CoinGeek Conversations

Stephan Nilsson: BSV can fix the world’s supply chains

November 06, 2019 Stephan Nilsson, Charles Miller (presenter) Season 2 Episode 9
CoinGeek Conversations
Stephan Nilsson: BSV can fix the world’s supply chains
Show Notes Transcript

Entrepreneur Stephan Nilsson claims that in efficiency terms 80 per cent of supply chain operations are waste. It’s “making the whole world economy stagnate,” he says. Nilsson should know because he worked in the industry before he founded his startup, UNISOT. He still works in it - except now UNISOT is offering a blockchain solution to address that inefficiency.  

UNISOT will be a “communication layer” using the Bitcoin SV blockchain to record operations performed by different businesses on a unified system that they can all trust. 

“We humans, we have Facebook and Twitter and all of these social media. We are sharing tons of information with each other,” he says. “Companies are not doing that - because they only have this EDI [electronic data interchange] communication, which is slow and expensive. That is what is missing in the industry.”

Nilsson’s ambitions combine success for UNISOT with a wider, more philanthropic approach: “we don’t do this just to make a ton of money and get out of it. We actually have a purpose of making the world and the supply chain better.”

If he can persuade companies that currently use different systems to record data in a single supply chain to move onto UNISOT’s BSV-based system, he’s convinced it will mean greater security for all of them: “if all the different providers in the supply chain are using this system, then it gets very hard for one actor to manipulate the information.”

And he sees his own efforts to utilise the BSV blockchain as just one example of a general trend towards creating accountable data - and that’s a shift from the emphasis on Bitcoin as an alternative currency. “Instead of this digital currency that we were talking about in the beginning, it’s now a data layer.” But “the unique thing is that we have built in payment systems, which means that we can now start monetising information.” The Internet revolution allowed anyone in the world to publish information. “But if anyone can publish anything, we also get a lot of very bad information in there. What we need to make the Internet good again is to actually value information.”  

In selling his ideas to business, Stephan has found he’s up against some preconceptions that he has to dispel. “Most of the big companies today have already been educated by IBM and the big companies that you should have a private blockchain. Then we have to start educating them in the problems with private blockchains and why we are using a public blockchain. As soon as you say it’s Bitcoin, the question is raised about its inability to scale, and that ‘it’s only used by criminals, you can’t store information there’. 

But the facts usually allow the discussion to move on: when they hear that today BSV is doing 15,000 transactions per second, he says, “most of the time we get a positive outcome from that.” 

Speaker 1:

Stephan Nelson has big ambitions. He wants to persuade big businesses to put their supply chains onto the Bitcoin S fee block chain. His startup Unisom is based in his native Norway. That's why his first project was with the supply chain for the Norwegian salmon industry. Now he's developing solutions that will work for all industries and he says that potential customers are approaching him to see what unison can offer. I first met Stefan last year and today he seems more confident than ever that he can fulfill his vision for UNICEF.

Speaker 2:

[inaudible] you're listening to coin deep conversations. Charles Miller.

Speaker 3:

Stephanie, thank you very much for doing your second coin geek conversations. Yeah, thank you. First one was back in November last year and Eunice was just starting out.

Speaker 4:

It feels both longer and shorter because so much has happened, not, not only for us, but for the, for the whole community. It's just loaded good things. Real and good thing. Very good thing. So many companies actually doing business rated thing, not just this coin, uh, uh, making money on the investment or the coins themselves, but, but actually applications that can be used in businesses.

Speaker 3:

Yeah. When we spoke last time, your focus was on supply chain and you were particularly thinking about the fish business and how Bitcoin could be used to trace the process of a fish all the way from it being in the water and growing up to being on our plate. Right? Yeah. How have you developed that, uh, idea since then?

Speaker 4:

Right. So we have a got a, a number of, uh, instruments interested customers that we are doing proof of concept with though because we are working with supply chain, we can use that for any kind of supply chain. And now we have customer approaches, us asking for, for our different kind of supply chain that is, has nothing to do with fish or, or even food. So one of them is fought for a furniture producer and high end furniture producer, uh, which, uh, exports different and show to the whole world and they want to have this product, a provenance. So, uh, and they want to dig. It ties the whole, uh, sales process of furniture to today that most of that process is very old fashioned. So if you go into a furniture shop and say, Oh, I like this so far, I want to buy it, then the sales man goes to his office, takes out a paper folder and he looks there and says, Oh, okay, yeah, you can have it in six to eight weeks. Right. Maybe. And people today, they don't like that. They want, if they like it, they want it directly. So that's why I[inaudible] is so popular because you go there, you see it, and you pick it to drive it away. You have it at home in the evening. Yeah. The big, a more high end furniture producers now want to dig, italicize there, their whole sales process. And they see that, that we can help them with that, uh, with using blockchain, um, both in their old fashioned backend EDI communication. So from the furniture company making an order through their suppliers today, that EDI electronic data interchange. So that is electronic messages between companies like, uh, they, they can send an order, they can get an order request, they can get an order or a, um, an invoice and they can send these messages back and forth. But now we can take that old fashioned communication methods, which is mostly filed based on SFTP based on text-based stuff. And we can put that in there, the data layer of, of Bitcoin and blockchain technology. And by doing that, we re reducing middleman. We are reducing middlewares because both receiver and sender and receiver must have their own middleware to translate the message from internal format to external formats and so on. Now, now they just have a units or plugin and then they communicate with the blockchain, which made it much, much more easy for company to do it. At the same time, it's getting cheaper and more secure and of course auditable, because it's stored in the blockchain. So it's auditable forever afterwards. But so what

