Future Policy Principles for Digital Assets & Commerce

As governments, regulators and policy makers around the globe grapple with the increasing volume of trade and prevalence of digital assets, and the world matures positions on appropriate frameworks and lenses for responsible regulation alongside risks and opportunities, what common principles can be identified to guide policy makers? What themes have arisen to provide principles that may become the bedrock of a new economic framework that allows for a truly connected digital asset enabled global economy? This session will seek to bring together insights from the working groups and various session across the three days to showcase the various perspectives and investigate if there has indeed been common principles that have arisen in Adelaide that can seed a global policy framework.

Leading Participants

Patrick Byrne, CEO Overstock.com
Stuart Davis, Global Head, Financial Crimes Risk Management, Scotiabank
Caroline Malcolm, Blockchain Policy Centre OECD
Shikha Mehra, Mainchain
Joe Schoendorf, Accel Partners
Joseph Weinberg, Chairman of Shyft Networks

Comments from

Nick Giurietto, ADCA

Moderated by

Nik Gowing, Thinking the Unthinkable

Blockchain in Health - My Records and My Identity

Lead Participants

Mark Staples, Data61
Dr Shada Alsalamah, Media Lab, MIT

Working Group Whitepaper Discussion Q&A

Robert Laidlaw, Secure Health Chain
Michael Costello, General Manager, Innovation & Gateway Services, HealthDirect
Jason Lee, NEM.io Foundation

Moderated by

Frank Ricotta, BurstIQ

Payments & the Future of Money
2030: A Blockchain Enabled world - a Nirvana or Purgatory?

Lead Participants

Patrick Byrne, CEO Overstock.com
Simon Chantry, CBDO Bitt
Ganhuyag Hutagt, CEO Ard Holdings
Caleb Yeoh, CEO Travelbybit
Joseph Weinberg, Chair Shyft
Ben Yablon, SALT Lending

Comments form

Kyle Kemper, Strategist, Technologist & Author
Ron Tucker, President ADCA

Moderated by

Nick Giurietto, CEO ADCA

Masterclass Primer - Capacity Building

Innovation in emerging tech poses unique and significant challenges across the sector, especially in the area of resourcing and skills-development. Companies and projects looking to capitalise on the disruptive potential of technologies like blockchain need to consider both current and future resourcing requirements to ensure their success.  Join us for a Masterclass on Building Capacity and Skills in Blockchain, looking at key considerations for corporations entering the blockchain and distributed ledger technology arena. Through case studies and shared industry insights, this Masterclass will walk executives through some of the fundamental aspects of building and leading a blockchain team.

Conversation Starters from select speakers

(by registration only)

Participants will have the opportunity to gather at a local Adelaide venue after dinner to share insights, experiences and stories.

This is a ticketed event.

Registered participants will be able to attend via their registration accreditation.

This evening includes limited entertainment and is supported by the local blockchain community organisations Adelaide Blockchain and South Australian Blockchain Association.

Topic and Speaker based dinners will happen around the following topics. Registration is essential.

A stand up dinner will continue in the Pre-Dinner Drinks location for those not wishing to attend the ‘dine-around’.

Topics

• Evolution in regulations of digital assets

• Start-up opportunities in blockchain

• Crypto market ideas

• Enabling Social Impact with Blockchain

• Mauritius Stories

• Bermuda Stories

• Other

Keynote Address

Introductory comments

David Ridgway, Minister for Trade, Tourism and Investment

Crypto-currencies, Digital Assets and Financial Markets

This session approaches the broad topics of crypto-currencies, digital assets and the relationship to financial markets. What makes a robust crypto-currency (if a real currency at all) and what are the ways digital assets can impact and interact with financial markets. How is the potential confusion between unregulated and regulated, favourable vs unfavourable jurisdictions, good practises vs bad practises play out? How do we tackle the confusion and asymmetrical knowledge gap through this period of transition toward institutional adoption and investment digital assets. What role do stable coins and exchanges play or custodian services play in this transition? It also looks at some of the factors challenging the markets given the pace of adoption. Where does one draw the line between payment systems, infrastructure, forms of payments and digital assets themselves. The revolution of change in the speed of adoption (responsibly or not) is creating brands and brand confusion but is this the new types of companies that we will see enabled through digital assets, or noise in a process of transition to a more stable and environment of clarity.

