This is epicenter episode 214 with guests, Christopher Fabian,
and Sean Conway. Welcome to epicenter.
The shores talks about the Technologies project starts,
driving decent. Elevation and the global
blockchain Revolution. My name is service language
Errol and today I'm doing a show by myself.
Both Brian Mayer were unavailable, so I thought I
would bring you an episode here today about blockchain and
humanitarianism. It's a topic that we haven't
really covered very much. I mean a lot of the topics that
we have on the show and projects we have on the show are usually
startups or for-profit entities or protocol projects.
But today we're actually going to be talking a lot about
humanitarians How blockchain can help him help in humanitarian
projects and who better to have as a guest.
Then our two guests today Chris Fabian who is a lead at UNICEF
Ventures and co-founded the UNICEF Innovation unit and we'll
get to talk a lot more to Chris about UNICEF Ventures and
Innovation unit and the work that UNICEF is doing in.
Promoting blockchain Technologies as a means to
improve humanitarian work and Sean Conway, who is the founder
of the EXO foundation, and EXO is an organization that is
promoting an operating system for data-driven impact,
especially in the humanitarian space.
So, thank you very much for coming on, guys.
Thanks for having us. Great to be him.
So, as we often do with our guests, we like to still get
introduction and learn about your background in the space.
So, perhaps starting with Chris, tell us about your background
and how you came into your current role at UNICEF I came
into a totally by accident. I come from sort of the world of
tech startups and making things that are really fast pace and I
somehow ended up in an austere 72 year old International
bureaucracy. But I think that the The work
that we work on in our team and that I did before, was really
about creating the space for new things that can fix really big
problems. And so before I was at UNICEF, I
was in Tanzania and I had companies that looked at
connectivity and access to information for profit and I
didn't really know a lot about what UNICEF was but having now
spent a few years in the organization, I think about
eight. Now, I found that we can
actually have that same startup culture and that same approach
to solving problems, using the technologies that we're all
interested in. In.
But do it I'd really a global scale and I'm happy to talk a
little bit more about the specifics of the work.
We do later in the episode. So how do you?
I mean I guess we can talk about this later in the show but like
how have you found tried to bring this sort of startup
culture into a 72 year old, very large International, very
political organization. And I think it's a lot about
resolving to different kind of orders of magnitude, of problem
solving. So, like startup World works
really fast and works really great.
Julian likes to smash things and international bureaucracies work
really slowly at Big scale and like to not smash anything at
all. And so, a lot of what our team
does is try to translate that and we build a lot of
prototypes. We build a lot of physical
prototypes of things which are actually software or data.
We show those two people, we work with them and we work a lot
with Partners so partners of ours that are in the tech.
World can also show us what's coming and I think we try to
gently introduce those to an environment.
That is really not a risk accepting environment.
Aunt. And we've had some successes and
more failures, but it certainly gives us a scale of operation.
UNICEF is five and a half billion dollars a year as an
organization. It works in 195 countries and
their 12,000 people, that's 12,000 people who are nodes in
our Network, know who we use to find out about new things to
find out about hard problems and who become our partners in
building stuff and that's that's kind of really amazing scale to
be yet. And how did you become
interested in blockchain technology?
I accidentally as well. A lot of stuff happens by
accident. We've got a great engineering
team in Ventures, and both Mike Fabric and and cruzada who have
been working with us on various software development projects
have been talking about blockchain and distributed
Ledger for a long time. And then it's obviously, like
the dumb ones like me, that just pick it up later.
We, we try to look at Technologies for Investments
that are three to five years out.
And in terms of kind of being out, Out in production.
So about two years ago, we did our first experiments with
public blockchains and and they totally failed and I'll tell you
that story because that's a lot of fun.
But we, you know, we got a sense that this was something that was
moving. And the way that our team
evaluates potential areas of investment is by looking at
industries that are at 100 billion dollar market cap and
problems that can affect a billion people.
So that's our sort of heuristic for what we look at.
And I mean, is there something that's got a trajectory to that
hundred billion? And of course, three years ago
100 billion seem like crazy as a you know, a figure to talk about
in the crypto space. It seems remarkably uncrazy now
so we found that like with drones like with data science
like with augmented reality, this is very clearly a set of
technologies that we want to learn about work with and invest
in. And we think that can actually
positively affect affect and infect, the work that you guys
have does. Cool.
And Sean actually took Sean and I met in Cancun over lunch,
eating burritos and having margaritas and he told me all
about EXO Foundation, I thought it was really fascinating
project and actually it was Sean who sort of connected me to
Chris and and you know, Sean will be talking a little bit
about the collaboration that we have with UNICEF but we are
going to have Shawn on the show a little bit later and maybe in
a few months or so, to talk very much in depth about his project.
But so Sean, tell us a bit about yourself and your background in
the space. Yes, I guess I've got a crazy
party here. I trained as a physician and I
work for most of my career in international development and
health and I guess the real kick-start to that was around 20
years ago when the when the HIV/AIDS epidemic was really
showing its head here in South Africa.
So I was a young physician working in the government
Hospital services and was given a project to look at some
statistics. And so with Excel spreadsheets
you know looked at at the estimates of what the epidemic
was going to look like and it was it was very clearly an
exponential epidemic and and I got really charged up about this
and thought, what we need to do something, we need to do
something that's going to be an exponential response.
And for me, the use of data to drive all kinds of development
initiatives. Whether that's two To influence
market prices of medicines, or to plan out the demand for
health workers or write down to a patient level sort of tracking
over a long period of time. The clinical parameters that
show whether you're having success or not in a treatment
regimen, that was really important to me.
And so I got fascinated by the use of data within development.
And so all of my career has really really been about
venturing. On data driven projects and
data-driven Ventures including some nonprofits.
And and and this this latest Venture that we that we've
launched so that's a good segue into x0 Foundation.
Tell us about about this this project.
And one of the goals here Yeah. So around for years back I was
actually taken a bit of a career break and was lying on a hammock
in Sri Lanka of all things and the great internet connection
there 4G connection. And I was thinking about how to
solve the problem of supply and demand within services that seem
to always have an increasing demand and never enough Supply
and the Why is usually driven institutionally?
