Paseando por BlockchainCon 2018

The Event “BlockchainCon – Blockchain innovation for Business” in Madrid on 20.09.2018 brought together many stakeholders who have Blockchain activities. Among the presentations, the following strategic positions could be identified:

• Nuria Avalos of Repsol has underlined the importance of having a national public Blockchain in Spain, and also permissioned networks to create value. The primary use case of Blockchain in the energy industry is to tokenize and certify the origin of energy units, but it also appears to be an important competitor in matters of financial and payment services, e.g. automatic payment determined by SmartContract, liquidation and netting. Repsol works with Alastria.
• Andrew Darley of IBM has presented a series of Blockchain projects such as FoodTrust (traceability, transparency and efficiency in the food chain), TradeLens in collaboration with the shipping giant Maersk (streamlining global trade and shipping, customs documents, formalities in a SmartContract and the Blockchain performs the signings in an immediate way), TrustedIdentity with Sovrin (to exchange documentary evidence in a way that is both verifiable and protecting privacy). IBM uses Hyperledger Fabric and goes back to its roots, Blockchain being (but not only) an “International Business Machine” par excellence!
• Ignacio Bustillo of Blocknitive has demonstrated how Asentify permits to ensure GDPR compliance using Blockchain technology, with complete traceability of the user data handling by the provider, illustrated by an example of a company corresponding with a CallCenter and a marketing agency.
• Régis Louis of Oracle has explained his strategy for facilitating the adoption of Blockchain by businesses: permissive Blockchain for the acceleration of B2B processes with SmartContracts containing the business logic based on prior business agreements and with “Bring-your-own” management of identities, of autonomous recuperation and of the chaincode containers, and SaaS applications for the traceability of the supply chain.
• Montse Guardia Güell of Banco Sabadell also has mentioned the use of SmartContracts designed with business intelligence for managing specific processes between companies. Banco Sabadell works with Alastria and its standard of digital identity and uses Blockchain for simplifying transcations and simplifying customer service.
• Enrique Martin of Vodafone has shown Blockchain as a solution (via SmartContracts of course) for numerous challenges of IoT, for example for connected cars, for the cold chain when transporting frozen goods, and for insurance against the lack of rainfall in agriculture.
• Yaiza Rubio Viñuela of 11paths has exposed various cases of Blockchain fraud, in particular by sending small monetary quantities to places where they cannot be spent, and using this hack to embed in the public part of an address some information that will remain permanently registered in the Blockchain as real information; a further fraud is performed by malware dedicated to mining, actually stealing electricity from the attacked, by loading mining Javascripts that execute while the user visits a webpage (e.g. watching a video). Solutions : CriptoClipWatcher, NotMining.org