Marc Taverner is the executive director of the International Association for Trusted Blockchain Applications (INATBA) since the middle of January 2020. He has been active in the global blockchain ecosystem for more than five years, working across 20 countries, engaging with organisations from core crypto currency companies to governments and financial institutions, through to large corporates and industry associations.

As executive director of INATBA, Marc is committed to positioning INATBA as the only international organization truly equipped to convene public and private industry partners with the credible support of powerful allies like the European Commission and key advisory bodies

 
What is blockchain?
For Marc, blockchain is a type of distributed ledger technology (DLT) where transactions are recorded with an immutable cryptographic signature called a hash. These are added into a chain of blocks, with each block, validating the prior block and creating an immutable audit trail that in turn creates trust.

Distributed ledger technology is a decentralised database managed by multiple participants across multiple nodes.

The reason why blockchain and distributed ledger technology is important is because it finally helps us solve the issue of trust by applying technologies such as cryptography and governance models such as consensus mechanisms.

 
What is INATBA?

To answer the question of what is INATBA, Marc took us on his journey that ultimately took him to INATBA. In the 2014, Marc was introduced to the world of blockchain and bitcoin when he met Valery Vavlivo, CEO and co-founder of Bitfury, who made him Global Ambassador & Markets Development at Bitfury.

Whilst at Bitfury, Marc learned that trying to get large blockchain applications to scale, such as the Land Registry one for the Republic of Georgia or the one the Ukraine’s Government plans to auction seized assets on a blockchain, would come up against a number of friction points. These frictions points weren’t only technology ones but also one of policy and of interoperability both between nations and between technology stacks.

All these applications were interesting for those governments and created a great deal of interest with other governments around the world who wanted to leverage those applications and others. But the friction points were preventing the adoption of blockchain based technologies at a massive scale.

Some of these issues are rooted around the lack of standards and interoperability between technology stacks which would cause governments and large potential customers of this technology to recoil a little from making early decisions for the fear of either putting themselves into a vendor locking position, or a situation where they've made the wrong strategic technological decision.

INATBA exists to address some of those friction points. They bring a number of parties together from governments and supranational bodies in the public sector to startups, SMEs and enterprises in the private sector, to try and achieve commonality across standards, good governance and interoperability. By reducing those friction points they hope for blockchain to be massively adopted.

 
Interoperability
Establishing standards and interoperability from a technology perspecti...