B&L TaxKingsis in the Finance-Accounting Tech Industry

B&L TaxKings

First proposed in a 1985 paper, Zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) methodologies have long been applied in the fields of mathematics, cybersecurity, commercial transactions, and cryptography. Now, blockchain technology is taking a keen interest in ZKP protocols, which may add yet another layer of technological advancement to blockchain's evolution. At the center of this particular development stands DZK, a company leveraging ZKP to create a blockchain-based proof platform. DZK is two very bright men: Rami Akeela and Weikeng Chen, both Ph.D. holders with deep expertise in the blockchain space. Blockleaders recently spent an evening chatting to both, to learn more about their work, and why it matters. This is our conversation: Blockleaders (BL): What prompted you to start DZK? We built this company because, in recent years, ZKP technology hasn't seen a lot of adoption, particularly in the blockchain area. A big issue with ZKP is that, although the technology is very powerful, it can consume a lot of computation resources. If there are not enough computation resources, then ZKP is basically not practical. Now, we feel we can use hardware and hardware-friendly algorithms to make ZKP practical for the real world. This is what DZK is all about. Weikeng: Continuing with this idea, Weikeng is the cryptographer, and I'm the hardware engineer. We're applying the lessons that we learned by working in previous industries, including IoT, communication  -and more recently, Machine Learning-, and we can actually see the same patterns. To make anything practical, we need to look at the underlying platforms, which include hardware and software. This is what motivates us. We saw what happened before, and we can now see what's going to happen in this industry (blockchain). We decided to start DZK to address these issues. Rami: BL: Let's talk a bit about your backgrounds. I'm a hardware guy. I've basically been doing hardware design and engineering for most of my professional life. Rami: I worked on logic level, architecture level, and digital level. I got my Ph.D. from Santa Clara University, and the topic was actually field-programmable gate array (FPGA) acceleration of multiple applications. One of them was ZKP algorithms. So I've worked in several companies doing hardware design, and about three years ago, I was introduced to blockchain and crypto by someone who was interested in my work. So I started exploring this field, back in 2019, working on FPGA acceleration applied to blockchain. Some basic algorithms, and soon after I started looking at ZKP. I created a start-up on my own to work on this, but then the pandemic happened, so everything sort of stopped. But I'm still committed to this field, I feel there's a lot to be done, and that's why I'm currently working on blockchain. I recently graduated from UC Berkeley with a PhD in computer science. During my time in graduate school, I focused on cryptography, mostly building practical systems for  zero-knowledge proof and secure multi-party computation. To make these systems practical, I need cryptography to run fast, so I have always been interested in hardware acceleration. Weikeng: My background is mostly using cryptography to build this system, and now is the time for me to look at the hardware side to build this working platform with real-world usability. BL: Just as a personal curiosity, how did you two meet? We actually met in Palo Alto, California. I was introduced by someone in the blockchain industry that Rami is doing some very cool stuff about zero-knowledge proofs. Weikeng: BL: Where do you see the future of blockchain? My feeling about blockchain is that the technology will likely go in different directions. Firstly, privacy. People are starting to do a lot of financial transactions and playing with NFTs on blockchain, and they are looking for privacy. Weikeng: Another one is scalability, because there are a lot of applications running on blockchain, the decentralization nature of the system limits its throughput. This is what we want to solve. I would add that interoperability is another important topic today—different blockchain ecosystems interacting with each other as if they were the same blockchain. So I see blockchain developing in these three strands. And I think that all three aspects confluence in ZK: privacy, scalability, and interoperability. ZK enables proving things without disclosing secret information, that's privacy. It allows blockchain to verify whether something has been processed correctly, without needing all the validators to check it all, that's for scalability. And lately, we have started to see the needs for one blockchain to interact with many other chains. ZK can also be applied here, to this interoperability. I think large corporations are beginning to realize that ZKP is something they can incorporate into their existing platforms and services, because of the unique position of ZKP and blockchain technology. And to capture this interest, and the wave of applications that are coming, one needs to think about how to address issues that will definitely be surfacing soon. Rami: I mean, blockchain is still in its infancy, really, and people got caught in the excitement of  developing applications without answering some basic questions first. How will the app play out in terms of processing speed or cost, for example. I think the industry will do well once those foundational questions are addressed. We firmly believe that blockchain and ZKP have a very, very interesting future. We just need to take care of the basics before we move forward. Otherwise, we'll get stuck at some point. If we try scaling too fast we'll hit the wall. That's a very good point. Actually, for all these directions, privacy, scalability, and interoperability, the problem has always been about computation. Some people might want to use ZKP to generate proof, but the proof generation is way too slow. So the actual hardware infrastructure for the blockchain is a crucial consideration to use ZKP efficiently and realistically. Weikeng: BL: DZK is collaborating with AMD-Xilinx to architect the field-programmable gate array (FPGA) division in the upcoming ZPrize competition. The project seeks to accelerate the Number-theoretic Transform (NTT) operations for zero-knowledge proofs. I wanted to know what this collaboration meant for DZK, both personally and professionally. I think the blockchain community is starting to realize that they have a strong need to have a robust hardware infrastructure to run ZKP efficiently. The ZPrize is originally focused on CPU and GPU, so we feel it is a good time to promote awareness of FPGA. We're doing this as the next stage of blockchain acceleration. Basically, we want to use this opportunity to push the industry forward. Weikeng: AMD is very passionate about this concept too. They believe that ZKP will be the 'killer app' for FPGAs, for several reasons. FPGA will be vital in the processing of ZKP-based apps. The work that we're doing with ZPrize, we're actually the architects of the FPGA division, and, as Weikeng said, we're taking this opportunity to promote awareness of FPGAs to get people to start looking into this. Rami: We got a lot of attention and support from several top ZKP companies and investment firms, including , , and . The prize pool for the NTT FPGA division is $725k, and the prize pool for MSM GPU/FPGA division is $910k. This is the biggest prize for ZKP research and development to date. Aleo Polygon Jump Crypto So this collaboration is an indication that the industry is a) acknowledging the need to look into this technology, because they believe that this is the next generation of blockchain technology. And b) this is the perfect environment for innovation. If we onboard not only university students, but also companies and developers, we have a great incentive. It's the perfect environment, and it's good for us as a company, because it validates that the work we're doing is going to be the future and the answer to all the problems we currently have in the ZKP and blockchain communities. Just to add that our partnership in DZK, that is, a cryptographer and a hardware engineer, has long been needed in the industry, and the prize money in ZPrize also serves to create this sort of novel partnerships between individuals with expertise in seemingly disparate fields, but can come together to foster innovation. Weikeng: BL: As the last question, if you were to define DZK's mission in one sentence, what would that be? : Make the impossible possible. Weikeng Well, I can't top that, really, so we'll go with Weikeng's statement! Rami: BL: Just as we were wrapping up, Rami wanted to make an official announcement. DZK has developed a set of end-to-end, FPGA-accelerated privacy algorithms. We have successfully created systems capable of efficiently generating proof built on FPGA servers. This is the first, and so far only, end-to-end FPGA accelerator system for ZKP. Rami: BL: Interesting revelation, and an interesting future for this enterprise. Also Published Here

An Interview with Decentralized Zero Knowledge's Rami Akeela and Weikeng Chen 

Google’s MLKit library finds text in images and this works well for simple text but for tabular data such as receipts or tables, it does not. If you’ve ever used an you might have noticed that it works reasonably well when scanning a page with uniform text but when dealing with any kind of tables or text formatting, it just falls flat. OCR app This article discusses an algorithm used in a mobile application I wrote that processes text to keep it in line. We’ll take a common example of a store receipt. In the example below you can see exactly the problem that I’m trying to solve. Lens does not prefer lines for text but will rather put together text that is physically closer together. This works sometimes but definitely does not work for receipts and other tabular data. See specifically how Google Lens put the price as a new line because it was physically far away from the lines on the left. Google 1,49€ is an application developed specifically to scan tabular data and the results of scanning a receipt are in the top right corner.  You can see how it respected the horizontal layout of the receipt and put the price together with the correct article. Line Text Scanner Google OCR library Here is a quick overview of how to use the OCR library: load an image and get text. Recognition of characters happens entirely on Google’s side. InputImage image = InputImage.fromBitmap(mSelectedImage, 0);
        TextRecognizer recognizer = TextRecognition.getClient();
        
