Layer 2 Stage | Better Business Through Blockchains

Captions as YouTube publishes them, usually machine-generated, so product and people names can be misheard.

1. 0:03

   there we go all right so our first talk it's going to be better business through blockchain it's going to be moderated by Joe Nakamoto from coin Telegraph he is not an intern and a fun fact about Joe is that he is banned from Cuba so let's welcome Joe Nakamoto thank you so much well um very kind of you I'm not banned from Cuba for any illicit reasons um feel free to asked me in the pub later and the joke was I'm not the coin Telegraph Inn I.E it wasn't me who liquidated $ 200

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   million worth of bitcoin shorts two weeks ago that's my ice Breer out the way now to bring my panel onto the stage I think you're sitting in is it Alex first or Alex at the other end Alex at the other end okay in which case I'll welcome typhoon first from haa Cloud please clap him to the stage Veronica from Geek pay please clap to the stage Bria from uh sorry from block Health please welcome to to the stage and finally Alex from

3. 1:04

   aexis um thank you all so much for making the time this morning it's great to be with you all I know the weather's a bit naff um but you know it's great to be with you this morning before I introduce my panel my name is Joe Nakamoto as explained in the intro I am not the coin Telegraph intern I was actually on a flight to Milan that day when the famous spot ETF tweet uh took took place and let's just say I checked in for an easy jet flight and I landed in a private

4. 1:36

   jet I don't have a Lambo I don't have a Rolex I'm not the coin Telegraph intern okay um my introduction out the way of course I make content for cointelegraph um over to you typhoon haai Cloud who are you why you here today thank you very much for being here for everyone it's a great opportunity to attend nearon and also share this panel with uh other people from other companies thank you um at uh huawe Cloud I the ecosystem

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   manager and for Partnerships we working with web three companies and we offer services and products to enable them to being a being a active company and help the C help their customers thank you fantastic okay Veronica over to you at geekay can we see your T-shirt yes this is my t-shirt I just show you because with with the jacket close here my name is Veronica I'm CEO and co-founder at geekpay geekpay is a financial operations platform for digital currencies we work with small and

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   mediumsized businesses and actually for the past two years we've been working hard to bring more business to blockchain and I think that we managed and did a really good job and keep rolling fantastic so we've gone from Cloud to payments now bring to health is that right yes Health hi everyone my name's brigetta thanks so much for having me I'm really looking forward to today and tomorrow uh so as mentioned

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   health so I'm a physician by trade spent most of my time seeing patients and then began advising for healthtech companies more and more healthtech companies were blockch offering blockchainbased Solutions and the investors wouldn't invest so we had to set up investor education because they don't invest in things they don't understand that um put me in a place where I was doing twoe

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   boot camps for investors and eventually with covid the workload dropped so I wrote a book for my healthc care colleagues uh process um policy folks legal developers trying to get the entire ecosystem to have the same vocabulary and make it very use case Centric so that we can all work together for our Preferred Future and that what brings me here today fantastic and finally Alex thanks Joe hi thanks for having me I'm

9. 3:48

   Alex from myex what we do is we bring business processes on chain you can Define your own business process on our platform and then you can run it on a chain of your choice and we use that for providing a shared single source of Truth for uh inter company and Inter organizational business processes awesome okay to open up the discussion this morning I thought we get a sense of where we are in 2023 you've all been in the blockchain business for a for a

10. 4:19

    little while now but and I go personally to a lot of blockchain crypto Bitcoin conferences around the world sometimes I'm a little bit like are we really still here could we not be a bit further could we not have better levels of understanding to to pick up on what you were saying brigita um or are we not at a broader level of adoption than what we are in 2023 you know if I try to give out some Bitcoin to someone in the street they will usually laugh at me and

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    I actually do this for my YouTube channel so I can prove that to you um so are you surprised by where we are in 2023 could we be doing a little bit better in 2023 who would like to go first um sure yeah br so so I think we're going to go a lot faster and U one of the forcing functions of course is AI and we have this amazing situation where the AI can uh because of course coding for blockchain is difficult and we so we have an opportunity to offload the

