BeefLedger joins Austrade Shanghai Blockchain Mission

BeefLedger continues its strong engagement with both the Australian blockchain technology sector as well as with the China marketplace. Between 10-12 September, we joined the Austrade Shanghai Blockchain Mission (co-arranged by the Australian Digital Commerce Association).

We had opportunities to meet with technology leaders in the financial services space, which from our perspective touches on efforts to streamline supply chain financing and cross-border transactions.

We gained valuable insights from discussions with China’s largest insurance company and financial services group (Ping’An), Ant Financial and rapidly scaling peer-to-peer lender Dianrong. BeefLedger thanks the teams at these companies for providing us with their valuable time and insights.

The Mission also opened new opportunities to explore collaboration with banking institutions, particularly in areas of more cost-effective and time-efficient cross-border payments and settlements. Discussions we held with a number of Chinese banks provide the avenues for future collaboration as BeefLedger readies its “exports smart contracts” project with the Food Agility Cooperative Research Centre (more below).

A highlight of the Mission was the intimate high level dinner hosted by the Australian Consul-General at the Official Residence. It was an opportunity to sample some Australian product being showcased in Shanghai, where we were able to discuss cross-border payment opportunities with a number of leading financial institutions.

 

Expanding IP base through global knowledge exchange

Blockchain Summit: BeefLedger also attended the 4th International Blockchain Summit, organised by WanXiang, in Shanghai. Two days of robust presentations and discussions of technological developments, use cases and use case opportunities were framed by Ethereum Founder, Vitalik Buterin’s keynote address on “Mechanism Design in Blockchain”.

Opportunities to integrate the economic incentive features of “mechanism design” is an important field of research and development for our team. We are working on these issues in partnership with Professor Uwe Dulleck and his team at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) as part of the Exports Smart Contracts Project (see below).

ETHIS: In addition to the International Blockchain Summit, BeefLedger also attended the Ethereum Developer Conference in Hong Kong (8 September).

Privacy and identity management issues featured prominently in discussions, with a focus on opportunities to use decentralised cryptographic protocols to bridge the “gap” between privacy preservation and system security (and regulatory compliance).

Crypto-economics and industry skills development were also hot topics, with a lively presentation by Karl Florsch from the Ethereum Foundation.

 

 

Listening to our stakeholder community

A key plank in the BeefLedger development journey is our commitment to building and working with a diverse range of communities.

As a whole-of-supply-chain activity, BeefLedger’s communities span end consumers (whether they be in China, Australia or elsewhere in the world), restauranteurs, distributors and wholesalers, collaborative consumption groups, transporters, IOT developers and system providers, feedlot operators, producers and processors.

It’s a very diverse community requiring ongoing attention to detail. We make a point of getting out and about, directly engaging with those in the supply chain committed to the pursuit and the rewarding of excellence.

Consumer Community: BeefLedger has a strong consumer community and active collaborative consumption groups in China, where food quality, food safety and food fraud are serious issues. As part of our China Roadshow, we have gained insights from our consumer community, which continues to remind us how important credentialed and trustworthy “country of origin” data is.

Restauranteurs: restaurants in China depend on reputations for ongoing success. Sourcing secure and credentialed supplies of high quality produce is a daily supply chain need, and challenge, for many high-end restaurants. The evolving maturation of the Chinese diner demands of restauranteurs attention to provenance like never before. We are grateful for the restaurant owners who’ve already expressed interest in working with BeefLedger to secure credentialed beef supply, support our future showcase events to raise market awareness of Australian beef and our technologies and provide ongoing user community feedback as part of our FA CRC development activities.

Unsurprisingly, we’ve also found strong interest from importers of wines who are seeking opportunities to partner and leverage our credentialing capabilities and channels for high quality Australian beef.

Over the next few months, the BeefLedger team will be refining the partnering opportunities with restauranteurs and wine importers to grow awareness, expand distribution channels and secure growing export volumes of high quality Australian beef utilising the BeefLedger technology platform.

Retail platforms: We’ve also progressed discussions with an online retailer to the point where we are finalising transaction terms and scopes. This platform reaches 100,000s of regular consumers each day and provides a fantastic opportunity to showcase the value of Australian produced beef.

We will share more insights based on user feedback shortly.

 

 

 

Export Smart Contracts Project

BeefLedger has a long association with the $200m Commonwealth Government supported Food Agility Cooperative Research Centre (FA CRC). As a founding industry partner, we have been working closely with a diverse range of expert collaborators to shape up a key research and development activity in the national interest.

In short-hand terms, we describe this project as the Export Smart Contracts activity. Initially conceived as a 12 month Roadmap, through detailed discussions with the CRC and feedback from the CRC’s leadership and investment council, the project scope has now been extended to cover a 24 month Program.

Over that period, we will focus on delivering (among other things):

  • An integration of data access and verification functionality into a cryptocurrency Wallet, to be progressively improved via ongoing involvement of our user community domestically and in China;
  • Develop, design and code smart contracts that can support the cross-border transactions and payments requirements of supply chain participants;
  • Address Oracle validation challenges through the application of cryptographic solutions, which enables greater confidence in data validity provided by, or accessed from, third parties. This work will also focus on validity of the platform and its “tools” from the point of view of relevant regulators;
  • Design and begin implementation of a multi-chain architecture that delivers the variable performance requirements of different supply chain actors (eg., latency, transactions speed, security, privacy etc.);
  • Design and implement a number of trial cryptoeconomic approaches to creating incentive mechanisms aligned to, and validated by, valid data states. This work will be strongly informed by mechanism design theoretic considerations; and
  • Initial insights into the data feedback loop mechanisms that better link consumers to producers and producer communities, to explore new ways in which supply chain data value can enable more sustainable regional communities and, at the same time, create new data-driven value creation opportunities for regional labour forces.

 

BEEF Tokens: Exchange Listed

The BEEF token is now listed on SoarEx, a cryptocurrency exchange platform serving South East Asia and Australasia. SoarEx (www.soarexchange.io) provides exchange pairings for a growing portfolio of cryptocurrencies, including BEEF token.

The SoarEx platform has been developed by our ecosystem collaborators at Soar Labs in Singapore. This enabled the project an opportunity to open up to a wider audience across SE Asia and Australia, via an accessible and easy to use exchange platform. As the first Wallet integration for the BEEF token will be with the Soar Wallet (a low-cost / high-speed offchain technology), being accessible via SoarEx has been a logical step.

Token exchangeability is to enable holders to benefit from fungibility, and navigate across different functional ecosystems in a seamless and cost-efficient manner. As an ERC-20 compliant token, BEEF will be exchangeable across other platforms in the future. The BeefLedger team is in discussions with a number of other platforms already.

BeefLedger has issued a Responsible Token Ownership Guidelines and we encourage token owners to take their responsibilities to the ecosystem seriously.

 

Join the BeefLedger Community: Register on the Exchange

To join the BeefLedger community, you can register on the Exchange and begin trading. The Exchange has a Know Your Client identification and verification process, so you will need various forms of identification documents to complete the process. To begin the process, go here: https://www.soarexchange.io/join/25dec4