Blockchain protocols for repatriation of stolen assets

Transcript

hello hello all right hi everybody my name is Simone Neumann I'm going to be telling you today about the technologies for accountability Foundation which is an initiative that is being started by my father and I I'll get right into it okay cool so I'm just gonna start off with this is kind of like a little bit of background for us to be considering as I get into this conversation these are some questions that batalik has put forward in the community a long time ago I for one think that the answers to these questions are pretty abysmal I don't think that blockchain and

especially cryptocurrencies etc are really being used as much to save people or help people as the community would like to believe and it's something that I've grown quite frustrated with so just with that in the backdrop I'm gonna continue on with telling you about what I'm working on so give you a quick background tell you how I got here talk about blockchain for good kind of end with a call to arms so first and foremost I'm the CEO of location-based incentives we're a company that developed non-predatory and sentence structures some ones that don't rely on the extraction of data in order to get what we want we work with different

governments and nonprofits for this purpose today I'm here primarily representing the technologies for accountability foundation and I'm also the head of token design for influencer Ltd which is a venture capital company that is on the path towards decentralization feel free to come and coach me about any of these projects so I entered the crypto space in 2017 I was originally interested in using incentive structures and crypto economies to coordinate you know positive net gains in subjective economies I've lived in eight different countries

because of my father's work and part of that work brought us to Kazakhstan where I lived for about four years as where I went to high school my father Aaron Bernstein he headed the Bota Foundation which was the world's first foundation to be funded through repatriated or stolen assets I'll go more into what that means but the program was able to directly benefit over 200,000 kizaki citizens is kind of regarded as one of the only success stories of success of repatriating assets back to the people they were stolen from this is an issue that goes on all over the world and for instance in Nigeria over a billion

dollars that's been stolen from the people over the last 20 years although it's now being returned yeah so my dad wasn't working in this I was working in blockchain a lot of these things that he was talking about were related to accountability transparency I was like well you know maybe blockchains the obvious answer he didn't really believe me at first but then we teamed up and last year we were able to speak in the French Senate a transparency international event there about our work and I really got more excited about the applications for DL T's in the specific context so the some background on stolen

assets and what I mean by stolen assets the United Nations Convention Against Corruption has identified stolen assets as a potential funder for the goals of the SDGs my father's foundation that he was running in Kazakhstan was called hotel which stands for young camels and it was used primarily to invest in the education of kisaki citizens as well as increasing support for vulnerable people especially women this was done in partnership with the stolen asset recovery initiative which is out of the World Bank Group as well as key players from the US Department of Justice and the Swiss government and the Kazakh government and this is something that

happens all over the world all the time the the scale of the money is absolutely staggering right now there are over a trillion dollars globally that are just frozen because people cannot agree what to do with the money and this happens after a dictator is caught someone is sent to jail and it's a laborious process that with lots of different stakeholders who can't really agree on whether the should be used or if it can be used for any good purposes so I'm just gonna talk about all this should be fairly obvious for everyone in the room but of course when we're talking about the

repatriation of stolen assets returning money that's gonna require us to think about supply chains identity transparency knowing where numbers are flowing in and out being able to verify and measure impact so you know programmability supply chain as I said we're really looking specifically at conditional cash transfer programs because those are some of the most efficacious ways to redistribute money and to redistribute wealth as well as self sovereign identity this is a very important recipe in any conditional cash transfer program so I'm also right now very concerned with how can we protect the citizens from an external perspective when we're redistributing money towards them and

that brings us to the technologies for accountability Foundation which is the brainchild of myself and my father Aaron Bernstein and our goal is to leverage existing and emerging technologies to increase the transparency of stolen asset repatriation as well as development aid in general right now we are making significant progress in both Nigeria and as Becca Stan I'm not going to talk too much about that right now but if you're interested please feel free to approach me afterwards about those on going's and we're continuously partnering with relevant organizations and are looking to partner with more so we're partnered with the African Network for environment and economic justice dispersed topal which is a impact monetizing platform as well as the IXO

protocol our long-term vision is to develop somewhat of an analog to hyper ledger fabric but for development aid purposes and as basically just to show that we can use emerging technologies like DLTS to increase the transparency of the stolen asset repatriation process which should in theory help convince Morcom governments to release these funds so just imagine what we could do with a trillion dollars to save this earth so that's all they're already there for the taking we are not interested my father Knight in developing any specific blockchain protocol ourselves we're agnostic in that sense but we are interested in

connecting as many relevant tools as possible to kind of come up with a consortium of offers for what could be used on a case-by-case basis depending on the needs of the governments and civil society organizations that are engaged in the discussions of repatriation so I'm just gonna end this with a word of caution for those within this community so last year I was at SCC I am the uncredited YouTube spokesperson for the conference although I had more hair back then and I had this really life-changing experience that I just