        recognizer.process(image)
                .addOnSuccessListener(
                        new OnSuccessListener<Text>() {
                            @Override
                            public void onSuccess(Text texts) {
                                processTextRecognitionResult(texts);
                            }
                        })
                .addOnFailureListener(
                       // 
                        }); Full documentation is here and the diagram below is from this link. https://developers.google.com/ml-kit/vision/text-recognition/v2?embedable=true Once we have the Text object we can begin our own logic. We’ll try to process Text to do better than Google Lens. First, we need to look at the Text object. Text is a hierarchical representation of the scanned text as seen in the following diagram from Google’s documentation. The algorithm looks for characters and words in physical space and puts them into a hierarchical structure. As mentioned, this works well for easy text as in the diagram above but for tabular data like a receipt it does not. Below we have the full text of the receipt scanned by Google Lens. ENTRETIEN/BAZAR......
MPX FILM FRAICH30M
EPICERIE/BOISSONS.......
1,49€
265G POIS CHICHES HARICOTS ROUGES TR
0,95€
PECHE FRAICH FRTS
COOKIES SABLES CHO
1,25€
3,69€
2,39€
HYGIENE/BEAUTE.......
2,99€
20 ELAST COURTS WA
2 X BATISTE SHP SEC 6,59€ 13,18€
2è à -60%
-3,95€
MPX FIL DENTAIR 50 SOIN BLANCHEUR GOU
2,09€
7,29€
SURGELES/PRODUITS FRAIS...........
LAITIERE PV VANILL
1,69€
MALO F.FRAIS FRUIT COMTE AOP 6M 450G
2,35€
5,29€
QUICHE LORRAINE ESCAL.PANEES DE BL
2,79€
OEUFS PLEIN AIRX12
2,85€
MORIN MOUSSE CHOCO
3,25€
2,09€
LONGLEY FARM COT.C
1,99€
TOTAL HORS AVANTAGES
57,62€
18
NOMBRE D'ARTICLES I think that you’ll agree that this is not very useful. The algorithm picked the columns first rather than the rows. It made new lines for text that was far away. This is the difference in text processing that this article explores. Processing Text To demonstrate what MLKit does I’ve modified the application to only output the index of Text Elements (those are boxes with dark green border in the diagram from Google). In the screen below we can see text blocks 0 to 31. We can see how the MLKit library prefers physical distance to group words together into phrases. This is not exactly what Google Lens has outputted. We can see that Google Lens made the price of 1,49€ below the first three lines. It treated the text blocks differently but didn’t manage to output clear lines. As seen from this output, the OCR library makes up block 0 as ‘Entrentien/Bazar. MPX FILM FRAICH30M’. The second block is made up of multiple lines of the left column. The library continues to create text blocks from the left column and then moves to the right column to create the text blocks from prices. The image is correctly converted into characters and words. We’ll use these words but do it using a different algorithm to prefer lines to make our sentences. It’s clear that Google Lens also processes these blocks but obviously in yet another way. Breaking boxes Now to our algorithm. The first thing we’ll do is process all the TextBlocks from Text to extract the individual lines. Each line has one or more object and we extract them all and put them into a single  list. Text.Element List<Text.Element> textElements = new ArrayList<>();

        for (int i = 0; i < blocks.size(); i++) {
            Rect rect = blocks.get(i).getBoundingBox();
  
            List<Text.Line> lines = blocks.get(i).getLines();
  
            for (int j = 0; j < lines.size(); j++) {
                List<Text.Element> elements = lines.get(j).getElements();
                for (int k = 0; k < elements.size(); k++) {
                    Text.Element e = elements.get(k);
                    textElements.add(e);
                 }
            } At this point, we have an array of objects which all contain some text. In our example, the four in block 0 are 'ENTRETIEN/BAZAR......’, ‘MPX’, ‘FILM’, and ‘FRAICH30M’. All of the elements are put into a list. Text.Element Text.Elements Sorting boxes So now that we have all these objects in a list, how do we determine what goes after what? As seen from above, the OCR algorithm just recognized blocks of text but it made no effort to make correct sentences. First, we need to realize that object is bound by Rect object which has coordinates and dimensions. We use this fact to sort the . Text.Element Text.Element Text.Elements We take the top and left coordinates of the rectangles and sort them: public int compare(Text.Element t1, Text.Element t2) {
            int diffOfTops = t1.getBoundingBox().top - t2.getBoundingBox().top;
            int diffOfLefts = t1.getBoundingBox().left - t2.getBoundingBox().left;

            int height = (t1.getBoundingBox().height() + t2.getBoundingBox().height()) / 2;
            int verticalDiff = (int)(height * 0.35);

            int result = diffOfLefts;
            if (Math.abs(diffOfTops) > verticalDiff) {
                result =  diffOfTops;
            }
            return result;
        } The main decision in this algorithm is to decide whether one rectangle should go after another based on whether it is more to the right of it or more below it. The horizontal difference is easy, if one rectangle has coordinates more to the left of another rectangle then it will come before it. But this will be taken into consideration only if the difference in the tops is more than 35% height of the line. Basically, we allow for some skew in the picture-taking where the text might not align perfectly. But if a rectangle is 35% the height of the current rectangle below the next rectangle then we consider it as another line. Overall, in our algorithm, we prefer horizontal lines along which we can find the objects. Text.Element Making lines In this final processing step, we will make lines by processing the list above. Remember that the list just has rectangles and so we need to add a condition based on coordinates to decide whether to start a new line. To do this, we get the difference between the top of the boxes and take the average of their height. We don’t check the difference in location on the horizontal axis as we already did that when sorting boxes. Here we just have one decision to make: whether or not to make a new line. private boolean isSameLine(Text.Element t1, Text.Element t2) {
        int diffOfTops = t1.getBoundingBox().top - t2.getBoundingBox().top;
    
        int height = (t1.getBoundingBox().height() + t2.getBoundingBox().height()) * 0.35;

        if (Math.abs(diffOfTops) > height ) {
            return false;
        }
        return true;
    } This finally gives us the well-formatted tabular text. Here is the full text again. ENTRETIEN/BAZAR.  
MPX FILM FRAICH3OM 1,49€  
EPICERIE/BO1SSONS.  
265G POIS CHICHES 0,95€  
HARICOTS ROUGES TR 1,25e  
PECHE FRAICH FRTS 3,69e  
COOKIES SABLES CHO 2,39e  
HYGIENE/BEAUTE.....  
20 ELAST COURTS WA 2,99€  
2 X BATISTE SHP SEC 6,59€ 13,18€  
2è à -60% -3,95€  
MPX FIL DENTAIR 50 2,09e  
SOIN BLANCHEUR GOU 7,29€  
SURGELES/PRODUITS FRAIS....  
LAITIERE PV VANILL 1,69€  
MALO F.FRAIS FRUIT 2,35€  
COMTE AOP 6M 450G 5,29€  
QUICHE LORRAINE 2,79€  
ESCAL.PANEES DE BL 2,85e 
OEUFS PLEIN AIRX12 3,25€  
MORIN MOUSSE CHOCO 2,09e  
LONGLEY FARM COT.C 1,99e  
TOTAL HORS AVANTAGES 57,62e 
NOMBRE D'ARTICLES 18 Conclusion The solution to process the text in lines in this article is not without faults. The text should be relatively straight and not skewed too much. With some effort, we could calculate the vectors of lines even in the most crumpled receipt but that would be for another article. Here we show how a small tweak in treating the output of a large library can have a big effect for a very specific purpose. If you think that this is useful to you, the app is available in the . Google Play Store

