The Convergence of AI and Web3 in Decentralized Mobility Solutions
As noted by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, AI and Web3 are converging technologies that leverage decentralized networks, self-sovereign identities (SSI), autonomous agents, and machine learning. These innovations enable new business models and streamline business processes, particularly in the realm of decentralized mobility solutions. A crucial success factor lies in integrating these technologies with existing business processes. Collaboration between innovative AI and Web3 startups and established industry leaders is essential for driving impact and fostering innovation.
At IAA Mobility, AI and Web3 startups collaborate with industry players and universities in the moveID consortium. They are showcasing a state-of-the-art smart city solution called MOBIX Park & Charge. To meet the project’s goals, positioning innovative cutting-edge solutions is vital. These solutions leverage data to redefine the technological landscape, heralding a data-driven revolution. The synergistic trio of Fetch.ai, a long-time partner of Datarella, along with peaq and Ocean Protocol as moveID partners, is making significant strides forward. This initiative is further supported by solution providers and integrators like Datarella, DeltaDAO, 51Nodes, and university teams from htw saar and Zeppelin University.
Fetch.ai: Bridging AI and Blockchain
Datarella partner Fetch.ai seamlessly combines artificial intelligence (AI) with blockchain technology, unlocking new possibilities across various sectors. These possibilities include autonomous machine economies, smart cities, and efficient resource management. The Fetch.ai platform provides a decentralized infrastructure for Microagents capable of executing tasks autonomously.
In the context of MOBIX Park & Charge, Microagents act as bridges between different software components on edge devices. This setup enables autonomous control over various systems, such as traffic lights.
Microagents in Action
Fetch.ai Microagents serve as multifunctional intermediaries. They communicate and initiate processes in external systems, handling complex tasks like:
Managing crypto wallets
Ensuring secure payment transfers
Verifying events
Controlling access to hardware such as gates, traffic lights, and chargers
In essence, Fetch.ai Microagents automate tasks on behalf of human clients, streamlining processes and enhancing efficiency. These functionalities contribute significantly to the development of decentralized mobility solutions.
peaq: Empowering the Economy of Things
As automation surges, the peaq network emerges as a key player in sharing its benefits with everyone. It fosters the Economy of Things by establishing a crucial layer-one blockchain infrastructure for decentralized mobility applications.
Peaq’s technology stack and economic incentives enable the development of applications for machines in this emerging economy. For instance, it powers electric vehicle (EV) charging applications. The peaq token fuels the entire ecosystem, facilitating digital identities for machines and enabling seamless payments.
In MOBIX Park & Charge, peaq allows communication with charging points, using peaq tokens to initiate and pay for EV charging processes.
Ocean Protocol: A New Data Economy
Ocean Protocol aims to unleash its potential for individuals and organizations alike. It empowers secure data sharing (Compute-to-Data), selling, and monetization while ensuring control and privacy. Users retain the power to determine who accesses their data and how it is used.
This establishes a novel paradigm in the data economy, especially for AI models in the mobility sector. In MOBIX Park & Charge, Ocean Protocol integrates its decentralized data marketplace technology. This facilitates sovereign and privacy-preserving data exchange within mobility applications.
Key Components of Ocean Protocol
Key components of Ocean’s data pricing mechanisms include Compute-to-Data and a Gaia-X-compliant Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) approach. Additionally, Ocean solution provider DeltaDAO collaborates to implement the Ocean Tech Stack. In future versions of MOBIX Park & Charge, the goal is to simplify data sales for IoT devices. These devices will automatically sell data directly on the Ocean Marketplace or through Compute to Data. Fetch.ai agents possess built-in intelligence, allowing IoT devices in cars to decide when and how to post data to the Ocean Marketplace based on traffic situations.
Conclusion: Paving the Way for a Data-Driven Future
The versatile infrastructure of peaq, the automated decision-making capabilities of Fetch.ai’s Microagents, and Ocean Protocol’s sovereign data exchange mechanism synergistically converge to facilitate MOBIX Park & Charge. As we stride toward a data-driven future, these technologies pave the way for decentralized mobility solutions that could profoundly reshape mobility.
