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Key talks from the Cardano Summit with a focus on social, economic and environmental issues
Sustainable ADA | Nov 2, 2021
Image credit and art by Jan Drenovec, jan.drenovec@gmail.com
Here at Sustainable ADA, inspired by the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals, we have put together a first of its kind shortlist of 17 talks out of a total of 117 from the Cardano Summit 2021.
Using a sustainability analytical lens, Cole and I attended an array of talks that explored wide ranging issues such as social impact, community, governance, utility and adoption.
We’ve drawn up the following list below, to help connect people, and save the curious thinker and busy individual some time in finding the key talks that address the sustainability agenda and climate emergency we find ourselves in.
We hope that by accessing these talks, you will find that despite the many wicked problems afflicting our world, there is still much to have hope for, with change agents working to build a better world, today.
17 Sustainable Development Talks from the Cardano Summit 2021:
Click the talks below to go straight to that part of the list:
1. Wall Street & the UN Sustainable Development Goals
2. Building brighter futures in Rwanda with Blockchain
3. Blockchain for climate, environment and social impact
4. Cardano Foundation & SDGs: Giving Identities to the unidentified
5. Keynote: Decentralization for advancement in Africa
6. World Mobile – Stronger connected
7. Planting a blockchain forest with the Cardano community
8. Keynote: IOHK building a better future for all
9. Keynote: Culture, governance, and leading the way with Cardano
10. Welcome to Cardano Summit 2021: Live Opening Keynote
11. Education – How Cardano blockchain education benefits societies and individuals
12. The importance of education for blockchain adoption
13. NFT and new livelihoods for the creative economy and more
14. Are NFTs the future of creative pursuit?
15. Governance of the blockchain revolution: Introducing the DCF
16. Exploring models for creating a Cardano ‘nation’
17. The Power of Catalyst
1. Wall Street & the UN Sustainable Development Goals
Former Wall Street veteran Input Output Chief Financial Officer Jeff Pollack joins ‘technology alchemist’ Dr Mihaela Ulieru to discuss whether we can achieve real-world social impact and return on investment at the same time? Watch here.
Image by Tumisu
Key takeaways and quotes:
“We did not inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we borrowed it from our children.” – Dr Mihaela quoting an ancient proverb
“I think it’s still an open issue, how do we do meritocracy right?’ – Dr Mihaela
Community driven solutions, innovation and entrepreneurism is shifting the power centres away from centralised places and decentralised models of financing projects.
A redesign and rethink of measures of income and success is necessary.
“I think there’s a theme and I think it’s technology provides the tools to marry capital and need and so I think that technology is empowering the individual to actually act…” – Jeff Pollack
2. Building brighter futures in Rwanda with Blockchain
Eva Oberholzer, Chief Growth Officer at Cardano Foundation, Maggie Korde, Country Director Rwanda and Burundi, share what Save the Children has learned so far in its partnership with Cardano Foundation. Watch here.
Image from Cardano Foundation
Key takeaways and quotes:
The KUMWE Hub is a women led, African based impact innovation hub. Shaking up traditional aid delivery. Supporting children in the most impactful ways. Putting power back in local hands. Investing in businesses that benefit children.
“Blockchain allows the tracking of programmable finance to see where the money goes when aid is given to a disaster stricken area, what the money is spent on and therefore why the money was needed. The woman living on a dollar a day in a rural area. The displaced child refugee. How can blockchain impact and empower them in positive ways through the Cardano and Save the Children partnership?” – Eva Oberholzer
“The ethics of donating with a currency that is not necessarily recognised like traditional finance, fiat currency, cash. These are the challenges when deploying blockchain technology and using digital assets. Should charities be holding such assets and is it seen as gambling with donors’ donations when the price can fluctuate?”
“With the highest rate of child malnutrition in the world, where thousands are regularly displaced due to climate change related flooding…Burundi is experiencing crises that few know about due to it being one of the most underreported crises in the world. Where better than for Cardano and Save the Children to focus their efforts, where the need is great and the opportunity is great…how can all of this be helped with the use of Cardano’s blockchain technology and digital asset technology?”
