From Concept to Reality: The Triumph of Blockchain in Vaccine Distribution | Devcon SEA

[Music] [Music] all right um thank you for that uh it's one of the last talks of the day we don't have much time so hope it'll be a good one for you guys yeah so my name is Arun I uh work with UNICEF I the blockchain lead at the ventures team within the UN office of uh Innovation and we are here to uh chat with one of our portfolio companies stawick around the supply chain solution that they worked on and the impact they are creating along with uh uh a partner of ours on you know how to get these open- Source uh digital public goods funded um may I ask you guys to quickly introduce yourself starting with Mani yeah sure uh thanks a uh hi good evening everyone my name is Mani I'm the head of product at statway we are a blockchain based company where we are basically focused on enhancing the transparency and efficiency uh in the global Health public Supply chains what we essentially do is uh help stakeholders keep a track of all their transactions and give end to end visibility in the supply chains thank you and thank you both for the invitation today uh David Casey here director of funding the commons uh funding the commons is a community and event series focused around exploring public goods funding mechanisms and we do conferences hackathons uh open source developer residencies we just completed one in changai last month and uh public goods funding experiments so applied uh experiments using new new mechanisms so in case you wondering what a UNICEF person is doing here so we have been working with blockchain since 2015 uh we run something called the UNICEF Venture fund where we provide uh funding for early stage startups such as uh stat that man is working for uh and we are also interested in digital public goods we are part of the digital public goods Alliance and that's how we got to know David So hence here I am uh first question to Mani could you please maybe talk a bit of the product uh around the vaccine Supply chains please uh yeah uh so I think the problem um the the challenge that we were looking at was twofold uh so the first initial issue was around uh how the supply chains are fragmented and specifically in the Healthcare Systems how they rely on siloed and information which do not talk to each other the other issue was also around product wastage in terms of expiry counter feating and cold chain failures so these this was like the primary agenda that we wanted to like you know uh solve firsthand and like you know have a unified platform so that is where we've built a a solution called vaccine Ledger uh which typically ensures that uh every physical asset in the supply chain uh we create a digital twin of that uh and so from what how that works is that from the time of procurement or from the point of manufacturing and every time the product changes hands we basically record the Journey of products as in how it is passing on so we uh help ensure that you know all these stakeholders are completely aware of where the product is in supply chain right now uh yeah and and we did we did also have like issues looking around how 30% of the global vaccines were wasted and there was lack of information even within uh you know many organizations who where like sending out products to various uh uh lmic countries but there was like lack of visibility whether it's reaching the final beneficiaries or not so it it becomes very important and critical to ensure that the life saving vaccines and medicines reach to those uh people especially in the underd deserved areas and that's how I think what what we're trying to do is uh leverage blockchain uh and provide that uh you know the whole data uh in real time for every stakeholder to make informed decisions that's fantastic so um blockchain here is of course used to track every vial of the vaccine I think which adds a next layer of traceability uh and you know visibility which uh all the stakeholders uh get and U talking of stakeholders uh where have you piloted this solution uh so far uh yeah so we we've had a couple of deployments so we had it both on the private side also and on the public uh so we did uh a couple of deployments in uh Costa Rica uh we had partnership with idb inter American Development Bank uh who actually opened doors for us to like uh help track products within that market so the major issue at hand was that once the manufacturers send the product they only have visibility till Panama and after which there's like complete lack of understanding if the how is the product moving in the country so we we did make uh a deployment there and even during covid we were able to like track a million doses of covid-19 vaccines and also the end beneficiaries who were receiving it um and we we did have a another deployment another major deployment with the UNICEF uh so the way it works is that we have an LTA with UNICEF so that basically gives us that opportunity to like uh go to multiple countries we recently just deployed in Bangladesh uh so we are ensuring that we are tracking the product from the central procurement level at the country and uh there are like multiple various stakeholders within the entire ecosystem who are also going to be a part of it the major challenge I think we did have around was uh you know there were barriers in terms of uh digital infrastructure so they did not have like enough capabilities that could support uh and even in terms of remote locations right so there were like very very remote locations where you do not have like bandwidth capacity internet bandwidth capacity so we did employ a good good workaround plan for that to have an offline mode which basically helped people record information in real time so once they have the data connectivity back they can like you know they don't really have to enter it again but there were again issues with having uh uh localization in place uh so we did understand that it was going to come up uh eventually like as in how we like you know uh naturally grow uh to multiple countries we would uh have to like you know have uh the application of available in multiple languages and we how we have also made the whole thing accessible is that it is it's a combination of both web and mobile app so the way it works is that the user who actually who was initially recording it manually on a book and pen and paper he uh has the access on his mobile app so all he just has to do is download the app uh you know uh record the transaction so there's like no double work that he would necessarily have to do uh so in in that sense I think what we're also trying to do is have some concept called incentivization for uh making it easier for people to adopt the application so that's where I think with uh UNF Bangladesh what we have done is like the uh you know the demographics are vast there so we looking at almost 100,000 million doses of vaccination that we're going to record every year and that's like a huge number and then we have like good 150,000 plus users and wallets that we going to generate rate just with uh UNICEF Bangladesh the plan is also to like scale up to various other Supply chains so we've had like par conversations running with uh animal vaccines for nutritional vaccines so the way it works is that the whole platform has the capability to not just expand within the human vaccine space