Innovation in Web3 from a Public and Private Perspective | European Blockchain Convention 9

[Music] so uh hello everybody Welcome I see people leaving uh for lunch but some of you are remaining so great um so in this I first of all I'm ja melam head of blockchain and web three observatory in poly Technic of Milano that is the main Technical University in Italy and we do research about blockchain and web three try to understand how businesses can uh use this technology uh here with uh with me uh we have an very interesting panel because we have uh different perspectives on the adoption of blockchain and web three uh so I just leave you like a a quick introduction to you to yourself uh please Jo if you want to begin okay so good afternoon everyone uh Jean rri frat from the European Commission I will not be talking about MAA or new regulations I will be talking about the European blockchain Services infrastructure or ebsi I don't know how many of you know ebsi if you do fine if you don't you'll get to know it hi everyone uh my name is Haley forth I'm here from MSD we're a pharmaceutical manufacturer and I work in the digital manufacturing division um I'm in a team where we focus on Innovative Technologies um particularly blockchain and how we can bring efficiencies to our business and benefit our patients all right so hey everyone I'm hula Bitner um director of new business development in FC Barcelona um and in that role also working on blockchain all the web three initiatives in a small team together with two colleagues Anna Sol and Jordi mpart and we are driving basically the strategy for FC Barcelona in theti okay so you already see that we have different perspectives uh so our public in institution pharmaceutical company uh sport team so uh very interesting so let's try to understand uh I mean right now talking about web three project blockchain project makes no sense so let's try to get into deep in which are the perspective that you have so first of all hoger uh why a sports team like FC Barcelona uh use uh blockchain or tokenization or why a a sports team in general uh has to use this technology so being a sports team we are Entertainment also we have a massive Community we have large events and for all these um spaces it's it's use cases for us to use the technology so you can look into this um to begin with an easy example ticketing for us a very important one which based on a blockchain of course you have the possibility to trace who is the owner of the the ticket where has the ticket been so that it don't transfer this no longer um we as a club we even use the blockchain already for assemblies so for polls for votes um to also make them more transparent more traceable and ultimately for us of course I mean we have a fan base of 400 million throughout the entire world so you ask yourself as a club how do we get closer to those fans and even more importantly how can those fans get even closer to the club because um obviously we're very much aware that unique experiences here in Barcelona and the Spotify come new this is this is the Holy Grail of of uh sports fan at the end of the day being in the stadium watch your Classico whatever it is but we do understand that out of that 400 million people just a tiny little fraction is enabl to really come to see us in Barcelona to Be Our Guest here so the trick is how can we offer experiences how can we offer possibilities for those fans to really engage with us as a club to give them a platform to become closer and to ideally give them a digital experience which comes very close to that physical experience we are having in the stadium great thank you uh so ay uh let's change uh again the perspective so uh you work in a pharmaceutical company MSD is part of one of the biggest Consortium a blockchain Consortium that we see right now that is phal ledger and uh together with other let's say competitors or peers uh you created this Consortium uh with the blockchain and uh the question is uh uh how do you work together with uh possible competitors and what value brings this technology in this kind of projects thank you um a huge amount of value so really we are a pharmaceutical company so you wouldn't expect us to be focusing on technology like many of the other companies that you see at the event today um so it's important for us to be able to collaborate in a safe space like with the farm leer Association so that we can share our learnings um perhaps even share um potential failures and successes so that we don't make the same mistakes over and over again great um and how uh formal Ledger uh that's I mean uh brings value for you and uh uh I mean always seen this kind of Consortium with a lot of competitors uh one ask okay but why do you want to share a project with maybe another company that is doing the same uh business uh that you are doing so how you can connect and uh I mean I already know the answer but is it blockchain a technological solution that can help to also collaborate uh with the competitors I think what we um learned early on in our example is we want to build a a digital trust ecosystem for healthcare so you can approach it in a way where you think okay where each company is going to build their own network and treat it like a commodity where you can profit with that cuz that's not really going to sue of the industry and The Wider Healthcare ecosystem as a whole um so that's where you can come together in an association like this and together design build a network or in some cases perhaps even you agree what you could use that's available great thank you and uh instead Jo let's