And we've been working on on models of care delivery and
social support delivered through networks of community agents.
And, and the real challenge there is, how do you collect the
data? How do you incentivize, how do
you move information around these decentralized networks?
How do you govern govern the transfers of value and and the
information and I was I was lying this surfing the web and
so some articles about Bitcoin and sort of had this year Moment
and thought well wouldn't it be great if we could insert the
information about the services that are being delivered into
into these transactions and transfer value and informations
information of value and value of information?
And this will give us some proof of impact could bring together
financial accounting and performance accounting.
And so I thought this was going to be really easy.
This is for years back. We got the opportunity to, to
test this out and some proof of Concepts in early, childhood
development, and course I guess. Well, We'll explain the context
of the UNICEF and investment into what we were doing and over
the four years. We've realized that we have a
core set of standards and operating principles that we can
draw on that. It become standards for the
decentralized web and I can I can talk about that in more
detail. So it's we kind of stumbled Upon
A really exciting development in terms of Core standards at a
protocol level, that can be applied across all of the impact
space and it's really about taking data and turning that
into into assets that can be tokenized.
So, impact assets, and into impact tokens.
And I can talk about that a bit later.
Actually that sounds really fascinating me.
Of course, one of the great benefits of blockchain is having
some sort of traceability and coming back to some initial
event. And if you can, like, is if you
can, if you can trace so source of funding to an impact, right?
Of like how we spend that money in the impact and the result of
how you spend that money, then you sort of the reputation
system there, where, for instance, a like a sort of
humanitarian organization then Has like proper reputation and
credibility about how they're spending their funds and the
actual impact on the ground, rather than just, you know, how
much money they're raising or like how many people are
reaching or some sort of data results, that don't really have
a whole lot of meaning. Yes.
Oh, so in this development space, the catchphrases are
accountability and transparency and they've been a number of
initiatives over certainly the last decade really pushing
accountability and transparency and certainly blockchain Geez,
provide for this but they also provide for four more than that.
There is the opportunity. We see to create a new form of
capital and new form of economy. The impact economy, which values
the impacts that are being delivered through organizations
that are that are making a difference in the world, you
know. And so when we start to count,
what matters and value, what counts we can, we can generate
new forms of Ami, you know, so as we all know in a Bitcoin sort
of came from nothing and now it's a hugely valuable part of
the economy. Now, why can't we start to Value
impacts that are relevant to our sustainability and to our
well-being, a society But would be very valuable indeed.
So you know what will come, will come back to to EXO towards the
towards the end, the show to talk about the recovery
collaboration with with UNICEF. So, back to Chris, most people
are familiar with UNICEF. I mean, most people have seen
the little orange boxes, you know, next to cash registers and
convenience stores or just retail stores and like growing
up in Canada. I remember seeing like UNICEF
commercials on TV and Of course, like it brings up all these
really positive things of like helping kids and developing
world, but remind our listeners. Like what is UNICEF as an
organization like this part of the UN.
So maybe talk about that and also, what are the goals of that
organization short? So it's an interesting and
complex place and then I sort of learned more about UNICEF every
year that I'm there. I actually didn't know a lot
about UNICEF when I joined and so I came from this kind of
world of fast paced Stuff and I guess I had the same
Recollections. You did like something about
kids and it was like a pretty nice organization.
It wasn't mean like UNICEF didn't do mean things about what
I've learned over the last few years is that it actually does a
lot more than just not doing mean things.
UNICEF is the world's largest humanitarian Organization for
children and when it when the organization focuses on kids,
that really focuses on the most vulnerable and I think that's
one of the reasons that a lot of our team work in our job.
So I'm almost all of us come from the tech world.
But there's a clear mandate in the Relation to fight against
bullies, and Bullies can be physical bullies or system.
Bullies things that make the World unfair.
And by most vulnerable. We quantify that by looking at
bottom quintile of people economically, but there are many
many types of vulnerability. So, economic vulnerability is
only one. And so, this is an organization
that literally fights for the kids that are that are left
behind that other people don't fight for.
And I think that's really nice. That's something that we can all
kind of get behind. We all feel good waking up with
that as a mandate specifically UNICEF works with governments.
In 195 countries to create the right policies and governments
that are that make sure that kids are included.
But also to take action so we respond to emergencies.
You must have responded to over 350 emergencies last year.
That's a two billion dollars of emergency supplies and that
means getting things to communities faster than anybody
else. Getting the right things there
and making sure that communities can rebuild.
So our team was in Liberia, during the Ebola crisis, which
was the most scary. I think, I'm probably, most
scary things I've ever done working with communities there
to Sure that information could flow that kids could get
information about hand washing that we could know when schools
were being closed and so on. And and that's that's the
on-the-ground part of what. UNICEF does the others in the
UNICEF does is at a system level.
Make sure that the right policies are in place for
inclusion for making sure the kids with different or
disabilities kind of are able to be in a common space for
Learning and opportunity and choice and we also buy a lot of
stuff. You must have the world's
largest single purchaser of pencils.
Here's a fun fact. Act but we also by 34 percent of
the world's vaccines and that's important when you buy that much
stuff that's a billion dollars a year of vaccines more than a
billion. When you buy that much stuff you
have the ability to move markets and this, I had no idea about
when I joined UNICEF at all. And what that means is you can
sit together with the big Pharma companies and make sure that
there's Fair open and transparent pricing on vaccines,
that's incredibly important. So all of those three levels to
sort of programmatic work doing stuff, the sort of policy work
in the Financial work, come together and make a very nice
environment for a team like ours, which looks at new
technology. And you can imagine that, you
know, we try to turn the gears of, unicef's Education or Health
Systems strengthening, and, and turn them faster.
And, and by using those three levels, so making sure that
we're building products on the ground with with users, making
sure we're working with government.
So the right policies are in place to take those Technologies
and then working with big companies to make sure they
understand that there's a market, even in parts of the
world that they might not consider their main, their main
kind of Market. I like this idea of like UNICEF
fighting bullies wherever they wherever they appear, whether
they be corrupt, governments or corporations or illness or
medical email nutrition. Those are all the, all the
bullies that UNICEF goes out and tries to fight against by
implementing policy and getting people to change their minds
about certain ways and things ways of thinking cetera.
