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Francis Bacon, the 16th century philosopher and statesman,  is quoted as saying, “A prudent question is one-half of wisdom.”

Bacon’s statement can mean a few different things. One of those is that a wise conversation comes from equal parts question and answer. In earlier times, people were known to gather in town centers to hear conversations among thought leaders revered for their cognitive abilities. Though the audience’s medium has changed dramatically, the need for business and political leaders, experts and specialists to have a conversation is still as necessary today.

One new blockchain-based project seeks to create a new digital ecosystem for discourse. ASK.fm, a popular social networking community, is now offering an online forum for users to ask and respond to questions openly and anonymously.

As an alternative information source to the fake news and overall noise currently happening within the mainstream media landscape, ASK.fm is tapping into a growing demand for robust discussions among thinkers, opinion leaders and other experts.

Headquartered in Dublin Ireland, the company has a worldwide social network that accommodates 49 languages across more than 70 countries.  Through its 215 million users and 600 million questions asked each month, ASK.fm facilitates access to publicly available information with a “human touch.”

Recently, the next stage of the company’s project, ASK.fm 2.0, has been announced. ASk.fm 2.0 proposes the use of blockchain technology to further boost user-generated Q&A content across its social network.

ASK.fm looks to the blockchain’s value as a security protocol for its users, as well as an immutable ledger to track transactions, allowing users to withdraw and deposit currency through an escrow service.

This news indicates that ASK.fm could very well become the first incentivized and decentralized social network of its kind. The platform is powered by ASK.fm’s native cryptocurrency, the ASK token, which will give professionals, influencers and experts the ability to ask and answer questions and receive rewards based on the quality of their content.

Embracing the mantra "Your answer is an asset," ASK.fm is on a path to digitally tokenize humanity’s universal need for intellectual inquiry and validation. Through this innovative project, users will have the opportunity to unlock the value of their knowledge on an unprecedented scale.

Technical Components Valuing Human Knowledge

ASK token runs on a plasma framework based on a hierarchical blockchain platform. On this platform, smart contracts distribute content rewards on an internal blockchain, while financial transactions with ASK tokens are run on a root blockchain. Only summarized commitments are periodically broadcast to the root blockchain (Ethereum) during non-faulty states. This allows this platform to be very scalable, low-cost and autonomous.

ASK.fm CEO Max Tsaryk said that advancement in blockchain technology will help foster more democratic environments, allowing self-regulated economic models governed by market-based tools and systems. He cites Ask.fm’s desire to create a massive open online (e-learning) course market as just one example of this. By way of example, parents would be invited to the platform to pay for online courses and training models that offer gamification-based learning and testing options for  children.

“Modern times bring about change,” said Tsaryk. “There's a new economy looming using the blockchain, where anything can obtain value. We believe human knowledge is the priority pick to get evaluated, and we have a plan.”

Tsaryk noted that with ASK.fm 2.0 the business model will be changed in order to give ASK.fm a new push forward.  

“We are building a decentralized economy by tokenizing social interactions, and tokens are the lifeblood of the new system. That’s why we are introducing a new cryptocurrency token (ASK), not on a whim but out of conceptual necessity. For without it, the product wouldn’t be able to exist. We do not see the future for ASK.fm, technologies and social networks without blockchain [technology].”

For the second year in a row, a flagship cryptography conference in Europe has devoted an entire session to blockchain technology.

It was a sign that cryptographers, who once struggled to take the cryptocurrency space seriously due to its hacks, frauds and often reckless approach to developing secure protocols, are now investing their time into the space.

The 37th annual Eurocrypt conference was held this year on April 30 to May 3, 2018, in Tel Aviv, Israel, at the Dan Panorama Hotel, steps from the Mediterranean ocean. Hosted by the International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR), the conference was attended by 370 people. Five blockchain papers were presented on the second day of the conference, and one of those even received a “best paper” award.