switch again uh from the public institution perspective uh also in this conference we heard a lot about uh uh web three decentralized application defi tokenization uh and when we talk about public institution it's all about the regulation the regulatory perspective uh what do you think is that uh let's say uh taking a step back from the regulation uh what blockchain what three uh can bring to public institution yeah so um you you can hear me well because I know that there is a lot of background lines I want to make sure that you guys uh are able to listen so um I'm here from the European commission but the European commission does not only regulate so that's an important first message the European commission also enables so it means it uses technology and one of these Technologies is blockchain and we are actually like you implementing blockchain and using blockchain for concrete use cases I come from the director general of informatics which is let's say the technological arm of the commission so I don't do regulation I actually help the member states to use technology one of the projects and there is a lot happening that we are currently doing with the member states is the European blockchain Services infrastructure epsi I don't know many of you know know epsi for you yeah some of you know epsi but not that many so indeed the public sector the member states also run blockchain nodes in case you don't know so we have our own blockchain it's called epsi it is actually public permission so it means that only um trusted entities can write on that blockchain so you cannot do it but everyone can read from epsi so that's idea is a public permission blockchain now why does the public sector want to use blockchain because as you know there's a lot of information between public and private entities and it's very difficult today to verify information you might not notice but actually it is trust me on that but you should verify it as well so what what we are trying to do is to make information very easy to verify and and very difficult to fake and blockchain helps on verifying information so let me give you a couple of examples we are doing this with authentic documents so for example diplomas when you get a diploma applying to your company is it easy to verify that diploma it's not so we want to make that very easy very fast very reliable products we have here the intellectual property office of the commission of the European Union is there uo and we want to verify also the authenticity of products so we want to make sure that the brand owner actually is associated to the product that you buy and we are doing that thanks to the collaboration with uo finally accreditations when you go and you buy a product as well or you use a service many times there is this accreditation we are accredited but you cannot verify it so the idea is to use not only blockchain but also other Technologies like verifiable credentials and digital wallets so that we keep control of the information and to give you a simple use case when we put information into a verifiable credential it becomes signed by an issuer it can be transferred to your digital wallet so you control it and finally thanks to blockchain anyone that wants to verify that information can look into the blockchain information about the issuer to get the public key of that issuer and to get to know if it can issue that specific piece of information now think about this verification takes really a long time and you cannot even know if it's you know reliable with the use of these three Technologies we shorten the time we make it super super simple the information is with you so it's privacy preserving and the blockchain is just a trust list of entities that can issue information so a trust list of issuers or verifiers if you want to know more everything is online great thank you uh so going back to nfts uhar back to you uh we saw in this ecosystem a lot of projects related to nfts that were called Cash grbs okay also from uh traditional institution they only to make uh let's say money fast and creating these nfts uh we we already talk about this so I know also your perspective so can you expand a little bit about uh uh the value that you want to bring also in the future with this strategy that you have in FC Barcelona yeah absolutely I think this is the main point actually where where you say the cash grab is it's basically the worst thing you can do and we've seen that often times so far already I think actually when we all look into this monetization should be the very last component on that long journey it should be what happens automatically at some point maybe if it happens but what we want to do is really to attach value to give value as I said we want to get closer to our fans and we want to give the fans a chance to get closer to the club so what we do have is such a great and big Sports IP is experiences is contents is access to things um you normally would hardly get so there is um probably also sometimes the the the experiences money can buy but it is experiences you could earn in this space in the digital Space by contributing by being part of it by by really make make your impact for example I I would I would like to add something we just launched a Discord server like 3 months ago with really the aim to engage with people and with really the aim to understand what what do our fans really wish to receive from our end not like defining for them what we want to offer and say hopefully everyone loves it but to really play it the other way around to wait for the response what are the fans waiting for and