So you mentioned that you worked in in Liberia, what are some of
the most impactful things you think?
That UNICEF is doing today, you know, aside from obviously,
like, delivering vaccines to people with illnesses that might
end up killing them or delivering pencils to kids that
need them in tools. So I think that structurally
UNICEF is, is looking at the biggest weaknesses in system.
So the reason that I mean, people are poor because systems
are unfair and and when you're poor, you don't have the ability
to go to a good. It's cool.
You don't have the ability to have action and to have an
opportunity and choice Vector in front of you, your kind of left
behind. So I think the most important
thing that UNICEF does is ensure that every kid try to ensure
that every kid try really hard to ensure that every kid has
equal access to opportunity and choice, and I'll give you an
example. If you're so, they're 55 million
people who are children. 55 million young people who are on
the move because of war or violence, but inconceivable
number. There's no way to make 55
million makes sense. Anybody so 55 million kids who
don't have access to the things that many of us take for granted
a health system, a school and identity.
And so the type of work that UNICEF does with refugees, is
make sure that that five-year-old Refugee kid has
some semblance of normalcy that they can go to a school that
they can be around other kids and it's not only to be nice.
It's also really important to society when you have imbalance
when there is unfairness and inequity and inequality
societies come apart. And you can see this in the
Today, you see the strains of inequality everywhere and, and
this is how a dialogue that could be very condensed and
connected has become very polarized.
And so I think, when UNICEF works with Refugee populations,
for example, we not only make sure that their systems to give
kids health care and vaccines but also that those kids once
they get the right nutrition and the right education, have some
access to opportunity have some idea of how to be part of the
world and that sounds very lofty.
But I think it's really important.
We were in Liberia during Ebola, there were these, there's a
group of 14, 15 year-olds who were in the most hard-hit part
of Monrovia. There's a peninsula in the city
that have been really cut off and quarantine and we met them
after. We got there in November, I
think octopus end of October, we met these young people who were
literally going door to door with notepads and asking
questions of households in their neighborhood and telling
information that was important to other young people to adults
saying, you know, don't don't wash dead people and things like
that. We worked with them to build a
system and I can talk about it a little bit more, but we worked
with, we were like, okay, so you guys are the heroes of the Ebola
outbreak. You are literally in the most
difficult place these, it was 45 degrees.
It was muddy, they were walking around with with boots, you
know, rubber boots on and this pads of paper and we worked with
them to build up a system that so that they could use their
phones to SMS in that information more quickly.
I don't think that there was any genius in that.
We literally looked at people who had a brilliant idea.
But maybe not all the access to networks and things that we do
and help them build something that made their job better.
That made them create more balance in the world around
them. Interesting.
So so there have been some so I guess the Innovation unit that
has produced some projects that have been valuable and have have
had positive outcome. I'd like to ask you then sort of
you've been with UNICEF for a number of years now.
And so I've been the humanitarian space, do you Think
that the world is is tending towards less inequality.
Like so like if you were to look at like results of actions of
impact that units have had 15 20 years ago and the impact that
it's having now and sort of the result of that.
Do you see that we're moving towards an improved situation?
Or is it staying the same as it's degrading?
I'm going to go with With Jack Ma on this one and say that the
next 30 Years looks really bad for Humanity, I think that you
see aggregate gains. So UNICEF was started as the
United Nations International children's emergency fund after
WWII. My mother still has a blanket
that my parents, my mom was a refugee, she steals a blanket
from the version of Unicef that existed then That was the
organization was founded to respond particularly to children
who were displaced after WWII and the EV, the emergency was
taken out of the name about 20 years later because it's like,
this should be for all children. I think we see an aggregate good
change in the world. Like on aggregate, things are
getting better but the Divide between those 55 million Refugee
kids and us who have houses and infrastructure is growing
greater and that really worries me.
You have a country like Malawi. We've just opened the Largest
humanitarian drone testing Corridor in the world, in Malawi
6,500, square kilometers, 400 meter vertical, incredible
opportunity for young Malawi and engineers and techies to work on
drones. But Malawi has 18 million people
more than half of them are under 25 years old, and the major
economic hope for them is a cofactor, that's being built.
So, I really worry about that in a quality about the inequity
that we see in front of us about the fact that The technologies
that are coming to currency and the in wealthier countries or
wealthier parts of wealthier countries are built on
disparity. The training sets were using for
modeling and are not fair. The genomic samples that were
using for building medicines are not fair, they're not equitably
sourced from from all of humanity and that creates an
inequity, that doesn't necessarily appear at Global
statistics. Like, there are fewer big Wars
now. Sure, but that really shows
itself acutely in the places where there's the most weakness,
the most. Some weakness and our team tries
to address a lot of those things.
Sorry I know that's a more Bleak answer than maybe one would
expect. Hey you you tell the truth, how
you see it? I mean I do sort of agree with
you that you know as an Aggregate and we see less Wars
and like less massive extinctions of you know, human
population as we did maybe like 100 years ago or even more
recently than that. But that we do see growing
inequalities amongst The most privileged people and those that
are least privilege and I think that that's something that we
should all that that's a gap that we should all try to
narrow. And I think that one of the ways
that one of the tools for that maybe maybe blockchain
Technologies and we'll talk about how that can be applied.
So, moving to the more like the technology side, how much of
unicef's resources and like the man?
Date of Unicef generally, how much of that goes into,
developing new technologies, for humanitarian reasons?
So a lot of I mean, you just have his a big five.
It's at five and a half billion dollar organization.
Most of our money goes into kind of core work and for us core is
delivering services to most vulnerable children.
We don't we try really hard not to fetishize technology or to,
you know, make technology be the goal in itself.
And so we don't have a huge budget and our team has Ever
wanted a huge budget. I think we do a lot by being
kind of lean and aggressive and small and hungry.
And so if you look at sort of how UNICEF invest in
Technologies, we are a I mean, our regular resources, the
funding that we took from core UNICEF last year was like less
than a million dollars. So, tiny and all the rest of the
money that we use, we raise through our Venture fund and
through other mechanisms. But we invest in these early,
very high-risk areas and as they Velop as they become more, sure
UNICEF puts its organizational muscle behind them.