On the third day of the conference, Matthew Green, a cryptographer and assistant professor at Johns Hopkins Information Security Institute, had the honor of presenting an invited talk on the 30-year history of cryptocurrencies.

The Papers

Getting a paper accepted at Eurocrypt is no mean feat. Only one in five papers that are submitted get accepted after going through a months-long, peer-review process, where experts in the field scrutinize the work to determine its suitability for the conference.  

Four blockchain papers were presented at this year’s blockchain session. Cornell Tech’s Rafael Pass presented Thunderella, a blockchain protocol focused on fast transactions. Following that, Vassilis Zikas, a senior lecturer at the University of Edinburgh and IOHK research fellow, looked at the core cryptographic assumptions underlying Bitcoin.

Shedding light on why the second paper was important, because Bitcoin did not come through traditional academic channels, cryptographers had no formal model of how the protocol worked, which they needed to build alternative consensus algorithms with comparable security properties. The work of Zikas and others is changing that.

Later, Peter Gazi, a researcher at blockchain development and research company IOHK, presented Ouroboros Praos, the next-generation, proof-of-stake algorithm for the Cardano blockchain. Finally, Joel Alwen, a researcher at the Institute of Science and Technology in Austria, presented an examination of ASIC-resistant, proof-of-work hashing algorithms.

Outside of the blockchain session, a fifth blockchain paper, Simple Proofs of Sequential Work won an award for best paper. The paper was presented by cryptographer Krzysztof Pietrzak. Bram Cohen, CEO of energy-saving cryptocurrency Chia, was a coauthor.

Peer Review

The IACR has an interesting history. The nonprofit was initiated in 1982 by David Chaum, who later founded DigiCash, a company that specialized in digital money and payment systems. Cryptographers at the time wanted to form their own organization for meetings and research outside of established ones for mathematics and computer science. Today, the IACR is responsible for eight conferences, including three flagship cryptography conferences: Eurocrypt in Europe, Crypto in the U.S. and Asiacrypt in Asia.

Peer review is a big part of these conferences. Papers are submitted in a double-blind process where the author’s names are removed from the paper, and the reviewers do not reveal their identities to the authors. The point of peer review is to ensure only the best papers get into a conference. Beyond that, peer review also strengthens the security of a protocol because the more eyes that examine a protocol, the more likely it is that flaws will be found — and fixed — before a protocol is made widely available.

Blockchain technology has deep roots in cryptography. Bitcoin, for instance, is founded on the early discoveries of pioneering cryptographers like Chaum (DigiCash), Ralph Merkle (hash trees), Wei Dai (b-money scheme) and others. Despite that, somewhere along the line, blockchain parted ways with its academic roots. As a result, few papers in the blockchain space today have gone through any formal peer review process.   

But that may be changing. More blockchain and cryptocurrency papers appearing at flagship IACR conferences is an indication that blockchain technology is returning home to its academic roots and future blockchain protocols will be more robust and secure.  

Two researchers from Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand have proposed a new quantum blockchain technology that, by exploiting quantum entanglement across time, could greatly increase the security of future blockchain systems operating on quantum networks.

Senior author Matt Visser is a renowned mathematician and cosmologist who has authored books with titles like “Artificial Black Holes” and “Lorentzian Wormholes.” The lead author, Del Rajan, is a Ph.D. student in Visser’s group.

"Previous blockchains that worked with quantum operations were presented, but the blockchain itself was never quantum," said Rajan, as reported by IEEE Spectrum. "We are presenting the first fully quantum blockchain."

"It's expected that 10 percent of global GDP could be stored on blockchain technology by 2027," added Rajan. Therefore, it’s critically important to find ways to increase the security of blockchain networks. Visser and Rajan are persuaded that their quantum blockchain concept could permit watertight tamper-proofing of all records and transactions.

The two scientists propose using “[quantum] entanglement in time between photons that do not simultaneously coexist.”