We are happy to announce that Datarella is now an Associate Partner of the IDunion consortium. As an established blockchain solution provider Datarella adds expertise in blockchain development, system design and identity management.
IDunion develops a basic infrastructure for the verification of identity data. For this purpose, a distributed database will be jointly operated by a European cooperative. The network will be set up and managed by various actors consisting of private companies, associations, cooperatives, government institutions, educational institutions and other legal entities.
IDunion’s infrastructure is based on open standards and open source technology for Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI) and is particularly characterized by data economy and transparency. The solution gives users the opportunity to manage their identity information themselves and to decide when and with whom they want to share it.
Despite the novel coronavirus pandemic and partial lockdown in Germany, the KOSMoS consortium held the fourth consortial meeting. Initially planned to take place in Munich, all participants joined a shared video conference from their safe places at home. Despite the circumstances to not be physically present, the two-day consortial meeting turned out to be a success.
The two days of the workshop each had a different focus. While the first day was all about working together on common topics, each consortial partner presented their progress and future tasks in short presentations.
On the first day, Datarella presented blockchain impacts for KOSMoS. In particular about the Node- and Client infrastructure, transactions and signatures in Hyperledger, and proposed open questions for a governance model in KOSMoS that are going to be answered in the next weeks and months. With a very interesting guest presentation from CashOnLedger, the topic of regulative questions regarding cryptocurrencies was faced in the afternoon, followed by discussions about identification and key management of actors inside a consortial blockchain. These topics lead to multiple constructive discussions that left a fair amount of valuable inputs for the consortial partners and Datarella. In the afternoon, Datarella was asked to hold a presentation about itself, where we presented some of our innovative products like Track and Trust, the XSC Smart Wallet or the recently released Connex Coin.
In parallel to these topics in the first workshop, a second workshop took place that focused on a common KOSMoS system architecture. Here, important aspects like information exchange and availability were being discussed.
On the second day, there were interesting topics by the consortial partners such as identity management in KOSMoS, standardized formats for transmission of machine data, defining tasks in apps, time series analysis and many more. These topics will have a major impact on the final KOSMoS system.
As a result, it’s fair to say that we had very productive days even though it was held remotely. We had a great exchange of information and collaborated efficiently during the workshops that leave us happy with the overall result. However, we are already looking forward to our next consortial meeting that will be held in September 2020 to see all consortial partners in person.
The number of and capital raised through ICOs have been in steep decline since mid-2018. Non-existing regulatory frameworks, fraud, and the decline of cryptocurrency prices were among the reasons. So called security token offerings promise to fill the gap approaches to compliant offerings based on actual assets. Will asset-backed STOs initiate a second wave of token offerings? How do typical STO projects look like, and where will security tokens be traded? For this meetup, we invited Richard Olsen, Founder, and CEO of Lykke as well as Dr. Markus Kaulartz, Senior Attorney at CMS Hasche Sigle to talk about the impact of security tokens on financial assets markets and regulatory aspects of STOs, respectively.
After the hype about ICOs in 2017 with billions of dollars raised, ICOs became less popular in 2018 due to missing regulatory frameworks as well as quite a number of fraudulent projects and the decline of overall cryptocurrency prices. ICO’s were initially attractive to projects because they enabled project teams to raise relatively large amounts of capital in an unregulated environment mostly based on white papers and promises of future project/product development. This changed rapidly following the beginning of the “Crypto Winter”.
Since then, security tokens have become more popular as token-based capital markets have continued to mature. In contrast to utility tokens from “traditional” ICOs, security tokens represent real physical value, such as a share in the company who issued them or specific assets like a power plant for instance. Security Tokens are comparable to actual shares on the stock markets, which represent partial ownership, have a price and sometimes provisions for profit sharing schemes such as dividends.
Richard Olsen
The first speaker of the event was Richard Olsen, Founder, and CEO of Lykke, a Swiss-based exchange for financial assets targeting B2B and B2C clients. He presented the development of the Lykke exchange and its transformation from a ‘prototypical startup’ to a mature ‘regulated entity with global potential’.