“Cash to females, the heads of the households have been proven to lead to better outcomes for children’s nutrition and educational outcomes. How do we enable social mobility for working volunteers from these affected communities and areas to employ them and give them a stipend when they are often unbanked?” – Maggie Korde
3. Blockchain for climate, environment and social impact
What can blockchain do to accelerate the shift towards an environmentally driven economy? Here we explore and discuss four projects positioned to harness social innovation to address the climate crisis. Watch here.
Key takeaways and quotes:
“The hottest potato in the room…we will be talking about climate, environment and social impact. We know that global warming is an existential threat but we have been warned by climate scientists for a long time. To paraphrase Carl Sagan in his genius and brilliance, he compared climate scientists to Cassandra in Greek mythology. Cassandra was endowed with the gift of prophecy by Apollo. However, she was also cursed because she refused her advances, she was cursed so that nobody believed her. So Carl Sagan thought that climate scientists had Cassandra’s fate. They were warning us and nobody believed them, and here we are. Year after year the hottest year…how can technology help the transition to an environmentally friendly economy and increase our hopes that this is still possible in the 12th hour.” – Dr Mihaela
How can blockchain incentivise plastic recycling by tracking and in this way solve a huge problem in India where Ferdin Sylvester, Project Officer India Plastic Recycling at UNDP is based, and move away from a wasteful, linear economy to a circular economy system “where something that is waste is brought back into the system, and this way we use less raw materials and is less strain on the earth as a whole.”
James Spence from the Libra Project, a renewable energy company, shares his thoughts on redefining impact investing and how they will tackle one of their biggest problems; funding renewable energy projects.
Ian Choo, Founder and CEO of Ekofolio, a mission driven fin-tech company who have made it their mission to make forest assets tradeable and liquid using blockchain technology, shares more about the tokenization of natural assets in order to incentivise their replenishment.
“Fundamentally we should stop seeing nature as a pool of resources to exploit but as a home that we live in and invest in. The same way that you would invest a whole lot of money to take care of your home because it is something that you live in, I think that much more capital in this world should end off making nature, the home we live in, a far better place for us and the future generations. I find it particularly strange that in a world of excess capital, that so little of it, less than 0.1% of it probably find its way into nature and nature backed investments, and I founded Ekofolio to basically correct this mismatch in the general scheme of things…Nature and nature backed assets is a field that decentralised finance can really lead traditional finance as I don’t think the answers are going to be coming from traditional finance.” – Ian Choo
Rafaella Orelli from Offsetra , explores how we can measure the carbon footprint of blockchains and educate people and future generations. How do we deal with blockchain backlashes due to a lack of understanding or education?
“How do we deal with the meta-crisis? We are in this situation as we don’t have the solution because investors do not trust the new technologies like blockchain as they do not trust the new companies and we are in the middle of a meta crisis. One thing which is relevant here is the meta-crisis is a wicked problem. That means we cannot literally point to the causes. So what we can point to is the so called generator functions which are interdependent…exponential tech can be for good but not necessarily. It can just amplify the bad situation that we are in now, like the current financing systems are doing. We do not invest in what we should invest, we invest in things which are polluting more, which are destroying the environment more.” – Dr Mihaela
Dr Mihaela’s key takeaways:
“Each of us has to do their part. We need accountability. For our actions. For whatever we do in the world. For our companies, how we position them in order to be environmentally friendly. Always keep an eye on the measures of environmental friendliness.
We need new models of impact investing that are departing from the greenwash, as you have seen with the Libra project and Ekofolio. They are doing their part in that.
We need education. We really need measures for carbon offsetting. We need to be accountable by metrics, by measurements.
We need also a shift in behaviour. The shift in behaviour comes of course with education and it will be toward accountability that we all strive for. Blockchains have to be properly designed not to destroy the environment more but to support the work of these entrepreneurs which are actually pushing to shift the world’s economy towards environmental friendliness…let’s take the lessons and apply them. There is no time to wait.”
4. Cardano Foundation & SDGs: Giving Identities to the unidentified
AID:Tech and the Cardano Foundation come together to support sustainable development. Watch here.
Key takeaways and quotes:
Niall Dennehy spoke about how they can harness blockchain technology to help bring the Sustainable Development Goals SDGs together. AID:Tech is an international award winning Blockchain company backed by Temasek, (Singapore’s Sovereign Wealth). The AID:Tech senior leadership team is composed of experienced technology executives from the World Bank, Cambridge University, and the World Economic Forum.