Using Google MLKit Text Recognition to Scan Tabular Data

Having been working for , a last mile delivery platform based on blockchain, some time now, I have researched a lot about how blockchain can revolutionise the supply-chain and, quite frankly, how badly the supply-chain needs revolutionising. VOLT This isn’t just about tracking cargo more efficiently, though that is a big consideration, it’s also about how to keep the costs down and increase transparency to the customer. In the Transport industry, Billions of Dollars are tied up daily in financial disputes whilst invoices can take well over a month to be paid. So much time and money is wasted through unavoidable things like this I wanted to take a look at a few companies that are trying to make a difference by saving us time, money, the environment and maybe even our lives. CargoX The shipping/freight industry is one of the largest industries on the planet, handling over 80% of all goods traded globally. So some people may be surprised to know that a paper document is still relied upon as a crucial part of the industries receipt of shipment process. A Bill of Landing (B/L) is a document that ensures both the importer has received the expected goods and the exporter has been paid. It is used to acknowledge the contents of any shipment and as either a receipt of the goods, proof of contract that the goods have been sold or as a title to the goods. As you can imagine, taking into account the sheer volume being shipped around the world each day, this is a hugely time consuming and expensive task to continue doing by hand and paper. Using Smart Contracts, for their initial project have developed a protocol and platform based on the Ethereum blockchain to manage the B/L’s. Issuing these documents using blockchain can be instantaneous, ensures that they are tamper-proof and that they cannot be lost. CargoX CargoX will save companies and consumers money and will increase the efficiency of the industry as a whole. Their platform will have further applications down the road too so they are a big one to watch in the industry. FedEx The FedEx Institute of Technology works alongside the research infrastructure of the University of Memphis to promote interdisciplinary research in emerging technologies. They recently announced a partnership with Good Shepherd Pharmacy to develop a new blockchain-based infrastructure to help cancer patients get medications. There is a huge amount of unused medicine that, if retrieved, could be redistributed safely to others who need it. “I_n Tennessee alone, over $10 million worth of perfectly good prescription medication gets flushed down the toilet every year”_ said Phil Baker, the CEO of Good Shepherd Pharmacy “ Blockchain is the solution for that problem.” Earlier this year, before the announcement mentioned above, The CEO of FedEx, Fred Smith, said that blockchain is “the next frontier that’s going to completely change worldwide supply chains.” FedEx are very much looking to blockchain not only to streamline their own business but to make a difference elsewhere where it can have a positive impact on peoples lives. Walmart and IBM Last year IBM together with 9 other companies including Walmart began testing their blockchain based initiative, looking to be able to track food through its supply chain. Named ‘The Food Trust Blockchain” their main goal is to improve the companies’ ability to trace food related outbreaks more quickly and to identify issues involved with the recall of certain produce from certain batches. Being able to trace a bad food source in a matter of seconds rather than days vastly improves the chances to limit how far the bad produce can reach and how long an outbreak can last for. Earlier this year, Walmart announced that is able to use blockchain in its live produce business, helping track farm to table in an efficient and highly transparent way which will not only reduce costs and subsequently food prices but it also gives peace of mind to the consumer, who will know exactly what they are eating and where it has come from. VOLT While a same-day courier service isn’t a new phenomenon, same-day delivery in retail and from the high street is still a relatively new link in the supply-chain. Despite that, it is already a massive market with a vast amount of major companies spanning many industries already offering a same day service, at a premium for the consumer. have built a decentralized same-day delivery platform based on blockchain to not only compete in the same-day market but to also compete with the next day market too. Volt Technology By having delivery messengers work for themselves via the VOLT platform, packages, documents, food or merchandise can be delivered P2P with the middleman cut out almost completely. Next day delivery typically uses the Hub and Spoke method, whereby same city/region deliveries would be sent to a central hub, probably outside the city, only to be delivered back to the same location the following day. VOLT’s platform will mean the need for a central hub is completely negated which is great for the environment thanks to less space being taken up by sorting hubs and less traffic moving the packages around. Using AI, VOLTs platform will also be able to offer new jobs to messengers already on a similar route or on the way back from where they are going, massively increasing efficiency. By taking out the middlemen, VOLT’s service will be a cheaper than others out there, meaning independent businesses will be able to compete with some of the big boys and not have to lose out on profit to do so. VOLT will use blockchain to secure both the messengers and consumers data, to make tracking packages more reliable and nearly instantaneous and to ensure an efficient process is in place that will benefit the environment and also society in general. Conclusion Blockchain is nearly limitless in terms of its applications but there are some areas where there is a clear and necessary need for the kind of change that blockchain can offer. Logistics and the movement of goods is one of those areas and we are hopefully not far off seeing some of these applications in the real world making a difference. Sources _Walmart and nine other companies have partnered with IBM in order to release a blockchain for tracking food globally…_cointelegraph.com Walmart, IBM Blockchain Initiative Aims to Track Global Food Supply Chain _Walmart Inc. is getting suppliers to put food on the blockchain to help reduce waste, better manage contamination cases…_www.bloomberg.com Walmart Is Getting Suppliers to Put Food on the Blockchain _FedEx is one of the many global entities that have publicly acknowledged the power of blockchain technology._bitrazzi.com FedEx's New Partnership to Use Blockchain to Distribute Medicine to Cancer Patients - Bitrazzi

Supply Chain and Blockchain — The companies linking them together

Considering how far we’ve come with technology, it is a surprise that many areas of modern life are outdated. We still issue paper money, use physical ID cards, and we still follow century old cargo shipping procedures, relying heavily on paperwork and needless bureaucracy. The problem is that nowadays there are too many companies involved in the process, so this approach slows down everything. Let’s look at an example. Thanks to for support in creating this topic (First platform with proven ICO contractors) agency.howtotoken.com The majority of cargo freight, approximately 90% of it (which is more than ), gets . Before arriving to the port, the cargo has to be created somewhere by a manufacturer or grown by a farmer. It might change hands two or three times, and by hands we mean logistic companies, before arriving to the port. Every time the goods get passed over to another company, a lot of must be transferred over: 10 billion tons a year transported by sea documents The CMR document, The Cargo Insurance Certificate, The International Commercial Invoice, The Packing List and the Delivery Note. Preparation of documents can take time, each one requires signing by different authorities and delivery ( (which might take weeks because all involved parties don’t meet in the same place). When the cargo arrives at the port, it gets offloaded and typically stays in a warehouse where the storage costs can quickly accumulate. Then it gets loaded onto a ship by another company and transported by sea to the destination port, where it’s stored again. It will pass through customs clearance, usually done by a customs clearing agency, then be loaded onto a truck or rail, and go through some more warehouses to be sorted, because there are various containers with various products. Eventually it will be transported to its final destination. How many parties are involved in the process? Up to 10 or even more. The amount of paperwork and delays is overwhelming for everyone involved. Every ship delivering the goods, sends the , a detailed list of a ship’s cargo, in printed form to the receiving party. In many cases, the ship arrives before the B/L delivery, because the courier is often slower that the ship, and the cargo can’t proceed further without the B/L, which causes delays. Bill of Lading (B/L) Another thing that adds up to delays is that all payments are made via bank transfers, which are very slow and expensive. Cross border payments via SWIFT can take to be completed, going through several banks, each one taking its fee in the process(the average overall fee for a wire transfer is $25). All these factors pile up, the expenses pile up, amounting to huge losses, up to millions of dollars if a serious delay happens. A freighter ship, waiting for the paper to be delivered or signed is the usual situation in the ports. Empirical research shows that every cargo ship is idling in port for . Such delays cost billions for industry, each idling day of a ship could cost as little as , including salaries, port charges, warehouse storage, and running expenses. Delivering delay penalties can also amount to per one shipment, if the buyer charges 3% penalty for a week of delay. up to 5 days 25% of its lifespan $10,000 and up to $150,000 in expenses millions of dollars Considering that the global value of sea freight itself accounts for , such losses are a billion-dollar figure. Who pays for that? Consumers! The financial burden is always borne by the final consumer because the operational costs are always included in the retail price. Thus, speeding up the process would benefit everyone, give a boost to international trade, and cut costs while increasing efficiency of maritime trading fleets. $380 billion per year The solution: keeping all records on blockchain How can it be solved? Blockchain technologies are the ideal solution for that problem. All participants of the supply chain can be chosen automatically, selected from all available offers at some kind of free auction, or assigned manually from the list of partners, each company having its own address on the blockchain. Of course, there must be an interface for that, otherwise nobody would use blockchain directly. Blockchain provides the transparency, given that every party on the supply chain can check all the necessary data and save time that otherwise would be spent on bureaucracy. This would reduce the need to hire mail couriers and sign documents physically, and all of it is practically free. Basically, international trade can benefit from implementing blockchain in many ways. 1) The digital document circulation Every approved carrier or manufacturer or retailer can sign the document with its signature, thus validating the receipt of goods or the sending of cargo. Once it’s signed, the signature can’t be deleted, that means that the signer participated in this supply chain. It’s always there, on the blockchain, it can be checked in a matter of seconds. All cargo properties can be recorded on blockchain, all containers counted, the Bill of Lading can be digitized, all payments can be transmitted via blockchain. Saving time on sending and waiting for various documents can help cut the costs significantly. Each day spent waiting for paperwork costs an additional of the transportation value, each international courier , and each trading company sends of documents per year. GIVE EXAMPLE OF THAT COST HERE? A NUMBER 0.6–2.1% costs $50-$75 thousands 2) Tracking Every piece of cargo is delivered by various carriers, and at every stage of delivery something bad can happen. Some containers can get lost or stolen, or perishable cargo expires, and it wouldn’t be noticed until any final customer buys it and finds it out, or doesn’t find it and consumers get sick. Using blockchain, the whole supply chain can be tracked and the delivery time for each carrier can be measured. If something went wrong, it would be easy to find in blockchain records. 3) Finding a carrier for delivery Currently it requires hiring people with many years of experience in the cargo transportation business, who have the right connections and can find you the best offer, or negotiate the best price for shipping. If the cargo manager would be able to negotiate a 1% discount, it can save up to $540,000 for a shipment (one ship can carry containers, and the cost of carrying each container is , which equals to $54 million total). That’s much larger than the cargo manager’s yearly salary ( ), even with bonuses. Blockchain can be used to create a marketplace where manufacturers, carriers, and retailers can be connected and sign deals, so the prices will be effectively regulated by the balance of supply and demand, and you won’t even need a special manager to handle it. 18,000 $3,000 $66,000 4) Issuing smart contracts Smart contracts are impartial, once the cargo is delivered, the payment is made. Or if something is stolen, this can be addressed and settled. Creating smart contracts is cheaper than issuing the ordinary paper Bill of Lading, it cuts the issuance tax cost of $50, saving hundreds of thousands of dollars per annum for a single company. This isn’t an overwhelming saving for a big transport company, but a pleasant addition to other beneficial effects of blockchain usage. Summarized, the use of blockchain can revolutionize the industry, changing it the same way the the maritime trade. The benefit is obvious. So the question is: do we take any steps in this direction? steamboats changed Current use cases Of course, it would be stupid for large companies to simply ignore such opportunities. Many of them are already exploring such possibilities. For example, Walmart (in partnership with IBM and the Chinese retailer JD.com) announced the creation of to improve the food supply chain in China. China has problems with food delivery, a lot of its food is , . Increasing transparency in the Chinese food supply chain is their goal, and blockchain technology could help them achieve it. Blockchain Food Safety Alliance fake causing food poisoning Another Chinese giant, Alibaba, blockchain technology through its subsidiary companies Lynx International and T-Mall. Here blockchain is used to track information in their cross-border logistics services, such as production, transportation, customs, inspection and any third party verification. adopted These developments are oriented to the Chinese local market and aren’t intended for global use. While big companies have the capital to experiment with building their own infrastructure, small and medium-sized companies are left behind, right? That’s why , a project which incorporates practically every single feature that these international trade companies would need, aims to fill the gap. It offers digital Bills of Lading, integrated in the platform in form of smart contracts. Any participant of the supply chain can check the status of the cargo shipment, giving transparency but at the same time, the security of blockchain prevents any hacking or industrial espionage. The only way to gain access is to have the necessary access level. All parties have the tools to interact and change the cargo receipt (the document, containing the description of goods), the cargo ownership, or destination by mutual agreement. CargoCoin It also offers a marketplace for hiring crew for ships via smart contracts. This marketplace looks like a fresh solution on the market. Overall, CargoCoin provides a complete solution for the trading and shipping industries. The utility of the project, adopted at a large scale, would be tremendous. It’s a good example of a logistics blockchain oriented at the global market. And we have existing use cases already in the air transportation industry, like , developing a platform for tracking commercial cargo planes, and allocating safe traffic routes for flying. While everyone is busy with sea trade, Boeing thinks about the sky. the NeXt project of Boeing Will blockchain become the solution to the problem of inefficiency in international logistics? It certainly has a great chance to do so. There are too many benefits in using it to ignore it, so eventually it may become the standard in cargo transportation. Every business wants to be more effective, to cut the costs, and to speed up the process. This innovative new blockchain utilization offers a perfect opportunity to do so.