Quantum entanglement, the “spooky action at a distance” that baffled Einstein, indicates correlations between remote quantum particles that share a common origin or have interacted in the past. Entangled non-local correlation seems instantaneous, or at least it propagates much faster than other physical interactions. In particular, entanglement between particles too remote to exchange signals limited by the speed of light has been repeatedly confirmed in research labs.

It turns out that probing the state of one particle in an entangled pair affects the state of the other particle in subtle ways. While, according to current scientific consensus, entangled correlations can’t be used to send faster-than-light signals, important practical applications of entanglement include quantum computing and quantum cryptography.

For cryptography, entanglement is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, future quantum computers based on entangled qubits — physical quantum bits that can be in a quantum superposition of classical zero and one states — promise to break today’s strongest cryptography. Quantum information technology is actively pursued by entities with large budgets, like governments, including the U.S. and China, and tech giants, including IBM, Intel and Microsoft.

A report recently issued by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) notes that practical quantum computers, which could be developed in the near future, would be capable of greatly weakening (and, in some cases, rendering useless) existing cryptographic algorithms.

This could result in the need to change, or update, the cryptographic technology used in today’s blockchain systems. The report provides a table, taken from NIST’s 2016 “Report on Post-Quantum Cryptography,” describing the impact of quantum computing on common cryptographic algorithms. In summary, RSA, Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECDSA and ECDH) and Finite Field Cryptography (DSA) should be considered as no longer secure. AES, SHA-2 and SHA-3 should use larger key and output sizes.

On the other hand, while entanglement enables powerful quantum computers that might soon break today’s best cryptography, it also enables quantum cryptography with unbreakable security, guaranteed by fundamental quantum physics itself. Quantum key distribution exploits entangled correlations to detect attempts by eavesdroppers to intercept cryptographic keys.

If entanglement sounds weird, entanglement in time sounds even weirder. It turns out that nonlocal entangled correlations extend not only across space but also across time.

“[Measuring] the last photon affects the physical description of the first photon in the past, before it has even been measured,” noted the physicists who first demonstrated the concept in the lab. “Thus, the ‘spooky action’ is steering the system’s past.”

Visser and Rajan’s basic idea is to encode data on a quantum particle, explains MIT Technology Review. “This becomes the first quantum block. When more data is available, this is combined with the data from the first particle in a quantum operation that entangles it with a second particle. The former is then discarded, and the record of the first block of transactions is combined with the second block. The data from a third block can be added in the same way, creating a chain.”

Visser and Rajan note: “[In] our quantum blockchain, we can interpret our encoding procedure as linking the current records in a block, not to a record of the past, but [to] the actual record in the past, which does not exist anymore. The attacker cannot even attempt to access the previous photons since they no longer exist.” Therefore, entanglement in time provides a far greater security benefit than entanglement in space.

"Records about past transactions are encoded onto a quantum state that is spread across time," summarizes Rajan.

"This work can be viewed as a quantum time machine," adds Visser.

This may sound like science fiction, but it’s backed by solid science and existing technology implementations. “[All] the subsystems of this design have already been shown to be experimentally realized,” note the researchers. Practical applications to creating highly secure transaction networks are likely to attract the interest of governments and corporations.

The quantum blockchain couldn’t be implemented on top of today’s commercial communication networks, which are not designed to handle quantum information. However, Visser and Rajan emphasize that significant progress is currently being made toward the creation of a global quantum network.

“We have reached the point where the question is no longer whether we are going to have a global quantum network, but rather when and how it will be implemented,” claims a recent review published in Nature Photonics.

Among the powerful state actors, China is developing quantum key distribution satellites and a fiber link stretching over 2,000 km from Beijing to Shanghai. In the private sector, South Korean telecom giant SK Telecom is investing $65 million to develop quantum technologies for the telecom and Internet of Things (IoT) markets in partnership with Swiss quantum information company ID Quantique.

In view of the surging interest in quantum information technologies and the theoretical work of Visser and Rajan, it seems plausible that highly secure quantum blockchains could be implemented on future quantum networks.