Lead Participants

Henrik Andersson, Apollo Capital
Simon Chantry, CBDO Bitt
Ganhuyag Hutagt, CEO Ard Holdings
Sam Lee, CEO Blockchain Global
Matt Loughran, Founder Uulalaa

Moderated by

Ben Yablon, Chairman SALT Lending

Traceability, Provenance, Cultural Heritage and Increasing Consumer Demands

DLTs and blockchain present perhaps the biggest opportunity for the digitisation and preservation of artefacts the world has scene at a global scale. The protocols, platforms and applications themselves may not yet be written or in their infancy of adoption at a broader sense, but some countries are more advanced than others. This could be authenticity of art provenance, wine vineyard or other brand validation, or something more structural like land title protection. Challenges arise with this too. Should for example, native title and cultural heritage, not just an Australian phenomena, be immutably preserved in an applicable DLT and protected and rewarded this way where there is conjecture or sensitivities to the form of ‘record keeping’ for certain cultures involved? What risks are there for getting on-ramping and off-ramping right or wrong? This session will draw on our lead panellists experiences in rolling out or researching such solutions.

Lead Participants

Ali El Husseini, Medici Land Governance
Katrina Donaghy, Co-founder Civic Ledger
Dermot O’Gorman, CEO WWF
Jason Potts, RMIT Blockchain Research Centre
Paul Pounendis, President Adelaide Blockchain

Moderated by

Rowen Fenn, Rise-x.io

Education & The Future of Organisations & Work

With the opportunity for efficiency and certainty in various decentralisation processes underway enabled by technology such as AI and blockchain protocols that can change the way we live and work, what will this new way we work and organise look like? What impact will it have on our lives? Will companies and organisations have less dedicated workforces and people pick and choose where they apply their skills and time in a more relevant way to purpose? Will the jobs created by these new industries replace those that it disrupts and makes redundant? What has the spirit and collaborative approach of developers and entrepreneurs who have delivered systems across countries and sectors now used by millions of people taught us; or those communities who have introduced digital assets and payment rewards meant to how we are incentivised to apply our time and to whom? Will there be enough work and how therefore will governments and societies accommodate those who aren’t employed or aren’t skilled? This session looks at the increasing digitisation and decentralisation of systems across our working lives, and the impact on how we will work, what education we will need and how we will collaborate in the future.

Lead Participants

Patrick Byrne, CEO Overstock.com
Heather Delfs, Kingsland University
Sophie Gilder, Head of Experimentation - Blockchain Embodied AI & Emerging Tech, Innovation Labs, CBA
Nimo Naamani, Horizon State
Ashok Mysore, Vice President, Regional Head Delivery and Operations, Infosys

Moderated by

Dr Jane Thomason, Blockchain Quantum Impact

Distributing Impact Through Disintermediation & Other Transformative Enabling Social Impact Consequences (NDIS, WHO, etc)

Blockchain has significant application in reducing payments and remittance costs across borders as well as enhancing certainty of distributing value to those who need it most. Furthermore the risks of corruption or unintended losses maybe reduced through a DLT solution without potentially as big an administrative and cost burden of facilitating aid as the traditional centralisation of financing and distribution through intermediaries. A solution utilising mobile devices for ease of localisation, biometrics for identity and blockchain based protocols for delivery when combined under smart contracts were shown recently to allow direct distribution of aid funding post disaster relief reducing the risk of people taking more than their intended share of the food or aid and intermediaries not holding up or reducing what ends up with the intended beneficiaries. This is just one example. What other opportunities are there where blockchain based solutions can change the way we enable communities that need it most?