12. 5:17

    developers that are burdened with all of that um cryptographic um challenge that they have with blockchain and then also with AI uh interestingly especially in healthcare I think we have a a huge opportunity because right now um as as is well understood AI is only as good as the training data and in in health we actually don't have health data we only have disease data in clinics and hospitals and so we have a huge opportunity to in on board the masses

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    because we can now use um wearables apps to digitize our health expression we're all physical beings first but the ability to convert our physical health into digital health so that it becomes explorable and then be available for AI for training to really understand what is health what are the co-occurrences that allow us to have ideal outcomes as opposed to average outcomes Healthcare today still treats everybody like a population that means you're only going to get an average outcome most of us

14. 6:26

    anyway and so moving us from a very outdated product average treating everybody as a population to highly um or Ultra personalized Health Care where Healthcare knows you to uh you know 500 a th000 attributes at a time that's something only AI can do and it'll only be able to do it if we participate by digitizing the minutia of our lives in very safe and very effective ways and that's where web 3 comes in okay I mean I think think we're all very excited about the AI uh element right now and

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    it's definitely going to be a buzz the next couple of days um but if we stick on the blockchain stuff Veronica maybe like I have a very interesting story from a life experience so I was uh a month ago in Estonia talking to the guy who doesn't have any clue about digital currencies before but there was a case happening to him in London so he was standing trying to get money out from the ATM and then apparently a guy with a

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    gun came to him and said okay give me your money he was withdrawing money and then he said do you have binance account do you have wallet and as soon as he said yes I have and he started opening the uh mobile phone the guy told him send money to this crypto wallet to me right now and he had to send his Bitcoin which he had on binance account directly to the was it just Bitcoin I'm just interested if he also sld his at least he mentioned just Bitcoin Maybe because

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    he didn't want to share all the portfolio that he had but that is the real case of the real guy and when you ask the question how far we are with blockchain and how far the whole world uh with blockchain I would say that even fraud people even bad people understand there is a thing there and they have to capture this market for themselves so I think we are very far with blockchain

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    and I do hope that in the nearest Future the blockchain will convert from the bad or like not a really um good reputation sometimes into really use cases for businesses protected businesses and other stuff great point no and I like that framing of yeah criminals realize it has value exactly but I mean aside from go ahead Alex I mean there there are criminals on the inside and on the

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    outside right because I mean with with FTX and everything um trust has been an issue in the last year and um we've also come to realize that there is not a single chain that will do it all so the future is going to be multi-chain that's also issue here at the near conference and um especially if you look at businesses they want re reliability they want trust they want somebody to cooperate with was like a minimum size um they want to plan ahead in in maybe

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    in in five 10 years and not like in one two years like like most of the people here do MH so that's that's a completely different point of view and um if you want to open up to to like processes happening in web 2 you have to pick these people up from where they are and provide them with easy possibilities to get started and near is doing that very well on the on the b2c side so to speak so with the end users but I think there's a lot lacking in the in the

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    business and Enterprise space to to give business an easy opportunity to explore what blockchain can mean for them to take current weight of their shoulders to solve problems that they have at the moment but also to give them like a a hunch of what it could mean in the future but for them it's always like what's currently solving a problem that I have right at this moment yeah and

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    then you can come with all the nft stuff and everything else that's that's later and of very often we don't realize that yeah I know big time I feel like yeah blockchain has definitely made the case for being something of value and something that's speculative but when it comes to business I think a lot of people get distracted by this whole you know smoggers Board of wonderful acronyms and funny words when in reality they're just looking for a solution to a to an everyday business problem could we

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    talk about that now are there any use cases you'd like to suggest or highlight which show that yes there are businesses being made better through blockchains I can start yeah or I can I just want to say something before uh answering this question I must agree with Bridget because AI is very important in the healthcare and it will definitely change some stuff for the general public uh thinking about the predictive uh analytics but also Precision medicine we can definitely use

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    that for uh longevity of uh uh humans that you can live more longer because of the better analytics from the healthcare perspective but if we are focusing on the uh blockchain Tech technology also adoption the things must be much easier and accessible for people if we are going back to '90s uh 99 when first uh companies uh established before theom bubble it was very difficult to build them website building infrastructure but