In November 2017, a pseudonymous actor exploited a vulnerability in Parity’s multi-signature Ethereum wallet library that rendered half a million ether inaccessible to their owners.

Ironically, the culprit, Devops199, was trying to patch another vulnerability that allowed hackers to steal $32 million from Parity’s multi-signature wallet accounts back in July of 2017. While tinkering with the popular service’s smart contracts, Devops199 blundered his way into complete ownership of the library that houses the entirety of Parity’s multi-signature wallet accounts. Alerted to this mistake, he made another by killing the code he deployed.

The fallout of this decision resulted in the library locking up roughly $150 million worth of ether, leaving the funds completely untouchable. Fast forward five months: The 514,000 inaccessible coins are worth over $320 million, and the community now has a few feasible options at its disposal to restore them to their rightful owners.

The problem is that not everyone agrees on how the contract should be restored, nor does everyone agree that any action should be taken at all.

Stick a Fork in It — Or Don’t

On April 4, 2018, Afri Schoedon gave owners of the 587 affected wallets a potential solution to their problem. The Parity developer published the EIP-999 commit to Github, a proposal to resurrect the funds from the pit of multi-signature purgatory by restoring the code-dead library.

“This proposal suggests restoring the WalletLibrary by a patched version to allow the owners of the dependent multi-signature wallets regain access to their assets,” Schoedon wrote in the commit’s abstract. In the Rationale section of the commit, Schoedon continues to defend the patch as a low-consequence, satisfactory solution for all involved:

“The total supply of Ether is neither changed nor does this proposal require the transfer of any tokens or assets including Ether. It is assumed that this change is aligned with the interests both of (A) Parity Technologies that intended to provide a smart-contracts library for multi-signature wallets to last forever for its users and (B) the users of the multi-signature wallets that meant to safely store their assets in a contract accessible any time they desire. Lastly, the client-side implementation cost of this proposal is estimated to be low.”

Not everyone is on board with this proposal, though, even those affected by the vulnerability. At least, an informal coin vote on etherchain.org, wherein the affected users signed votes with the keys to their now defunct wallets, indicates as much. Out of the 639 votes recorded, 330 voted against the EIP-999 proposal, 300 voted for it, and 9 didn’t care either way. The vote, however, is in no way conclusive, and some community members are even calling it “fraud” outright, arguing that it doesn’t accurately reflect the community’s sentiment.

There’s concern within the developer community that, if implemented, EIP-999 will fragment the community and code to the point of a hard fork. “The change that is proposed by EIP-999 would be incompatible with the current version because it would introduce a single transaction to restore the deleted multi-sig library contract,” Dan Phifer, CTO of Musiconomi, a project that lost funds to the vulnerability, told Bitcoin Magazine.

“That transaction would not exist for any client that is running the upgrade, so the old and new software wouldn't agree about the state of the chain,” he continued. “If it's widely believed that the large majority of users will run the code containing the fix, then only that version of the chain will retain its value.”

Although one of its own developers suggested EIP-999, Parity announced in a recent blog post that it is against forking Ethereum to recover user funds. “Let us make [it] clear: we have no intention to split the Ethereum chain,” the post reads (emphasis theirs). “We plan to continue to work with the community to find a path forward. We have all dedicated a great deal of time and effort to developing the Ethereum ecosystem, and have no intention of harming what we have helped build.”

Two prominent Ethereum developers, Alex Van de Sande and Péter Szilágyi, have expressed a similar concern over this outcome. They’ve both voiced the opinion that the already contentious EIP-999 could evolve into a turf war over Ethereum’s code that would devolve into a chain split. Van de Sande has written about the topic extensively on his Medium blog and Szilágyi, in unpublished interview questions that he posted to Twitter, espouses the idea that “[the community] is trying to reach consensus here, not destroy [its] work.

“It's not possible to unlock the coins without a hard fork,” Alex Van de Sande told Bitcoin Magazine in an interview. “If they [Parity?] moved with EIP-999 (which they now have publicly vowed not to do) then it would inevitably lead to a fork as we know there would be enough users on both sides to maintain both coins.”

