Blockchain Use Cases and the Future of Crypto at the WEF

Well, I think that blockchain and crypto in Davos. So yeah, that's an interesting question. I mean, you think about how crypto has evolved over the past eight years. I think that what we're seeing is more acceptance of a new type of system that might be better than the old. And I think that if you look at the financial systems, which really is one of the main things that are on stage here at Davos being the economic forum, and you look at how we're creating a new version of a trustless market for how value can be exchanged, I think that's a highly relevant topic for not just the first world countries, but for the emerging world countries as well. And so in the emerging world, I think there's probably a lot more potential for early adoption of blockchain and crypto as just a means of providing infrastructure that didn't previously exist. We've seen this before with other types of technologies where cell phone usage penetration had leapfrogged other technologies in parts of Asia and, and Latin America. And we're going to see the same thing here. We're going to see a leapfrog effect in the same sort of way that it happened with mobile phones.

The jury's out a little bit for me on this. I feel like there to some degree it's important to have all of the Lambo and to the moon types of people in the sense that they bring liquidity. I think behind that wave is a series of very serious projects that are focused on delivering equality to the planet. So I think in 2018 we're going to begin seeing and weeding out some of these very serious projects. And I look forward to that.

2017 was very, very lucrative in terms of ICOs, right? Getting 10x20x50x out of ICOs projects. It was driven by speculations, like totally speculative. Right, because you had many projects with just no underlying businesses, just white papers. I, from my perspective, from my angle is just, I don't like this, I don't support this kind of projects. What I support is the technology itself. If you have an underlying good business and a technology that is supporting it, then okay. But I'm not a supporter of just, you know, using ICOs just for a fundraise and for speculations. So, but I think in terms of like investments, it was pretty good in terms of how it's going to evolve in 2018, I think we're gonna look more for like projects that are actually, you know, have an operating product, operating business, and more security tokens than utility tokens, that's for sure. So we have, we have a lot of big funds investing into crypto right now. So it's gonna be more regulated, that's for sure.

I think that the cryptocurrencies like back back to 2017, there was like a huge movement of ICOs people getting into it. We have to know that it's only $700 billion market right now comparing to a normal Wall street and normal economics, it's like a tiny little bit, it's growing very fast. So there's a lot of child, a lot of young people going into it. So it's trying to grow and the ICOs, the new projects that come into the market are being pushed out, the shitty ones being pushed out, out of it. So the only legit ones that have a next level trust stay into the market and they actually grow itself and that what we should trust into right now. I think that it's hard to say that crypto, crypto market is now mature, but it's still getting into it. It's gonna have to wait a couple of more years. I think that's gonna be like next, maybe next year. 2019 is gonna be the best year to invest because we will be getting rid of the not mattering projects and we only have the mature backed by the government, probably projects only on the market.

So I'm Kat, I'm the CEO and co founder of Simply Vital Health. And in the quickest way I can say we're creating a healthcare safe blockchain protocol. And so the reason why we need to healthcare safe blockchain protocol is because we want to make sure that healthcare does not say no to blockchain. Right now in healthcare, I know it's a, it's a bit difficult to hear for us in the crypto community, but healthcare does not like the bitcoin blockchain. They're a little bit nervous of the Ethereum blockchain as it is. So bitcoin they immediately associate with Silk Road. And I know that was in crypto time, that's decades long ago, but to them it's cemented in their mind and it's just, it's wrought with just negativity and law breaking. They don't really understand the cryptocurrency and why you actually need a crypto to power the entire system. And so for Ethereum they don't know where the nodes or the server sit. They can sit in China, they can sit anywhere. You don't actually know who's powering the system. So what we're doing instead is we're creating this healthcare safe blockchain protocol. In a technical definition it is a fork of Ethereum, but we use HIPAA compliant validators, proof of stake. So HIPAA compliance is a globally recognized level of security around healthcare data. And what that means is there's a certain requirement if you are working with or sharing with or utilizing healthcare data, you have to be HIPAA compliant. It's a federal law and it basically says that even though we don't store data, and I can talk a little bit more about that with hipaa, you have to be able to prove that you're storing data in a very secure way. You have multiple backups, you have to make sure that there's a level of security around the data that you have, especially if you have demographic data. So first name, age, gender, zip code, things that you could string together to essentially identify an individual. And so this HIPAA compliant validator is a way for us to have an open source, free to build on blockchain, but a secure enough environment that healthcare says yes, I will use that decentralized application that's on the health nexus protocol.