They are using blockchain technology, specifically the Cardano blockchain to bring together the SDG’s. AID:Tech is focused on SDG 16.9 Provide legal identity to all, including birth registration by 2030. AID:Tech has created an app called Trace Donate. Which enables donations to be sent completely, transparently, and efficiently over the blockchain using Digital ID.
Trace Donate:
- Creates unprecedented transparency for donors
- Donors are provided with a personalized donation dashboard
- They can trace how donations are being spent. Including the breakdown of assets
- Trace also by amount Donated vs. Spent
- Visual representation
“What we see with Cardano we notice you get more data for less, and there are really innovative solutions which enable you to expand the applications, and build in some programmable transparency.”
“Because we have built an interoperable Digital Identity protocol, is that Cardano works with multiple DID protocols and our method which we have built ourselves can easily, and rapidly be ported, and expanded to Cardano.” – Niall Dennehy
AID:Tech also has created PharmAccess, a mother and child registration platform. By partnering with Pharm they can help improve maternal care in Tanzania. This is connected to SDG 3.2, ‘End preventable deaths of newborns, and reduce neonatal newborns.’
5. Keynote: Decentralization for advancement in Africa
John O’Connor, IO’s Head of Africa Operations shares more about Cardano’s plans to enhance systems in Africa by building on ‘RealFi’ and local collaboration. Watch here.
Key takeaway and quotes:
John O’Connor speaks about enhancing systems in Africa through RelFi, and what this means for the different states of Africa.
“One of the challenges NGOs face is how to incentivize good long-term actions. One of the things blockchain is good for is incentivizing strategies. Decentralization and lack of ownership don’t really become a problem until it is a problem.”
Distributed Finance for Safety
“This idea of trying to build a decentralized financial network, it’s really just to stop the worst from happening. The worst from happening is that decentralized systems fail, and are manipulated and shut down by central authorities. For us, the idea of decentralization is about building safeguards, by creating a network that is cheap, fair, and easy for anyone to access.”
IOHK, and the Cardano Foundation believe “the next set of innovations will be the fastest adopted within the African continent.” The Ethiopian deal with the Ministry of Education was to produce 5 million decentralized IDs for the education system. The system will track the education system’s students’ performance, for the Ministry of Education to allocate its resources across the continent.
The significance of this deal – “It was the first nation-state blockchain adoption deal of its kind, 5 million users puts it squarely in one of the biggest deals we have done this year, and this gives us a lot of credibility to now go and start working with other governments and stakeholders to implement our technology more broadly across the world.”
Realfi for Real Growth
“Realfi is the concept that what we are doing is connecting cryptocurrency liquidity to real-world economic value. Take some of the value and liquidity available in networks like Cardano and start making it easier for that value to be invested into loans and credit opportunities for real people in the real world. In practical terms, realfi means lower interest rates comparable by borrowers and a higher yield for the investors.”
“We have an opportunity here to connect high-yielding loan opportunities in markets which have a deficit in capital and liquidity with markets which have large amounts of liquidity and people searching for yield.”
“So really Realfi is about trying to make the world a smaller place and connecting up capital opportunities with those people who have it. Enabling digital identity we broaden the part of capital which people can apply to and ultimately reduce the interest rate that people pay.”
Governance for Participation
Within a couple of years IOHK plans to have a voting blockchain solution. Looking to start testing it out for real-world application, and elections.
“What we are doing now, we have launched our global catalyst fund. The world’s largest decentralized fund sitting with over 1 billion dollars of value which is distributed through a voting system which our community participates in.”
“We’re starting to work on this idea of internet and distributed voting systems. We hope to see that evolve and start to impact real world elections in the coming years.”
6. World Mobile – Stronger connected
World Mobile partners with IO to create a more sustainable future, with everyone connected. How do we connect people, bringing economic identity, digital identity and financial inclusion to all that don’t have it? Watch here and learn from stories in Tanzania and Zanzibar to see how we are stronger connected.
Image credit
Key takeaways and quotes:
World Mobile partners with IO to create a more sustainable future, with everyone connected. They are trying to connect everyone, everywhere. “With nearly 4 billion people left offline. digital exclusion is a significant problem”. World mobile plans to help solve this problem to create a more sustainable world for all, connecting the unconnected.
