Enterprise Blockchain Adoption, conversation with Sakhib Waseem (Proof of Trust) & Kevin Gill (IBM)

and again thank you to you and also thank you to maria the first fireside chat we had with with maria and inetim and now let's continue with the proof of trust so we have here today with us we have sakip wassim who is chief innovation officer at the proof of trust and we have kevin gill from ibm he is cto blockchain um in ibm uk and europe so please welcome sakib are you there i'm i'm absolutely here thank you victoria fantastic thank you to everybody for participating and listening to what we have to say today great and also kevin are you there yes i'm here and i'm looking forward to having a fireside chat with you all fantastic just one thing guys i know you've been very concentrated uh listening to all the information provided but i mean feel free i have this lovely can you see what it says it says do you see what it says evc talks feel free to do a post because it's always exciting to see that on social media okay so um i mean i also want to thank you er to the proof of trust because they are one of our partners of this event this would not be possible without them and also to inettum um as you know things will not evolve if there is no on one side human capital but also proper capital um everything has a cost so thank you very much and now i mean to start with the fireside chat i have some questions prepared and i would like to ask you is i keep the no sorry i wanna no kevin sorry i wanna talk to you first okay yeah so i would like to know how did ibm and the proof of trust decide to collaborate because you know um we know we all know ibm but we don't know yet all of us the proof of jobs the proof of trust so why what how did you decide to yeah celebrating give a little bit of background so as as you introduce myself cto for blockchain prior to that i've spent well tens of years in financial services and other industries delivering marketplaces so delivering finance financial services exchanges or other uh multi-dimensional marketplaces which is where blockchain is exciting because the key role is about establishing business networks and marketplaces so last summer sakeb a cio and the ceo dean armstrong who is a qc and barrister came into our offices and we we do quite a lot of work with startups looking at marketplaces and new ideas and how they work with blockchain technology and how we can actually work together and cooperate so sakeeb and dean came in and they brought what's really a legal services proposition around smart contracts for blockchain now i mentioned about my background in uh marketplace exchanges it's starting in messaging technology and moving on to blockchain one of the interesting things about blockchain is the fact that you can execute a trade you can make something happen at a a point in time however one of the challenges with it is if you just trust a programmer to code that up it may not have the legal rigour that traditional hardcopy documents would have had and if we take some examples so i mentioned about uh exchanges and if you take lloyds of london and borderos when you look at those there's a probably several inches worth of contracts that have had a lot of lawyers pouring all over them and they will have got things right they will have put metadata around the actual execution that enables redress in the event of later disputes now if you look at one of our big business networks that ibm runs a trade lens it's done 1.5 billion transactions in the first year it's got 15 key documents that are executed via smart contracts around each shipping container that shipped so just trusting to a programmer to get that right probably doesn't give you the the the the reports in the event that goods arrive late import and they're perished so sakeeb and dean came in and they said we've got a proposition here it's not just a solution it's a marketplace as well and what they've got are a set of patented algorithms that enable at the point a smart contract is written for delegates to actually do a review and make sure they've got that rigor that stands the test of time further down the line when you you look at any disputes that might come around that that same marketplace can actually provide dispute resolution and it provides a similar process and similar level of rigor as going to court now in the cove world where courts are constrained it has even more value at this stage so we could really see the value for big business networks and what proof of trust brought to the equation and what we've actually done is over the last year and a half we've worked with sakeeb and dean and team to build the platform so the platform's built and what it does is it records during smart contract review or delegate review all of the key attributes of the transaction it's open it uses hyper ledger fabric at the back end and actually it goes through the um patented algorithms and arrives at a consensus and this is where dean comes in dean qc head of chambers and his team have created all of the business rules and for each use case there is a category of the dispute and there's a killer question that comes with the dispute or the resolution that says can the delegates check on whatever the question is the actions attract and for instance we built something and we've demonstrated it to the prime minister of bermuda around shipping and this is looking at registering of ships and what we've done is we've built the ability to register a ship we we track that on the blockchain each uh delegate is given a series of actions to undertake and for instance the delegates might be legal services or they might actually be surveyors they might be shipping or insurance smes they all conduct a review at the same time the algorithm brings it together and then you get the agreement that it should be registered and further down the line you can use the same team to do the dispute resolution so as i said it's built it's open so it comes with the client front end that can be tailored it also is api centric so being written in hyper hyperledger fabric it's open source it's also multi-cloud enabled so on top of kubernetes 1.14 it runs on pretty much all of the cloud flavors that are out there but not only can it be used for fabric but