Indeed, the conflict represents crossroads that could fracture the community, even if it isn’t as dire as some outlets may present it. Van de Sande believes that Parity’s official announcement shows that “they saw the concern the community had and have stepped back” from the proposal.

Still, Van de Sande has explored alternative solutions to the Parity dilemma in the event that the community can’t reach a consensus on a way forward. The two solutions, both of which he posits in a post on his Medium blog, could be accomplished without a code change. The first involves creating a “recovery token” whose supply would reflect a 1:1 ratio of the frozen funds. “The idea,” he expounds in our interview, “is that the tokens would have multiple sources of revenue, donation being one of them,” and users can redeem these recovery tokens for real ether by burning them through the token’s smart contract.

In the same vein, the second solution involves a decentralized insurance fund. Basically, the community could create smart contract insurance policies to refund those who lost ether to Parity and to cover future losses, as well. Featuring its own insurance tokens, this system would pay out 90 percent of losses and would rely on community members to act as issuers/insurance brokers for others.

While novel in design, neither of these solutions is without its faults, and Van de Sande admitted in our interview that “[it] would require a lot of work to build such [systems].” The first bets that the community will display a degree of extreme altruism, as $320 million is no small loss to cover via donations. Without proper funding, the recovery tokens would have nothing to buttress their value, as they function solely as a voucher for lost funds. The second proposal also raises questions as to the incentives insurance issuers will have to front funds and how these policies would properly manage risks and liabilities.

Phifer told us that, while he appreciates “Alex's continued effort to find another solution to the stuck funds that would not require a hard fork,” he does not see these solutions (in their current form) as “viable,” an opinion he has stated publicly elsewhere. He suggests that alternative solutions like those Van de Sande proposes are creative and well-intended, but in trying to make everyone happy, they’re likely to fail some while appeasing others. Someone — or some people — will inevitably have needs ignored.

In their separate interviews, however, both developers agreed on one key point: splitting Ethereum’s chain would come at a cost, and hard-forking is more complicated than a yes-or-no question.

“It's true that there is a cost to a split chain if both versions continue to exist for an extended period of time,” Phifer said. “However, I don't think recognizing those costs helps to decide which solution is ‘right.’”

Van de Sande suggested, “We need to differentiate between hard forks and contentious hard forks. Many of the EIPs in the eips.ethereum.org repository require a hard fork, but most of them are non-controversial improvements that can be bundled together in a planned hard fork that is likely going to get 100 percent support from the community. But [EIP-999 has] already generated enough controversy and infighting that we know [it] will not have 100 percent support.”

Clearly, the debate has revisited concerns over code immutability and what role, if any, rescue forks should play to restore lost funds. Lurking in the background of the discussion, the in-fighting has reopened old wounds from Ethereum’s hard fork after the DAO hack. To this precedent, EIP-999 proponents see a parallel scenario where opponents see a dissimilar occurence entirely.

Given that there was a strong consensus behind the DAO fork, the current debate has Van de Sande believing “that the DAO fork was the last of its kind.” Even so, Phifer insists that decentralized systems need a certain degree of flexibility to respond to events like the Parity multi-sig library fiasco. If a decentralized network’s selling point is individual asset ownership, to him, the question should not be if a hard fork acts like a bailout that conflicts with that blockchain’s decentralized vision; rather, he asks how “should a decentralized system behave when users are prevented from controlling the assets they own?”

Following up on this argument, Phifer stated, “I would instead encourage people to consider what the primary value of blockchain technology is and if the rejection of EIP-999 and other such recovery efforts is consistent with those values.”

Problems of Perspective

One Medium post by “pimpindots” challenges us to examine the problem from their perspective. The author reframes the debate, asking not “should we change the code” but “[should] people and projects be allowed to access their funds?” After all, the post points out, this isn’t a bailout as Parity itself wasn’t responsible for the losses; those affected had no control over one coder breaking the multi-sig library, and, in the aftermath, they’re left holding the pieces while everyone else around them argues whether or not they should be pieced back together.