Richard calls himself the “grandfather” of crypto both due to his age and his experience. Richard can boast of decades of experience on the leading edge of global finance. He founded the forex company, Oanda in 1985 with the goal of forecasting financial markets using computers, before moving into innovating the provision of second by second interest payments and some of the earliest frequency trading facilities.
After an “Aha” moment in 2011 where he realized that bitcoin wasn’t just bitcoin but rather the first DLT and a concept which would transform the world, Richard began planning to build the Lykke exchange. Since Oanda’s board wasn’t ready to enter the world of crypto, Richard needed to raise money. Of course, he then looked to crypto. Once the market was ripe the Lykke STO was ready to go. While most projects were offering promises of future development in exchange for money as part of their ICOs, Lykke was already doing an STO. Few people can report from first-hand experience about the benefits and risks of executing a security token offering. Richard has done this three times in as compliant a manner as possible. Lykke’s first STO was with the LKK token which promises the delivery of Lykke company equity to bearers of the token. The first STO brought in 1.8 million USD. Further rounds included LKK-1y and LKK-2y forwards which raised more than 4 million additional USD.
Licenses, Liquidity and High-Frequency Trading
Richard brought up a very important question – namely, why were they allowed to sell these security tokens? In this case, they were selling their own equity. In order to provide an exchange for third-party security tokens, they will need an Organised Trading Facility (OTF) license which Richard sees as the next logical step for the company. OTF licenses are part of the MiFID II EU financial regulations and according to the Dutch Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM), OTF’s are intended level the playing field between the various venues for the execution of orders.
Specifically, once Lykke obtains an OTF license, they will be “a multilateral trading venue in which third-party buying and selling interests in bonds, derivatives or structured products are able to interact in the system in a way which results in a contract”. OTF’s have all the compliance regulations of an investment firm. In contrast to multilateral trading facilities (MTF) however, according to AFM, the “definition of OTF is intentionally broad, so that it can contain as many (future) forms of organized execution of transactions as possible”, which leaves space for innovation by exchanges and market makers such as Lykke.
Richard also discussed the macroeconomic aspects of the current financial system, in particular pointing out that liquidity and transparency are sorely lacking in much of the system and that blockchain-based solutions can make processes faster, easier and more transparent. Richard claimed, that tokenization will get more and more popular as soon as regulation catches up with the technology Everything that can be tokenized is going to be tokenized. One of the reasons for this is that tokenization enables risk sharing. Exchanging tokens instead of cash spreads the risk on multiple parties. That’s why it’s so important that any token be exchangeable for any other token. The more liquid the market the greater the likelihood that systemic risks are shared widely and unwound quickly before they grow to massively disruptive proportions.
He also dispelled a myth about high-frequency trading or rather clarified it with a metaphor. A question came up about whether or not high-speed trading was necessary or could be healthy for a system. Richard argued essentially that while the high-speed arbitrage-based trading of the past years was quite destructive, overall, trading in a financial system is much like blood circulation in a human body. Just as blood needs to move relatively rapidly through the body to enable waste removal and homeostasis, a financial system needs deep markets with lots of high-speed trading in order to clear the gunk and keep things competitive.
At the exchange level, he noted, the key is liquidity, which means that there should be enough tokens available to trade. This is currently made by bots all over the exchange business but there’s a lot of inefficiency in this model. Richard argues for well-designed matching engines which efficiency earn their keep. Moreover, people should be empowered through technology and crowd intelligence while staying within the legal system. Richard pointed out the self-regulatory success of Airbnb’s reputation system as a model for this kind of feedback system. He further emphasized that the laws and regulations have to be designed to incentivize the right behavior in spite of the corrupting effect of money.
In the same vein, Richard cautioned that at the moment it is difficult to determine which actors in the STO market are legit and which may be rather dubious. Essentially many say that they are issuing an STO but due to the lack of clear standards and transparency, it’s difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. According to Richard, investors should pay attention to the jurisdiction of the asset, the reputation of the company issuing the asset, the rigor of the regulatory structures where that company is based and finally the question of where the secondary market for the asset takes place. If these aspects aren’t all covered within a reputable regulated environment, it’s pretty clear that something may be fishy with the STO or the platform involved.