“The World Bank and United Nations by 2030 want to have the world connected. I believe that together we can do this quicker.” – Mickey Watkins Founder and CEO World Mobile
“Africa is full of so much talent. We should be able to share that with the world.” – Aisha Saadi – DJ Hijabu
“Our vision as a company is to build the systems of the world for everyone, everywhere. No system needs more revolution or change or iteration than I’d say the telecoms space. It’s very occified and broken. It has really delivered the ubiquitous experience where no matter where I go I have connectivity.” – Charles Hoskinson, Input Output CEO
“As a company, World Mobile will be implementing as much green energy as we can through the network. We’re also going to be implementing circularity concepts. We already source second life batteries. The energy grid in Africa is never going to reach the last mile. In order to build a kilometre of electricity line, imagine you’re spending thousands and thousands of dollars for every hundred meters, for a customer that’s going to be spending $10, $20 a year. So these distributed energy generation and storage solutions are so important when it comes to connecting up this market to a new world…without the power you can’t bring the connection. Without the connection you can’t bring the goods and services. We’re going to be able to facilitate financial inclusion through loans, through crop insurance, through all sorts of goods and services that are available out there in the world who just don’t have access to these customers, and that’s what we’re trying to fix.” – Andrew Soper, COO and Co-Founder World Mobile
7. Planting a blockchain forest with the Cardano community
Cardano steps towards a carbon-positive future in a new partnership with Veritree. Watch here.
Image credit
Key takeaways and quotes:
“Tree planting, in my opinion, is one of the most tangible, meaningful and impactful missions that we have out there today to help heal our planet…tree planting is such a critical part of the broader climate change solution. It’s not a silver bullet when done correctly can have such a fundamental impact on both the livelihoods of the people on the ground as well as the planet. ”– Derrick Emsley, CEO of Veritree.
Can businesses go from having little to no negative impact to creating positive impact whilst remaining a viable business?
Sidney Vollmer – Head of Brand and Communications Cardano Foundation talks with Derrick who with his company Tentree have already planted 65million trees in the past 15-16 years and within the next couple of years aims to plant half a billion trees annually. That requires a platform and scalable verification and auditing process of reforestation efforts that are transparent and tangible, whilst gathering ground level data that is communicated to investors in impactful ways.
They share more about Cardano’s first Global Impact Challenge, first Cardano Forest and first ‘ITO’ (Initial Tree Offering), where 1 ADA = 1 tree planted. The target being to plant 1 million mangrove trees, this will thus offset the entire carbon emissions of the blockchain.
By working with Cardano, Veritree demonstrates how businesses can be a vehicle for change, and inspire others in the efforts needed to transition from a global model of doing ‘less bad’ to ‘more good’.
Veritree is democratising restorative measures and by working with Cardano which aims to be the social and financial infrastructure of the world, they seek to tackle poverty and in turn tackle deforestation.
8. Keynote: IOHK building a better future for all
How do we build an operating system for a more democratic, ethical, and inclusive society? How do we bring fairness to the world of finance? IO’s Strategic Impact Leader Mihaela Ulieru explores governance rules and incentives that could pave the way for a better society. Watch here.
Key takeaways and quotes:
“We did not inherit the Earth from our ancestors, we borrowed it from our children.” – Dr Mihaela quoting an ancient proverb
Quoting a Romanian poet, “On this planet we have everything, good and bad, we have geniuses, we have idiots, we have stars and mud. So home is everywhere and it is on spaceship earth to the extent of which I can envision a way which can take us faster from the mud to the stars.”
Dr Mihaela shares more about how her work is “working for those marginalised” and “giving power to the underdog, bringing power to the fringes, through technology.”
“It is not possible to use a linear approach, you need a self organising of communities around their own problems in order to find local solutions. My work is called engineering self organising application but broadly speaking it’s all about information, adaptive information structures because we coordinate people and those communities through information infrastructures, which now are very much on blockchain, through incentives which get people to do the right thing, at the right time, at the right place.”