but it has like a similar use case in various other dimensions so it it has a potential of creating a good uh you know 5 million wallets uh in the next coming up year or two uh so we looking at like some potential uh contracts coming up um yeah hopefully soon um thanks a lot for um not just highlighting the challenges that you guys had to overcome in a real world use case but also the kind of impact um that could be generated so she was talking of millions of uh wallets and you know stuff like the offline mode uh it's it gets very real out there so that is a lifesaver actually um which which enables the blockchain to always be in sync uh and and and then know other things that you that you mentioned as well that's that's actually fantastic so now I'll switch to uh David So as you could see David like these guys U manage to not just build the tech but also make it accessible and make it work in the real world and just in Bangladesh uh they're uh they'll soon start tracking 100,000 um vaccines with thousands of wallets so um for um projects such as this uh web 3 projects um real world uh open source what would be the um sources of funding that they can tap into could you please uh take us through an overview of that yeah so I think I've always thought that this is a very interesting use case real world real time supply chain tracking I remember a project from about six or seven years ago I believe it was called wobby that was more focused on food and there was like a a lot of kind of uh fake ingredients issues especially in China um I'm not sure what happened to it but I thought it was a Brant use case and it's like it's not like sexy cuz it's real world and there's not that much to speculate on um but it's actually like really really useful for millions of people um I think in in terms of funding uh in crypto we have this uh kind of phrase of public goods funding but often what people mean are funding Network Goods which are uh kind of digital public goods open source that is specifically applicable to uh the optimism super chain ecosystem or the polygon ecosystem or the ethereum ecosystem or the Stellar ecosystem um which is a little different than uh when kind of government public sector UNICEF folks talk about public goods which are kind of like the the public that is you know the human species or um the public of Bangladesh so um in that light there are um a number of public goods funding uh systems being developed and um some really interesting work being done in the optimism ecosystem with retroactive public goods funding um there's a kind of old protocol Gollum Foundation which deployed something called octant um which uh uses quadratic funding uh like gitcoin to fund a number of again mostly ethereum uh open source public goods what I think um these ecosystems are looking for is essentially transaction volume on their chain on their Network um and so deploying millions of Wallets on a decentralized public blockchain network um like a layer two on top of ethereum would be uh I think critical to to going after uh public goods funding from one of these ecosystems um there's always uh the option of launching a token um using that token as uh an incentive layer for uh real world's uh validators or Auditors um that are you know tracking um the vaccines as they go through time and space using basic devices that um millions of people have around the world so you enable kind of uh uh large amounts of people that are not technical um to directly engage in validating transactions or um kind of interactions um so these are some ideas and then beyond web 3 I think um this is a real use case for public sector for governments for large uh nonprofits and philanthropic philanthropic bodies like Gates Foundation um I think that the uh yeah this use case goes Way Beyond web 3 um I think that web 3 uh and blockchain Foundations should be very interested in these use cases um unfortunately it's generally um only if you're if you're using some specific um stack or technology uh like I mentioned of of a specific layer to um would they generally become interested ethereum Foundation is an exception they fund a lot of interesting research thanks both that um uh what got me into blockchains for the very first time many years ago was actually the real life potential of uh of this technology uh helping society as in a whole and then now we are beginning to see these real world use cases and you already mentioned um about let's say the amount of data that has to be stored on chain for the sources uh of uh public goods funding from the web3 ecosystem to be interested uh in them uh um what what else should these projects uh keep in mind apart from just using the blockchain of course uh that you know goes without saying how else can they make themselves attractive uh to yeah I think I think um as we spoke about a bit earlier um understanding how can we engage uh people in the real world Beyond uh uh developers um bringing this technology outside of the kind of um internal circles that it I feel like um Al I also got interested in blockchain about 11 12 years ago for um real world use cases and impact and um always have been really interested in projects and that's how we got connected uh so yeah looking at how can um people around the world uh living in places like Costa Rica Bangladesh um use very basic and rudimentary devices to confirm uh things that are happening in the real world and reward them directly um on a public blockchain uh for those actions okay uh so impact can of course be generated by web 3 projects they may also be generated by web 2 projects um who are doing fantastic work the thing is these web two projects are typically not aware of how to become web 3 how to get the data on chain and all that so how can the web3 ecosystem the funding ecosystem be more inclusive and you know including them like do they have to learn some protocol do they have to like or is or could there be easier Pathways for for these guys to enter the ecosystem as well yeah I think uh this is an issue with web 3 it's it's uh more insular than it could be um and a lot of use cases are being built specifically for the web 3 Community um I think these uh types of exceptions are really interesting and um the the broader crypto ecosystem would would do well to engage um more I have seen uh some kind of retroactive uh airdrops and and funding mechanisms going to uh GitHub profiles of web 2 developers that may have never heard of uh the people sending them the token but like I think uh ZK sync might have done this a few a few um recent uh airdrops have gone to web 2 developers that are building libraries that have been leveraged um by crypto protocols and then the the they send it like directly to a a Hub um address and account and and that's uh that's one way that I've seen the the web3 community engaging um Beyond kind of the um the small relatively small but but growing ecosystem that we have here that's uh very very encouraging uh to know that new avenues are opening up uh for broader areas of impact uh to be funded by the by the web3 ecosystem so that's fantastic um that's all the time that we have uh thank you so much uh MB mani and uh David for of course highlighting the solution and of course uh talking about the ways in which Solutions such as stat wig and the vaccine Ledger could get funded thank you so much thanks