If you want to learn more about Lykke and its products, go on their website or download the Lykke wallet.
Markus Kaulartz
Following Richard’s presentation, Dr. Markus Kaulartz presented the legal implications of STOs as the second speaker of the night. He is a senior attorney at CMS Hasche Sigle and specializes in IT-Law, IT-Security, and Privacy.
Markus firstly explained that tokens generally always incorporate a connection between the token and a representation of ‘something else’, for example, a voting right, shares or licenses. In the case of security tokens, the underlying asset is generally either equity in an enterprise or debt. The only exception to this is tokens and coins which serve a pure currency function with no underlying value underlying utility or asset.
First a Slight of Hand
As a result, a critical legal issue is the separation between the token itself and the rights “granted” by the token. It may be possible that the token and the rights associated with it might be separated.
Markus illustrated this with a simple example involving his physical leather wallet. For his example he let the leather wallet stand-in in for a security token and a 5 euro bill inside illustrate an underlying security. He noted that if he as the token issuer were to sell the wallet with it’s included right to the underlying security (and thereby dividends) to someone it might be possible that they could subsequently sell the token onward to a third party (Just the empty wallet) without also passing along the underlying linked security. That would result in a situation with two potential claimants for the dividends issued by the security issuer. In such a situation, the token issuer might end up paying a dividend twice.
One legal approach is to limit the original buyer contractually and prevent them from selling the rights to the underlying token to a third party without also selling the token. There is not however currently any clear solution to this problem at a systemic level inside the German legal system. It’s currently being discussed on both the legislative and regulatory levels but is not yet solved. Essentially you can issue a security token at this time but it’s not possible to definitively link the token to the security it represents without some significant contractual acrobatics. Markus is hoping for changes to the law which would essentially make blockchain transactions equivalent legally to a written contract transaction transferring ownership of a given security.
Prospectus or No Prospectus? That is the question.
Markus also outlined the legal options available currently for organisations who wish to issue a security token. The first significant question for prospective STO issuers is whether or not they will need a prospectus for the project. This prospectus contains potential risk factors, information about the issuer and a description of the security as well as deep financial disclosures about the issuing company. Such documentation must be approved by Bundesanstalt für Finanzdienstleistungsaufsicht – BaFin (German Federal Financial Supervisory Authority).
The process is pretty much the same as for issuing any other kind of stock or blond and is very expensive. Legal costs for producing such a document are likely to exceed 100,000 Euros at a minimum and getting a prospectus approved by BaFIN often takes months of waiting and working through numerous drafts prior to approval. The idea of a prospectus is that it is a document which contains reliable information regarding the risks and benefits of an asset and serves to protect “mom and pop” investors from unknowingly spending too much money on projects they know essentially nothing about. The major advantage for issuers if they choose to issue a security with a prospectus is that it can be rapidly “passported” into all other EU jurisdictions and traded in a compliant manner without further examination by the individual member states.
Exceptions, Alternatives and SPVs
The alternative to this process is to issue the STO under one of three exceptions designed to allow funds to be raised without offering consumers the “protection” of a prospectus. The rules are designed to protect the mass of average investors and there is some flexibility for situations which don’t have a substancial impact on everyday asset consumers.
Exception 1: If the token will be sold to less that 150 people. This is intended to support startups by allowing investment by small groups of friends and family.
Exception 2: If the token is sold exclusively to investors who each invest over 100,000 euros. Individuals rich enough to invest more than 100k are deemed to be defacto professional investors who don’t require state protection and “know what they’re doing”.
Exception 3: If the token sale raises less than 8 million euro. This is the exception under which most crowd investing happens. The logic is that at this level the damage from such an issuance can’t become significant at a structural level.
Lastly, Markus described the process of buying tokens and approaches to token issuance. Classical approaches follow the simple structure that the investor buys and gets the token and the right directly from the emitter who runs the business.
