The power of blockchain

Sally Eaves: We have a crisis and a new surge in refugees across the world, more than at any time since World War II. People can be held in a frightening and frustrating limbo, whether that's at a refugee camp or in transit trying to move to a new country. Many of these refugees are stateless and have scattered, inadequate, or no documentation at all, so there can be acute difficulties in establishing or proving who they are.

Where a paper ledger could be stolen, lost, or worse still, manipulated, identities verified on the blockchain are time stamped and can't be changed or faked. Identity opens the door to access to opportunities, so this is critical. Using a blockchain solution, governments could begin to issue digitally authenticated identification documentation, which would change so many lives, providing the pathway to financial services and work, while enabling better collaboration and transparency for all involved. The UN World Food Programme has also used the Ethereum blockchain to support refugees, providing cryptocurrency-based vouchers for redemption in food markets.

Beyond this, I work a lot with supply chains, which is probably the most natural use case for the use of blockchain tech. One nascent project in Malaysia and Thailand has looked at ethical and fair-trade opportunities.

Oud, as one example, is a commodity that we hear less about in Europe, apart from in perfumes and cosmetics, but in the Middle East, it is very prominent and meaningful from a cultural perspective. The problem is that 10 to 20 billion dollars a year of the oud trade is illegal and everybody across the supply chain is missing out. Governments lose tax revenue, trees are destroyed by not using best practices for extraction, product quality may not be clear to purchasers, and the farmer typically receives a small fraction of the end value. With new tech extraction processes supported by science, alongside radio-frequency identification (RFID) tagging and blockchain to track and trace, you can bring all of this together, from field to retailers, with everybody getting value. I'm excited to see where this goes.

Geertjan Wielenga: Would you say that it's the combination of different techs that is special? You have mobile, AI, blockchain, and so on. All of these different newish techs are coming together and filling in the gaps in these scenarios that you describe.

Sally Eaves: Absolutely, it is only when you get true integration that scale and sustainability start happening. We're at a tipping point right now. But it is also the people who are coming together that is important alongside the tech.

I work with all sorts of different stakeholders, from bleeding-edge start-ups to large traditional and transitioning organizations. I also research, speak, and engage in university environments and advise government and professional bodies.

I was at South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin recently running a workshop on "tech for good," talking to young people, and looking at how we can do things differently, for example, by bringing transparency and accountability to the supply chain.

We need to be engaging in more than one community and this broadening of awareness is key. I have different types of audiences and sometimes they effectively use different languages, which can often be a barrier for knowledge sharing. There is so much jargon or buzzwords that aren't properly understood unless you're embedded in that specific community. The very word "blockchain" is a great example of this! We need to have more metaphors, I think, to help people to relate, alongside more tangible real-world examples that make the tech meaningful and relevant to everyday lives and experiences.

We need to make tech more accessible to people. I'm currently writing a book and supporting education and awareness is a big part of what motivated me to do that. I want to provide good-quality, non-biased information, but also for it to be accessible, relevant, and to spark curiosity about what can be achieved. It can be hard for people to find content with that balance and often, people just don't know where to go for informed and trusted content. I've just built some courses on blockchain and AI. I'm trying to make them very accessible for different types of groups.

Geertjan Wielenga: Tangibility, as you say, is often what is missing with all of these different terms and buzzwords. What can we do, as advocates, to make all these terms meaningful?