As always, the debate is more complicated than pimpindots’ portrayal or those previously examined. Even some of those individuals who lost funds to the bug, as the poll indicates, don’t want to change the code to retrieve them.

Whatever action the community decides to take, the debate exposes a catch-22 for both decentralized community consensus and open source governance: In a realm where open source access to vulnerable systems can cause major problems, that same open source access can provide solutions to these problems, even if the community doesn’t agree with these solutions.

Going forward, if open-source technologies give any users uninhibited access to its code, then the community needs to adopt policies for managing the hazards this presents. Without such contingency plans in place, we convey that we’re okay with code meddling until something goes horribly wrong; after that, it’s every man for himself and trying to rectify these changes runs contrary to the mantra “code is law.”

In line with its Vision 2030 commitment to become the world leader in blockchain adoption, Saudi Arabia’s state-owned Aramco oil company is partnering with Nick Spanos and his company Zap.org to put Saudi oil industry management and accounting on the blockchain.

Second only to the U.S. in world oil production, Saudi Arabia sees an opportunity to pull ahead and become the number one oil producer in the world.

Saudi Arabia’s petroleum sector accounts for 42 percent of the country's Gross Domestic Product, 87 percent of their budget revenues and 90 percent of export earnings.

In an interview with Bitcoin Magazine, Nick Spanos, CEO and co-founder of Zap.org, and founder of Blockchain Technologies Corp and the Bitcoin Centre NYC, talked about the Saudis’ enthusiasm for blockchain technology:

“Saudi Arabia is kicking the tires, and that’s huge. As part of their ambitious Vision 2030, Saudi Arabia as a whole is doing everything it can to modernize and diversify their economy. It means they’re open to doing things differently — and to doing big things with blockchain,” said Spanos.

Everyone we meet is thrilled about the potential of blockchain. It’s not just for oil, and you’ll see a lot come from here very soon.

Eliminating Fraud and Human Error in the Oil Industry with EnergyLedger

Spanos is working with the Aramco company to build a secure supply management chain and smart contracts on the blockchain using a DApp called EnergyLedger. As Spanos explains:

“Since the beginning of oil production, there’s never been a way to truly secure and track the process to prevent fraud, nor any way to automate the chain-of-custody and settlements to virtually eliminate the window for human error. All of this is now possible.

“Zap.org’s next-generation smart contracts are revolutionizing blockchain applications everywhere, and we also realized that the energy sector needed a dedicated, custom solutions provider, so Zap.org is powering EnergyLedger, the killer decentralized application for oil and gas.”

How It Works

The existing oil infrastructure — flow meters, pipelines, barrels, tanks, terminals and trucks — are tied into the Internet of Things and onto the blockchain, via Zap.org’s oracles.  

Each time a barrel is produced, it will be matched with a utility token generated from that particular flow meter, which constantly reports to the smart contract.

At each point in the process, from upstream to downstream, that barrel will be tracked and everyone involved in the process — the contractors, the tax collectors, the truckers — will only be paid at the moment that they’ve verifiably performed what needs to be done for that barrel.

It’s all automated, and overhead costs will be slashed as thousands of accountants, finance professionals and back office traders will no longer be needed.

The U.S. Oil Industry Falls Behind in Blockchain Adoption

According to Investopedia, the world’s top five oil producers in 2016 were the U.S. (14.86 m. b/d), Saudi Arabia (12.39 b/d), Russia (11.24 m. b/d), China (4.87 m. b/d) and Canada (4.59 m. b/d).

While the U.S. oil industry hasn’t embraced blockchain technology, Spanos says that there are many other oil-producing nations looking to use it. He says:

“There’s [blockchain] activity on most continents, notably in Mexico, Venezuela, Chile, UAE, China, Singapore, Nigeria, Russia and more. They've reported that they’ve already implemented blockchain or are testing it for wider applications.”