“We can step off the dysfunctional systems which are keeping us as cogs, in unhappy lives in which we cannot fulfill ourselves. Yes we can step off and have our own identity and sovereignty, and create a better world, and a better society through this technology because now we exist. We have identities of our own. And we have our own money, to ourselves, which we can use, and put together in projects that are helping us and not those at the top. I think that is what drives me, what I have seen drives Charles and this community of fans, of which I think I am the greatest, of Charles’ vision and work.”
Advice for making a better world – “The real trick to life is not to live in the know but to live in the mystery of what is possible. This is the only way in which you can create a better world. This is the only way to move forward. Begin, you know, by putting yourself in the shoes of the other. How what I’m doing, let’s say I’m a start up, impacts the others. And not impacting them immediately, how is it going to impact them 10 years from now…begin with the end in mind, as much as possible.”
9. Keynote: Culture, governance, and leading the way with Cardano
IO Chief of Staff Tamara Haasen shares her thoughts on how decentralized technology can create fairer conditions for everyone. Watch here.
Key takeaways and quotes:
“The most important problem I would love to see the community work on is the notion of culture and governance”
“We need to set up a governance system that clearly articulates what a mentorship network may look like”.
Through Project Catalyst, and different Catalyst projects Tamara Haasen believes we can build that mentorship network out.
Project Catalyst works in a systems way similar to systems thinking. Tamara articulates this by saying “I’d love to see the system go towards getting these pockets of expert mentorship networks built in Cardano, and to be incentivized to do so.” Cardano and IO are trying to bring together all the systems to create a sustainable blockchain mentorship network, with a focus on different systems.
Cardano and IO are partnering with both Entreprenerdy, and Ice Addis, an African based incubator program. “ I think incubators and accelerators are going to be essential to build that network out.” These accelerator programs combined with Project Catalyst are great ways to grow and support projects, businesses, and communities using the Cardano platform.
“I think governance is the systems. It’s who gets to vote? How they vote? It’s systems of accountability so it’s sort of like the rule of engagement. Which should be embodied by a value set to monitor these behaviors.”
10. Welcome to Cardano Summit 2021: Live Opening Keynote
Charles Hoskinson delivers his vision for the future of Cardano. Watch here.
Key takeaways and quotes:
Input Output CEO, Charles Hoskinson, opens the summit with his vision for the future of Cardano and the path to financial inclusion and empowerment for everyone, everywhere.
“What we have here today, which is one of the largest most prominent crypto currency blockchain projects in the entire world.”
“At this moment over 80,000 people are registered and watching, across the world, in more than 100 countries.”
“I took a moment to reflect… What is this all about? Why are we here? What are we doing? What are we trying to accomplish, where does all the resilience come from? Cardano is special in that it is probably the most resilient cryptocurrencies perhaps outside of Bitcoin. How do we know that? Because we get shit from everybody. Yet we are still here, we’re still alive. We’re thriving and we’re growing.”
“There is a lot of belief that we Cardano do things no one has ever done before. If you don’t like your government, rebuild the damn thing. Don’t like your money? Make new money.”
“This isn’t a superpower I have. It’s a superpower because of this platform. The ideas here that all of you have. Every single one of you. That is why Cardano is viewed sometimes well, sometimes not well. So well it’s an instrument of change for the world. Where we started so long ago in 2015, and the journey we have gone on we have seen a growth of a community into the millions.”
“Cardano in the coming years will be more defined by the things you do, rather than the things I did. That’s what makes it so special, so powerful, and so durable. Look at Catalyst. When we started that last year, a few hundred people. Not a lot, just a little bit of conversation. You could literally fit all the people participating in a zoom call, if you wanted to. Now there are tens of thousands, and millions eventually. How much connected-knowledge, integration, capability, and execution is embedded in that? How do you stop that?
“Especially when it’s completely cursive, its self bootstrapping. The communities in control of the funds, the community is in control of the ideas, they’re in charge of the challenges. They are in charge of the ventures. The ones who do well continue to get funding. The ones that don’t, continue to die off. That’s a self evolving system. That continues to grow and bootstrap. You blink it’s an army. You blink again, and it’s a nation. You blink again, it’s the whole world, and that’s just one thing inside Cardano.”