So what we did is like everything started by seeing all these catastrophic events happening in the world like Puerto Rico with the hurricanes, Mexico with the earthquakes and all that. And we've been very, very deep involved into the financial industry creating automation, financial tools. So we said how can we contribute to the world and to cause an impact and help all these people that are the victims based on these catastrophic events. And we decided to create this social financial network that basically what it allows is like let's say a nonprofit or a government. What they do is like they just, in the case of a non profit, they just create a profile in our system and we enable them to aggregate all their crypto or their fiat accounts in one place. They can create projects and they can publish it. So the people, they have an honest interaction with the communities so people can see exactly how they're spending their resources. The more trust that they deliver to the donors, the more money the donors will sent and the more resources that the people in need will receive.

We our machine learning technology is predominantly detecting the characters in the documents taking out to see whether it seems fraudulent or not. And the more checks that we do, the better it becomes. That's why it's quite powerful detecting fakes more than the human eye would. And we aren't on the blockchain ourselves, but we power blockchain companies. But be it for an identity use case or Increasingly for crypto exchanges or even ICOs.

Yeah, I think the open environment that blockchain is bringing is the first important point. So, you know, we're seeing that peer to peer economy, you know, distribution, distribution of wealth away from the world's top largest companies into the hands of retail. It's a, it's a case where retail's led the institutional market and I think it's institutional time to catch up. So 2018 we're going to see a lot of obviously, you know, securitized tokens and you know, that's something I'm seeing from my hometown. In Perth, Australia, we've got the Perth Mint. They're looking to tokenize gold and that's really an investment market that's really been dominated by old world. There's not too many people 20 to 30 years old that I know that have said that they're looking to make portfolio weight into gold. The Australian government has done an amazing job world leading. The reason how they've been able to do that is strong industry collaboration. So the Australian Digital Commerce association, that's been a group that, that's been involved since 201415 originally ceded by the top blockchain companies, they've been able to work with the government, change the taxation so that Australia's on a very good and open environment for taxation. They've been able to establish a code of conduct for digital currency exchanges, which means that our consumers are going to be protected around using those exchanges and make sure they do the right thing by them. And then finally there's an ICO working group so that Australia is able to take advantage of this evolutionary funding model. It's a way for startups to get funded, it's a way for companies basically to have a project that could change the world and get sufficient funding to give them an opportunity to get their.

Leg up with cannabis. I created a seed to cell tracking on blockchain so you can see where this plant was grown, how it was grown, what the PH levels of the soil were. You can also see the lab results of did it test positive for mold, did it test positive for pesticides, what the actual THC and CBD levels are. These are all really important things for patients because if you have a low immune system, you don't want anything that has pesticides that will later turn into carcinogenics. But also very important for government because if a farmer says he grew 100 pounds of weed and he claims to the government that that 50 pounds of it tested positive for mold, that's a Lot of weed he couldn't sell. But how can he prove this to the government without just showing a piece of paper that they don't trust because they could have paid this lab off, they don't know. So the government has to do what they think is right and charging them 100% tax on that crop that they grew, even though the farmer couldn't sell it all. But with blockchain, this farmer has the real proof of the labor that tested their farm products and put this lab result on the blockchain. And the government can now see that it really was the lab that tested it. And if they really want to retest it and see if it's true or not, they can test it themselves and upload this as well. But it gives them the power to see who's really able to sell what and who isn't. If A farmer said 50% of his crop was positive for mold and he really has to throw it away now, the government gives them the chance to be honest and say, we'll pay 50% of our taxes on this because it's all we were able to sell, just like a normal crop. But this, this will take some time. They just need trust.

I think governments have to, yeah, look, at least look into it and hopefully also not just regulate it, but also see the huge opportunities and potential in the underlying blockchain technology. And the whole use cases include including cryptocurrencies and cryptocurrencies assets. I mean, in Switzerland last week we had the Swiss Federal Councilor at the event and he announced that he wants to create the crypto nation Switzerland. So that's his, that were his words. So I think we see more regulation, hopefully useful regulation to avoid all the negative and dark side of the whole crypto asset world, which is by the way, in every other industry as well. But I think we will also see that the few governments are starting to understand that there's a huge potential and upside, not just regulating the whole space, but really enabling smart and passionate entrepreneurs in this field to create a big and tremendous market. Honestly, I was quite well surprised by the mainstream people, the bankers, the foreign affairs, the international relations affairs, people who were super into blockchain, they really wanted to understand a little bit more than bitcoin. Actually. They really realized that bitcoin is the tip of the iceberg. And the blockchain solution, which is, let's say behind it, it's much more than a storage of value, actually. You can implement it in so many things. You can track the supply chain of food and drugs. You can, I don't know, you can solve governance issues, you can track the supply chains of arms, weapons, many really, really good things that you can do with blockchain.