And an example of that is the work that we did with SMS as a
basically as a command line, for International Development.
So, over the last eight years, we piloted prototype and built
systems for using a text message to send like very important
information about Health Systems, how many vaccines are
left in a health center, how many kids are in school on a
given day and to do that all on a basic Nokia 1100, you know,
like a phone that has nothing else that can stay charged.
For days weeks. And so we basically built this
operating system for International Development that
allowed us to do our job better but also allowed us to connect
with people like these kids in Liberia and hear from them in
real time and we put you know, a bit of our investment into that.
We put a lot of our time into it.
That's now an organizational priority that system called
rapid pro-israel platform with more than four and a half
million active users. It's in 35 countries 39
countries, maybe now and that's a platform that's an open source
cloud. Add based Enterprise SMS and
other information moving system. And that's something that is a
core UNICEF priorities. Another millions of dollars
being invested in getting that into government scaling that up
working with new partners. And it's taken a life of its
own. So I think that's what we try to
do is really create those early prototypes build them to a point
where they have some gas behind them and then get them out the
door, the muscle of Unicef takes it from there.
And that's one of the reasons that a lot of us who are used to
the fast paced, sort of world of startups.
And, and, you know, failing and crushing it and all of that kind
of nonsense. It's one of the reasons that a
lot of us are in UNICEF, because we can actually see the
extension of our work. You can see when something's
good how it goes. Big, did you just make a new
Theory impugn their? I did projects with gas behind
them. Yeah, that does does.
I've got like four of those and I'll reuse them.
That's great. Okay, so let me let's let's dive
into watchings then and and so the intersection between you and
Stephen blockchains, I'd like to ask you given just what the
space looks like right now. You know there's been massive
interest in in blockchain and public blockchains especially in
crypto currency in the last the last three years.
But most notably in the last few months.
How and of course, there is all the Permissioned and more
private blockchains systems that we are seeing slowly, but surely
come into production and more the Enterprise space.
How does unicef's were valuable to evaluate the different
Technologies and the different types of networks that exist in
the blockchain space today? We take the same approach to
blockchain technology as we do to any of these other sort of
areas where you have a large Market Force behind the
technology and the potential to solve big needs.
So other areas that we look at in an analogous ways are drones
and uavs data, science and machine learning.
So these are areas that are all kind of buzz, wordy and
buzzworthy that some people really believe in some people
think that they're going to solve everything, drones will be
delivering everything. Some people think.
They're totally useless or scary or dangerous and there's a whole
bunch of people in between. So anytime we have a technology
space and blockchain is one of them, we try to Principles and
these are the units have principles of innovation there
online that we created them after many, many failures and
they just make us, we don't fail less, but we fail unless stupid
ways and these principles are things like design with a user
or be open source or, you know, be data-driven in your
development. So they're pretty basic but
they're a rubric that we use when we're looking at a new tech
space and so in the Block Chain space, I think there is a lot of
hype and I think there is a lot of potential and I think
actually crypto kitties showed us.
That we're at a space where meet you see the network?
In efficiencies and you see where things can go, right?
So we want to be careful of what we promise.
But we also want to be sure that we're taking advantage of new
things and making the world more efficient there.
There are three ways that we looked at.
We look at Sort of public, permissionless blockchains and
distributed Ledger's. The, the first is that we
there's clearly a road for fundraising and for, for
transactions coming into organizations that are doing
good. Now we've seen this with the Red
Cross. They're already using digital
currency accepting donations in Ethan and Bitcoin we have.
We've seen this now that like yesterday the pineapple fund
launch that's 83 million dollars of Bitcoins like 5,000 Bitcoins
that are available for Charities and nonprofits.
So there's something that's happening in terms of resources
and resource allocation and if I were putting digital assets into
a, you know, an investment to fix the world, I would want the
transparency and the accountability that public
blockchains bring, I would rather have that than just give
a dollar and hope that it gets to somebody.
So I think that we see an opportunity for a different type
of Engagement with people who want to fix the world.
And we've had really nice notes. We've got a public etherium
wallet People have been just dropping little bits of ether in
there, and we got a really nice note from somebody just random
guy and he's like, listen I put in like I don't think it wasn't
very much that in but we're happy with it.
It was like .1 ether, I he's like, I did this.
He's like I just want to be part of something that's that's
fixing the world. I just I like this feeling.
Here's you know here's something I think we need to understand
that better. I think there's a lot that we
can do to reshape the way that funding streams work and
development financing works. And that's very exciting and
it's very kind of macro the second level that we look at.
That is internal. And it's about reducing the
friction inside of a big bureaucracy.
How do we make sure that when we're paying a vendor or we're
moving money to a government or removing money across offices,
that we have transparency, accountability and speed how do
we use has a complex organization but we are
represented by contracts. How do we make sure that our
contracts are also represented publicly and intelligently and
we're testing out in our office in Kazakhstan, we just did a
hackathon on Smart contracts for bureaucracy, where we brought
about Kind of crypto folks together.
And we're like, here's an insane UNICEF contract represent that,
you know, I don't know in solidity, like to go do
something with it. And they're like, wow, that
really is an insane contract. If we can start to describe
those things publicly, we can bring them into the global view
and we can optimize them. And then, the last area that we
look at is direct investments into early stage companies.
So, like the company that we invested in that genre in South
Africa companies that are using crypto Technologies or
blockchain Technologies to To try to fix something.
And we have a small Venture fund that allows us to make directed
hundred thousand dollar investment of capital non
delusional Capital into these kind of companies that are
really trying to solve acute problems with distributed Ledger
and that for us is creating a portfolio of opportunity.
Those are high-risk Investments for us, our investors know that,
but that's where we also get to see things in action, things,
failing and changing, and turning, and twisting, and
that's the Venture part of our work.
Okay, so if I just recap them, so there's three levels of how
you evaluate this technology, the first being looking at sort
of public networks. And so the applications that we
are starting to see emerge there one of which of course being
funding and in your case the the the benefit there is having that
sort of transparency, you mentioned having a multisig
wallet. So people can donate funds and
like there's a sort of an audit Trail there.
Like what funds are being donated?