International Trades: Why We Should Stop Writing Everything on Paper

This is a document known as a Bill Lading. A Bill Lading (B/L) is a receipt for cargo transportation. So when a cargo is moved from port to port, there is acknowledgement and signing of the B/L to transfer the responsibility of the cargo to the next person. The bill of lading doesn’t travel with the actual cargo. So for example, the cargo could be travelling by sea from port to port, but the bill of lading as a document would be sent by airplane and courier to the next port. This is to ensure if the cargo is lost at sea, the bill of lading is not lost and can be evidence of the worth of goods lost. In this day and age, you would imagine this would be an electronic process by now, but it is not, it is still old school paper and snail mail, making it slow, expensive and unreliable. Currently the average cost of sending a Bill of lading from one port to the next is about a $100 USD. And there are over 50 million Bill of ladings created each year, making the industry worth over $5 billion of courier costs each year. The average length of time is 5–10 days, depending on how far the ports are. What is even more expensive is if the cargo reaches the port before the bill of lading for unforeseen circumstances. The cargo then has to be detained at the port for very high fees. CargoX’s aims to transform the global shipping industry by securing Bill of Lading documents using blockchain technology. They will provide a way for importers and exporters to exchange these documents digitally, securely, and with no possibility of fraud in a neutral environment — extremely quickly and much more affordably than currently. Their cost will only be 10% of the current cost, literally 1000x faster, and as a blockchain technology, they will be the safest most untamperable open ledger of Bill Lading in the world. There is no other solution that can compare with theirs. And right now, they are the only blockchain project in the whole world addressing this issue. This is game changing technology. As you can imagine, there are many parties involved in the shipping transportation route. There is the producer, the logistics company, the carrier, the importer, release agent and more. Traditionally, the hardcopy of the Bill of Lading would have to be transported between all of these agents before the cargo reached port. You can understand now why sometimes the Bill of Lading reaches port after the cargo. CargoX introduces a new system known as Smart Bill of Ladings. This is an electronic copy of the Bill of Ladings that is created and managed with smart contracts, aka blockchain technology. The legal owner of the group can create a smart Bill of Lading in 20 seconds and it immediately becomes available for all parties to see and access. Because it is blockchain and decentralised, the information cannot be changed or hacked, meaning it is completely fraud-proof and secure. This is a simple table comparing paper Bill of Ladings with Smart Bills of Lading. The cost of creating a Bill of Ladings can be as low as 10% that of paper. There is no sending costs or risk of lost/ damage as opposed to paper where the average cost is $100 with associated risks. There is no transition time with Smart Bill of Ladings as opposed to paper which takes 5–10 days to reach port. And there is no paper storage needed. Furthermore, Smart Bill of Ladings, can be incorporated with other supply chain solutions e.g. sensors to provide up-to-date information about the condition of transportation e.g. location, temperature of the containers etc…something which you would never get with Paper Bill of Ladings. So there is really no reason for a shipping company not to use Smart Bill of Ladings. Potentially, this is a project that can combine with other projects e.g. VeChain or WaltonChain to form a partnership or even develop their own hardware sensors. Either way there is a lot of room for growth for this project. If you’ve been in blockchain for a while, you would be aware that there are a lot of supply chain projects arising, starting with retail industry e.g. VeChain and Waltonchain, to food industry e.g. Wabi, Te-Food, Ambrosus etc.. and now the shipping industry as well. This is because with these fields, you don’t need super high transction speeds, what you need is a technology that provides a very open and secure ledger for a very affordable price and that’s exactly what blockchain offers. So moving forward, I think blockchain will transform the entire supply chain industry and all of these projects in the space right now, have early movers advantage and are potentially very good investments. Definitely worth knowing about. CargoX has their own Dapp, that is a program with a very clean and easy to use interface that companies can install and use. There is also a very clear guide on their website, teaching how to use the App step-by-step. Furthermore, the CargoX technology can be installed as an API instead of an app. An API is an app for an app. So e.g. your Uber App on your phone would have several different features, e.g. a GPS, a payment gateway etc.. these different features are APIs, whereas the Uber App is an App. CargoX will provide both an App option, but for companies that don’t want another App to use, they can simply integrate the technology into their existing business software as an API, so e.g. a simple drop down menu on the current program they are using. There are some aspects of the technical bluepaper that is still confidential at this point. It may be due to patents or other reasons. So for that reason, so we can’ dive into the tech too much. But their tech is quite intuitive to blockchain so I would imagine that it is achieveable. In fact their Smart Bill of Lading which is the core technology of the project has already been developed and is in pilot test now with a couple of companies. The main product launch is expected in Q3 2018, so very soon. Token Use The entire system is run on CXO tokens to ensure token use and demand. But instead of torturing their customers to need to set up and exchange account, learn how to buy cryptocurrency etc.. they have developed a transparent process for topping off customers CXO credits balance when they pay their invoices with SEPA/ SWIFT bank transfer. The cost of each CargoX Smart Bill of Lading is exactly USD $10 and that will be converted to CXO tokens. CargoX will also have a treasury wallet to serve as buffer for the fiat-CXO conversion. Pegging the price to USD and having a buffer are great features to further promote mass adoption, because it removes the risk and concern enterprises have about the volatility of cryptocurrency. Remember we pointed out earlier that in a single transportation there are many parties involved? Only the initial owner who creates the smart Bill of Lading pays the $10. Every other party gets to use the technology for free. So for most of the parties, it’s using a great technology for free. Before you get concern, that the token is being under utilised compared to other blockchain projects, consider the cost. $10 sounds very little compared to the $35–100 transaction fees paper Bill of Ladings would cost, but with the exception of Bitcoin and Ethereum, other blockchain projects charge very little for a transaction. Stellar Lumens for example, charges 1 cent for 60,000 transactions. So in blockchain terms, $10 for one transaction could be seen as very high. It won’t affect the use of the project, because this fee is still the cheapest in the market, but it will guarantee demand. Other uses of the tokens besides Smart Bill Ladings creation include, other services e.g. arbitration if there is a dispute, payment for other services provided by their partners, payment for sea freight on selected web logistics portals with discounts of up to 30% for using their token to pay. If token use isn’t enough, one more thing in the token economics that token investors are going to love, is the token burn. CargoX has a crazy token burn rate. After the $10 is used to purchase the Smart Bill of Lading and converted into cryptocurrency, 70% of that, so $7 worth of token will be burnt and permanently removed. This is a very high rate of burn and will significantly affect inflation. Which means, all other factors even, the earlier an investor gets into the project, the better, because with every burn the price of the tokens will get inflated more and more permanently, and 70% is again a very significant amount. CargoX will set the CXO token burn percentage yearly, so it won’t always be 70% but for the first year it will be 70%. The parent company behind CargoX is a Slovenian container booking platform known as 45HC. They specialise in helping small to medium enterprises get their goods from China to Europe at competitive prices, and they are currently the fastest container booking platform on the web. 45HC is also in an alliance with INTTRA, who is the largest neutral electronic transaction platform and information provider for the ocean shipping industry. They initiate over 700,000 container orders weekly and represent approximately 25% of global ocean container trade. So whilst 45HC may not be Maersk the world’s largest shipping company, they certainly are a significant player in the field. The thing about CargoX as a project is that CargoX is a not a logistic company like Maersk or INNTRA. They are specific to streamlining Bill of Ladings, which is a problem every logistic company in transportation faces. Meaning every logistic company e.g. Maersk, INNTRA, 45HC etc.. can use their technology. They are aiming to be another company in the transportation industry, they are aiming to be a game changing technology that every company in the space can use. Although they haven’t lauched their working product yet, they already have 2 partners currently, Milsped a leading transportation company and MakerDao a respected team in the Ethereum developer community. Partners are enterprises that will be using their service. They are currently offering early partner advantage such as 1000 free Bill of Ladings, possibility of tailor made features and prioritisation etc… The project also has supporters, who are considering signing on with them. For them, CargoX offers them free consultation and an insider glimpse into an actual testing and working of the blockchain technology. Supporters will also get priority onboarding if they decide to start using CargoX smart Bill of Lading. They have quite a few supporters already, including significant names like Samera and Co, Republic of Solvenia (Ministry of Infrastructure) — potential government partnership!, MANA and TPG. A lot of the bigger companies will probably require working testimonies before they jump on to a new technology, so I suspect, once CargoX launched it’s live product in Q3 and start getting a few more partners, the Slovenian government and big companies will probably jump on then and that’s when the project will really gain a lot of tractions. If you go on their website and check out their blog, the team has been very active in building partnerships and promoting their product. They recently presented at EurTradeNet 2018, Transport logistic China, collaborative innovation Days 2018 — organised by ALICE (Alliance for logistics Innovation through Collaboration in Europe) and more. The thing I want to point out from here is that all their marketing has been targeted at real world logistic seminars and events. None of it has been at Blockchain events like concensus. That is why this project is so unknown to crypto investors at this point. But I believe one day soon, once they have a working product and attract big partnerships e.g. Slovenian government, this will all change, and the crypto world will be blown away by this hidden gem. At that point, it will probably rise very quickly and steeply. This is a project that has very good fundamentals but is currently very undervalued. Team This is the team behind the project. It’s a good team with a lot of experence and success, and well balanced in both the business and technical aspects. Their CEO and founder is Stefan Kukman who is also the CEO of 45HC. He previously worked with one of the largest logistics providers Kuehne-Nagel and has a very strong background in product promotion and market research. Their COO is Igor Jakomin who has more than 20 years of experience in transport, logistics and shipping industry. He was the previous State secretary at the Ministry of transport of the Republic of Slovenia, an experienced lectured and assistant professors at various universities with a PHD in transport and logistics and also previous managing director of Samer Global logistics, and Supervisory Board member of Port of Koper and BTC terminal. And you can go through the rest of the resumes in your own time, but it’s a heavy weight team that inspires confidence. Roadmap They have 2 versions of a roadmap. The first one on the left is the one on their website which is actually outdated and ended 3 months ago. They need to update it. A longer pitched roadmap is found in their technological paper and that runs to the end of Q4 of 2019. We are at the beginning of that roadmap, right after releasing Smart Bill of Lading MVP (minimal viable product) and awaiting the launch of the Dapp and first customers. Other longer term feature they are hoping to include next year involve extending the protocol to accommodate insurance, quality control, integration with Internet of things (IOT) vendors (mostly like the sensors in the containers we were talking about before) and more. So once again, a lot of room for this project to grow. Conclusion Finally, I wanted to round off this article with a look at the token price, because I feel it’s in quite an unusal position. If you see from the chart, since being launched in late Jan, the token price has taken a real beating. At its peak right after it hit the exchanges, it peaked at $0.23 and currently it is sitting at $0.038. It’s dropped by 85%. This isn’t because of the project, this is because of the general market crash. The thing with the crypto market, is this thing called Bitcoin Dominence. Bitcoin is the biggest coin on the market by far. And when the market is good and people are more risk taking, they will invest in altcoins like CargoX. But when the market is bad and people want to be safe, they will take money out of altcoins like CargoX and put it back in Bitcoin. So in bear markets like the past few months, we see a general rise in Bitcoin dominance and all altcoins suffer, the smaller the altcoin, the more it hurts, because people will have less confidence in them. The thing about CargoX is even at ICO stage, it was very low capped at $7million, (normal ICO is $30–40 million). So even at launch it was in marketcap, which normally would have made it a great investment opportunity, but it ended up instead being unintentionally punished for that and got pushed down even further as investors moved to Bitcoin. That’s what I think happened at least. And now, I think we are at an interesting spot where the market is possibly close to it’s lowest (I hope), but also the project already has an minimum working product and are about to launch their life product. They have partners in pilot testing and are soon to have real customers/ partners, including big enterprises and the Solvenian government expressing interest in the project. Once the product goes life in the next quarter, token burn will start, and inflation will being. They are also focusing heavily now on transportation partnerships and haven’t started marketing to the crypto community yet, but I see that changing in the next 6 months. And finally, with every market crash, when the market picks up, investors are abit wiser and more investors start looking for projects with good fundamentals rather than FOMO as they have been doing, and you can see this with recent conferences and forums. Crypto investors are not asking “when moon” or “when lambo” so much, they are starting to ask about the technology, the token economics etc.. even within 1 year, you can see the overall maturity and education of investors rising significantly. To an investor looking at projects with good fundamentals, CargoX potentially comes across with alot of potential. This is a project worth keeping an eye on. These are my thoughts on CargoX. None of this is professional advice, it is all my personal opinion and thoughts. Always do you own research and make your own decisions. Let us know what you think of CargoX in the comments below, and your comments will also help others form their opinion of this project. If you found this post helpful, give it that clap so that others can find it too. Have a great start to your weekend wherever you are, and Il catch you again very soon!