it can be used for any ledger at the front end or any legacy application can call it so that that's where our relationship is born from we've built it and we're ready to go looking for more use cases to take to market so i think you've probably got more questions for sakeeb about what it does rather than the product and what we've developed thank you very much kevin thank you yeah let's continue with keep so keep you were there yes fantastic so um maybe it would be interesting for the audience to understand a bit better who the proof of trust are i mean who are you behind um and why is your solution and marketplace important to all of us in the blockchain space and even in in in various sectors that's that's a great question so first the private trust we're an irish company we're based out of dublin we've got engagements all over the world as kevin mentioned spanning from the us to the middle east bermuda of course um and with corporates governments and ngos um but 2021 frozen is a major focus on european engagement so i think being here today is quite significant for us um also to know we tend to do this on the london stock exchange and the nasdaq in q1 of 2021 so lots of exciting news to come but what prover trust really has as kevin touched on quite briefly is we have the only globally patented algorithm for distributed consensus that's quite significant what it means is we can take in any kind of information be it blockchain or non-blockchain we can categorize that information and then we can disperse it to multiple different specialists who can cast their own individual view of it in a completely anti-collusive insulated manner so highly secure we allow each of those individuals to cast their view on it cast a vote if you will determine whether it's acceptable or not and then we use our consensus algorithm to bring all that together into a binary decision which we can use as a full recommendation or even as a legal outcome when it comes to commercial contractual disputes but it's really interesting when we start to talk about data accuracy and the management of information as well i mean how do we verify that information being submitted to a blockchain is valid and just and that's where we come in particularly in the governmental space where we look at potential fraud issues proof of trust can be integrated as a precursory layer to intercept fraudulent transactions and in the commercial world it means that we can effectively resolve disputes and really fast fair independent and cost-effective manner we're completely digital so we're not encumbered by global pandemics or issues that we see are quite prevalent today in terms of what we're focused on from a governmental perspective clearly ford reduction is a big issue in the eu there's around 160 billion euros of vat fraud annually we believe that we're well positioned to resolve and reduce that number right down through our patented algorithm secondarily is smart governments so if we think about how distributed consensus can start to bring individual ministries together for complex approval and processes we've got a really efficient way of managing that third we have covid and scaling for pandemic response so how do we equip governments with the bandwidth to scale up really quickly when they have significant issues such as the uk which has about 48 billion pounds of suspected fraud as a result of stimulus packages associated with covid so how do we really equip governments with the ability to scale up really quickly in a safe and secure manner allowing that specialist marketplace to engage and review that in a really safe way and then finally in the commercial sense contractual disputes billions of years are poured into contractual disputes and we allow companies to engage in growth we take risk and liability of balance sheets and pull that back into the hands of those who need it we provide a faster and fairer more cost effective way for companies to address them i think what's important to understand is that as we see the broader use of blockchain smart contracts in commercial and governmental use there are a couple of things that are really important firstly the rigor we need to ensure that the technology also has the legal framework and accessibility to ensure that the technology elements are also in parallel and in tune with current legal frameworks and then of course dispute resolution we can't always encode all of the issues that may arise in any kind of engagement be commercial or governmental so it's important that we have a really fast and digital mechanism to alleviate that but also bring that home um with our solution um i think that's pretty much a whistle-stop version of what it is that we're doing why we're so important to the world and a few things that we're currently working on right now thank you thank you very much to keep um i think then maybe it would be interesting to understand a bit better maybe this question goes for you kevin what industries and marketplaces you can support working together with the proof of trust sure so as we've already mentioned this this is about smart contracts and it's about subsequent disputes and so things like high value individual individual um disputes or b2b disputes are clearly going to be a target so for insurance we've actually already built something around high value claims so if there's a personal injury claim which can be very high value it can take a lot of time to resolve you might start with the claim handler and the claimant themselves trying to resolve it uh between themselves it might have a couple of iterations and not really get anywhere and what the proof of trust offers is a marketplace-wide solution that enables the claimant to actually raise their dispute and for external delegates to actually interject and go through the claim um to understand all of the key attributes of the claim and as i said multiple delegates at the same time can look at the same case and they all come up with a they respond to the overall question they're being asked they look at the key documents and that's all tracked and then the algorithms bring that back together so that then goes back to the claim handler and that there may be agreement at that stage it could go another level if the claimant and claim