I think this is our big point we can we can offer this to fans we can bring them closer by by streaming events by um think about nfts as such I mean it's it's about the price points where we say we refuse to to set a very high price because often times you know that CR s it wasn't back up so you did not receive any value for this so literally our idea is to to deliver more value than you pay um obviously there's a certain cost to touched on nft um there's some free mins possible but but for us really the idea is get the people closer uh make things people would not be able to afford in a physical world probably accessible in a digital world and to conclude with this obviously we are trying to do this also to lead our fans into some kind of a future metaverse experience where you can make use of those NFS great thank you and U starting again uh like with olar from problems that can emerge in uh in your projects uh we saw a lot of different uh blockchain Consortium uh through the last years failed okay trade lens b3i but the the list is is very long so uh how and why the reason are many like technological governance regulatory uh not trying to F not finding the value of the solution how in your from your experience uh have you seen these problems and if you are here talking about uh with us about this project what are the solution to overcome these problems yeah absolutely um that point on value I think is absolutely critical and it's not not you know news to you all there's been a lot of discussions about that over the last couple of days um but I think what's important is about how you articulate that value that's internally and externally making it unique to your stakeholders what does it bring to them um and then over the course of your project thinking of it as not just overall value in terms of a Grand Vision that's fantastic but you've also got to be able to break it down into short medium and long term um because critically you will need to have EX itive sponsors and people at high levels Who Will Champion your project and keep it going and if all you ever talk about is this Grand Vision and then they come to you and they want to see progress in three six 9 12 months and you haven't achieved that Grand Vision then you really are at a risk of disappointing your sponsors and um potentially losing their support so I think that is definitely critical um we I think have seen that Success Through Farm Ledger Association and the launch of API um so that's a new uh live Solution by all means go on the website um farm.org or check out the YouTube um you're familiar with in your medicine packets you pull out the uh the paper link flet and it's got all the patient information on there um the goal of this was to be able to digitize that so that ultimately patients would always have easy access through scanning the pack on their phones on an app uh access to the latest patient information um and then also thinking of from like ESG perspective it means that we can reduce the amount of paper waste across our supply chain um so I think what was critical to that success was that collaboration across the industry obviously um but also being really clear on what uh the vision is and um breaking it down into these key steps to get there great um Joe uh similar question to you like from the public sector perspective Ive what are the Arles and uh uh then another question you already talked about uh how ebsi can bring value so what are the different projects and uh what is the road map that's at what point are we in the absi development where will when it will be finished or yeah will never be finished never we're going to continue forever um no ebsi exists so is deployed by the member states sometimes they get a funding so they get the grant which means that member states have a financial incentive to deploy one of the nodes we have multiple nodes across Europe these are public sector entities so you cannot deploy one for the moment um we want of course to come to events like these to on one hand show that the public sector is engaged and doing things so that you can use this as an example for like you know promoting your your own project and also explain that blockchain is not only crypto and Defi and Regulatory things that are happening here and there so it's very important I guess to pass the message that we can use blockchain for different use cases and that the public sector is also invested in using blockchain and actually helping citizens and businesses to do things in a much easier way safer and trustworthy so that's the main message now the second point that I would like to pass as well the commission is actually also running a regulatory sandbox project so you can know about it on our website dbsi where we bring projects to work together with um the commission and lawyers and identify regulatory aspects that might need Improvement in the future so the commission is also thinking what about next you know what can we improve and make make easier uh so this exchange of ideas in my opinion having other examples in other Industries there are barriers it's not easy but we see that there is a lot of potential and value and of course this will take time but eventually we will get there great thank you uh so Jo you touched the the theme of collaboration we also saw it with Haley that has strong relevance uh for you holar in your project uh the uh nft the project the digital your digital strategy how can enable interaction collaboration with other uh actors in your ecosystem yeah we feel this is probably the biggest use case we see right now I mean um if you