Clavent held a conference on 1st of February, 2019 around Blockchain and how the technology is bringing disruption across industries and building smarter ways to manage any transactional process with least friction. Titled “Blockchain 2.0 Summit,” the conference attracted a plethora of speakers, industry experts, emerging startups and attendees from across the country and abroad. 

The summit began with a keynote session by Mohan Satyarajan, Technical Mentor of nVipani Labs who spoke on the state of Blockchain and its unlimited future possibilities. This session proved to be a head-turner and set the stage for all that was to follow. Ashish Bhatia, Senior Director and Global Head at HARMAN International focussed his talk on adapting Blockchain for Enterprise. Focusing on how effectively Enterprises can leverage this technology as a differentiator, he also highlighted the impact of GDPR on Blockchain usage.

Araf Karsh Hamid, Co-Founder & CTO of MetaMagic Global Inc drew from his extensive 25 years of experience with design and development organizations including Bank of America, the U.S. Department of State, and the U.S. Dept of Energy to stress the importance of Privacy and Trust along with Shared Ledger and Smart Contract technologies and move from Systems of Records to Systems of Proof. Speaking of the one key feature of HyperLedger Fabric, he emphasised the importance of channels to provide a mechanism for private communications and private data between the members of a consortium.

The audience was enthralled with another facet of Blockchain application when Dr Vikram Venkateswaran, Founder and Editor of Healthcare India, spoke of leveraging Blockchain to improve the current disease management system and other healthcare outcomes such as increasing access, improving quality and reducing cost. Gokul Alex, Associate Director, PwC spoke of the emerging frontiers of Blockchain security and how Post Quantum Cryptography Protocols can secure Blockchains against the emerging threats of Quantum Computers. He opined that there was an increasing need to provide privacy preserving smart contracts and trusted execution environments to the end users in today’s world.

Mohan Satyarajan spoke to the attendees about the lessons that could be learnt from projects like UBIN which established ‘Delivery Versus Payment (DVP)’ settlement automated using 'Smart Contracts', helped achieve invest protection and 'Interledger Interoperability'.

Vijay Kumar, Technology Executive (Blockchain & Security) for TiVo held a session on the potential of Blockchain in solving deterring issues of Non-Performing Assets (NPA) and focussed on how the convergence of Blockchain and AI would be the talk of the future. 

Industry professionals, Technical Architects, Senior Engineers, Regional Directors, CEOs, CTOs and Developers from companies like Cisco, CoinSwitch, Dunya Labs, Hitachi Consulting, Mindtree, Robert Bosch, Siemens, Infichains, BlockVigil, ThoughtWorks and other organizations constituted the participants of the event. 

Sessions by Shankar Ganesh P J, Staff Engg & Blockchain Specialist at Blockstack and Chandni Arora Project Manager, Solution Architect at Hitachi Consulting focussed on building dApps (Distributed Apps) and infusion of IoT and AI into Blockchain technology respectively. Chandni provided the audience with precious insights into real-world requirements, use-cases and client expectations from her personal consulting experience. She spoke of how the infusion of three transformational technologies – Blockchain, IoT and AI would result in something exponentially more powerful than they are alone and how it can help enterprises to derive unprecedented business value than before.

The evening of the summit witnessed ‘lightning talks’ on some real-life application examples for Blockchain adopters. Rajarshi Mitra, Blockchain Researcher at Blockgeeks spoke of how Blockchain technology is being considered a game-changer in completely revamping the supply chain management industry. Rohit Taneja, Director & CEO of BirthVenue explored certain killer apps of blockchain and how they disrupt different aspects of routine lives. Sharat Chandra, President, Bangalore Chapter of the Government Blockchain Association highlighted the Vital Records Management project as a paradigm shift in identity management.

The conference concluded with an extremely interactive and enthusiastic panel discussion moderated by Rajarshi Mitra on speculations about where the biggest impact of Blockchain be seen. Involving the CEOs of innovative startups in the panel proved to be a brilliant choice as it saw industry professionals, developers, CEOs and founders of several companies express their concerns, experiences and share their doubts with the leaders and the audience. The Summit received excellent feednack from the speakers as well as the attendees. 

More details: https://www.clavent.com/blockchain-summit-2-0/