Leveraging Blockchain For Social Change - Vanessa Grellet @ TOKEN2049

[Music] good morning everyone I'm excited to speak to you today about how to leverage box chain for social impact I've been in the financial industry for 15 years and I've been a social impact investor for ten years and when I joined consensus it was a natural thing for me to sort of combine the impact and the technology and we created the block chain for social impact Coalition where we have around 15 NGOs impact investors and technologists who came together to find solutions for the world's most vulnerable populations so in my presentation today I wanted I want to look after why blockchain for social impact and what exactly does it means and I'll give you some examples of what's been going on in the market so just a few statistics to start off today 2.7 billion people live on less than 2.5 dollars a day over 65 million people are displaced in the world and 40 million people are victims of sex trafficking forced labor or forced marriage due to climate change sea levels is projected to rise 1 to 4 feet by 2100 and corruption is estimated to be 1.5 trillion each year this is the world we live in and if you care about this you might want to think given the level of wealth that we've generated as a community through the blockchain and the blockchain technology if we can do something about this Vitalik butyrin on December 17th of the 12th of December sorry highlighted that the total crypto corn market cap just hits zero point five trillion and ask the questions have we earned it and asked other questions how much censorship resistant commerce for the common people have we enabled how many unbanked people have we banked how many Venezuelans have actually been protected from hyper inflation by our systems the answer to all these questions is definitely not zero but it's not worth zero point five trillion and so the question that I posed to you is what can we do about it through our daily activities whether we're building companies where there were investors whether were mentors to these companies however we were involved in the blockchain space blockchain at its core is impactful so if you're already involved in the blockchain space you're already bringing radical change to the system it's a radical innovation it's going to it's going to need a new manufacturing or service process to be able to use this innovation it's a competence destroying innovation any competence that existed before is going to be rendered obsolete it's also a disruptive architectural innovation it's not a modular disruption that you can just add to existing infrastructure so decentralization peer-to-peer exchange of value permissionless systems will allow for acceleration of settlement time lowering the cost of transactions cutting out rent taking middlemen and lowering barriers to capital and information so in itself what we're doing is very impactful but if we want to specifically target the people that I mentioned in the first slide the underserved the bottom of the pyramids people who do not have access to financial systems to identity we may need to be a little bit more intentional in what we do and we may need to target those specific populations so in doing that we have two choices we have the choice to go the radical systems change route or to go the incremental routes and that choice we have whether we're doing social impact or whether we're working with large enterprises right now in the blockchain space if we choose to go the incremental route we're building on the existing infrastructure we're changing them little by little we're enhancing efficiency and transparency but at the risk of using old frameworks and legacy system but if we accumulate all those changes there's a potential for exponential changes example of this in the socials in the social impact space would be enhancing transparency of the nation replacing paper-based registries adding layers of payment transparency if you go into the radical systems change you're gonna create new business models you're gonna leapfrog legacy systems but it might be more difficult for you to implement this at a wider scale and also you might run into the problem that all these legacy systems that you want to leapfrog you might have to depend on them I'm talking about governments or other stakeholders some examples are identity land tidal energy if you want to create self sovereign entity you might need to work with some governments so if you think that intentionally intentionality matters and you want to direct your blockchain solutions towards certain areas and city problems you want to solve you're gonna have to really direct your efforts and understand their problems on the ground at consensus we work with you and we work with the World Bank we work with other large charities and if you don't have the expertise of people on the ground and use design thinking human design thinking approach you're gonna get nowhere if you're just creating a tech solution out of your office you're not going to be able to do anything working with people who are also the participants and the end beneficiaries of the solutions are super important if you're driving a solution for Refugees try to have the refugees work with you have a refugee in your team if you are working with people who are displaced have interviews conducted with them partnerships are also key because there's no competition in trying to save people's lives we're all working together with NGOs and other entities and we're trying to lower the cost of access to the technology and so it's a different way of working together and always focus on your impact and measuring your impact it will allow you to to see how your goal is is achieved so moving on what are the sectors where blockchain for social impact are the most active when we created the blockchain for social impact coalition we asked all our members where do you think there's the most impact and where are you the most active right now so they identify four pillars the first one is identity and vulnerable population the second one is Financial Inclusion the third one supply chain and the fourth one energy and environment identity and vulnerable populations are really the cornerstone of everything it allows access to bank accounts education property rights cash transfer and AIDS and it's really self sovereign identity if we achieve to find some solutions is really the key to everything so as an example right now we were working on a project with the Moldova government on sex trafficking and sex trafficking of children and that will be based on an identity so that the children cannot cross borders with fake ideas but rather with if it's with an ID that's encrypted in a blockchain there will be signals if they cross the border and alert to the parents and other social workers so that they cannot be sex trafficking outside the country Financial Inclusion is really important in terms of remittances lowering the cost of remittances creating new exchanges where you cut out the middleman is really key and the supply chain is also another big area where we're able to identify and lower the capacity of human rights abuses and human trafficking but also labor rights such as wages and and other labor rights causes energy and environment is one maybe one of the most active areas that we were received great energy and peer-to-peer trading and also carbon offsets solutions so those were the four pillars that we started with but during the year four other areas came out which I find fascinating the first one was human rights activists and we've been in touch with a lot of human rights activists which needs a lot of security in terms of their personal security they need to to be sure that people don't know where they are they need to be sure that people don't know what information they're they're dealing with so that it's totally secure their their freedom of speech needs to be secure and they also need to secure their funding and the funding needs to be outside of the normal sort of banking banking systems and the blockchain provides some some solutions for that in terms of democracy and centralized governance there's a lot of solution coming up right now for voting fake news movement building liquid democracy and I think it's just the beginning right now we're in the stage where it's incremental change because we're trying to sort of say okay voting is we don't it's not great right now so we're gonna try to find how to vote on the blockchain but we haven't come to the stage where we're challenging the representation and the systems themselves so we're still in the process of thinking about the democracies that we established 200 years ago and the representations but we might we should be thinking about a totally different representation system through the blockchain and this through the you know the Western democracies and the eastern systems and other systems in Africa etc so I think we'll see more in that space in the philanthropy space there's a lot of action in the transparency of the donors and it's possible now to see exactly how your money is tracked through the through the charity and the exact impact that it does so that's a pretty interesting development and of course development of donation in crypto and the last topic is equal justice evidence minority rights criminal justice due process all these currents all these current processes will be enhanced by the blockchain and rights will be hopefully better guaranteed for citizens in this area so I just gave you like a brief descriptions of the potential for blockchain and social impact my time is up so I won't have time for questions but you see the huge potential for for doing good or for changing our society with the blockchain and if you have any questions please come and see me and you can also go on our website lock change for social impact Coalition where there's a lot of examples of companies and and ways to get involved with NGOs thank you [Applause]