By Pete Harris, Co-Founder and Executive Director, DecentraTech Collective
Many in the blockchain and MedTech world have fond memories of this day a year ago, when the Blockchain and Digital Transformation in Health 2020 symposium was held in Austin, TX. One of the conversations among the 100+ participants that gathered that day was the breaking news that the first cases of coronavirus had been detected in the U.S. A question that many had was what the impact here would be. Tragically, we now have at least a partial answer to that one.
The symposium – a unique collaboration between the Austin Blockchain Collective and Dell Medical School – featured keynotes from UCSD Health and IBM and combined presentations and panels from commercial innovators and academia. As such, it acted as a catalyst for a number of important conversations and partnerships that have continued since.
In particular, the symposium addressed several key themes that have risen in visibility and importance over the past year. Notable topics included:
While hosting a follow up in-person symposium in 2021 is unlikely to happen due to the ongoing pandemic, we at the DecentraTech Collective continue to maintain a focus on the decentralization of healthcare and look forward to running online webinars and video conversations and will continue to engage with the medical and healthcare community. See you in person in 2022!
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By Pete Harris, Co-Founder and Executive Director, DecentraTech Collective DecentraTech is the short notation for decentralization technology. The business world already commonly uses terms like FinTech to mean financial technology, or MedTech for medical technology, or MarTech for marketing technology. Thus, adopting DecentraTech to refer to a collection of technologies that allows decentralization to be adopted by businesses is both consistent and long overdue. To step back for a moment to consult the Miriam-Webster dictionary, decentralization is “the process by which the activities of an organization, particularly those regarding planning and decision making, are distributed or delegated away from a central, authoritative location or group.” The concept of decentralization as an organizational approach is not at all new, having originated in France 200 years ago. Technological decentralization – which in current times is a requirement of most manifestations of decentralization – became a possibility with the creation of the internet, conceived as an open network that anyone can access, based on common standards and with no central governance. Ironically, it is now increasingly accepted that the most popular commercial services delivered via the internet, especially the world wide web, are products of centralized corporations. And many consider that some of those players – including “Big Tech” companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter – now wield too much control over service provision and personal data ownership for the public good. One of the many with concerns about the power that Big Tech has amassed is Tim Berners-Lee, who created the web in 1990. He is now working on Solid, an open-source effort to reinvent the web so as to allow individuals to control their personal data. More broadly, Web 3.0, a term coined by Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood, who went on to form the Web3 Foundation, is focused on creating “a decentralized and fair internet where users control their own data, identity and destiny.” As a result of the recent actions of a few high profile companies – including Twitter cancelling the account of the then-sitting POTUS, and online financial app Robinhood suspending retail investor trading in certain wildly popular stocks – calls for the establishment of decentralized services that are censorship-resistant have grown loud. As it happens, Twitter – or at least its CEO Jack Dorsey – has been pondering the responsibilities that come with operating a forum for open discourse in an era where some use it to spread misinformation and hate speech that can have public safety consequences. Following Twitter’s recent decision to suspend and remove a number of accounts, Dorsey wrote (on Twitter) that “I feel a ban is a failure of ours ultimately to promote healthy conversation.” In the future, Twitter might be able to sidestep similar actions by becoming a decentralized service where (presumably) moderation processes would be under the jurisdiction of the crowd. At the end of 2019, it kicked off the bluesky project, which Dorsey characterizes as “an initiative around an open decentralized standard for social media. Our goal is to be a client of that standard for the public conversation layer of the internet.” A few weeks ago, the project released a research paper covering a number of existing decentralized social media ecosystems and noted that it is eager to hear about other projects. “Our DMs are open!” By Pete Harris, Executive Director, Austin Blockchain Collective Hyperledger, the Linux Foundation’s blockchain initiative, just celebrated its fifth birthday. Initially known as the Hyperledger Project, it originally focused on a single enterprise blockchain development – a private/permissioned platform dubbed Fabric. Its early members were a couple of dozen major corporates, with IBM as a key champion, influencer and code contributor. Five years on, Hyperledger has grown substantially. It now has more than 200 members big and small and comprises 16 core projects, including competing ledgers, development tools, identity frameworks, etc. Until