CargoX (CXO): Blockchain transforming the transportation scene

No waste of time. No miscommunication by (1563) The Tower of Babel Pieter Bruegel the Elder UPDATE: From now on, I would like to call it Loops Communication Model (LCM) as the feedback loop is the basic unit of the whole theory and its core element. It does not matter how many tools we use. In a professional environment there is always something misunderstood and noises introduced. This comes from contradictory statements and it leads to the denial of agreements. Lets get our hands dirty. There are many typical failures in working environments. But most of these failures has communication with stakeholders as a seed of the problem. By following the different communication models, it is pretty simple to see what it means at this level, how it is established and what is required to improve it. But are we adopting any communication model once we start talking? Yes, we do. . This is why it is really difficult to achieve a proper level of clean communication in any environment. Instinctively The bases of any communication is the use of mutually understood signs and semiotic rules (see ). In a professional environment, as a specialized interactional context, the communication between different parts must be defined following the same rules. Communication This is when the problems start to flourish. The main modern pillar of progress in product development (e.g.) is transparency. As many times it is mentioned as the bridge between knowing and doing. It sounds good right? Almost perfect to be honest. But transparency is indeed . extremely difficult to master Let’s take Product Management as an example. The definition of knowing in a product development environment refers directly to the knowledge about our customers (we do have several types of customers). But there is one thing in common in the interaction between Product and Customers. Conceptually, there could be a message and there could be a feedback. It is crystal clear that unilateral communication does not help to improve any product. Therefore there is the need to create feedback loops where the counterparts react over the given message. Feedback occurs when outputs of a system are routed back as inputs as part of a chain of cause-effect that forms a circuit or loop. Therefore, creating feedback loops is the only way to speed up working processes. Let’s put this in economic terms: you receive a service, you pay for it. You receive a product, you could give your feedback if you want it to get better. You give your feedback to the service provider and they have the chance to improve their services, bringing you to a better experience. This is a simple transactional model of communication. The basic premise of this model is that individuals are simultaneously engaging with sending and receiving messages. What if we define structural messages as templates to be sent from sources to receivers? Lets call these templates as between the source and the receiver. Getting back to the service provider: It is easy to define 2 types of contracts between service provider and customer. The service is the first contract. The feedback is the second one. They could have variation but the structure of the contracts is the same. contracts But, having contracts between the different parts is certainly not enough. There should be a common ubiquitous language to be spoken by the source and understood by the receiver and vice versa. The concept was already coined on Eric Evans’s “Domain Driven Design” (2003) which consists notably of striving to use the vocabulary of a given business domain, not only in discussions about the requirements for a software product but in discussions of design as well and all the way into “the products source code itself”. “(…)the technical vocabulary often tends to “leak” out from reasonable boundaries and take over design conversations to the point where business experts start feeling alienated and disengage from crucial conversations. Deliberately and explicitly adopting a “ubiquitous language” policy mitigates these difficulties and is therefore a success factor in agile projects.” But what if we take this concept to a new level? The Common Language Every company is divided by departments, divisions, units, etc. Each of these divisions speak an inner fluid language that sometimes is interpreted wrongly and taken from members of another departments, bringing misunderstanding and not desirable outcomes, delays on development or misbehaviors. All this is consequence of a twisted communication. The first need to solve this issue in any small or big company is to create a common language spoken by everyone. Without a common language, there is no medium of communication and the same mistakes will be repeated. Infinitely. Most of the failures have a common factor: lack of communication. And many of those communication issues are based on not clear statements, colliding ideas, not enough alignments between counterparts. Not clear records. That may not sound like much, but records are . remembering What? Blockchain? Yes, B-L-O-C-K-C-H-A-I-N As many of you recently were getting into the Blockchain concept, maybe you have been asking yourselves “What is this guy thinking by mentioning Blockchain in this article?”. Well, the Blockchain’s concept uses a terminology (and structure) that is pretty similar to some communication models. Especially the transactional model of communication. Let’s touch the concept of Blockchain. “A blockchain can serve as an open, distributed ledger that can record transactions between 2 parties efficiently and in a verifiable and permanent way. For use as a distributed ledger, a blockchain is typically managed by a peer-to-peer network collectively adhering to a protocol for validating new blocks. Starting with a strong focus on financial applications, blockchain technology is extending to activities including decentralized applications and collaborative organizations that eliminate a middleman.” Let’s play around with the concepts a little, take the abstract structure behind Blockchain and apply it on the transactional model of communication in order to create a common language to facilitate and simplify the communication between the source and receiver. As mentioned before, any unit in any company tends to speak an inner language. Meaning, the more units, the more inner languages, thus creating a large amount of interpretations for the same topic. Customers speak a language. Sales speaks a language. And developers and designers speak another kind of languages. Now, in Blockchain every agreement, every process, every task, every transaction would have a record and signature that could be identified, validated, stored, and shared. And of course, remembered. As mentioned on InVision’s article it could be defined something like this: “The user experience of Blockchain” • : Different user roles that interact with the blockchain. The Nodes can be different entities. Network participants (Nodes) • : Objects the user interacts with. Assets • : Input, logic, and output of a transaction. Similar to a single task-flow analysis performed by a specific user role. Transaction Flow • : Set of participants. Network • : Sub-networks to allow private interactions between participants. Channel • : This is the behavior users agree to follow in a blockchain. Smart contracts Notice that all open Transactions are visible and known by every node of a Network. Now We Are Talking By the definition of network participants, assets, transaction flow, network, channel and smart contracts we are defining a solid and transparent transactional communication model, where the source trades with the receiver. It is defined by the transaction flows. The traded objects are the assets. The smart contracts are the rules of the system. That’s it. We are establishing a co-regulated, transparent, transactional communication system. Several smart contracts can be defined between the different units of a company. This might be defined by all stakeholders involved into a network. Once the contracts are defined, the transaction flows are the next. And this is nothing else that the life-cycle of a smart contract. It will close the transaction between source and receiver speeding up the collaboration between nodes and improving the communication process. So, Blockchain’s abstract model can help to improve the working processes and have an impact on the relational behaviors of any company by creating a common language. Once this is properly implemented, the companies can reach the level of shared knowledge at most levels and between different networks (units). And with shared knowledge comes the development of a collective memory… What next? 👏 💬 Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this story, please click the button and share to help others find it! Feel free to leave a comment below.Have feedback? Let’s be friends on Twitter .