Everybody can see it. And then potentially at some
Point in there. You can sort of plug in another
system where you would have like proof of prove, in fact,
something that right like that's publicly visible and sort of
made available through everyone for everyone to audit.
The second would be sort of improving.
Streamlining internal processes and procedures within the
organization. This is a tough.
This is sort of an area that I'm very much interested in because
my company does this for Enterprise.
So like, you know, I like this idea, right?
A being able to streamline through some more IAM
blockchains and being able to automate a certain number of
things within an organization and the third then would be
investing in Innovative Technologies and identifying
opportunities through the Venture arm.
So if we if we because we're going to talk to John about
about his project and touch more about the Venture on if you
minutes, but coming back to the the two first layer.
So Polly blockchains and the Consortium networks.
I've have this idea. are you running around my head for quite
some time now, a couple of years and, you know, I think that it
would be interesting to consider as a thought, experiment, a sort
of public Consortium blockchain that would be run by Nonprofit
organizations for the purpose of improving transparency and
accountability within all those organizations.
So take like UNICEF and like Doctors Without Borders and like
right across and just take like the the top 100 humanitarian
nonprofit organizations in the world and have them be
validating nodes for something like a tenement blockchain.
And Have that platform be the basis upon, which you can, then
build all types of applications. So one of them could be like
funding, right? We want to have transparent,
traceable, accountability, and funding.
And we want to have a system upon, which we can do that.
That scales at a high level where we runs globally is
compliant across the world, right?
And like, we can build this on this platform and then take
another application. I don't know, like, Voting
governance, who are the board members of these organizations?
How do we elect people on the ground like local offices and
things like that? Is this something that is
conceivable today? Like because I feel like at
least for now for the next couple of years, public
blockchain infrastructure such as etherium is not going to
scale. I think God's a put to yesterday
actually saying that like nothing's in Productions,
nothing's close to being production and deploying a
Consortium blockchain within an organization sort of is limiting
to that under organization when there's could be just so much
more that can be done. Yeah, what were your thoughts on
that? It is not only possible but
there I think are notional artifacts now that show that
it's probable and likely. So I think that there's a lot to
be, you know, if you look at like fractional Reserve
development, so not everything needs to be on public
blockchains. And I think one of the things
that Shawn did in the early days of our investment with trust lab
was actually look a lot at kind of dual or you know, multi multi
blockchain Projects, we believe. I think what we're seeing from
our experimentation in our investments is that we can
create a network and we can use unicef's trust to validate parts
of that Network and we have enough corporate partners, and
other development partners, that would also be interested in
being part of such a network that could do a bunch of things.
So I think the answer is yes, I agree that that's a useful and
necessary and possible thing, and I would go even further and
say that, you know, within that Network which could be joint,
public and private. You could also use public
blockchains to Using transaction records to create soft
identities for people. You could start bringing in some
of the large amount of charitable or, you know, human
investment money that I mentioned earlier into that
system. You could validate that and you
could probably back that Network, you know, fractionally
with something like ether. So I think it's a very
interesting idea to explore and it's a conversation that's a
type of conversation. We're having with a lot of our
partners and we would be happy to hear from others who are
interested in being in that space.
Cool. So you mentioned this
experimentation you did with with a theorem etherium, smart
contract, multisig Walla and there's a blog post that will be
linked to in the show notes. Can you tell us more
experimentation like one of the goals and what did you learn?
Sure so this was under the the part of our you know the part of
our job. We're we're like let's just try
this and really hope that we don't break anything too much.
This was when we were, and this is, you know, considering ether,
not as a currency, but just, as a digital token, we wanted to
see if we could as a large International Organization,
accept tokens from others and do things with those tokens.
That was the premise of our work.
We had a contact and the crypto world is amazing and incredible.
We have a contact from somebody in Switzerland.
Who said that he was auctioning off some some posters and that
he would like to send us some ether from the auction.
We needed a To be transparent about accepting those non
currency non-value tokens into UNICEF.
So we created a nice kind of multisig set up with me and my
fund co-founder Sunita and Coos a linking it to our UNICEF
identities, which are publicly available in attributable.
And, and we created the smart contract, actually, accept
donations, from this auction and actually helped him build his
side of the smart contract as well.
And we set it up. I think we got to Ether.
Of that. And it was really interesting.
It. It showed that we could do
something it showed that we could set up an etherium node
UNICEF architecture. Like that was nice.
It showed that we could have a transparent way of receiving
tokens not funds because to receive funds, we have to have
our lawyers, clear things. And that's definitely not what
we were doing, but also that we could do that in a way that was
public in described and start to get public support from the
crypto ecosystem. So, it did a bunch of things it,
let us play around, but it also started creating a I was with
the networks that we like that we were doing something new and
so that that while it is still up, it's transitioned from being
an experiment to actually being discussions inside of Unicef on
what it would look like and how you would create an asset class
for cryptocurrency, if that was a donation where you would put
those assets how you would value them and so on.
So it's really been that prototype of the future that we
like to build and hopefully it's provoked enough discussion that
it serves its value. We haven't moved any of Ether
out yet. So that's something that we're
gonna be doing over the next few months is looking at like, what
do we do with those digital tokens?
That are certainly not money and how we how we use them in a way
that shows what a future of transparent Investments of
non-monetary things could look like that's interesting that you
say that they're not money because I mean like in most
jurisdictions I think governments would consider.
I know that in the US for instance and cryptocurrencies
are considered a form of currency.
Is this, is this Speaking of my naive View at the time that we
set this contract up of how a digital token was valued.
And that I certainly our team, never went into it thinking that
there was a financial implication behind it.
Okay, I understand. Okay, and it looks like you've
got like 2.7 17 either now and other tokens like data coin for
instance, you've got five cents of those.
How do people keep spreading things around, right?
That's the fun of it. Ico is what I want to know.
Okay. And so I'd like to bring the
discussion, take it, take a step back, a little bit and talk
about talk about sort of blockchain adoption.
And so as a technology evangelist, I think I would
qualify you as promoting blockchain within the UN, can
you give us some insight about, you know what response this has
gotten? You know, how do people respond
to this idea? People are responding well I
think that you know the future is a scary place.
So we try to evangelize with the sense of possibility and then
also a sense of looming fear and that's how we try to bring
products into into the Limelight.
