Antony Welfare is the Managing Director of Luxoft, which is part of DXC Technology and has accumulated a wealth of experience on blockchain across industries. He recently published the book Commercializing Blockchain whose content we will be discussing in this podcast. Antony is interested in real blockchain applications and is all about commercializing blockchain - using blockchain in a commercial business or a government to add value efficiency, trust, and a lot more which is discussed in this podcast.

 
What is blockchain?
Blockchain itself is just a technology. It's just a set of rules and principles that you can put into code. It is an enabler for trust and transparency in any network or business or community, in government, where data and information that's transferred can be more trusted and transparent. Blockchain circumvents all the modern issues we presently have around the reconciliation of data, auditing it and verifying it. Blockchain is fundamentally about trust and transparency.

How does blockchain compare to two companies who have a decade worth of trust in working together and have an API to sharing and exchanging information. Antony would really challenge if two companies, organisations or networks would really trust each other. Each party always reconcile the information they have as they don’t have the exact same copy of the data. At the end of the day the transparency and the trust isn’t there in a technical format. Blockchain is about making the trust and transparency there in a very clear black and white coded manner.

 
Commercializing Blockchain – The Book
Back in 2017, Antony was working with Oracle Corporation and was doing some deep research on blockchain. During his research he realised he wanted to write about real blockchain applications and how the technology could impact individuals, businesses, and government communities. His initial thought was to write a blog to help him in creating material for the keynote speeches. It is at this moment that it dawned on him that there was an opportunity to write a book. Through his contacts from meetups and the feedback he was getting on his book idea he realised that not a single person in the world knows it all on blockchain. He invited 13 contributors to write different sections of the book from how contracts are formulated to global trade issues to consensus mechanism and what the future looks like.

The common and most interesting question he asked all of his contributors is what does blockchain look like in five years time. They all agreed that blockchain is going to be an enabler for us to build solutions to be more efficient to more trusted as a community and that no one will be talking about blockchain just like no one talks about TCP/IP for the web.

 
Killer app of blockchain?
Email is one of the killer apps for the internet. We asked Antony what he thought would be the killer app for blockchain. Antony believes that the killer app is around identity. He believes that there will be an app that will sit on your device (mobile, laptop, etc..) that will hold the identity keys where you share what you want to share with whom you want to share it, what portion of the data and for how long. Essentially, self sovereign identity. Which means that similarly to how you use Google or Facebook but with the difference that you know what’s happened with your data, where is has gone, who has used it and crucially you determine that instead of Google or Facebook. Then tokenization of this data can also all you to get paid for how you wish your data t...