Loops Communication Model

Ocean Protocol by BigchainDB Through millions of years of biological design, humans have developed a resistance to paradigmatic change. It makes sense. Anything which we cannot anticipate or imagine is, by definition, a threat to the of our line. With almost inscrutable consistency, is the cause of our everyday . The uncertainty of being late. The uncertainty of losing money. The uncertainty of getting sick. It’s not the hours lying miserably in bed that we fear (which will almost always resolve itself) but rather the not knowing if or when it will happen. certainty uncertainty stressors But why then do we still send (wo)men to the moon, work with large hadron particle colliders, or conduct any dangerous scientific experiments? “The biggest risk is not taking any risk… In a world that changes so quickly, the only strategy guaranteed to fail is not taking risks” — Mark Zuckerberg Ocean protocol is the genesis of two visionary technologies which harbor as much uncertainty as they do optimism: and . Much like the enormous body of water for which it is named, the is a vast ecosystem deep enough to be fascinated by, but not so deep as to entirely fear. It is the first real innovation which I have heard of that truly intertwines AI and the Blockchain. Many startups have claimed to be separately using both AI and Blockchain technology to build their platforms — but this begs the question: “will you ever hit a home run by swinging with one bat in each hand?” Yes, each bat may increase the odds of making contact, but it takes two hands, seamed together, to really touch all four bases. Artificial Intelligence Blockchain Ocean Protocol The First Risk: AI According to the , championed by , the “life expectancy of non-perishable things (like technology and ideas) is proportional to their current age.” That is, Artificial Intelligence has been around for roughly seventy years, so it should survive for at least another seventy. AI is here to stay, but the applications and its malevolence is what causes apprehension to some folks in the Artificial Intelligence community. Lindy effect Nassim Nicholas Taleb potential At present, there is no irrefutable evidence to convince those who believe in our impending Artificially Intelligent doom. But what if we could prove that the benefits of pursuing this technology far outweigh the detriments? If we could prove that a computer passing the , or achieving , is less corrosive to society than our avoidance of the technology altogether, then research and funding will come pouring in from sides. Turing Test self-awareness both After all, where would we be if horses still cobbled through the streets of New York City? Already, Aritificial Intelligence is responsible for immensely important algorithms which have had society level impacts. Take for example the 2016 US election. Without delving into either side of the political spectrum, it has become common that Facebook’s algorithm played a large part in lassoing certain demographics to vote and not vote for a particular candidate. It did this without intention other than to keep users happy and spending time on the platform. (..A topic for another article). What this influence shows, though, is that our Artificially Intelligent programs are already so deeply embedded into the social fabric of global culture that if man simply turned them off or refused to investigate them, they could spiral into exactly what cynics most fear. knowledge Risk Two: B⃣l⃣o⃣c⃣k⃣c⃣h⃣a⃣i⃣n⃣ Right now, Blockchain and have become trendy topics in the field of entrepreneurship and finance. At its core, Blockchain has enormous potential. It could open up , create an unencumbered channel for sending and receiving , remove our reliance on the financial sector, reinvent some types of , and so much more. (Ex. self-driving Uber/Lyfts which pay their own bills using cryptocurrencies earned from riders. Posed by Andreas Antonopoulos.) Cryptocurrency social scalability remittances engineering PwC Blockchain Analysis Yet, the world is and there are various obstacles standing in the path of the technology. Currently, Blockchain has become inseparable with cryptocurrency, which is under fire from some of the largest and on the planet. Given the scale of its opponents, it’s safe to say, that if Bitcoin is able to thrive, even amid assault from Big Banks and governments, the platform is here to stay (the Lyndi effect would agree). Nevertheless, on the other hand, if these corporations are able to pound Cryptocurrency into the ground, it would be many years before the masses realize that Blockchain and Cryptocurrency could be mutually exclusive. That is, Blockchain could dismantle its bindings to the domain and continue applying itself to others. far less predictable than we often imagine it to be corporations regulators currency Diving into the Ocean The The computers we have in our pockets, backpacks, kiosks, grocery stores, airports — they all run on immense pools of data that have been gathered and looped into various bands of information. The problem with the separation of these collections is that the data available to a facial recognition device in LaGuardia International Airport has no access to photos that have been synched to Facebook. Or the Amazon Go Kiosk being unable to detect that there is an APB out for the man purchasing his groceries. At present moment, there are millions of different data pools lined up next to each other, but they are all divided by rigid barriers. idea behind Ocean Protocol hinges upon the fact that modern society is irrevocably reliant on data. So what if we knock down these walls? This is precisely what Ocean Protocol is hoping to accomplish in building the world’s largest and most efficient Data Marketplace in history. However, the problem with knocking down the walls and creating one fluid body of data is that it would difficult to reconcile owners to their data. With the need for privacy, regulation, and data sharing, that might render this one big data ocean a no-go. There is, however, an alternative which still retains the essence of a Data Marketplace — and it relies on swinging the bat with two hands. According to Trent McConaghy of , in order for this type of marketplace to exist “It needs to be decentralized. It needs to be at scale, not just some shiny toy technology. Private & decentralized at scale is hard. However, that’s exactly what we’ve been working on since 2015: an .” If you were wondering, an Interplanetary database is like Wikipedia, but for everything. BigchainDB IPDB Describing the moment when his company realized they were in a position to turn this fiction into a reality McConaghy elaborates, “First, we have the scalable Blockchain database technology. Second, we have both AI and Blockchain expertise, key for designing data marketplace algorithms. Third, we know the customers’ worlds, both data suppliers (enterprises) and data buyers (AI companies). Finally, we’re going to build relationships with governments and data regulators.” Backing up the claim Unlike some other ambitious startups, BigchainDB is following up on its claims to build relationships with their biggest competitors — regulators. His company has teamed up with the as well as The Data Exchange SG. This willingness to team up with research companies who may have vastly different motivations from his own reflects well upon Mr. McConaghy and should give him and his team a leg up on the inevitable friction that they will face. Toyota Research Institute DEX: There is no predicting how and when Artificial Intelligence and the Blockchain will truly become one entity; however, the logic behind their genesis is strikingly clear. The latter is a wonderful tool for fair marketplace trading. It’s fantastic at , security, and . The former is powerfully efficient and only becoming scarily more so. Individually, these radical technologies have reason for fear, but perhaps then we shouldn’t look at each in isolation. Perhaps we should unify the two as a system of checks and balances. Perhaps Blockchain is the security net we need to rope down Artificial Intelligence and keep it from spiraling out of control. Only time will tell. privacy scalability If there is one thing to be sure of however, it’s that these are uncertain waters. If you found even 1 Ripple of value from this story please “Clap 👏 ” below so others can find it as well.