Coos I is our blockchain lead. He is an incredible evangelists
of the technology and has presented our work much better
than I do at for alike the World Bank.
So he presented his sort of senior will Bank leadership at
the state department at various you.
Venues and at universities. And we've what I think we've
seen from his presentations in the networks that were building
is that there is a sense of opportunity, a desire for
direction, an interest in following, the principles that
we've setup and an ability to do some quick rapid prototyping in
various organizations inside of the UN.
I think that one of the things we're trying to be very careful
of is making sure that we keep the direction towards public
permissionless blockchains as much as possible.
And that's really that's really to keep Lined up with our
principles which are very firmly rooted in the open-source
tradition, but also to make sure that we don't put ourselves in a
position which we were in in the mobile and SMS space.
In 2009, where we had one company who owned a lot of our
infrastructure or owned a lot of our data.
So we're trying to make sure that we're creating that
internal sense of possibility but also keeping the market open
so that as different protocols develop on different
blockchains, we are able to be flexible and we're not locked
into anyone. Vision of the future.
There are other organizations that are doing prototypes and
tests of blockchain. We work together through the UN
Innovation Network, which we co-chair with the world food
program and that brings together nerds from across the agencies
to sort of share what we're doing.
And and so that's kind of publicly documented, I think
we'll be putting out our most recent report on, like what's
the state of blockchain in the UN in a few weeks?
I just saw a draft yesterday. Great.
Can you expand on some of these experimentations is that
something you can talk about at this?
Sure, I can speak to our own failures better than anybody
else's. We so we started looking at
using the Bitcoin blockchain, as a way of holding identity in the
transaction, kind of hashing up an image and holding that as a
person's identity. That was like two years ago.
That was very expensive, even then.
And that was also are fumbling around with the concept of big
online databases. So that didn't work.
But we did some experiments with that and that there's a lot of
talk about like, oh, blockchain means Ade and it's like you
know, as we all know it doesn't mean identity explicitly it can
mean identity. If a certain set of conditions
are met so we but we try to this very explicit identity.
Like let's hold an identity on the Bitcoin blockchain that
didn't I was interesting but didn't work we played around
with the smart contract. We've seen that wfp is doing
some things with private etherium nodes for refugees in
the Middle East, for kind of payments and a payment system
there. I think we're seeing a lot of
interest in the smart contracts. Side of things.
So as I mentioned our office in Kazakhstan is trying to describe
some of its very difficult and and and complicated contractual
stuff in a way that could be publicly accessed.
So those are the those are sort of the initial pointers that we
see and we're trying to document them and just learn from them.
And those are all on UNICEF stories dot org slash
blockchain, as much as we do, as much as we can capture them.
And when you present these use cases, and is of these
experimentations internally, what kind of reaction are you
getting from, you know, people that have been.
So, I would say, like, in the more conservative side of an
organization like the UN or UNICEF, I mean we've presented
drones you know like as I know you could move Health supplies
with drones and and had people say like don't do that drones
kill people. I mean, so we're very used to
this reaction. We try it when we tried to bring
SMS as like a data platform in 2009, or 8, we're like don't use
SMS. This is what we were told, don't
use sms. Use VHF radios.
They're much better for moving data.
So we're sort of used to the resistance of, you know, of a
way of doing things against the future.
I think that the D complicating the technology is important
explaining that this is not really that new in a sense like
databases distributed databases have existed for a long time and
making very clear use cases of how this technology can be
applied to ongoing. Work are the three important
things. Like if you say, do you want to
use a distributed ledger to make your job better?
I think people will kind of throw up their hands at that, if
you say, I've taken the contract that you use for paying your
partner in. In the government.
And I've put it in a way that makes it faster and cheaper for
you to do it. Here's how much it cost you
before it used to cost this much for a transaction because of all
the paperwork in the people and then Anna.
And now it costs you one tenth of that, here it is.
And they're like, wow, okay, I get that and I see how that can
be applied operationally. So that's the process we follow
with any technology, like make it useful to the user.
Build it in a concrete way. Get rid of the jargon in The
Flash and be boring, like be superb, or a contract is a
boring thing. That's great.
Like, I like being boring and and so, I think that that gets
more Of a transaction happening. Sets of transactions happening
in the organizational lymphatic system.
The more boring and simple, you're definitely Echo that
sentiment to anyone who's explaining any of the technology
to anybody who's typically wearing a suit?
You know, try not to geek out about it.
Just just be boring about it and don't mention Iota.
Don't talk about the tangle. Don't don't mention Iota.
And and and definitely. Yeah, if you can, if you can
show some sort of return on Man or show how this technology will
make their job better or reduce operational frictions or reduce
paperwork or the time it takes to do certain thing.
That's definitely a direction when I take and, but, but it is
hard to find to find those of those those key metrics that you
can point to because it's just the state of where we're at
right now where a lot of the stuff is still experimental.
We're not experimenting with real like real data that a lot
of like parts of the stack that are Still not, you know, quite
there yet in order to bring things to production.
So, you know, I think slowly it's getting to a point where we
can say oh we've experimented in like we've been able to show
that we were reduce cost by x amount but it's it's taking a
while to get that wheel turning. But I think what's it?
Like, if you know, if Kitty's brought the whole thing down, if
like 12 kitties per second, brought the whole thing crashing
down for a little bit. That's that should tell us how
humble we have to be, you know, and I think it's totally fine to
design for the future. Iran.
Are we try to do that a lot, but I think we need to be very
explicit about that, like we're creating a runway for the
organization to be more efficient.
It may not be this year, it may not be in the next 18 months,
but at some point these small experimentations in the
Investments we put into them will pay off and I think we have
to you know you can create you can value-- future options in
finance, you can do that. So I think if we consider
blockchain like we consider Artificial intelligence, there's
doesn't that's means less than blockchain to me.
But, you know, those types of fields as potential future
options, we can then be in a better position to talk about
them because we don't have to prove something right now.
We can say this is the process of experimentation were going
through. This is our hypothesis.
This is what we think will happen.
And and this is the runway of time that we expect to see
results in. But I do think that the, some of
the very basic organizational, descriptions that you can do
through a smart contract will be immediately interesting to the
people in suits. It's like that's a nice thing.