want to tell you guys about briefly so it all starts with Colgate this is a weird it's a weird of those story but basically there was a game theorist who was presenting on how you could use board games to simulate token economies I thought it was really interesting really good event afterwards someone an organizer in the crowd ask the question something like hey me and my friends want to figure out how to send aetherium or either to the homeless in Paris do you have any ideas of how we could do this and this game theorist he could get you know he grabs them like he was that's a really interesting question this is a man with a PhD really intelligent and he starts telling us

this story which is you know this reminds me of something similar which is I had a friend and they were not very wealthy and they had a child who had Down syndrome and this child for some reason only wanted to use brand toothpaste but they couldn't afford it so I wanted to set up a system to use ether to just give this kid toothpaste automatically and then he proceeded to say it was much more complicated than I thought I had to set up a wallet that would automatically transfer to an exchange which would then automatically be converted into Amazon giftcards which would then be sent in to Cole and send to the kid and everyone started applauding that's brilliant he said maybe you can do something like this for

the homeless people in Paris and for me it was this moment of almost madness because I was just thinking myself like give this kid the [ __ ] toothpaste you know what I mean like what what are you talking about how are you reaching these levels of abstraction for something that is fundamentally based on human interaction if you want to help the homeless people in Paris volunteer give them money give them your time but if we keep on focusing on how to automate everything if we keep on focusing on how to tap into Oracle's I fear that we're not leveraging the opportunities of this technology the correct way nor in a way that is in the original intention of why we hopefully all got started exploring

distributed ledger design so with that being said let's design better solutions and thank you for your attention we're looking continuously to partner with relevant technology providers especially those that are concerned with helping vulnerable people and there's my email if you're interested in reaching out and that's it if you guys have any questions I'll open up now [Applause] any questions I'm the trend astute what technology exactly you worked on at the

foundation have you real specific process up on the use case or access to beat the situation it's a good question unfortunately I'm not in a position where I can really disclose too much at this time but we are involved in the repatriation processes right now with both in Nigeria and who's becca stan and those are two separate big lump sums of money that are being returned or have the potential to be returned in Nigeria it's happening no matter what and we're becoming involved in the process of optimizing the existing they're using a conditional cash transfer program already and we're interested in optimizing that through DLT technology in the case of lose becca Stan we're

actually getting involved in trying to convince the US Department of Justice as well as key stakeholders within the uzbeki government that this is a viable strategy for returning the funds so where it can never be a one case fits all situation and it really is very context dependent and in very early days and we're kind of at the stage right now where we're transitioning from exploratory and to actually making things happen but I can't really speak to much more on specifics at this point I mean I appreciate you can't speak on the exact specifics but conceptually if

I understand what you're doing correctly it sounds to be very much it's very relationship based and its political it's trying to bring people together to do the right thing and it sounds fascinating but can you say something about what role blockchain might play at least on a conceptual level sure so the you know the things that be the concern here is that the money from frozen Bank actually reaches the Intendant recipient or funds the intended project whether that's school infrastructure etc so what we're interested is leveraging existing protocols such as EXO which has a way of monetizing sorry monitoring impact and

knowing that you know through API etc that projects are actually being completed or Topal which is a decentralized project that issues con sorry um where they called credits like the equivalent of carbon credits but for development aid so that they can use api's as well to prove that for instance air quality is getting better from a project that has been funded by stolen assets to improve air quality or that literacy levels are rising if you're looking at just purely the distribution of funds that we might be looking at dispersed which has a novel mechanism for transferring funds a lot faster to people that need it than traditional

banks as well as having a open and verifiable framework so anyone can peer in and see that the money there's no slippage that's a huge issue with this type of money to begin with right now there are still lots of people that are tapping into these stolen assets which is totally illegitimate and irresponsible but I just don't think that there's a lot well let me ask a question who here knew that the amount of stolen assets prior to this that were out there right it's if it's it's you know it's something that is not really on people's radar the only reason I know about it is because my dad did it you know like that's the life that my dad has had and it he's it is a very political thing as

you said as well I'm really coming in from the technology side but a lot of our momentum is based on our ability to coordinate with the right people and reach consensus prior to even discussing these types of technologies and so that's where my dad has really been instrumental in driving us forward so I hope that answers your question but we are also you know the the things that I mentioned earlier you know it really is about increasing the transparency the programmability so that we can come up with interesting mechanisms for a specific lifecycle of a development a project that's funded by

stolen assets and so that we can reduce a lot of the overhead costs associated with its monitoring so like in Kazakhstan the Bota foundation was redistributing a hundred and ten million dollars but about 30 million was spent purely on making sure that the money was going to where it was supposed to go so if we can reduce that overhead via DL T's by even a small fraction we are greatly increasing the available funds for actually making a direct impact in people's lives yeah okay thank you very much [Applause]

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