Lead Participants

Sophie Gilder, Head of Experimentation - Blockchain Embodied AI & Emerging Tech, Innovation Labs, CBA
Robert Laidlaw, Secure Health Chain
Lina Lim, Tempus Adventus
Margaret Towle, Yakima River Partners

Moderated by

Heather Delfs, Kingsland University

Blockchain Governance as an Export Industry: Observations for Australia

Australia has a unique place in the emerging global blockchain industry. If it positions itself carefully and mindfully, can Australia play a leading role of exporting best practice and governance principles around digital assets and DLTs? What commitment does the Government need to make to facilitating infrastructure and consequently attracting investment into this country around blockchain? What capacity building is required to sell services and these expertise to others. What does Australia need to do to be a leader and should Australia be taking this step at a government level in such an emerging industry? How ultimately does Australia make sure it is attracting investment from the blockchain community and not losing talent and therefore investment to other countries? In this session we explore these questions and look at the experience of other countries through the eyes of our Lead Participants and an example from Malta.

Insight form

MALTA Experience

Lead Participants

Susan Corbisiero, Lead, Services and Technology, Austrade
Nick Giurietto, CEO ADCA
Lorreta Joseph, Fintech & Regulatory Adviser to FSC Mauritius
Kyle Kemper, Technologist, Strategist and Author
Mark Staples, Senior Principle Researcher, Data61
Tadej Slapnik, Chairman World Blockchain Hub

Comments from

Patrick Byrne, CEO Overstock.com
Anton Roux, CEO ADC Forum

Moderated by

Dr Jane Thomason, Blockchain Quantum Impact

Technology Frontiers - DLTs, Hash Graphs, Blockchains and more

Like any technology or practise, there are good and bad designs, appropriate and inappropriate use cases and applications and advances in thinking and discovery ongoing. This session looks at examples of good and bad or appropriate and inappropriate application of various DLTs. It also looks to discuss what advances and frontiers are next after blockchain. Sometimes it is not the best protocol or best solution that gets mass adoption but the one that was used in the right place, by the right people at the right time. We look also here at the latest thinking and research into solutions and what impact these may have too.

Lead Participants

Vallipuram Muthu, Associate Prof Griffith University
Frank Ricotta, CEO BurstIQ
RK Shyamasundar, Distinguished Visiting Prof, Dpt Com Sci & Eng, IIT Bombay
Joseph Weinberg, Chairman Shyft Network
Liming Zhu, Data61

Moderated by

Shikha Mehra, Mainchain

Blockchain and the Impact on Economies and Government - a Q&A Dialogue

The adoption of new technologies that can impact economies at a large scale whatever they are requires mindful and responsible processes through appropriate stakeholders. Digital assets prevent a potential new paradigm and challenge for transferring value with numerous implications. This can be challenging as new policies are required and regulation rolled-out, and therefore several factors such as capacity building on technology, education and core required skills, as well as an underlying platform for basic infrastructure are necessary to ensure it can move from theory to practice. This can take time. Equally if other countries are adopting a pervasive trend more quickly than others, or don’t have encumbrance of legacy infrastructure or large historic investments in other skills or solutions, they can move more quickly. Wireless for example leapfrogged fixed line, systems of drones/UAVs versus traditional trucking logistics routes, etc. How does Australia, or any country ensure they get the balance between rapid adoption and responsible regulation and policy making right? What have other countries done well or poorly? What means, levers and mechanisms do these governments or central banks have to create a ‘sand-boxed’ environment to allow the growth of blockchain as a new industry to discover its own destiny as to whether it will live up to the expectations or find its natural course of adoption relevance.

Lead Participants

Jane Hume, Senator of Victoria
Ed Husic MP, Shadow Minister of the Digital Economy
Elizabeth Genia, Asst Governor Bank of PNG
Navin Beekarry, Director-General ICAC Mauritius

Intervention from

Yandraduth Googoolye, Governor of the Bank of Mauritius

Comments from

Caroline Malcolm, Blockchain Policy Centre OECD

Moderated by

Nik Gowing, Thinking the Unthinkable

Venture Capital, Hedge Funds & Blockchain Investment

What investment opportunities should investors be observing and considering in this rapidly evolving sector? What is common about this wave of DLT based investments cycle in the emergence of entrepreneurial blockchain projects that have attracted billions globally compared with other waves of new technology adoption in the past like the tech boom of the 90’s? What’s different this time if anything? Is there a clear ‘facebook, google or amazon’ yet? Or are we looking at the myspaces of our time? What role do these huge tech giants have to play in planting a flag in blockchain? Will they get it right? Where are the opportunities presenting themselves for digital assets and investment in DLT and blockchain projects the next 2 to 5 years? Is the institutional waive of capital coming now the introduction of custodial solution is beginning to emerge?