They like to see systems described and and I think that's
where we're going to see the first real impact inside of the
organization which is awesome. And our finance, people are
incredibly interested in this space and it's great to be able
to have discussions with people who know a lot more about money
than I do, where they're really part of the of the building
process. And I hadn't seen that with,
like the SMS technology. We didn't, we didn't have that
kind of Alliance inside. Yeah, it is bringing together
all of the different I guess, like, business units over over
an organization that that's, that's what's so interesting.
But also presents a big challenge with this technology
is that it doesn't only impact like this one little corner of
your organization. It's going to impact your entire
organization and the way your organization interacts in the
broader ecosystem. And I think that's, that's a
sort of paradigm shift that and an idea that is As massive, if
not more, I think even more massive than the idea of taking
your paper card database and putting it onto and I computer
system, which people had to juggle that thought like 25 30
years ago. So before we move on to the
Venture arms, you talk about the sort of the the strategy for the
next 12, 12 months and Beyond. So what is their sort of the
long-term goals here in terms of how How the UN and UNICEF is
will be approaching the blockchain and implementing them
in. In projects that have to act.
Our timeline is pretty clearly aligned with the three levels
that I described. So we have a we have a set of
sort of external funding accepting of cryptocurrency
discussions that we are having. Now we believe that those will
option out. You know, in the next six months
I will have some answers from accounts and financing about how
we can deal with cryptocurrency. That's at that top level at the
business process level we did a hackathon in Kazakhstan that was
amazing. We're going to do another one in
the end of the first quarter of this year with another UNICEF
country office where we're going to bring the some of the
Kazakhstan stuff to another region and be like this is the
Smart contract. We described.
Here's how it could work. Let's try it in another office
so we should have some internal momentum around that stuff.
Bye. The end of quarter one and then
we have Investments. So we've got an arm of our team
that does direct capital investments in companies and we
have a call out for blockchain related companies.
Now that is a call for companies that want 50 to 100 thousand
dollars of capital investment and that's described on on our
website as well and we hope that will be funding five to six
companies in the coming months that call closes at the end of
January. It usually takes a sixth Weeks
to eight weeks to make our funding decisions.
So we'd see those coming into play and of quarter to probably
realistically. So those are the three levels
that were working on as well as some you know secret stuff that
we don't to pull the curtain back on too far.
Okay so it's good segue into our next topic which is the The
Venture arm. I was actually surprised to hear
that the UN had like properly Venture funds to invest in
startups but I guess it's like any organization you need to
have that. Sort of spark of innovation that
comes from a from a very agile organization start-up.
Can you sort of talk about the types of companies are investing
in? And what are you looking for, in
the startups that you're investing in?
So, the fund is a relatively new vehicle, Sunita grow today, and
I co-founded it about two years ago.
It it's based on, you know, our ideas of what what's best from
the VC world. Which is like itself, a very
dodgy Place sometimes and what's best for the world of
development. And what we try to do is create
a hybrid model where we went to our LPS and investors and we
pitch them on an idea of creating value out of Open
Source, intellectual property. So we said, look, what if we
don't want to hold on book assets for Unicef?
What if we want to create portfolios of Technology?
That's curated that goes back to our LPS that has a worth.
And if we could invest in five companies around data science in
five countries that are interesting, you know, would
that five hundred thousand dollar, Dollar investment
potentially be worth more than 500 thousand dollars.
Our initial investors said that that was a reasonable
hypothesis. They provided us with 12 and a
half million dollars of initial investment money from for
anchor, investors. And we've made our first seven
or so ten Investments. Now into private companies, the
fund only invest in companies that are registered in the
countries that UNICEF works it which is interesting.
So that's the 135 companies that we go countries that we Program
countries. So that's not the not u.s. not
Europe. We only invest in companies that
are registered as for profit. So we don't do nonprofit kind of
Investments and we look at companies that have the
potential for growth in their technology space we combined a
set of companies. So Sean is currently alone in
the in the blockchain portfolio but we're going to find some
other Investments to connect them with soon but in the space
of drones or data science, we try to bring groups of companies
together given the Nicole support from our team and from
our partners that they need and and help them grow faster by
being open source and working together in these spaces are
investments. Actually get us a lot more than
you'd think 100,000 other capital investment in Burundi is
quite a substantial investment to make.
And we find that these companies can then grow to a second round
of investment to graduation into acquisition and so on, and we're
going to be seeing the first of those things happen in the next
six months. We Also invest in some of the
platforms that support this work.
So as I mentioned, we've got the largest drone testing Corridor
in the world for humanitarian purposes, that's an investment
through the fund that is its own asset class that supports the
individual investment to make in drone companies.
So if you're the drone company, we invested in Kenya, you can
come and use our Corridor for free, and that can accelerate
your work. So the fund does those two
things we are looking at and exploring, how we could have a
crypto denominated fund that would work along the same lines
that is pending all of the review of the people that need
to say that it's okay to do that and it will break the system but
we feel very positively about that as a possibility and we're
also looking at another stage a second round of the fund which
is shaped a little bit differently but but in general
the Investments that we've made cluster around these kind of
emerging technologies that have 100 billion dollar market cap
behind them or more and that can address.
Fundamental human needs though not with an explicit social good
Focus. It's just that the company has
to be good like they have to have good.
So it's not a it's not a social impact Fund in that sense, that
that's very clear. And so, how big is this fund?
Its twelve point six million we've put out about 5 million of
that and is it is it funded or where's the capital coming from?
It's coming from UNICEF donations or are you have
external funders nothing that we do comes from the core UNICEF
donations? So this is from for LPS
therefore anchor investors who came in to governments and two
foundations They all have expressed sort of slightly
different interest in the valuation of the IP.
So some of the government's are interested in using the
procedures or the companies that we work with.
In their own, internal arms, the foundation's have similar
similar, the Divergent interests, we were very lucky to
have Sean and his team present at our first LPS meeting in New
York a few months ago and show the progress that they've made
and we had really good comments from the people who've invested
in our fund that show that the types of Technologies were
investing in are actually pertinent to their work.