11. Education – How Cardano blockchain education benefits societies and individuals
EMURGO Academy is building a global Cardano workforce, empowering the public and improving societies. Watch here. – *link appears to be going to an incorrect video upload from Cardano*
Key takeaways and quotes:
Ellappan Venkatesan, CEO of EMURGO India (EMURGO Academy) sees increased demand for education about Cardano. He explains EMURGO Academy’s mission to build a global Cardano workforce, why Cardano blockchain education for developers and the general public provides empowerment, and its strategies to improve societies through the lens of Cardano education.
“I am right now focused on bringing finance to the places that don’t have financial capabilities.”
“I stumbled upon blockchain because I was looking for a solution for distributing a product. I was working with people who were engaged in using blockchain for the supply channels of shipping. When I saw what a blockchain has, I was like this is a great way to tokenize a product and to eliminate the currency risk, and to eliminate the counterparty risks. I started doing some research on blockchains and how I could use it to distribute it to people who don’t have access to projects.”
“The concept is to create an economic ecosystem and the Cardano community is what ends up owning that ecosystem, but there are a lot of things that go into building the capabilities of that ecosystem, some technical, some nontechnical. I think in building the Cardano Community, you know, looking at Input Output Global as the technology provider, the Cardano Foundation as the stewards of the Cardano community, and Emurgo as the entity responsible for incubating adoption and development on the Cardano platform. When you bring all of those things together, and think about how do you create liquidity, in a cryptocurrency. You have to get it listed on an exchange, you have to create adoption by institutions, as well as a large amount of retail investors. You have to create a global community so you’re not concentrated in one jurisdiction or another.”
12. The importance of education for blockchain adoption
Education in blockchain technology will improve the lives of billions of people. Watch here.
Key takeaways and quotes:
Blockchain technology has the potential to improve the lives of billions of people. In his keynote, IO’s Director of Education Dr. Lars Brünjes explains the crucial role education plays in making this a reality. He talks about IO’s past and present educational initiatives and envisions a future where education in all our technologies will be freely available for every person on this planet.
“It’s all about adoption. Today cryptocurrencies, if you’re honest, are used for speculation, but if we really want adoption it can be useful. There can be things everyday people can do with cryptocurrencies to improve their lives. Must be able to buy services with it or buy goods with it, and things like that. So it’s no longer for speculation only then is when mass adoption will happen.
“We also don’t know how to solve the problem. We don’t even know what the problems are. Because the people who live in those countries know best. They know what they suffer with in their everyday lives, and what’s most painful where new technology could obviously help. But in order to do that and use the technologies they of course first have to understand them, and that’s where education comes in.”
“When we enter a new country, and want to deploy our technology there, do business there. Then the first thing we do is, we offer a long 10 week course. So that first of all a showing of goodwill, and that we will invest something, and bring it to the table. Instead of just asking for stuff. But also of course it helps educate the people there and make them more familiar with the technology. When we do that we always aim to incorporate with governments and with universities.”
13. NFT and new livelihoods for the creative economy and more
Charles Hoskinson and rock legend Billy Gibbons talk decentralization, Africa, NFTs, and more. Watch here.
Key takeaways and quotes:
“This basic idea that you can create a system where everybody is treated equally. Doesn’t matter if they’re rich, doesn’t matter if they are poor, or who they are born to. It is all open source. Every product we have built, no patents, not intellectual property, it’s all open source and it’s there for everybody.
It can work in Ethiopia, like the Ministry of Education deal or some of the other deals that are coming online. It’s going to work for the homeless in California, and poor towns in West Virginia, and places really getting hit hard, and creates a new economy. We’ve got NFTs, and ICO’s, we’ve got all these crazy things that didn’t even exist two years ago. Holy moly it’s like when color came to television, and VR came. People said wow this is incredible; times were a little difficult to know exactly how that was going to work out. But over time the creative medium gave artists, and entrepreneurs so many more dimensions to work with and express, what they want to say, and how they are gonna say it, and monetize that.
Right you can’t have any growth economically or spiritually if you don’t give. You have to give more than you take. The world gets better” – Charles Hoskinson
“It’s a challenging concept but once you’ve felt it. Once you have had the luxury of tiptoeing through the experience, its wide open space, everybody can win.” – Billy Gibbons
14. Are NFTs the future of creative pursuit?
Thought-leaders discuss the transformational potential for NFTs in the art world. Digital art has long been undervalued, in large part because it is so freely available. Non-fungible tokens have the capacity to change this by democratizing access to creative income by helping artists create financial value for their work. Industry leaders Misan Harriman, Sofiane Delloue, Janet Adams, Gillian Tett speak about how we have only just scratched the surface of NFTs, and their implications for transforming the art world. Watch here.