Surfing the Ocean Protocol on a Blockchain of New Paradigms

A story of how one CTO took the company to the brinks of its existence and another almost managed to save the ship I have been sitting on this post for some time now — I wasn’t sure if this is a story that others would find interesting or useful. But after speaking with Jeff Meyerson on the podcast I realised there might be a lot of lessons other engineers and would-be founders can learn from what transpired at Yubl and avoid making the same mistakes. Software Engineering Daily _http://traffic.libsyn.com/sedaily/ServerlessBurningMonk.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | Download After raising $18…_softwareengineeringdaily.com Serverless Startup with Yan Cui On a side note, one of my submissions to Hacker News about also got some traction a while back. As you can see from the comments some readers tried to extrapolate a causality between Yubl shutting down to our decision to use AWS Lambda. things we learnt about AWS Lambda at Yubl Anyone who was there knows that was not the case, and although I had previously touched on the it’s a story that needs to be told in its entirety for one to understand the burning shipwreck it was and how close we came to saving it. Had one of the investors followed through with the investment he verbally agreed on, things could have turned out very differently and those involved will get the accolade they deserve for turning things around in a short time. context around Yubl’s closure But alas, there was no fairy tale ending. Instead we have a cautionary tale of how one CTO took a well-funded startup to the brinks of its existence, and for another CTO to (almost) turn things around through ruthless, decisive hiring & firing. A tale that I will tell with characters from beloved TV series Game of Thrones in order to protect the people involved. : Disclaimer I joined Yubl in April 2016 so I wasn’t present during the reign of the first CTO, the stories from that era are first-hand accounts by those who were there and lived to tell the tale. Prologue (~Aug 2013) A group of fresh university graduates were literally put into a room to think up ideas for a new startup. After some market research and brainstorming, the idea of a new social networking app is born — an app where users can interact with your post via interactive buttons that are part of the post rather than via meta-actions (liking, retweeting, etc.). The idea is pitched to private investors, (non-trivial amount of) investments are raised, and soon a commercial entity is formed around this idea. The app will be known as , or, o r social ubb e. YUBL Y U B L The Littlefinger Era (2014 to ~Aug 2015) joined the company as consulting CTO on the strength of his remarkable CV. On paper, looks the perfect fit for this young, ambitious and well-funded startup looking to take on the established giants in the field — the , and Petyr “Littlefinger” Baelish Petyr Baelish Facebook Instagram Twitter. It’s no small feat. Luckily we now have a fancy office in the heart of London and has assembled an elite marketing team to help us take on the big boys! The only problem is that, we don’t have a product yet… Petyr Baelish The engineering team would be situated far away (at one point the engineering team was in a different building!) from the “product people” so they can focus on doing what their do best. would act as the bridge between the teams and provide regular status updates to the investors to let them know that everything is on track. Petyr Baelish Requirements are passed down to the engineering team in the form of a 300 page document, lovingly crafted by the same eager young minds that had conceived the very idea the company is founded on. Meanwhile, the engineering team scrambles to build more and more features. We need a timeline feature similar to Twitter. Check. Users should be able to follow/unfollow other users. Check. Users can search for other users by first name and/or last name. Check. We need a Suggested Users feature to recommend people for you to follow. Check. We need a Nearby Users feature to show you nearby users for you to follow. Check. and the list goes on, and on. Amidst all the excitement, we also secured contracts with various outsourcers: a company to moderate contents on our platform (for the paltry sum of £10k/month!) a company to provide us with contract PHP developers to develop a CRM/CMS system long term contract with MixPanel at £3k/month … 18 months flew by. No one outside the engineering team had seen the product yet. Despite all the reports from that we’re making good progress and are on track, the investors grew weary. Petyr Baelish And yet, all the engineers are also singing the same tune. If and his engineers are to be believed, everything is rosy, right? Petyr Baelish One of the lead investors, (the original ) did manage to find the truth he seek from the diligent and honest QA engineer . Jeor Mormont Lord Commander Podrick Payne From what and told me, this is how that conversation went. Jeor Podrick : “So tell me, how are we really doing?” Jeor : “We are f**ked” Podrick : “No, that’s not true. We are really really f**ked!!” Podrick : “The app is untestable, nothing works! And the devs are not remotely interested in fixing bugs, when I bring bugs to the server team they just blame the client, when I bring them to the client team the client team just blame the server, nobody wants to find the actual problem.” Podrick It sounded unbelievable to me, I have never ever worked at a place where developers would just keep passing the buck and not take any ownership of their work! Yet, that was a recurring theme when I spoke to folks about what happened during _Petyr Baelish’_s reign — distrust, incompetence, arrogance and downright disrespect and hostility towards one another. Two of the Node.js engineers would forbid the other server developers to look at the code they’re working on. It would later transpire that they spent months building their own framework for doing pub-sub via RabbitMQ. What’s worse, the system they conjured together was so complicated they had no way of debugging and making sense of it. How bad was it? Well, see for yourself… Here, the handler for a RabbitMQ message would decide which of the modules named , , , , and so on would process the message by giving each a chance to run a predicate function against the message. The reason the modules have to be named this way is to enforce precedence. 1 2 3 4 To call it the worst, over-engineered, ill-conceived piece of crap would be an insult to crap. I’ve seen bad code in my time, but this takes the cake. Try figuring out what happens when the handler receives a message from RabbitMQ… The feature in question, however, is crucial for retention — when you post a piece of new content it should be distributed to your followers by background workers. The QA team had a detailed spec of how it should work and a suite of test cases, the system failed most of the test cases. We reimplemented the feature from the ground up after consulting with the product team to understand how the feature is supposed to work. The rework took just over 2 weeks with most of the work carried out by one developer. The reimplemented feature passed all of QA team’s test cases. The feature was rewritten using services AWS offers out of the box, was far simpler, and was covered by a suite of automated tests that were created with the help of the QA and product team. The culture of a startup stems from the founders and the management team, and judging by the evidences on offer one must question the leadership of both (the CEO at the time) and , specifically at their decisions to bring in engineers with such destructive qualities into the company. These bad apples were brought in at a great expense too, all of them were on pretty high day rates even by today’s market standard. Aerys Targaryen Petyr Baelish Angered by what he heard, took immediate actions. Within days both and are gone. Jeor Petyr Baelish Aerys Targaryen was dismissed in a spectacular and public style, and was gently pushed aside as took over the reigns as CEO. Petyr Baelish Aerys Targaryen Jeor Mormont _Baelish’_s close allies soon fled the company, and with _Baelish’_s removal there is now a power vacuum that needs to be filled. In comes as the new head of engineering. Edmure Tully We would later discover some questionable hires by that brought forth questions about his integrity: Petyr Baelish , a tester turned contract Scrum Master after a crash course (well, technically he is certified) was