Managers in enterprises or start-up founders all have to go through a framework in order to unlock the necessary investment for their blockchain projects. Understanding that process and what it entails is key. Areiel Wolanow is managing director of Finserv Experts, expert advisor to the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Blockchain amongst many other blockchain advisory and non-exec positions. In this podcast he takes us through the commonalities between successful and failed blockchain projects before building a framework for requesting investment for a blockchain project.

 
What is blockchain?
Blockchain is an enabling technology. It allows multiple separate legal parties to share a single version of data and keep that data in synch between themselves. Thus, removing the need to reconcile different versions of data between themselves.

 
Journey to blockchain
In early 2014, Areiel was running IBM’s financial services practice for East Africa based out of Nairobi. 90% of the Ethiopian commodity exchange is with coffee. The challenge that they faced was that the Fair Trade Association was threatening to remove accreditation across the country, because of the level of corruption. Virtually all coffee farmers in Ethiopia were calling themselves Fair Trade with only a tiny minority having actually gone through the process.

The Ethiopian commodity exchange had asked IBM if they could do an IOT based provenance solution. The idea was to give where farmers, who had gone through the Fair Trade process, the ability to purchase Fair Trade RFID tags to put in their coffee bags. Whilst this solution would help solve the problem from the farm side, the problem remerged when the coffee reached the roaster and ultimately the market floor. The Fair Trade coffee would get mixed with other coffees thus making the ability to trace provenance very difficult and easily gamed.

It became clear that considering these challenges that blockchain could be an excellent solution for nailing down the provenance, tracking the coffee throughout the various transactions all the way to the consumer scanning a QR code on their coffee bag and seeing their coffees journey.

 
Blockchain – addressing the “world’s oldest business requirement”
The above coffee example, or Everledger with diamonds, demonstrate how provenance is a powerful use case for blockchain.

Blockchain is an innovation that addresses what Areiel refers to as the “World’s oldest business requirement”. This is a requirement that goes back to 4,000 BC when humans were designing the very first contracts.

At that time Sumerians would record future commitments (eg. use of an Ox for bushels of grains) on a “bulla” a hollow ball-like clay that contained tokens that identified the quantity and types of goods being recorded. This ball would provide an independent verifiable tokenised representation of a contract. A bulla was at that time as transformative as the internet is today.

However, as the bulla becoming increasingly adopted it became difficult for individuals to remember how many tokens where inside each balls. This set an upper limit on scale of the bulla system. The next invention was creating indentations on the outside of the bulla to represent the number of tokens on the inside. These indentations eventually took the form of symbols to represent not just the number of tokens but the different type of tokens.

Finally, it was realised that the symbols had supplanted the tokens themselves. As long as both parties where present when the symbols were being drawn and that th...