One new approach to token issuances uses a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) which has the right from the emitter to sale the tokens. For the issuer, this guarantees that the emitter is completely disconnected from the investor in a contractual manner. Despite the fact that this strategy reduces the risks for the token issuer, it increases the risks to the investor because the investor has no legal claim on the underlying assets being securitized. Markus essentially said that the use of an SPV could be a red flag for investors especially when in conjunction with the issuance of STOs from jurisdictions with lax regulatory oversight.
Another approach is to securitize subordinated loans either with or without an SPV. This is a common approach within the crowdinvesting area but it’s rapidly being adopted for STOs as well due to the relatively lax regulations on this type of debt and to the established procedures / regulatory framework for ordinary subordinated debt. Investors should be aware however that subordinated debts are services last behind all other commercial obligations in the case of a bankruptcy.
Thank you very much to Richard and Markus for giving these interesting presentations! Also, thank you to Deloitte for hosting our Meetup. Also, a big thank you again to our community for coming and participating! We hope you enjoyed the meetup and we encourage you to give feedback over the known channels!
Our next meetup will be about Blockchain in PropTech on July 23rd and we would love to see you again there!
Privacy is one of most central topics of this internet connected era. People want their private data to be protected from third parties which, for instance, resell the collected information to promote personalised advertisements or worse to do things like manipulate elections with what amounts to weaponised data science. In the past it was often the case that privacy was a mere afterthought when designing an online application. That’s not the case anymore. In the wake of scandals such as Cambridge Analytica, it has become increasingly clear that system design needs to put privacy front and center if we want to avoid dystopian outcomes in our society. Thus, “Privacy by Design” was the topic of our meetup on on March 19, 2019.
Our audience at the meetup “Privacy by Design?”
The first person we invited to give some insights about this topic was Andrew Tobin, Managing Director of Evernym. Evernym is a US-based software company which develops decentralised, self-sovereign identity applications. Andrew talked about how Evernym developed and open sourced the Sovrin protocol to manage the secure and private issuance, holding and verification of digital credentials in a decentralised manner.
By using Sovrin, anyone can verify claims made by identity owners including the following four aspects of data validity without any contact with the credential issuer. This eliminates the risk that anyone can draw a correlation about private activities of credential holders based on the claims they make to verifiers.
Who issued the data to the holder?
Was it issued only to the holder, and not to anyone else?
Has the data been tampered with between issuance and time of claim?
Has the issuer revoked the credential?
He also pointed out that Sovrin is not limited to human credentials making highly useful for the M2M economy. It can also be used to issue and verify credentials for organisations and things empowering proofs for stuff like part numbers of machine components, company records or tax returns.
Sovrin enables the storage of verifiable credentials in a digital wallet. Compared to a physical wallet, there are a number of additional benefits. Backup- and recovery functionality, the ability to revoke credentials remotely and a selective disclosure functionality for the individual data points making up your identity are all made possible using this technology. The trouble with paper credentials is that they’re pretty stupid. Passports can get lost or stolen, if you show your drivers license to someone you have to show them the entire document, not just the relevant details, and if an issuer wants to revoke a credential they’re pretty much out of luck when using a traditional paper identity document. With self- sovereign identity all of these scenarios are no longer problematic.
If you want to learn more about Evernym, their solutions and tools behind it, check their website or Andy’s slides here and here.
Andrew Tobin presenting Sovrin, a self-sovereign identity solution
The second speaker of the event was Kevin Leuthardt the new Steward of Governance Working Group of the European Blockchain Association (EBA). He briefly presented the founding of the Working Group Governance in the EBA and explained how decentralised organisations can rely on a suitable governance model.
If you are interested in governance in decentralised organisations and have a law background we would appreciate if you could take a couple of minutes to fill out this survey. Thank you very much in advance.
Kevin Leuthard presenting an update on the EBA Working Group Governance
As the final speaker of the day, we invited Dr. Elad Verbin to the stage. Elad is a Berlin-based computer scientist specialising in blockchain technologies, algorithm engineering, and predictive modelling. In blockchain space, he works on blockchain filesystems, governance, and macro-cryptoeconomics. At this meetup Elad shared some insights about “Privacy on the Blockchain – Zero Knowledge Proofs and their Future Use”.