think about it right now we have possibilities to to collaborate and to show Partnerships in a 90 minutes game often times or when we go on a tour or you're on a sleeve or on a shirt I think there's so much potential in in just collaborate in in offering more in um if you think about loyalty programs this is probably one of the biggest use cases we could have in mind um why not um receive your coffee somewhere in some place um just due to the fact that you've seen a match of FC Barcelona before or vice versa um I mean we have partners for example in CA if you think about it watch five games and you have a Driving Experience stuff like this I think there is so much unta potential in this space um where we have to be open where we have to collaborate a lot and um I think this is a super super early stage we're at right now um but we have in conversation with so many partners of ours like what we could do in that space thank you and um expanding on the topic of collaboration with you I uh okay you collaborate already we said with the competitors with other company uh but how do you foresee the future of this kind of Consortium and now maybe are separate entities different consort but do you see also collaborating with other blockchain project in the future so what your what's your take on what's your Insight on the future of this kind of consort project I agree I think that cross industry collaboration would be great to see more of and it's wonderful to come to events like this even though I'm obviously say not from a financial background trying to take learnings from what I'm hearing here um I think being able to create that safer space for people to have a transparent conversation would be wonderful to add to that because of course this is in the public domain um companies are not likely to come before you and admit if they did something wrong even if it's a great lesson that they learned it's just they want to put their best face forward um a lot of companies here are to pitch and to sell so they're only going to talk about the good stuff in short um so I think uh working across completely different Industries and trying to learn from one another is something I would love to see I'd love to participate in thank you and uh just the the the last minutes uh the topic that we are discussing is innovation in web 3 different perspectives uh What uh Jo starting with you uh what is still missing for developing the web three in your field or also in other fields but what uh would you change if if you can snap your finger and just say okay I would like to have this to have really development of web three and blockchain also in your project well I I can talk about what we are doing um just sharing know what we are trying to do and for us the most important step was to show the technology working instead of just telling that it works and that it's great and can do amazing things so what we did was to open an experience Center in Brussels the Brussels effect um so that people could come and actually play around with the technology play with digital wallets play with see how the blockchain actually works and go through a journey of one of our use cases being a student that goes abroad and wants to show that he is qualified for a job or being a mobile worker going to work somewhere else in the European Union and then showing that he has the Social Security entitlements and all these great things that are able and possible thanks to blockchain so my advice is show the technology working show the value just don't you know try to repeat because I think the hype is gone now it's the moment to really show to people that it's working and can deliver value h no um I agree wholeheartedly um I think I'd perhaps just add to see more use cases from you know different Industries as like I was touching on before I'd um love to see more conversation outside of the financial sector outside of crypto particularly when um you're not in that space and you're trying to introduce blockchain and other um web three concepts you get a lot of push back particularly around perhaps um fear of the crypto space and seeing a lot of risk so it'd be great to see some other examples out there of how it works successfully thank you Aller what would you change there's two angles I think on the one hand side I agree much with Haley here it's it's often it's about purpose which I'm missing in that space because it too often it is obvious monetization model where I think uh we try to do our very best like partnering with uh projects like Plastics with environmental impact we of women when it comes to female empowerment I think that is sometimes forgotten and we have to look into this from scratch a bit more and when I'm looking into a tech perspective I think it's the UI the uix where we have a lot of room to improve because I think we must understand I think there was a panel or there will be a panel where it's like how to onboard the next billion people in that space and I think it's not going to be possible with an existing web 3 solution because we have to make this more accessible to more seamless um to enable people who are used to a web 2 world or probably even struggling there already to give them an easy entry and I think this is a huge challenge in that space right now because we assume very often um that people are more Tech sevy than they really are thank you I I thought was very interesting discussion I thought that we saw different perspectives but uh in the end quite a common view in different projects so thank you very much it was a pleasure and uh thank you all for being here