“The U.S. appears to be lagging; we have yet to hear of anyone in the U.S. industry testing blockchain, other than a small drilling firm in Texas that we just began working with.”

Spanos agreed that it was odd that all of the high-profile oil industry blockchain trials are happening outside of the U.S. but suspects that it won’t be the case for much longer.

“One reason is the regulatory climate, in which blockchain industry startups choose instead to create hubs abroad, where there isn’t this cloud of doubt hanging over them from what the regulators will do to the industry,” says Spanos.

“Even as the regulatory environment under the new president has become more favorable, blockchain will still go a long way to helping with regulatory compliance. The cost savings along the line will bring costs — and prices — down for the U.S. consumer and manufacturing.”

Spanos concluded that the U.S. oil industry will likely be converting to a blockchain soon.

“America is heading toward energy independence, and if it wants to remain competitive and continue this trend, then it will seek to match or surpass what the competition is doing — and they won’t be doing it the same way for much longer,” Spanos noted.

Anyone who does not implement what blockchain has to offer, in some way or another, will fall behind. The benefits are just too immense.

Companies ranging from IBM and Context Labs to Ford and BMW announced their collaboration at this year’s Futures Blockchain Summit in Dubai and have gathered together to form the Mobility Open Blockchain Initiative (MOBI). The association will explore further blockchain use and study how its technology can make the industry of global transportation less expensive, safer and more widely accessible to citizens around the world.

MOBI is now working with enterprises that account for over 70 percent of global vehicle production in terms of market share including General Motors, ZF, Bosch and Dowa Insurance Services USA.

The group is also seeking to put power back in the hands of consumers by giving them strict sovereignty over their vehicular transaction data, identities and driving data, making their personal information less vulnerable to fraud and cyberthieves.

Former chief financial officer and director of mobility services at Toyota Research Institute Chris Ballinger has agreed to serve as MOBI’s chairman and CEO. His goal is to coordinate the organization’s proposals to better control driver assets and keep their information safe.

“Blockchain and related trust enhancing technologies are poised to redefine the automotive industry and how consumers purchase, insure and use vehicles,” he explained. “By bringing together automakers, suppliers, startups and government agencies, we can accelerate adoption for the benefit of businesses, consumers and communities alike.”

Ballinger told Bitcoin Magazine that while there are many different coalitions in the DLT space, MOBI is unique in that it is horizontally integrated and focused on a particular industry. Other have coalitions have typically driven from the top down, with one big corporation on top (like Walmart or Maersk), or they are focused on developing and promoting a particular technology (like Hyperledger).  

Through an open-source business design, MOBI is aiming to boost blockchain adoption among businesses that either develop or deliver autonomous vehicle and mobility services. Thus far, the group has sent invitations to various automakers, public transportation operators, toll road providers, blockchain firms, technology firms, academic institutions, startup entrepreneurs and even global regulatory bodies to join the cause.

Ballinger will work alongside several tech experts and innovators who will serve on MOBI’s growing advisory panel. The organization’s staff already includes Dan Harple, CEO of Context Labs; Brian Behlendorf, executive director of Hyperledger; and Jamie Burke, CEO of Outlier Ventures. Ballinger and the team are now putting a list of projects together relating to car sharing and ride hailing; supply chain tracking, transparency and efficiency; vehicle histories; vehicle pollution; and even traffic congestion.

Sophie Schmidtlin — global director of Groupe Renault and fellow MOBI partner — believes the blockchain is among today’s most important technological creations.

“Blockchain technology is by essence decentralized, and its full potential needs to be assessed by working in an open ecosystem,” she stated. “That is why it is natural for Groupe Renault to take part in the MOBI consortium. This consortium will be a great opportunity to share and learn about the possibilities that can be opened by the Distributed Ledger Technology while applied to the automotive ecosystem. Ultimately, we aim to work together to define future standards and use cases that will make an easier everyday life for our customers.”