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    also being online nowadays we have a low code no code solution that you can easily build a website within several hours I think for the blockchain adoption it's very important for for big infrastructure companies to offer better services but also for blockchain companies think about how we can improve Solutions so that the C their customers the general public can easily use blockchain technology in their daily life okay awesome I think that's quite a good segue into what Veronica was going to say right I have a real business case

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    but before we go there can you please raise the hands who has uh been paid with digital currency like usdt okay interesting fact so um the thing is that even businesses who are not from web three space who doesn't who doesn't deal a lot with web 3 they face with a very tough problem right now they're using banking systems and banking systems are currently a showstopper for them because they can

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    have their money on their account like blocked for more than 10 days or they can send a transfer to a person whom they work with from the US to Ukraine for instance and the money will not be delivered through bank because of compliance because of regulations because of many many stuff and business is trying to find the solution for themselves because they cannot afford to be sending money uh for 10 days and their team players will never get it or will get that in a certain of DeLay So

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    they switch to digital currencies when they switch to digital currencies they're trying to find the solutions that can help them to organize payments to send them quickly and other stuff and then they face with wallets the wallets sometimes are quite tough sometimes people lose uh access to their wallets and then money that were sent would never be delivered and other stuff so the business case that we are solving

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    right now with gig pay is helping companies who are working with a lot of different contractors gig workers vendors providers all over the globe to send the MSP out to be the organized and controlled way and we see a huge Trend that web 2 companies who are working purely on web 2 earning their revenue in Fiat currencies your dollar whatever you Fiat currencies you know and they switch

30. 14:10

    to digital currencies because it's the best solution for them because they solve their particular pain fast and um quick transfers overseas and I think blockchain is one of those solutions that actually make this process reliable and quick yeah and we have to work on that to make this relability and actually trust that we have just touched so clear to businesses that they can easily switch from Euro or

31. 14:40

    from USD into usdt send their mpay out and feel safe and don't have like a problem with that yeah no I think that definitely I think we're all in in agreement right that when it comes to money whether it's sending value you know speculating on value or transferring value then blockchains have definitely proven themselves and businesses are warming up to that but I mean for the preparation for this panel I went back and looked at the stuff that

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    I so I used to work for a journalist for Bloomberg one of my jobs was to investigate blockchains around the world and this was eight years ago now and the idea was that uh classic example is agriculture you know they would they would put everything on the blockchain or logistics companies would put everything on the blockchain it would streamline services this is eight years ago and to this day I don't think there's any company globally that's

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    using blockchain when I say blockch I don't mean a permissioned database that's not really decentralized I mean like a proper permission list decentralized database to get better business done so I'm just wondering when are we going to move away from money to anything else or Does the Buck stop with money and and blockchains aren't really great anything that doesn't have that um incentive model built in which is you know money and Bita so I think in

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    healthcare there's a lot of good examples they're early examples and and you want to think of Bitcoin it came along Finance it didn't touch Finance at all that industry that sector stayed the way it was and it just showed up alongside and we're seeing that in healthcare now in places such as cannabis use the beauty of blocks blockchain and the ability to stay uh pseudo Anonymous while you're using

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    various products has made it possible for folks in in the Cannabis industry to set up situations where we already know the complete DNA of the plant that's being used because seed to sale regulations are in place so when a customer purchases cannabis that information is um encoded in the barcode of the product and then that individual if they're purchasing for sleep or pain or for some other use can provide their personal experience of that product yes for their own benefit but most

36. 16:47

    importantly for the benefit of the entire Community using that product so that they can share what works and what doesn't work with each other and um I think that's uh kind of the model of crowd-based intelligence where the individuals pull up their sleeves and participate in the co-creation of the science by which they can live their lives you also see it in uh for instance hair Dow hair hair regrowth is very big business apparently uh going up to uh

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    something like 53 billion in 2028 up from 17 billion just last year and uh the herow has already on board Ed 1300 participants so you have of course this new movement around Dai and this idea of using blockchainbased solutions to enable that ability of individuals to share the minutia of their lives while still controlling their privacy and um having some agency over where that data gets used and for what reasons other