Lead Participants

Joe Schoendorf, Accel Partners
Henrik Andersson, Apollo Capital
Patrick Byrne, CEO Overstock.com
Ben Yablon, Chairman SALT Lending
Wei Zhou, CFO Binance

Moderated by

Stephen Roux, Vice Chair ADC 100

Risk & Security with Blockchain & DLTs

At the heart of developing blockchain is cryptography, mathematics, and core computer science and engineering skills. However, the exposure and risks of implementing blockchain solutions might be farther reaching than purely what is happening at a coding or hardware issue. These systems all variably operate under a dependence on hardware speeds and reliability, good architecture, robust digital infrastructure and depending on the use case, in some applications, potentially unregulated offline interactions. What is the risk of a poorly understood or implemented smart-contracts having unintended consequences? Can we rely on these systems to work as intended and what risk do unsupervised systems have when immutable ledgers are involved? With the potential for blockchain and smart contracts to underpin the basic functions of our societies, what measures should be put in place to ensure the good coding practises and defences are there to avoid unintended consequences and protect the valuable data that is to be stored within? This session also looks at what are the unthinkable ways that these systems can be manipulated or compromised and what is being done to avoid this?

Lead Participants

Vallipuram Muthu, Associate Professor, Griffith University
Liming Zhu, Data61
Frank Ricotta, Founder BurstIQ
Daniel Floreani, CyberOps
Shada Alsalamah, College of Computer and Information Science, King Saud University

Moderated by

Jason Lee, NEM.io Foundation

SHOWCASE SA - South Australian Blockchain Stories & Community

As part of our SHOWCASE SA series, together with the Blockchain Innovation Challenge, this session looks at what South Australia has achieved already in community building, university education, entrepreneurial initiatives and establishing companies and projects. We hear from some of the earliest adopters and innovators in the Adelaide community, many of whom have travelled globally and been part of numerous DLT businesses and successful projects. The questions are also posed on what else is there to do in capacity building for the sector? What more can be done to strengthen the skills and what deeper investment can be made in South Australia to grow it as a capital of the blockchain industry? With $50bn+ of defence contracts, a growing engineering skills capacity as a result and winning the $12bn national space industry only late last year, can Australia become a centre for Australia’s blockchain industry and more so, can it compete on the world stage?

Lead Participants

James Scott, Digichain
Derek Grocke, CyberOps
Chris Weddle, PAC
Angela DiFabio, Flinders University
Ben Longstaff, MEECO
Paul Pounendis, Adelaide Blockchain

Comments from

Caleb Slade, Chief Knowledge Officer, SALT

Moderated by

Luke Lombe, Echelon One

Blockchain in the Supply Chain, Food Safety (Food / Agriculture)

Blockchain technologies and smart-contract based protocols are presenting perhaps the most useful solutions to start to address a tightening of global supply chains and therefore potentially strengthening of biosecurity, delivery, traceability and perhaps in the longer term greater distribution of wealth to the upstream suppliers. Many solutions are being tried both here in South Australia and across the globe from wine brand protection, infant formula food safety or general visibility for consumers of the supply chain. What role is a smart-contract or DLT playing in this? How big an issue is offline/online on-ramping and what other technologies are required to ensure integrity of what is put the ledger? What are the various applications in supply chain and food safety where DLTs and blockchain can solve problems best and where does it not make sense? This session looks at different examples and technologies that are being implemented and some of the challenges with rolling these out as well as the opportunities yet to be tapped.