First of all he explained why people should care about privacy on the blockchain.
The first reason to do so is that privacy on the blockchain is broken. In the early bitcoin days people were buying pizza online with the same addresses they used to buy drugs on Silk Road. Even if it wasn’t clear to the users at the time, what is clear now is that the buyer of the pizza is also the buyer of the drugs. There’s a whole industry of players such as Chainalysis and BitCluster cropping up with products dedicated to tracing these transactions out there “in the clear”.
The second reason to care about privacy of the blockchain is that private computation is necessary for Web3. It is not desirable to for all transactions made on the blockchain to be public. That notwithstanding we still want the benefits that data availability provides. As a result we’re increasingly turning to computation on encrypted data, for example homomorphic encryption, to restore privacy while maintaining the availability of data sets for computational tasks.
The third reason is that more privacy establishes more trust in the system which automatically leads to more shared information and therefore more value all around for everyone.
The second aspect, Elad pointed out is the so called Secure Multiparty Computation (SMPC).
In SMPC, every player in the system learns only about their own input into the system and the output of the system without knowing the input of the other players so that privacy comes first. The special thing about SMPC is that it can be done for any function given enough time for computation and every task that can be computed can also be computed securely.
In an ideal world there would be a trusted middleman who could compute those functions. The middleman could collect all the input of the players and simply publish the result back to the players. We all know however that the trusted middle man approach usually fails due to the untrustworthiness of the “man in the middle”. SMPC protocols functionally simulate the trusted middleman scenario without actually requiring any trusted party.
As a third point he introduced applications of private computation.
Private computation has been used in a number of productive contexts already and it is starting to seep into consumer applications like such as the chat platform Telegram. The same goes for Zero Knowledge Proofs nowadays.
As a first practical example, Elad presented a case study about Sugar Beet Auctions in Denmark from 2008. The problem there was, that the participating parties in sugar beet auctions needed a secure technical means of simulating a “trusted middleman” without actually having such a party and also without revealing private bids or the demand curve of the commodities purchasers. After deploying a SMPC-protocol-based auction system, the parties only knew how much they each sold without learning anything about the overall auction results while still arriving at an efficient market clearing price at the market level.
Based on this success governments started using private computation for radio frequency spectrum auctions resulting in more efficient and more fair auctions for these public goods. Telecommunication companies didn’t have to make the prices paid for spectrum rights public and simultaneously the state received an efficient economic outcome from the auction.
Another potential use case is for private computation would be an algorithmic redistribution of wealth whereby individuals could make their finances and demographic information available in an encrypted format for algorithmic analysis. The idea here is that if the data were made available due to the advent of widespread trust in private computation, algorithmic design including reinforcement learning, control theory and optimisation theory could give us substantially better results and public policy than is available today. In the future, there will be more and more libraries available for private computation. Compared to today, the computation will also be cheaper and faster.
The last major point in Elad’s presentation was regarding practical issues in adopting this technology.
The first issue is the challenge of replacing the trusted middleman with a protocol. How is the function f defined and how to keep the privacy over time?
The second issue is the speed of SMPC. The speed of SMPC is pretty slow right now. But compared to some years ago it became significant faster.
The third issue is the current general lack of trust in SMPC. It’s a big challenge for a new innovation to gain trust of the users. It takes some time for people to trust innovations and adapt to new technology.
Dr. Elad Verbin presenting Zero Knowledge Proofs and their future use
We want to thank the speakers for their very interesting presentations at this Meetup about “Privacy by Design?”. We also want to thank Deloitte for hosting our event at their facilities and of course we want to thank our guests for coming to our meetup and asking high quality questions.
We would appreciate seeing you again at our next meetup about “The State of Secutity Token Offerings” on May 21st, 2019.
In our first Meetup of 2019, we invited people to Werk1 to listen to three presentations around the topic of “Blockchain as a Social Technology”. The special thing about this Meetup was the decentralized nature of the event. Parallel to the event in Munich there was a meetup hosted by the University of Bayreuth and Fraunhofer FIT. The two locations were linked via a live video feed. Additionally we piped in guest speakers from remote locations in Denmark and the USA. Everything was broadcast in real time via a live stream on our website. You can rewatch the video here!
