissible licence. Because anyone can use it and what it does is it creates trust. I think we’re in a new world.”
Although to some businesses, this may be a problem as they choose to keep their intellectual property, open-source is seen as a disruptor many have an appetite for.
A survey done by Black Duck Software and North Bridge in 2015 found that 78% of companies run on open source. What may have sounded as crazy a few years ago for businesses to put out their data has now became the norm. They found that open-source systems are critical to reducing potential security, legal, and operational risks while allowing companies to reap full benefits.
“To actually create this kind of a system, to earn people’s trust, that’s just a huge challenge and tremendous amounts of fun. I wake up every day, really excited about this incredible opportunity that we have within the Tari community to pull this off and make it happen,” says Jain, before ending yet another call to his colleague in Johannesburg and beginning yet another day of building an open-source world.

Tag: blockchain

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