On May the 6th The DeBio Network initiator Ms. Pandu Sastrowardoyo was invited to speak at the G20 4th Infrastructure Working Group Meeting on the topic “Consumers’ Awareness, Protection and Blockchain for Traceability in the Digital Economy”.
Pandu is the founder of the Indonesian Blockchain Association and currently serves on its board of supervisors. The Indonesian Blockchain Association is an organization with 22 member companies and is the only Business-to-Business and Business-to-Government organization in Indonesia.
She is also the Chief Innovation Officer of Blocksphere, a Business-to-Business and Business-to-Government technology firm. In terms of supply chain management, Blocksphere has been involved with a lot of major players in Indonesia ranging from large corporations to non-profit institutions.
In recent decades, globalization has helped industry specialization. Fast and cheap shipping enables firms thousands of miles apart to compete with each other. Some small-to-medium-sized companies are not able to compete, and big firms who are able to compete in prices prefer to buy cheaper goods from overseas. Thus, creating a chain reaction of small-to-medium-sized businesses closing increasing the specialization of a region/nation.
A single product could rely on goods from multiple nations. Events such as the recent pandemic broadened this issue to an extent that companies worldwide start to realize how important their supply chains are and how ignorant they were towards their supply network.
According to an article by River Logic, there are 5 big challenges in supply chains that corporations encountered in 2020. Four out of the five challenges are closely related to supply chain management. The lack of data management in supply chains causes massive unexpected shortages in goods because most firms are unaware of where exactly their products come from. One potential solution is more transparency in the industry, and decentralized digital solutions might be able to help with this issue.
In her talk, Pandu is quoted saying, “In the future, we think that the primary things that matter for supply chains and blockchains are tokenization of IOUs, invoices and all these other documents both physical and digital assets and in payments can be tokenized further using these blockchain technologies”.
Blockchains are distributed ledgers that contain information about the transactions that are distributed to an entire network of computer systems. It is very difficult to change transaction data within a blockchain because blockchains are immutable, thus data integrity can be guaranteed.
The digitalization of assets would allow for additional metrics and analytics that can be anonymously aggregated enabling easy data access for companies to look up the condition of their supply chains. The transparency provided by blockchain solutions would enable a lot of things from enhancing traceability to increasing efficiency by reducing disruptions. It is also possible to create a network visualization because digitalized assets can be made to be interoperable between different blockchain networks.
Pandu mentioned both ERC20 and ERC721 protocols are being implemented for supply chain management systems. ERC721 is more commonly used nowadays because it is more commonly used for NFTs.
NFTs are digital assets that have taken the internet by storm lately. Currently, the most popular use of NFTs is for the selling of digital art but it can also be utilized to tokenize other assets such as purchase documents, payments, etc.
The digitalization of assets will bring upon new marketplaces to sell and trade these assets. This is evident with the many NFT marketplaces worldwide. An example of this would be Unique One, a non-profit digital assets marketplace. Unique One mostly sells digital art, but there are also examples of people selling real physical items on the site.
The possibilities are endless, and with the recent rise of NFTs, it can be said that ERC721 is getting adopted more than ever. The DeBio Network is also working on implementing their own type of document digitalization with the aim of implementing the digitalization of electrical medical records, vaccine documents, and many more biological data such that it would increase the privacy and efficiency needed in the biomedical market.