Key takeaways and quotes:
“For me as an artist, and as a storyteller I have been collecting digital art since 2013. So I have been laughed out of the room at many dinner parties of where I collect jpegs and I’m so glad. The ability to revocaly prove scarcity and profits through minting art on the blockchain finally armed. Why is it so important from my point of view? It’s important for many many simple points. The ability to prove scarcity, so you can see, anyone can see what amount of work you minted on the blockchain and who owns it, and what it was sold for.” – Misan Harriman
“The second major advantage of NFTs is that you can actually produce an equal amount of acquired and residences on the blockchain. NFTs can be used for billions of creativity but can be used for anything that is scarce and unique, and that’s the thing missing in the digital space.”
“What I find really interesting is the way you connect NFTs to licensing models. That’s something we are working on where you could define a certain amount of rights that could derive so a person can stay free, and open to everyone.” – Sofiane Delloue
“A new form of creativity is exploding with NFTs. It’s really interesting how the human and technology interplay here because if I walked down the street even here in Dubai or in London where I live, or wherever. There’s so much uniformity in how people present themselves. They do their hair, make-up, and clothes. Going to an online metaverse there’s so much more creativity being expressed, and humans are expressing themselves online in open and more creative ways. So I see an ongoing growth of the NFT industry. That’s purely from a human creativity perspective.” – Janet Adams
15. Governance of the blockchain revolution: Introducing the DCF
Digital thinker and author Don Tapscott discusses the state of the union in the digital asset space and introduces the concept of Decentralised Consortium Funding (DCF), the result of a collaboration between the Blockchain Research Institute, Boston Consulting Group and Input Output. What does an analogy of a bird chasing away a predator 25 times its size have to do with blockchain technology and the future of our society and world? Watch the video to find out more! Watch here.
Key takeaways and quotes:
“The trouble is that the virtual you, is not owned by you. Your identity is owned by large corporations.” – Don Tapscott
Don Tapscott, best selling author of Paradigm Shift and The Digital Economy and Executive Chairman at Blockchain Research Institute, “the world’s largest independent think tank, investigating blockchain, digital assets and really this second era of the digital age.”
“The digital age has really gone through a first era. We’ve had mainframes, mini computers, PCs, the internet, the web, mobile web, social media, the cloud, big data, and now technology is infusing itself into everything. Billions and trillions of inert objects have become smart communicating devices. The physical world is becoming animated. The Internet of Things. We have technology that learns to do things that it wasn’t programmed to do in all these extraordinary technologies. And I found myself coming to a surprising conclusion that the foundation of this second era will in fact be the underlying technology of cryptocurrencies, blockchain.”
“Throughout this first era, we’ve had an internet. I was using the ARPANET in the 1970s, we’ve had an internet of information. But when I send you some information like a PDF of this deck…I’m actually not sending you that information, I’m sending you a copy, and that works great for information. But when it comes to assets, things of value, like money, or securities, or intellectual property, or the data in our identities, or cultural assets like art or music or even votes, and votes are assets, something of value that belongs to somebody. When it comes to assets, copying those is a bad idea. You don’t want somebody copying your vote or your ID. And if I send you $1000, it’s really important that I don’t still have the money…so the way that we solve this problem, it’s called the double spend problem by cryptographers,is through intermediaries. Banks, Government, credit card companies, transfer agents, stock exchanges, now social media companies, and they perform all the business transactions and logic for every type of currency. Identify the asset, that’s a dollar, they clear and settle transactions, they keep records, and overall they’ve done a pretty good job, but there are growing problems. They exclude a couple billion people from the global economy. They’re centralised which means they can be hacked. It takes too long. Why does it take 47 days for a housekeeper in Toronto to send money to her Mum in the Philippines, and why should she be charged 20%? And overall they capture our data, which means we can’t use it to plan our lives. We can’t monetise it and our privacy is being undermined.”
