We saw many events focusing on educating the public about the innovations in the blockchain space last year, and before ending 2022, the “Blockchain, Tourism and the Future of the Internet Conference” organized by Gate2Chain took place in Mallorca with key speakers like Dr. Craig Wright, IPv6 Forum President Latif Ladid, and Blockchain Practice Leader at IBM’s Central and Eastern Europe office Dr. Agata Slater.
Dr. Slater talked to CoinGeek Backstage reporter Becky Liggero on the sidelines of the event, and the duo talked about the importance of blockchain solutions for enterprises, how IBM is involved with BSV blockchain, and what the company shared during the event in Mallorca.
“IBM has been involved with blockchain for many years now, and we work mostly with enterprise clients, and we bring blockchain solutions to them from consultancy advising on how to enter this space, advising on the best technology tools that address some of the business problems that our customers have all the way through to helping them out to develop a solution and then supporting them in that,” Dr. Slater said.
What would Dr. Slater say about the value of blockchain to their customers at IBM? It depends on the industry as well as the use case.
“I think we’re in an interesting point right now where customers are shifting their mindset from wanting to optimize processes to wanting to actually create new services for their customers and focus on bringing value to the end customer,” she explained.
“Blockchain is all about collaboration, about building that broader ecosystem of value exchange. So we need to have a business model that works well for everyone,” she added.
Talking about tourism, Dr. Slater says blockchain and web3—or what she called a new iteration of the internet that builds a “digital economy based on incentivization, engagement, and rewards”—can help, especially with identity management solutions and loyalty system, which are both essential aspects in the tourism industry.
“I see blockchain [is] enabling a technology stack that can open up opportunities for new use cases. And these blockchain enablers, as I call them, is identity and tokenization, traceability and payments,” Dr. Slater said.
“For example, providing better identity management solutions where your customers do not have to leave bits of information with every different provider and disclose all of them on demand…Also, I think about loyalty systems. That’s an area that’s deeply problematic right now, that loyalty points are locked in a vendor context. They’re not transferable. They are not redeemable,” she pointed out.
As for the steps toward achieving these goals, Dr. Slater said they are still in the sandbox space, experimenting with every possible solution and use case that aligns with web3 principles.
“Right now, it’s all about experience, experimenting, testing stuff out, testing out the technology, building the right capabilities, playing around with that a little bit. See if we (IBM) can target new clients through these new offerings or how we can enhance the user experience of our existing clients. “
Wrapping up the interview, Dr. Slater expressed that IBM carefully selects technologies that they think best fit and address business problems, like in the case of BSV blockchain.
“We believe that the BSV and the whole ecosystem is a very good fit for enterprises. Enterprises care about scalability. They care about low transaction fees. BSV has that. So, we’re actually very excited to talk to them (customers) about BSV.”
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