The first presentation was held by Jon Hearty, Business Development Director of Origin Protocol. He gave us some insights about blockchain-based decentralized marketplaces and the many social implications of this innovation. Moreover he talked about his blockchain platform for building decentralized marketplaces ‘Origin Protocol’.
According to Jon, many of today’s marketplaces that seem to be fully P2P have central companies sitting in the middle of all transactions which hoard and swallow the data to monetize it later. With the use of a blockchain-based decentralized marketplace, problems like these can be avoided. He sees four major advantages to Origin’s approach to decentral marketplaces.
The drastic reduction of transaction costs. Companies who run the platforms often request high transaction fees for basically just matching a buyer and a seller. With the use of blockchain there is no need of an intermediary so that the transaction fees can be put back in the hands of the buyers and sellers.
Redistribute value more fairly throughout the networks. Users have a major impact on the success of the platform but hardly benefit from it compared to the platforms’ founders or directors. Cryptoeconomic incentives provided by a blockchain powered platform to distribute the value more fairly within the platform so users also benefit as a network effects set in.
Promote free and open commerce. Many marketplaces aren’t available all around the world, they are limited or banned to a special region or heavily regulated. In the face of regulation, a company who runs the platform is a single point of failure. Decentralized Platforms don’t have this characteristic which makes them able jump in where where platforms like Uber, AirBnB are banned or regulated.
Making services available to the unbanked. Billions of users worldwide don’t have access to financial services but they do have access to cheap smartphones and therefore wallets to store their values. The unbanked can leap from traditional financial system and make transactions over a blockchain-based network.
Origin Protocol itself just launched a blockchain-based marketplace as a dApp (decentralized App). As underlying technology Orgin Protocol uses the Ethereum Blockchain and IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) for identity management. Go and check it out on https://dapp.originprotocol.com/#/.
Our second speaker of the Meetup was Pablo Velasco from the University of Aarhus who focuses on the digital culture through its technical infrastructures including the political and social aspects of technology. In his research, he deals with topics such as how the development of social technology happens and how it contributes to micropolitics such as how social relationships modify the outcomes of certain technologies. As an example, technology can be used as a political tool for including or excluding relevant stakeholders in a system.
Regarding the blockchain technologies that rose up during the last years, Pablo said, that they can be merged together as a list of attempts of some sort of parallel payment system or decentralized, electronic money. In Bitcoin, for instance, the key element was the exchange of economic value using cryptography and this cryptography was a elementary need for the social integration of the technology.
He also pointed out how different technologies have impact on the social interaction. As an example, sending coins over a blockchain network requires a new and different trust paradigm and therefore builds up a new type of social interaction.
In the third presentation Anna-Laura Liebenstund and Rebecca Johnson from the European Blockchain Association presented the importance of a governance model in decentralized organizations.
They pointed out why it is important to have regulations in the use of technology and how the interaction impacts our social behaviour as well as the way we think.
A key aspect was that we have to be very careful about the inputs, design processes and implicit cultural assumptions behind our development of new technology. Artificially intelligent agents, for instance, will always be a reflection of the training sets to develop them.
Technology without principals will become antisocial sooner or later.
As a result, we need governance as a framework for techno-social interactions. Recent projects like ‘the DAO’ failed and Bitcoin and Ethereum got forked because of inconsistent governance.
Therefore it will be important for decentralized organizations to establish common principles, ethical code of conducts, membership rules and a solid basis in existing social networks to ensure the durable success of the organization.
We want to thank the speakers for their very interesting presentations on this, the opening meetup of 2019! Also, thank you to the team of Werk1 who provided the location, organized the catering as well as providing support for the A/V setup. And we thank ZD.B for supporting the meetup in general!
We also want to thank our audience in Munich and Bayreuth for attending. We hoped you enjoyed the Meetup. Feel free to give us your feedback.
Our next Meetup will take place on Tuesday March 19th, 2019 on the topic ‘Privacy by Design?’. We would be very happy to see you there again!