So, you know, this is a Eating for the investors because they
see something that they maybe aren't able to play with exactly
at the speed that we are great. So I guess this is a good segue
then into into a section of the show with Sean and Sean has
received investment from from the UNICEF Venture fund, at
least one of the projects I was working on previously.
Did and so Sean, can you tell us about that experience?
And how working with the UNICEF has benefited your your work?
and you also talked about that about the XO foundation and this
idea of proof of impact So I think we're all familiar with
the general approach in Block Chain Solutions that you need to
start off with some proof of Concepts.
And so, we were provided with some Innovation, funding from an
innovation fund here, in South Africa, to do a proof of an imp
of of concept, in the context of early, childhood development
solving a real world problem, which is how non-governmental
service providers, who are delivering Preschool services to
children around about 800,000 children in the country, make
their claims for a daily attendance subsidy which is paid
by the government. Now, that's a boring problem.
It's, you know, making claims and getting paid for them.
The problem that has been identified, there is lack of
trust in the system or lack of administrative efficiency, and a
lot of gaps and lack of information around where the
needs are And where the money's going.
And so we were approached to to provide a use case
implementation, it sort of test of using Block Chain for this
very sort of practical real-world problem.
And so we built a solution for that which is a product called
amply and and we thought that would take, you know, six months
to a year to kind of prove out and scale up well, four years
later and we've learned a lot of lessons.
And we have a, we have not scaled that and and and we have
150 thousand attendance has recorded and we're now going
into into more production mode. But along the way, we know we
needed to establish new kinds of Partnerships to take this Beyond
one, use case and one local implementation into the global
potential that this has Chris has spoken about establishing
platforms and and I think this is a Very important concept, you
know, with and an important possibility within the Block
Chain. Also, if we at the broader sort
of set of Technologies, if we don't go beyond just distributed
Ledger, we also talked about the new web standards for the
decentralized web and new data Technologies including machine
learning and so on. All of these disruptive
Technologies are coming together in ways in which we can, we can
have a really transformative effect on How information is
collected, how it, how its valued, how it's exchanged and
therefore, the kinds of economy that we can we can enable
through the use of information. And so, that's really where
we've kind of migrated with the support from UNICEF, from a
local implementation, on a very specific use case to a global
potential and understanding that we can we can take this
fundamentally open source philosophy.
Safiye and standards that align with what's happening within the
standard setting processes around the decentralized web and
take them into a protocol that becomes a platform.
And so that's where the XO Foundation has kind of taken the
custodianship of this open source project and is seeking to
expand the the use cases of this and the implementation of this
across a broad set of users with a growing network of Partners.
So what do you see as the future here for the EXO foundation and
the work that you're doing with UNICEF?
I mean, I suppose and I hope that that this work and this
platform will then benefit organizations like UNICEF that
raise funds and that, you know, want to build reputation around
proof. Like some kind of proof of ever
that their work is providing some kind of an impact.
Yeah so so the next phase is really being able to to
systematize this and Chris has spoken about, you know, how once
Technologies are proven UNICEF has the reach and the scale
through its country offices and through its Partnerships with
other organizations, to be able to take things to scale.
And I think that that's the really critical thing for us now
you know. So it's been great doing the
learning developing the The the tech and so on.
But how do we, how do we go to the next level and get adoption
of these Technologies in ways that it can actually impact.
On many, many people's lives. Now, we can't do that ourselves
and we know we're not interested in, in going in implementing
the, the Solutions in all different contexts, what we want
to support is the platform that enables other people to build on
that. So, The analogy, I guess, is in
the way in which the theory of network and thorium smart
contracts. Enable an open ecosystem to to
exist creating applications on a core protocol and the core set
of capabilities around computer and data storage and so on.
Interesting. Well, I definitely do hope that
that you have a lot of great success in building this
platform that we see all kinds of applications being built that
are providing a lot of value to people who really need it.
And so, I believe it's just sort of starting as a project and you
plan on launching this network. What's the roadmap here?
Yeah, so so that the first step has been to formalize the open
source project, you know, so in the same Same way as we have a
kind of model around open source foundations like the Linux
Foundation Mozilla Foundation where 3 Consortium and so on.
We felt that the next step is to establish this open source code
base within an open community and fundation model and to bring
in key partners. And so UNICEF is one of the
partners, we have Singularity University, Ventures where the
gold standard foundation, the number of other organizations.
Then have an interest in, in applying the protocol into use
cases through their networks. And so we focused mostly on
organizations being participants in the network that have got
their own networks. And that creates of course, much
bigger, net work effects and across the Different
organizations that that have have expressed an interest or
have actually formed. There's a number of, very
interesting use killer carbon carbon credits, terrorizing
other clean-burning, cookstoves, and linking Health credits to
that from the health prevention. Benefits of clean-burning cook,
stoves and heating across to impact, bonds for education for
young women in India, or Early childhood development impact,
Bonds in South Africa. And so we have a whole range of
these cases which will provide us with further proof of the
utility of this protocol, but also add to the, the software,
with reference implementations and, and a growing data set
around around sustainable development initiatives.
Fantastic it's fascinating and so will.
We're going to have you back on in I guess a few months.
So to talk more in depth about or at length about about EXO and
the protocol we can get into the technical aspects of x0.
So we're looking forward to that.
Thank you very much to the both of you for coming on today is a
fascinating discussion and I look forward to seeing you know
the the I guess I'm I'm going to I'm just going to channel
Riesling Mark here. I'm looking forward to this you
know humanist blockchain future where humanitarian work can be
improved by by this technology and where organizations like
UNICEF can be more accountable and where we can have actual
proof of the impact that organizations are providing on
the ground for liking kids in the sentence.
In this, in this case. So good job to both of you for
working on such a noble cause and thank you for coming out.
Thanks for having us. Thanks Sebastian.
So thank you to our listeners for once again tuning in this
show. And lots of other great shows
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found at left my Bitcoin.com. If you like the show, there's
multiple ways you can support us.
One of the ways you can leave us an iTunes review.
It helps people find the show and you're always happy to see
reviews and you can also leave us a tip, we accept tips and
Bitcoin ether and now in Bitcoin Cash and The Tipping.
Addresses will be in the description.
Thanks so much and I look forward to being back.
That's next week. That's next week.