Provenance

Transcript

I'm Jessie Baker I'm from provenance and some other problems team members here Yetta Steiner actually presented provenance the concept at DEFCON zero so we're back with an update and yeah woo so it's been an interesting year going from a concept to UM startup and it's not just about dev that's for sure so fundraising design team building and most importantly understanding the market so we can make sure our decentralized application as indeed serving one so what is Providence and what are we doing and so provenance is dedicated to using technology to bring transparency to product supply chains and life cycles so what does that mean

that means we're basically here to help us all know more about our material world where's it come from how was it made who made it from what materials those kinds of things also a little bit into how might we kind of keep the record of those materials into the future so we might give materials a second life for example so there are a lot of reasons why we need transparency in product supply chains and some of those range from things like counterfeit goods being sold on the internet from drugs to handbags slavery it's not great that's happening in lots of supply chains and wasted materials all kinds of stuff and for the most part we can kind

of deduce that our material world and a relationship with it is is somewhat broken and so we started working on provenance for that simple reason how can we find out more about where stuff comes from and how might we start to repair our relationship with our material world a little especially when even mcdonalds advertising says that their ethical like what are we miniatures choose when crisps and both handcrafted finding out information that you can trust a bit about products is becoming increasingly difficult so we aren't the first people to think about trying to make supply chains more transparent in fact lots and lots of people have attempted this and you guessed it in a centralized way and this

is fundamentally flawed how could one organization or one even collection of organizations broker the world's supply chain data just doesn't work particularly when supply chains are inherently a network of organizations that don't trust each other because there is afraid they're going to be cut out or skipped over or screwed over and one other shape or form I think I was talking about it with somebody earlier it's a bit like The Hunger Games so essentially transparency with a centralized system it doesn't really work very well you have to trust in someone and it's usually the largest organization in a supply chain which means the whole system is fundamentally flawed so with providence's is exactly

what we're trying to do we're trying to not have one large centralized system broker all over the data about the world supply chains we're trying to do it on a theorem we're trying to let everyone use a shared secure auditable database in order to convey information about material things so we're not doing that in a kind of wikileaks style although some other people are and that's great and we are actually kind of on the side of companies and helping to reinforce and promote and make trusted good behavior so companies are more interested in a voluntary approach to transparency and a perhaps already taking steps towards making their supply chains better and this is where we kind

of intercept in an interesting way between supply chains but also branding and kind of our concept of whether we just choose or trust a product or not this is something we actually spend a lot of time exploring is to what is the future of branding what is the future of our relationship with with trusting goods and services and very much sort of provenance is nestled in that of intersection between how the world's supply chains are governed but also how we choose to trust products so we look at kind of four aspects we look at gathering information about products and we're very concerned with making this in an accessible format of course and we look very much verifying the data so

working with kind of trusted third parties in order to be able to verify data and we work a lot of traceability to source so in terms of development and we started with a material wallet so the simplest of the simple so this is actually a kind of prototype we made back in September which was just an asset wallet it allowed people to register an item so you could register it on using some existing information from the web for example this is taking some from amazon and you could give it a unique idea should it should need one and and really what you could do is transfer and receive items and that built up a chain of custody on the

blockchain and we then going to extended this and to start to look at gathering more types of information such as photographs or video location data things like that and and that's been pretty successful but the big challenge now and this is very much what we're in the midst of working on is verifying data so we have formed a partnership with 40 different certifications and we're helping digitize those those certifications but also helping the information about those certifications be verified and trusted all the way along the chain so from the point of issued to the end consumer allowing you to see a chain of custody of exactly

where that certification was issued and and came from and actually this is somewhere where we're really finding we're adding value incredibly quickly and the certification system so for example fair trade at the moment is very very centralized like if you want to find out where this product has a fair trade certificate you really how they have one one way in to find out that information and they have huge problem with double spend so how can you tell if there's twice as much coffee being certified fair trade when you're only auditing the supply chain around ten percent of the time and only on spot audits so really you're not kind of monitoring what's going on in terms of individual certifications being

granted at any step of the chain so with a book chain you kind of present this whole new paradigm which is you can now see what certifications are being issued and accounted for openly so everyone can trace back exactly where a certification was issued the quotas that were imposed on them etc which already is a kind of drastic leap in terms of auditing costs lowering the cost of being able to be certified in the first place so I guess this is the kind of picture we're working towards with provenance which is gathering information such as certification data but also other bits of information and cascading that along a chain of custody of course we're focused very much on supply chain data

but these certifications don't necessarily have to be organic or fair trade they could just be safety or proof of authenticity that the constructs exactly the same and we're now kind of moving into not only verifying this the certification data but also looking at transformation along the chain and how we can allow that to persist with the IDS so we really believe the blockchain is a powerful broker for supply chain data and really could be used for a huge catalyst for a range of things importing regulation for example across border drastically reducing auditing costs as I mentioned but also just hugely improving kind of social and environmental impact by allowing people to actually start

openly reporting these things rather than constantly gathering data in silos that it totally loses gets lost along the chain dutas it's it's fundamentally non interoperable current state so yeah that's a bit of an overview for what we're doing so we're based in London and we're currently hiring actually we've got funding for another year so if you're interested in writing smart contracts for social good drop of the line but thank you very much you