Singapore solidifies its status as Asia’s innovative tech leader

From left: Joseph Lubin cofounder of Ethereum and founder/CEO of ConsenSys, Moderator Emma Cui CEO Longhash Singapore, Humayun Sheikh CEO and Founder of Fetch.AI, Martin Lim co-founder and COO of Electrify, Meeta Vouk director of IBM research center and Soeren Duvier Managing director of BITA, Asia.

Just a week after Hamilton blazed to victory in Singapore’s 2018 F1 race, the island city hosted 1,000s of people in the SWITCH conference covering four entire days of innovation and technology conferences covering all imaginable areas of new technologies and their expected impact in the world. With foreign dignitaries and ministerial support from the host state, the days left lasting impressions on the participants in several key areas.

Tuesday saw the fruits of Singapore government’s commitment and deployment of resources to drive innovation in the areas of AI, IoT, blockchain etc. through various initiatives including SGInnovate standing out in the global Arena when CEO Steve Leonard’s team delivered a first in class conference day focused on latest technologies improving societies. 

BiTA was honored to participate in the panel titled ‘Blockchain and the Decentralized World’ where questions from the moderator Emma Cui and the audience centered around: Why is decentralization important for your industry? And is blockchain the right technology to achieve such vision? We all know blockchain technology’s still at its very nascent stage and mainstream adoption are still miles away, what do you see as the key challenges? 

For the transportation/ supply industry, some observations were that blockchain will optimize a paper intensive slow error/fraud-prone current process. The adaption will take a while and we may very well see initial developments in the trucking industry emerge before we see full international logistics solutions. The major challenges are mindset in an ancient well-founded maritime industry, differences in customs regulations in the various countries, and a lack of standards on which to base solutions in the blockchain space. The future holds promise, as today companies are searching for answers to these solutions, as was highlighted in the thriving community in BiTA.