In his 1901 published article titled “The Scope of Social Technology“, Charles Henderson renamed social art as ‘social technology’, and described it as ‘a system of conscious and purposeful organization of persons in which every actual, natural social organization finds its true place, and all factors in harmony cooperate to realize an increasing aggregate and better proportions of the “health, wealth, beauty, knowledge, sociability, and rightness” desires.’
Later, the term social technology was given a wider meaning in the works of Ernest Burgess and Thomas D. Eliot,, who defined social technology to include the application, particularly in social work, of techniques developed by psychology and other social sciences.
As a result of its decentralised architecture, its openness, and its data immutability, Blockchain can be regarded as a social technology: New governance models, represented in DAOs and DSAOs, have demonstrated the social impact of Blockchain technology.
The Blockchained Mobility Hackathon on the weekend of July 20-22 saw a flurry of innovation by a colorful mix of corporate and independent hackers along with some of the world’s biggest mobility players. In order to visualize the PoCs presented, we’ve built an interactive infographic.
Building a blockchain mobility ecosystem with multiple distributed ledger technologies is a complex task that will require the smartest minds among us over a number of years. To that end, we asked each of the hacker teams competing at the Blockchained Mobility Hackathon to locate their prototype within a specific point in the tech stack as part of a future mobility user journey. In the infographic above, you can click to explore each of the PoCs presented and see immediately where the solution fits into the big picture for blockchained mobility.
Embedded in the infographic you’ll also find the results for each team including videos of the final pitches, team interviews about next steps and you can even drill down into the code with direct access to the repositories from each team. Click the image now to expand the infographic and navigate to detailed information about each teams results.
We’re working hard to move toward the development of a mobility future where everyone can compete and collaborate by leveraging blockchain and distributed ledger technology across the mobility industry. Thank you to all of the participants and sponsors of the Blockchained Mobility Hackathon 2018! This is just the beginning.
Pac-Man on Wheels, the winners of third place (for USD 1 000 + 15 000 XSC tokens)
Democratize autonomous driving by crowdsourcing and gamifying the data collection via IOTA Tokens
Q: What problem does your project solve?
A: In order to empower autonomous driving hundreds of thousands hours of sensor data are required. Individual data acquisition without merging possibility is never able to gain the appropiate amount of data needed to secure all driving scenarios. This can only be achieved by crowdsourcing the data by incentivizing road users with IOTA Tokens. A decentralized market place ensures the complete data availability.
Q: What expertise and roles did you have on your team?
Dr. Simon Hassannia: Head of Business Innovation and Automotive Industry Expert
Martin Mihaylov: Computer Vision & AI Engineer, Entrepreneur, Designer, All things tech enthusiast
David Hawig: Iota, Ipfs and Ntru C# Developer
Dr. Simon Hassannia: Head of Business Innovation and Automotive Industry Expert
Martin Mihaylov: Computer Vision & AI Engineer, Entrepreneur, Designer, All things tech enthusiast
David Hawig: Iota, Ipfs and Ntru C# Developer
Q: Which technologies and tools did you use in your project?
A: NTRU for encryption, IPFS for decentralized file storage, IOTA for immutable decentralized data exchange and monetization, Xamarin for multi-platform application development
After we finished the Blockchained Mobility Hackathon with the 3rd place our team quickly set up communication channels to stay connected. Although our team has just found itself on the Hackathon we have a very strong attitude our project will successful be enhanced and implemented now. Because of the perfect mix between software and business developers and the seamless collaboration inside the team we have a strong starting point now. By attending at the DAHO.AM conference right after the Hackathon we received positive feedback from several attendees and company representative to have found a well-fitted business case here. The strong interest in “Pac-Man on Wheels” strengthened us once more to proceed with the project. We already spoke to interested companies and investors at the DAHO.AM and figured out some approaches how to get going. We are still in negotiations if the project will be kicked off as a start-up or, which is actually more likely, integrated into a project of an existing company. Since nothing is settled yet, we appreciate and want to encourage any interested party to get in touch with us to discuss common realization possibilities.
