I'm Jessie Baker I'm from provenance and
some other problems team members here
Yetta Steiner actually presented
provenance the concept at DEFCON zero so
we're back with an update and yeah woo
so it's been an interesting year going
from a concept to UM startup and it's
not just about dev that's for sure so
fundraising design team building and
most importantly understanding the
market so we can make sure our
decentralized application as indeed
serving one so what is Providence and
what are we doing and so provenance is
dedicated to using technology to bring
transparency to product supply chains
and life cycles so what does that mean
that means we're basically here to help
us all know more about our material
world where's it come from how was it
made who made it from what materials
those kinds of things also a little bit
into how might we kind of keep the
record of those materials into the
future so we might give materials a
second life for example so there are a
lot of reasons why we need transparency
in product supply chains and some of
those range from things like counterfeit
goods being sold on the internet from
drugs to handbags slavery it's not great
that's happening in lots of supply
chains and wasted materials all kinds of
stuff and for the most part we can kind
of deduce that our material world and a
relationship with it is is somewhat
broken and so we started working on
provenance for that simple reason how
can we find out more about where stuff
comes from and how might we start to
repair our relationship with our
material world a little especially when
even mcdonalds advertising says that
their ethical like what are we
miniatures choose when crisps and
both handcrafted finding out information
that you can trust a bit about products
is becoming increasingly difficult so we
aren't the first people to think about
trying to make supply chains more
transparent in fact lots and lots of
people have attempted this and you
guessed it in a centralized way and this
is fundamentally flawed how could one
organization or one even collection of
organizations broker the world's supply
chain data just doesn't work
particularly when supply chains are
inherently a network of organizations
that don't trust each other because
there is afraid they're going to be cut
out or skipped over or screwed over and
one other shape or form I think I was
talking about it with somebody earlier
it's a bit like The Hunger Games so
essentially transparency with a
centralized system it doesn't really
work very well you have to trust in
someone and it's usually the largest
organization in a supply chain which
means the whole system is fundamentally
flawed so with providence's is exactly
what we're trying to do we're trying to
not have one large centralized system
broker all over the data about the world
supply chains we're trying to do it on a
theorem we're trying to let everyone use
a shared secure auditable database in
order to convey information about
material things so we're not doing that
in a kind of wikileaks style although
some other people are and that's great
and we are actually kind of on the side
of companies and helping to reinforce
and promote and make trusted good
behavior so companies are more
interested in a voluntary approach to
transparency and a perhaps already
taking steps towards making their supply
chains better and this is where we kind
of intercept in an interesting way
between supply chains but also branding
and kind of our concept of whether we
just choose or trust a product or not
this is something we actually spend a
lot of time exploring is to what is the
future of branding what is the future of
our relationship with with trusting
goods and services and very much sort of
provenance is nestled in that
of intersection between how the world's
supply chains are governed but also how
we choose to trust products so we look
at kind of four aspects we look at
gathering information about products and
we're very concerned with making this in
an accessible format of course and we
look very much verifying the data so
working with kind of trusted third
parties in order to be able to verify
data and we work a lot of traceability
to source so in terms of development and
we started with a material wallet so the
simplest of the simple so this is
actually a kind of prototype we made
back in September which was just an
asset wallet it allowed people to
register an item so you could register
it on using some existing information
from the web for example this is taking
some from amazon and you could give it a
unique idea should it should need one
and and really what you could do is
transfer and receive items and that
built up a chain of custody on the
blockchain and we then going to extended
this and to start to look at gathering
more types of information such as
photographs or video location data
things like that and and that's been
pretty successful but the big challenge
now and this is very much what we're in
the midst of working on is verifying
data so we have formed a partnership
with 40 different certifications and
we're helping digitize those those
certifications but also helping the
information about those certifications
be verified and trusted all the way
along the chain so from the point of
issued to the end consumer allowing you
to see a chain of custody of exactly
where that certification was issued and
and came from and actually this is
somewhere where we're really finding
we're adding value incredibly quickly
and the certification system so for
example fair trade at the moment is very
very centralized like if you want to
find out where this product has a fair
trade certificate you really how they
have one one way in to find out that
information and they have
huge problem with double spend so how
can you tell if there's twice as much
coffee being certified fair trade when
you're only auditing the supply chain
around ten percent of the time and only
on spot audits so really you're not kind
of monitoring what's going on in terms
of individual certifications being
granted at any step of the chain so with
a book chain you kind of present this
whole new paradigm which is you can now
see what certifications are being issued
and accounted for openly so everyone can
trace back exactly where a certification
was issued the quotas that were imposed
on them etc which already is a kind of
drastic leap in terms of auditing costs
lowering the cost of being able to be
certified in the first place so I guess
this is the kind of picture we're
working towards with provenance which is
gathering information such as
certification data but also other bits
of information and cascading that along
a chain of custody of course we're
focused very much on supply chain data
but these certifications don't
necessarily have to be organic or fair
trade they could just be safety or proof
of authenticity that the constructs
exactly the same and we're now kind of
moving into not only verifying this the
certification data but also looking at
transformation along the chain and how
we can allow that to persist with the
IDS so we really believe the blockchain
is a powerful broker for supply chain
data and really could be used for a huge
catalyst for a range of things importing
regulation for example across border
drastically reducing auditing costs as I
mentioned but also just hugely improving
kind of social and environmental impact
by allowing people to actually start
openly reporting these things rather
than constantly gathering data in silos
that it totally loses gets lost along
the chain dutas it's it's fundamentally
non interoperable current state so yeah
that's a bit of an overview for what
we're doing so we're based in London and
we're currently hiring actually we've
got funding for another year so if
you're interested in writing smart
contracts for social good drop of the
line but thank you very much
you