Aside from its budding use case in overhauling mainstream finance, blockchain technology has also been lauded for the way in which it can help enact social good.
Jessi Baker, CEO and founder of London-based startup Provenance, established in the summer of 2013, is hoping to channel the potential of distributed ledgers to do just that.
Alongside heading Provenance, Baker is also undertaking a PHD investigating new technologies to build more transparency into supply chains – the lack of which, she said, brings aboutmost of the world’s social and environmental problems.
"One of the big culprits of that failure is in the global supply chains," she told CoinDesk in a recent interview. "We have seen products that are still being done by slaves, environments being destroyed by the production of consumer goods."
For Baker, consumers or companies are not inherently bad for purchasing products that have not been ethically produced. Instead, she argued, the issue resides with the lack of information available to people wanting to make those purchases.
This is where the blockchain technology comes in.
"What we see is really exciting with the blockchain in that there is finally a method of perhaps gathering this data from far-flung areas where products are being produced and having that connected to an open ledger that isn’t governed by anyone," said Baker. "So, it can be committed there and also help people who are already gathering that information to do so in a more interoperable way from the get-go, such as certificates, for example." Building transparency
Provenance sets out to help businesses become more transparent, both on a business and product level."More recently we have been looking on an item level, so looking specifically at tracking and being more transparent about what is going on with individual items," said Baker.The objective in doing so, she added, is […]
