Rethink Trust 2018: Ana Trbovich, Interview
Recording: Rethink Trust 2018: Ana Trbovich, Interview
Thank you for your speech first of all. It was kind of you know amazing to see the perspective of energy sector in blockchain. So in this regard could you say what is the key role is in blockchain industry? So Energy Web Foundation is focused on the energy industry as the name says and we're working with corporations and startups building an ecosystem and developing a common platform, one common standard for energy blockchain applications. We're supporting energy blockchain applications globally. And how have you come to this? What was your career arc that led you to blockchain and energy synthesis? My personal background is in international affairs and public international law, public policy, innovation policy, including research on good governance and at the moment I'm also involved in creating our governance mechanism in terms of how transactions are decided upon and how to achieve principles of good governance, protection of competition, protection of data and other human economic rights. Okay, what do you think are the business drivers in blockchain industry? Business drivers, hard to say. So I mean if you mean what are the applications? are those that simplify and render transactions less expensive but also some transformative applications in energy such as peer-to-peer trading that are enabled by this new technology. And then what are the key characteristics you need to focus when working on enterprise blockchain? We work on one hand with developers on the other hand with the energy industry and try to bridge the demand and what are the possibilities to prioritize feature development
So for example in the energy industry it was very important to develop certain permissioning features on the chain, features that allow for data to remain secret while making sure that one is compliant with different regulation and transparent in how business is done. So to continue with the main advantage of blockchain while enabling data privacy. So I guess you had a lot of challenges, technical challenges. Could you tell us about a few of them? Our challenges are probably common to everyone working in the blockchain space. They relate to the early stage of blockchain development. Main challenge being scale. Now of course that depends on the type of application that is being implemented on the chain. In some you don't need such a high scale, you don't have that much of an issue
But the more disruptive application requires scale. If you want to collect connect all energy devices onto blockchain you will require a much higher scale. Then the other challenges include even an HR challenge finding sufficient number of developers qualified developers and supporting development of WASM which you know the Web Assembly and enabling developers with other more common languages to work on blockchain was one of the solutions in that direction. What do you think is the role of community in this regard in helping blockchain industry thrive? We find the community to be critical to the development and it has to be a common project which is why we're a public open source initiative and all the development that we have funded has been and will be open source for everyone else to use even beyond the energy industry. Nice and what do you like about Rethink Trust conference so far? Could you share? Rethink Trust has been very useful in that it connects some of the more advanced blockchain developer applications that are developing use cases and explains how this works with enterprises. So, so far I've seen conferences that are very tech focused or conferences that are very industry focused. This is a nice bridge. So in that sense a good conference to attend
Well, thank you for your comments and I hope that you enjoyed this conference a lot. Thank you.