“So, what if there were an Internet of Value? Some kind of vast, global, distributed ledger or anything of value from money to securities. Votes could be managed, stored, transacted in a secure, private way. That’s what Satoshi did. He cracked the double spend problem and for the first time ever we now have a native digital medium for value…where trust is not achieved by an intermediary, it is achieved by cryptography, collaboration and some clever code…this is the trust protocol, an internet of value that we are building today and that’s what we are involved in creating.”
Don goes on to describe how these innovations are transforming industries such as:
“How are we going to reinvent management theory for a whole new model of how we create wealth, and innovate and solve problems in society? Everybody can get involved and that’s the exciting thing about this period.”
16. Exploring models for creating a Cardano ‘nation’
What might decentralized, people-first governance look like? And what would the ideal structure for a ‘Cardano nation’ be? Leaders from the eGovern consultancy, the SOV blockchain-based currency, and the Rohingya Identities project discuss initiatives to improve governance and redefine the concept of a ‘nation’ for the people.
Watch here.
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Key takeaways and quotes:
“I believe we’re going to a good place, and we’re going to see though a lot of pain on the way to this good place but I think we’re gonna see a monetary crisis around the world because since this COVID started Governments have been printing more and more money, and fiat money is kinda like losing its value, as we should expect, when they print so much paper.
And so now I think we will see a rise of blockchain technology and limited supply currencies etc. Just out of necessity, people are going to have to hold on something that still maintains value, that’s one major takeaway…the second major takeaway is that a lot of people in blockchain are getting very very rich in this process, and it’s important these rich people, people who are getting so blessed, will also remember to support and invest in projects that are trying to better the world, because maybe this is something that is really going to improve the state of affairs.” – Barak Ben-Ezer, CEO & Founder at SFB Technologies Inc.
“If you’re out there and you’re listening in on this, you’re feeling disenfranchised, you’re feeling left out of the system, reach out to us here on the call. You’ve got Dr M, you’ve got Barak doing amazing things out in the Marshall Islands. You’ve got Manmeet transforming the identity world. I think the reality is a lot of us can be felt left behind in the current governance structures we have. If you’re sitting out in the Caribbean and you’re an entrepreneur, you have a fantastic idea that transforms red-tech processes, that’s what we’re doing, please reach out to me.
We want people to take action, to ultimately move these projects. We need people who want to move things and ultimately that will be my call out to everyone on this call.” – Alexia Hefti, CEO EGovern
17. The Power of Catalyst
Project Catalyst offers anyone who wants to build on Cardano a chance to receive funding to bring their idea to life. Learn how Project Catalyst has changed the lives of project teams through funding, and about members of the Cardano community, known as the Catalyst cohort. Find out about upcoming support structures to help Catalyst teams and entrepreneurs accelerate their projects. Watch here.
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Key takeaways and quotes:
“The pathway to making a movement of Catalyst is all about openness and transparency. Open innovation, open to collaboration and openness to be held accountable for your actions. But all this openness needs more than just IOG or you guys. We really must update the process for innovation together, and with each Catalyst Fund and each project funded we’re really providing the proof points for this overhaul and upgrade in human effort and collective intelligence.” – Kriss Baird, Input Output Product Owner
My avatar was gazing out towards the horizon, standing upon an island that is resting on the back of a flying turtle. Yes you read that correctly.
So there you have it. 17 talks that cover interrelated and interconnected themes that seek to address questions and challenges faced globally, similarly to the UN 17 Sustainable Development Goals.
The Cardano Summit may be over, but the climate emergency remains and the conversations and hard work continues. The climate clock continues to count down.
COP 26 is upon us. World leaders, private sector giants and civil society are coming together to discuss and negotiate commitments necessary for an equitable, climate friendly and healthy world for all.
We all play a role in shaping the world we live in and the world we want to live in.
On that note, here are some lyrics from Tracy Chapman’s 1988 timeless classic ‘Talkin’ bout a Revolution’, that feel as relevant as ever:
“Don’t you know
Talking about a revolution?
It sounds like a whisper
And finally the tables are starting to turn
Talkin’ ’bout a revolution
Yes, finally the tables are starting to turn
Talkin’ ’bout a revolution, oh, no
Talkin’ ’bout a revolution, oh, no
Talkin’ ’bout a revolution, oh, no”
Sustainability + Blockchain Playlist