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    places that are really important are um individuals who have been diagnosed with a marker for a significant disease of unknown um onset shall we say so what we have of course are individuals with these markers who decade by decade go by and they still haven't been diagnosed even though their genetics suggests they should we as experts will never be able to figure out why that's happening but of course if um again back to AI sorry

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    if we had enough data from individuals we would start to understand why those participants with those positive markers are not demonstrating that disease provides us a future with amazing opportunity to co-create not not just Health intelligence but co-create new products and services and wealth as a community so I think of it as that next wealth inflection we had the Industrial Age the internet age and now with blockchain and AI we can move into a

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    world where transacting on our data isn't something that happens by just a hand handful of very large companies in the US but really all of us participate in terms of transacting on our own data and using our data as an economic asset for ourselves interesting I think the the Cannabis example is particularly interesting I guess there you're really minimizing trust right because it's that incentive to do the right thing always

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    um knowing that all that data you could if there's one fault in someone recording the wrong strain at one point then the whole thing is it's not worthless but you know it wrecks the whole system and that's the thing that I always struggle with with blockchains is that you need to make sure that every actor acts as best they can with the information they've got um otherwise it just becomes a sort of fuzzy sort of

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    messed up database I guess well that dilutes out when you start to have billions of us right so that bad actor um is increasingly identifiable through again um Ai and then uh the that those Bad actors dilute themselves out by many good actors over time okay very good um Alex we haven't heard you from you from a few minutes how are you using blockchain um with perhaps your professional work in terms of I guess transparency I guess you know you you work all on chain is that right we have

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    a we have a platform where you um we're like the Gateway between between the blockchain world and the web 2 world of the of the businesses and we enable them to use blockchain but the they do not need to have like any blockchain knowledge we take over the whole signing we are paying the gas fees they don't need to have a blockchain wallet they don't need to know what a funable token is or anything

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    but we can way they exactly and that's that's the way it should be so you are a business you have a problem you want to have a a a process running where you can trust that it's going to be run as it was defined and you also want to have security that the data is being processed as it should be and the big thing then later is if you if you look at the current technological development that this um business process automation business process TR enables later automation so

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    if you really know that some at some point in time your package was delivered to that recipient then you can then you can do with then you can trigger automatic processes with it and that's I think the big leverage that we that we have there okay and said what what's different now than like 2015 8 years ago I think one one is uh the the new layer ones that we have like near where you

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    have performance and price and and and throughput that's not comparable um it's also a learning process of course that people need to need to learn what this is really all about and it's also like a product Market fit what can we deliver um as what can blockchain technology do for for business and um the there was this big wave where everybody said good we're going to tokenize everything so everything is going to be a digital twin on chain which obviously didn't work because it's of little use in most

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    cases um and now I think the focus is much more on the trust issue and that's coming up in in the last time because we have these new privacy regulations we have ai data as a source you need data as a source for AI but you also need to make sure that data that you have can be trusted so I think in in the future it will be a big issue to say to be to be sure that that data that I'm buying from somebody or that data that that's being produced somewhere is that is that

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    generated or is that original and um how can we certify that is there going to be a data labeling of some kind and that's I think where blockchain will come in big time because there you can anchor data on chain and provide proof that there is really something real that they is spaced on and and that's what we're looking into and just to tap into the point there what you saying about you know how you communicate these things to business presumably everybody in this room has some interest in building with

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    blockchains or with their personal interests or whether it's their professional interests how should they how should we communicate how we can use sort of blockchain Technologies in our you know daily practices is there a way to do it are there best practices what tips and what advice would you give to people when they trying to communicate about blockchains and this is kind of my closing question I guess it's going to be a minute each um tyus why don't you take us away um I can definitely focus

50. 23:37

    on this question I think first internet companies came started 30 years ago beginning '90s and Adoption of Internet even changing from the personal computer to mobile phones took 30 years I think for companies education is very important for external users but also internal users because if the knowledge um blockchain literacy going up lift off then you can provide better Solutions and it can be also good for the end user to use those services

