Marc Taverner reminds us that during the COP 26 meetings, the INATBA’s Social Impact work group had the opportunity to present a series of Blockchain applications and uses cases creating positive social & environmental impact. Part of the topics were the distribution of clean drinking water in Africa or social security payment directly to the beneficiaries. For all use cases presented, the key was to give back the ownership of data to those who should benefit from it.  

Marc Taverner stresses that the challenge when examining how to measure the impact of those projects and the impact of the implemented technologies is the absence of standardised metrics. The INATBA’s Social Impact work group has decided to develop a standardized taxonomy to better assess social impact of blockchain use cases.  

He continues explaining us that a  positive use of tokenization has also been exemplified during the meeting. A company created NFTs out of the image of the UN sustainability goals that were projected on the building where the negotiations were taking place. Then those NFTs were sold to finance actions in favour of UN sustainability goals.   

Within the 170 members constituting the INATBA community, there is at least two common challenges that they are all facing, whatever their use cases, their size, and their business models and that we collectively have to tackle if we want to allow mainstream adoption of Blockchain use cases:  

• The urgent need to develop standards and interoperability, a regulatory framework to overcome geographical and legal restrictions ;
  
• The Education challenge and the lack of skills and talents which is a big inhibitor to mainstream Blockchain adoption.

The population of BC developers and cryptographers is today evaluated to 1M in the world when the population of developers working on Oracle is about 8M people.

To agree on Sophia Rödiger and Marc Taverner’s advocacy for more interoperability, Luca Comparini highlighted that the only platforms that will survive in the future are the ones that will be operating with the others by being interconnected to legacy systems (for stable coins for example) and interoperable, having common understanding of self-sovereign identity. Interoperability is key.  

To further elaborate on the need for a common metrics to measure BC impact, Sophia explained the various challenges BloX.Move is trying to address:  

• Through their “mobility portefolio”. They are trying to solve the difficulty people faced to change their mobility behaviour because of the very fragmented mobility offers.
• Through their digital identifiers system. They address the need for cleaner energy and cleaner mobility by connecting the mobility assets to the energy grids.  

She highlighted that through DLT, we have a great opportunity to build new business models allowing new ways of working between various applicative sectors which are, till now, still working in silos. Luca Comparini confirmed that the use cases that were the most successful were those where all the partners had a real incentive to share their data and breaking the silos.