handler still can't achieve a resolution it can go back to a super delegate and they can actually kick off another iteration of the review now but generally that the consensus will be achieved and the uh response back will have similar uh legal rigor to the courts process so it is something that is an independent arbitration process and what that enables is actually taking liabilities off the book early so for the insurer they can actually not have uh liabilities on their balance sheet fear for what can take years to resolve for the claimant it offers them the benefit of getting a resolution quickly so that's one example and similarly to high value personal injury the same thing can be covered for b2b insurance and a lot of insurance is a multi-party process when you look at things like trade finance trade credit risk insurance they all have similar handoffs so certainly in the public sector there are a lot of domains that have that kind of dispute also supply chain so goods in transit i mentioned about trade blends as an example of the the kind of application anything that has high value goods or a trade execution dossier that might involve finance insurance or multiple dimensions and again that can cover ports and borders and regulatory uh documents as well so that is quite relevant and then when you move into the government world particularly in emerging markets where there might not be such good access to justice what this actually enables is governments to actually invoke a dispute resolution around that and in some geographies things like promissory notes what would have been more financial services products are actually handled by government sake mentioned about tax fraud so whether it be vac carousel fraud or whether it be covid furlough bounce back or eat out to help out type loans and again it's in the tens of billions in each country that the frauds and it's in the tens of thousands of cases and what that enables a government to do is to actually look at the proof of trust marketplace and all of their delegates to actually have a white much uh wider portfolio of resolution promptly of those uh high amounts of fraud cases and then the last one is smart government so um inter-government handoffs and perhaps disputes you can apply the process to but we we've talked a lot about the public sector version of this we've actually created a version that can be landed in a um government environment dropped behind the government firewall so that it can actually be used for into intra government disputes as well so again a whistle stop tour but we're really looking for any dispute related use case that this might be applied to thank you thank you kevin so um i think before going a little bit closer to the end i can see that fritz has a question fritz was actually my teacher during a blockchain summer school at copenhagen business school in the summer of 2018. is that correct fitz i think so right if i remember um so maybe kevin or sickkip would you like to answer this question the question is what is the legal framework for the proof of trust does it have legal standing like the chinese internet courts i think if we've got pre-agreed um terms for arbitration between any kind of party proof of trust can be applied um it's also extra jurisdictional is something our ceo likes to talk about quite quite well i'm certainly not the legal expert but we can talk about that at length with our ceo at some point um certainly we feel that this is the future of managing those contractual disputes in a digital manner and it can be it can always be a binding as long as all parties uh pre-consent to this as a notion of arbitration just in the commercial sector but as we've talked about there are much broader use cases and each one has its own legal um stipulation as to how it can be carried out effectively thank you thank you have we answered your question fritz i i hope so um okay so yeah i mean so how can we get to know more about the proof of trust um i mean how do we get started with your solution if if any one of us would like to to get more our hands dirty certainly everyone can go and visit our website and register for further interest that's www.theprooftrust.

com uh we're also available on social media so at the proofer trust pretty much on all platforms um you can reach out to us in a more friendly manner if you wish to less formal but yeah if you wish to engage in any understanding of our technology and platform the best place to go is to our website we can fill out a form and we'll be in touch pretty rapidly actually we pride ourselves on prompt response to any kind of questions that serve to us but i would certainly recommend that you you register interest uh stay abreast of all of our information that's upcoming certainly we have lots of exciting news about potential partnerships in the future and also our listing on the stock exchanges as well thank you yeah and very very exciting that you are going to be listed was it in q1 yes on nasdaq and where else did you say so we're looking at a dual listing in q1 um starting with the london uh stock exchange and potentially the nasdaq not bad not bad be ready for financial reports absolutely what's the valuation is daniel asking here what's the valuation of your company it's significant expectedly yeah i won't punch the numbers today but if anybody's interested in that aspect of it you can certainly reach out on our website and we'll be happy to field any questions around that fantastic fantastic thank you very much to keep and kevin very exciting and also the good news for for the audience is that we will continue having um some evc talk sessions with the proof of trust so we will be able to get much more into depth with their solution because today it was i guess an introduction to your solution your marketplace um a lot of information which will be yeah we'll be able to to understand much much better all the details and even also with the european commission there will be much more uh it's been it's been yeah two and a half hours now uh again thank you so much to to keep and kevin the proof of trust to the european commission we had joao robert julian i hope i remember all the names we had maria from inatem also amazing amazing afternoon thank you so much to everyone