on the payroll for 2 months on a staggering £900/day. When quizzed about his role by he openly admitted that he was doing nothing. Well, at least he’s honest. Pycelle Daenerys , a server engineer who allegedly wrote the “whole” backend system in C++ although he was never in the office and no one has seen any evidence that this backend system exists in any form anywhere. What we had, was an invoice for £60k. In the email thread that shared (to prove that was in fact under Yubl’s employment) was a conversation between the two men where was coaching on how to make his invoices seem more believable. I don’t believe was ever paid that £60k. Jaqen H’ghar Petyr Baelish Jagen Baelish Jagen Jagen The Edmure Era (~Sep 2015 to Jan 2016) If _Petyr Baelish’_s reign was marred by questionable dealings and a lack of visible results, then ’s reign is the personification of desperation and ineptitude, with devastating consequences. Edmure Everything I have heard about paints the picture of a nice guy, a good engineer, and someone who genuinely wants to be everyone’s friend. Whilst he makes a perfectly fine teammate, he lacks a crucial skill required of leaders — knowing when to say no. Edmure From my experience, all the best leaders I have worked with are able to hold both the carrot and the stick and use the appropriate tool to motivate/push his team to get the job done. Those are also the qualities that I look for in the leadership team in any company I join. is perhaps the most famous example of a leader that is able to effortlessly combine both approaches and apply them depending on the player and the situation. Sir Alex Ferguson To ’s defence, this is his first time in the hot seat, and thanks to previous regime’s failures he is put under immense pressure to deliver . The investors have already spent millions and seen nothing in return, they want to see results right away. Edmure immediately Given where the engineering team was at, and the upheaval that has just happened, there was no way it could be done and the reasonable thing to do would be to explain the situation to and ask to revise the plan accordingly. is a perfectly reasonable man and a successful businessman, and he would have understood had communicated clearly the absolute mess they were in at the time. Jeor Mormont Jeor Edmure Unfortunately for him, and for Yubl as a whole, he did the one thing he shouldn’t have — he said Yes. His plan? Hire more developers. It must have been like an early xmas present for recruiters and contractors alike. Here is a startup with a good idea and a lot of money, desperate, willing to pay above market rates to bring people in by the bucket load… At the peak of this hiring craze, Yubl had 15 mobile developers for each mobile platform — that’s a total of 30 mobile developers! All of them expensive contractors. But wait! Why would do that? We know bringing more people on board a software project late on is only going to slow things down, and we have known that since 1975 thanks to the . Ironically, when later confronted by , would use the as argument to support his decision to bring in an army of developers to help get the project over the line… Edmure Mythical Man-Month Daenerys Edmure Mythical Man-Month After firing one CTO and spending a lot of money bringing in all these contractors, expected to see progress. Yet, good news were hard to come by and after a continued lack of progress (especially given the investment and support) it was clear that things had to change, again. Jeor In comes as the new CTO. Daenerys Targaryen The Daenerys Era (Jan 2016 to Nov 2016) In his own words, is a man (I know I know, is a woman in the TV show) who does not tolerate bullsh*ters. Daenerys Daenerys In his first few days on the job, interviewed everyone in the tech team and fired most of the newly hired contractors. In addition, a few of the bad apples who were either bullsh*ters or disruptive forces were also removed. Daenerys After just a few days the size of the technology team was down by nearly half, and the reduced communication overhead allowed those remaining to better focus on getting the app ready for launch. Aside from trimming out the fat in the staffing, was also acting as the . He discussed with the product team and trimmed down the launch feature set to a more manageable level. At the time, the essential features in the app were still barely functioning but the engineers were spending a lot of time working on new features such as VOIP. Daenerys Bad Idea Terminator _Melissa Perri presents how to destroy bad product ideas before they go to market while achieving the business goals and…_www.infoq.com The Bad Idea Terminator In a minor miracle, managed to launch the app within 7 weeks of taking over as CTO. After more than 2 years sitting on a shelf, most people had lost hope. The CEO even offered the option to start over if he thought the ship could not be salvaged. Daenerys Daenerys But things still aren’t great. The app is still buggy. The mobile platforms are not in feature parity. The backend infrastructure is not going to scale. We are down to 2 server developers ( had resigned at this point, after a failed attempt to get fired). There are still a few questionable characters in the mix due to contractual constraints with their agencies. Edmure Daenerys needed to surgically reconstruct the server team and he needed people who are doers, people he can trust. Daenerys I was introduced to through a mutual friend, I had the skillset he needs and he can offer me the new challenge that I’m after. Soon after I joined a few other people knew and trusted from his previous company also followed suit. Daenerys Daenerys What followed was an intense 6 months of transforming the company from both a product and engineering point of view. I am immensely proud of the work me and my team accomplished in such a short time, our efforts did not deserve the bitterly disappointing end we received. I have discussed our work during the podcast and at various , and I have many of our learnings on my blog. Software Engineering Daily talks shared The folks at AWS were very impressed with our work and were in the process of writing up a case study on us when the company was abruptly shut down. _theburningmonk Server Architect Developer @ Yubl. I like C#, F#, Erlang, Go, Dart, Elm, PostSharp and occasionally dabs…_theburningmonk.com Yubl's road to Serverless architecture By the end, we had attracted closed to 1 million installed users, and had around 200k MAU. The VC funds we were speaking to said we were much further along than other social networks after 6 months, but they won’t step in without seeing 12 months of live data. Epilogue (Nov 2016 — present) Since Yubl closed down, we have all gone our separate ways. My biggest disappointment is that the server team (the one that got together in the era) had been broken up. In the short time we worked together we had developed a great rapport and we worked so effectively as a team. Daenerys We tried to stay together as a team but none of the avenues we pursued panned out. After speaking to quite a few companies — by now I have developed a much better sense of what a good start up looks like and the sort of environment I would like to work in — I decided to go back to the mobile games industry and joined Space Ape Games. Space Ape Games is a really weird company in all the good ways — it defies many norms amongst tech companies and does many good things where other companies do badly. During my interview process I was really impressed by my conversation with the founders — they have a clear vision for the company and clearly defined the company’s culture, every recruit is hired for that fit. The company’s mission statement is clearly communicated regularly, and there is great transparency and honesty in the way the founders communicate with the rest of the company. It’s no surprise that, Supercell decided to after speaking to over a hundred game studios all around the world. The two companies bear many resemblance in how they’re structured and the way they operate with small, autonomous game teams. acquire Space Ape Games _Clash of Clans maker Supercell has acquired 62 percent of London-based Space Ape Games for $55.8 million. The deal is…_venturebeat.com Supercell acquires 62% of London's Space Ape Games for $55.8 million I’m currently working on a secret new IP which I can’t talk about just yet, but hopefully it’ll continue to progress through our creative funnel and become publicly playable in the near future!

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