The Sustainable Supply Chain Problem
The very future of our globe depends on establishing sustainable practices. For ourselves and for future generations, we must look at the impact of climate change, shifting nutrition needs, and the increasing scarcity of most of the physical factors of production. It’s essential that we shift to more productive and eco-friendly ways to produce our food, our resources, and even our waste. We need to apply our creativity to new ways of thinking about our land, our energy, and our water. We’re asking developers to use this challenge to stimulate creative thinking around these problems with blockchain technology. Sample issues include:
- Product integrity—assuring sustainable protocols are maintained
- A more direct connection between growers/producers and consumers
- Transparency of data so all parties can see the chain of trade for goods
- Reduction of human errors, faster response time to delivery challenges
- Authentication of goods and services that make up a sustainable product
- Detection of unethical suppliers and counterfeiters
Sample sustainable supply chain applications with blockchain include:
Energy: Monitoring clean electricity & renewable resources
Fashion: Tracking apparel production from the shearing of the sheep, to the making of a sweater with the wool, to the final garment
Coffee: Create records of the origins of coffee beans to ensure their purity and ethical trade. Mobile apps allow coffee lovers to check on the origins of each cup to ensure quality and freshness.
Food supply: With blockchain information can be collected about the path of food products including produce and livestock. With blockchain, these can now be tracked from farm to table help reduce spoilage and prevent diseases.
The Digital Identity Problem
Establishing a unique proof of identity is critical to gain access to basic services, such as healthcare, social benefits, and financial services. It also is essential to have access to better job opportunities. But over a billion children and adults worldwide do not have a recognized form of identity. In many countries, the design and implementation of civil registration and identification programs are shaped by cultural preferences, regulatory requirements, technological maturity and privacy needs. Often, registration can be approached from different points of entry, including both national ID initiatives or more narrow sector approaches, like healthcare, social welfare or finance.
The result is duplication and fragmented information and waste of resources. With blockchain, developers can look at collection data to establish digital identity from mobile phones, social media and other data. Blockchain has enabled better tracking of patient data for healthcare, tracking of academic data for school records and even tracking of missing and exploited children.
Typical digital identity challenges include:
- Access to birth records, passports and license information
- Ability to cost-effectively and seamlessly share data across borders and jurisdictions
- Secure access to payments, credit, government records, health records, or academic qualifications
- Enabling self-sovereignty by allowing individuals to control who can access their identity data via blockchain permissions
Sample Digital Identity Applications with blockchain include:
Healthcare: Ensuring Patient Identity via medical records accessible across the healthcare system. Several new apps have collected digital and paper based data with patient medical records and placed it on the blockchain for easy access.
Programming languages: For both challenges, a variety of programming languages can be used for Hyperledger blockchain coding including GoLanguage, Java and JavaScript.
Some other digital identity topics participants may wish to tackle include:
- Interoperability with Legacy systems. Extend the trust envelope to encompass Legacy systems used in the Enterprise
- Unlinkability - how does this operate in the Enterprise space, does it even matter? What about transactions and the visibility to participants.
- Integrate ZPK or other methods to prove certain statements revealing as little as possible about the identity of the participants
- Selective Disclosure: How can an Identity disclose the minimum (even to legitimate counterparties) to get our transaction done?
- Interoperability between chains and its effect on Identity.
- Revocation/Key loss, theft or removal of privileges and continuity of transactions. This can involve people getting assigned different roles.
- Interaction between public Identities (available on a self sovereign solution, like SOVRIN/Indy) and Identity on one of the Enterprise chains under Hyperledger.
- Implement ID2020 under Indy or other Hyperledger DLT- create a small PoC to implement
- How to make schemes like Aadhar more self-sovereign following the new legal rulings from Supreme court of India
- Look at the DID spec (https://w3c-ccg.github.io/did-spec/) and verifiable claims (https://www.w3.org/2017/vc/charter.html) and implementations that address specific concerns in those.