Reclaiming Blockchain: Trust, Sovereignty, and Real-World Impact (Melyn McKay)

when you're working in a humanitarian context and you have really pressing real world issues that you're trying to solve it's really difficult to find the time and the capacity to actually learn a new technology like blockchain that's a further blocker for the aid sector to really adopt and use those Technologies sustainably I'm M McCay I'm the founder of koala koip was designed to help large International Aid organizations to actually adopt blockchain technology so we come in to make sure that they can really take advantage of blockchain to be able to pay everything from communities on the ground to local Partners much more efficiently the difficulty we've had coming into the blockchain space is that some of the you know let's say more speculative elements of of blockchain of crypto that appeal to certain types of of users or Builders and maybe not quite as resonant with the kinds of things that we were doing and the kinds of communities that we're building for so when we found funding the commons we were really excited to be able to join a community of people that were working on things that are similar to the kinds of issues we're really motivated by but it could also bring additional skills or additional perspectives things like regen and other things that maybe aren't immediately applicable to the work we're doing every day with sort of communities that are vulnerable in in the midst of humanitarian crisis the funding the commons residency was such a great opportunity for our team we worked on actually building a digital wallet into that app which means that one of the things we'll be able to do is actually give our our users the opportunity to do Aid distributions Aid dispersements down to the ground to individuals to beneficiaries and clients and then also communicate with them in the same place where they're holding those funds that gives us an opportunity to really know where those funds are going the impact they're having on people's lives something that otherwise can be quite costly and time consuming now we can make that process much faster and also a lot safer for the participants [Music]