51. 24:09

    but if you are focusing on the better businesses through blockchain I think you cannot think black and white but there is also gray area because they need the shift from the web two solutions to web three they don't you cannot demand everything that they need to put on the blockchain next day but they can put some of the service to the blockchain still using web tree but giving the same expert same uh

52. 24:35

    experience to their users so that they get um um how you can say that they have a uh better accessibility but also usage for for your end users in the long term with the lifting off the knowledge externally and internally you can provide better Services that's what I'm thinking okay nice and Veronica what about yourself uh I was actually I wanted to reflect to Alex um messages about like I think there are two things that all users who are willing to cross

53. 25:08

    the line from Real World into blockchain let's say so they have to consider two things number one it's trust so you have to find trusted solution at least suggested refer it or ask for like referral from the person that you trust another one it's a UI user friendly products because why blockchain is not so Mass adoptive because userfriendly products are unique in this place because it's very hard to find a wallet that you can easily log in it's very

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    hard to find other solution that you can understand from first couple of clicks and I think userfriendly interface for Mass ad options in vital why chat GPT so popular because it's so easy to send a message in English and have your answer the same thing needed to be done with blockchain and uh as soon as we are there I don't think that we are there yet but I think the more we're going to

55. 26:01

    think about it trust and user friendly UI the quicker we're going to hit the the new the new estate I can add a third to that list as well it would be usefulness as well you know it's got to be useful well we have use cases already you see we have Healthcare we have payments we have workflow we have a lot of use cases in real business the thing is that we need to adopt more people here and in order to adopt more people

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    we have to create products that are easy to understand use and actually use this IM immersive power of blockchain fantastic B so yes Healthcare has kind of been primed because we have graveyards of failures in healthcare we've been trying to engage individuals in their health historically and there is um as I say lots of failed corporate Wellness programs and people do not want corporate to have have the minutia of their lives and so you need to talk

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    about this as a new model of privacy and security at a level that hasn't been delivered previously while also creating an opportunity for the individual to gain economic benefit from managing their own data participating in data marketplaces and uh having an opportunity to co-produce uh important information for themselves and each other so a very model than the um original use these devices because it's good for your health that value

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    proposition was too low for many people to participate uh and so I think if you talk about uh an opportunity to make health and um data management so uh call it so sticky and so irresistible through using technology that's going to be finally offering us that ability to stay private and secure when it comes to the details of Our Lives yeah for sure and I think also that point you made earlier about the fact that you know you can build a new system while the existing or the

59. 28:09

    incumbent system of rots away knowing that people do have this flight safety you know you you compare it to you know Bitcoin building this new Financial system while the old on still exist right to some extent they do now coexist now but there's a lot more people trying out that new system I think the same thing could be applied to healthcare exactly and the minute you have an opportunity to get your X-ray done at a place that where that information is going directly to your own home base to

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    your own blockchain you won't choose the other one same thing with uh you know where you get your labs done if you're going to have a visit televisit with someone you want that to be automatically added to your blockchain and uh so like you say I like the word rotting so the the incumbents are rotting on the side yeah super Alex what do you think how should we communicate um these blockchain benefits to businesses what we try to do is we try to put like the the power to our users

61. 29:06

    to create their own processes on our platform so so we don't not try to prescribe how to do the business how to how to leverage blockchain but we give them the ability to use this shared single source of Truth for their own needs and solve their own problems what I would suggest is um for every to to go to ibexes doio and download our ibexes connector and start playing around with it because we did we did so well without

62. 29:35

    Shilling we 25 minutes without Shilling you got to take the first step at some point in time that's it right okay um that was that was sooner than I thought was there another way you'd like to communicate it without necessarily Shilling your your company no um I think um the the the you have to to make it as easy as as possible to use blockchain for a for a real world problem and that's what that's what we have to find out where is

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    really the point where people can use it um in a way that benefits them and and and is not like a a constructed idea that's coming out of the web 3 space where everybody's thinking about identity and data ownership but where it's really useful fantastic okay great note to finish on we've gone from payments to Crime to speculation to to blockchains to healthcare to to usefulness I think we've we've covered a

64. 30:31

    good deal today guys thank you so much for being part of this today thank you all for listening and it's been better business through blockchains thank you thank you thank you