recently, however, its focus remained on the private blockchain space. That changed in 2019 with the announcement of Hyperledger Besu, an Ethereum client built by ConsenSys, which supports both private and public chains. According to Hyperledger’s annual report for that year, “Besu represents the growing interest of enterprises to build both permissioned and public network use cases for their applications.” Another report in 2019 – commissioned by consultants EY and analyst firm Forrester Research – found that some 75% of enterprises were interested in exploring public blockchains. As those enterprises embark on their public blockchain research, they will find more than a few variants to choose from. Ethereum is by far the most established, and with its ETH 2.0 scalability upgrade now begun, it will surely remain the leader for some time to come. But many other public chains are now launched and being developed, including the Web3 Foundation’s Polkadot, Cosmos, Cardano, DigiByte, Decred, EOS, NEAR, Solana, NEM’s Symbol, VeChain, etc. With so much innovation focused on (and investment in) the public blockchain space, and relatively little on private variants, bets against enterprise adoption of public chains would attract very long odds indeed. Scalability aside, perhaps the most common criticism of public chains is that they are not relevant for – indeed not usable by – enterprises that need to keep their vast data assets private for competitive or regulatory reasons. It’s a valid POV, but this year the Baseline Protocol has emerged to counter it. Baseline is going to be very useful for businesses. And it’s going to be huge. By Pete Harris, Executive Director, Austin Blockchain Collective As I write this blog, deaths globally due to COVID-19 are estimated at nearly one million. Health experts here in the US are suggesting that a vaccine should be available to everyone by the third quarter of next year. Meanwhile, some pharmaceutical company executives reckon that vaccines might take another 3 years to be distributed globally. How many deaths will this pandemic account for before it is snuffed out? It’s a big, terrifying number. That’s the direct human life cost. The global business collapse caused by the pandemic will impact many — probably most of us— over the next few years. A surge in unemployment, poverty, hunger, mental and physical illness are very likely. Civil unrest, regime change and even geopolitical land grabs are possible. The recovery is not going to be a V curve — methinks the affects of COVID-19 will be felt across the globe for a decade or longer. For sure there will be gloom and doom to contend with. But there is also the promise of overcoming the pandemic and its massive fallout. Innovation in bioscience, healthcare, supply chains and technology is already playing a critical role in the comeback — and at a bold and rapid pace not witnessed since the Apollo space program. By Pete Harris, Executive Director, Austin Blockchain Collective I’ve known for a long time that healthcare relies on data in order to operate (no pun intended) effectively, safely and efficiently. It’s also been apparent that current processes to capture and share data are pretty much broken — one example that most patients can relate to are badly designed paper forms, usually partially completed with bad handwriting, and then faxed between providers. Some of it might end up being manually entered into an EHR system, mistakes and all, which of course can’t communicate digitally with similar systems at other providers.
All that paper, manual processing and silo-ed databases will need to change, and not just to make healthcare delivery more efficient and less costly for payers and providers, and to offer better outcomes for patients. Here’s why … By Pete Harris, Executive Director, Austin Blockchain Collective
It’s too late for 2020 predictions so here is one for the decade ahead … read this blog to the very end … Web 3.0 describes the next phase of the internet where control and privacy, and hence power, will be restored back to individuals and away from big tech companies that millions of people and businesses have come to rely on (to their benefit for sure, but at potentially great cost). Blockchain technology — specifically public blockchain — is a key enabler of Web 3.0. So too is decentralized storage and query mechanisms, decentralized telecommunications, tools to build decentralized applications. And integration gateways with other public blockchains, private blockchains and non-blockchain applications and databases. The Web 3.0 term was coined in 2014 by Gavin Wood, a Brit computer scientist who was the first CTO of Ethereum. He went on to found Parity Technologies and the Web3 Foundation, which is now rolling out its first public blockchain projects, known as Substrate and Polkadot. |
About the CURATORPete Harris is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of the DecentraTech Collective. He is also Principal of Lighthouse Partners, which provides business strategy services to developers of transformational technologies. He has 40+ years of business and technology experience, focusing in recent years on business applications of blockchain and Web 3.0 technologies. Curated AND FOCUSED CONTENTThe Collective recognizes that there is a wealth of information available from publications, newsletters, blogs, and more. So we are curating 'must read' content in specific areas to help our community to cut through the noise and focus only on what’s important. Archives
February 2021
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