Lead Participants

Katrina Donaghy, Civic Ledger
Tim Cartwright, General Manager Fresh Foods, Drakes Supermarkets 
Rupert Colchester, Blockchain Lead ANZ IBM
Sophie Gilder, Head of Experimentation - Blockchain Embodied AI & Emerging Tech, Innovation Labs, CBA
Paul Ryan, CEO & Director, Trust Codes Limited 
Simon Tamke, Global Retail Sales Manager, Thomas Food International 

Moderated by

Hugh Rutherford, Software Engagement Leader IBM

Capacity Building - Serving the Blockchain Industry

As awareness grows of the potential applications, beneficial use cases and impact distributed ledger technologies can have across businesses, on governments and on the broader community, decision makers and entrepreneurs across the board are in various stages of initiating strategic reviews or new projects. Increasingly, there is demand on various stakeholders to assess the risks and opportunities of the applicability of DLTs to their businesses and sectors. Demands are accelerating for securing experienced developers, technologists, knowledgable practitioners and services providers who can actually undertake this work; but where will these people come from? What skills do they need? How does Australia train its talent, attract new talent and harness the opportunity to serve this new blockchain industry? What needs to be done not just in Australia but globally to build the deep science skills and workforce capacity that is going to be required to realise any such vision? What models exists to facilitate the current needs?

Lead Participants

Jason Potts, RMIT Blockchain Centre
Ed Husic MP, Shadow Minister for the Digital Economy
Robert Kim, Kingsland University
Nick Giurietto, CEO ADCA
Manjunatha Gurulingaiah Kukkuru, Associate Vice President and Principal Research Analyst of the Infosys Center for Emerging Technology Solutions
Ron van der Meyden, University of New South Wales

Moderated by

Angela Di Fabio, New Ventures Flinders University

Future of Regulation and Enforcement

Policy and regulation often shadows new innovations and new industry. In the case of DLTs, there are capacity building and education requirements within regulatory offices and policy makers to both understand the technologies, what risks and opportunities they present and how to appropriately and carefully develop regulation to accommodate them. Enforcement presents problems when identity, privacy and asymmetry of technology is present. How do regulators exercise their function with these challenges? How to protect ultimately the consumers relying on these too? With a truly global economy for digital assets how to tackle aml/kyc and general identity/transaction traceability and enforce it? This session explores the challenges, myths and recent sandbox environment use cases that are pushing the boundaries of existing regulatory frameworks to accommodate digital assets.

Lead Participants

Dr Shada Alsalamah, MIT
Dr Navin Beekarry, ICAC
Stuart Davies, Scotiabank
Loretta Joseph, Fintech & Regulatory Adviser to FSC Mauritius
Caroline Malcolm, Blockchain Policy Centre, OECD

Moderated by

Michael Bacina, Partner Piper Alderman

Townhall - How ready are we for the rise of blockchain based industries?

Identity, Privacy and Sovereignty

What role does trust play in blockchain enabled industries and systems as the dependence shifts from people to the protocol and the system itself? If we are increasingly in control of our own data, does this mean we have more control of our own privacy and identity? Are we more free or less free to act? Who is in control of the architecture and rules behind the protocols that govern the smart contracts in place and what are the intended and unintended consequences likely to be as the prevalence of these systems grow? Does greater control of our individual data positively or negatively impact the value of country sovereignty? Are we ready?

This session is a townhall format that seeks to engage participants on various questions and call on the lead participants for commentary from the audience too.

Facilitated by

Nik Gowing, Thinking the Unthinkable

Insights from

Kyle Kemper, Technologist, Strategist and Author
Matt Loughran, Uulala
Shikha Mehra, Mainchain Research
Nimo Naamani, Horizon State
Dr Jane Thomason, Blockchain Quantum Impact

Conversation Starters from select speakers

(invitation only)

Conversation Starters from select speakers

(invitation only)

Nightcap - Case Study Mongolia

Insights from:

Ganhuyag Hutagt, CEO Ard Holdings
Tenuun Garid, CEO Tenger Systems

Nightcap - Showcase SA

Insights from:

Steven Marshall, Premier of South Australia

Nightcap - Case Study Mauritius

Insights from:

Rajesh Ramloll, Deputy Solicitor General, Mauritius
Navin Beekarry, Director-General ICAC, Mauritius
Loretta Joseph, Fintech & Regulatory Adviser to FSC Mauritius