Speaker 3:

stage have you reached? Is this product available to people now, or what now are we at? We're still here

Speaker 4:

in, in a proof of concept stage, right? This, uh, because when we started, the union sought more or less, uh, we created a company, uh, two years ago and, uh, but we were looking for funding. We'll be looking for people. And then now this spring and summer, we got our funding. So we have actually a, a couple of investors that were from the, from the blockchain, Bitcoin, blockchain community,

Speaker 3:

including Calvin[inaudible] who is the owner of Klein geek who I work for. So, full disclosure. Yeah. So, uh, he was the first one,

Speaker 4:

uh, who, who actually started giving us a, some investments, but that also triggered other investors in the community to see that they believed in our idea.

Speaker 3:

So you mentioned furniture and we've talked about the fish business. I mean, presumably in time you will have a product where you don't actually have to be interested in whether it's furniture or fish or whatever.

Speaker 4:

No, no. Uh, so, so the reason for us to, to talk about fish and seafood is because we are based in Norway and Norway is famous for two things. Mainly that's the oil and it's for the fishes and the weed and Salomon. So, uh, we came in contact with fish producers and we saw that there, there are a need. There is a need for, for digitizing the whole process. Uh, today it's a lot of, uh, kind of a cowboy industry. They are using all kinds of it systems. They're using a word and Excel and, and databases and they don't really have an over gripping system. So this is what, uh, uh, the company I'm working for. Before I started a unit, I thought I was working for Ernst and young sky in Norway, which is an SAP implementer. So they are implementing SAP systems for customer in SAP is, uh, the biggest ERP system in the world. So the backend system for all the big companies. So they, they have created an industry solution in SAP for the seafood industry, but ERP systems are still this centralized computer system in one company and every company have their own it systems. So we still are missing that communication link. Like, like we humans, we have Facebook and Twitter, uh, and, and all of these social media we are sharing tons of information with each other. Company is not doing that because they only have this EDI communication with is slow and expensive. So that is what is missing in the industry.

Speaker 3:

Right. So as long as everybody goes on Unisoft, everything will be fine. But what happens if one person along the chain just says, Oh, I don't think I'll do that. Thank you very much. Does that mess everything up?

Speaker 4:

So we're, we are actually planning to do this as a part of it will be open source. So the base layer will be open source. So Unisoft will just be one of one supplier in this, in this public blockchain system. So we will be the first one and we will start this development. But the idea is that other companies should be able to provide the same services.

Speaker 3:

So, so that means that other people could come along and provide a different interface to the same system. Yeah. Competitors to Unisoft in that. Yeah. Yes.

Speaker 4:

Uh, so, so we start with, with a plugin module for SAP because that's my background. We also now are looking into to Microsoft, but there is a ton of different ERP and it systems out there. We cannot do all of them. Right. So I can see a future where where a small local ERP system, a provider that they want to use this system. Maybe they don't use the whole Unisource system but maybe they or they'll be a partner with us and then they can communicate directly on, on this global blockchain.

Speaker 3:

Is it in your interests to have that open source side because aren't you just creating an opportunity for your competitors?

Speaker 4:

Yeah, it's, it's a double edge. Swirled swore not of course, but uh, but I suppose we, we don't do this just to, to make a ton of money and get out of it with, we actually have a purpose on making the world and the supply chain better. Yeah. Because we have this problem today with, with the efficiency of a sub sub supply chain is only 20% so 80% is waste and the 20% is, is more or less only in Japan because they are very efficient. The second best efficient is in Germany. There are 18%. So from, from the fish eggs to the plate, the efficiency on the whole supply chain there is only 20% as best and the rest is just waste in, in wait waiting times. Uh, lost lost revenue, uh, lost the interest in money and stuff like that. Money tied up in the system and it's, this is actually making the whole world economy stagnate.

Speaker 3:

Yes. It was amazing that anyone can make a profit at all with that level of efficiency. That's what's amazing

Speaker 4:

to me, that, that we the only 20%, we still have a prosperous world that is working, but it could be so much better. Yeah. So if we can just provide this communication layer and be one of the first company providing this, then we see that, that we can actually[inaudible]

Speaker 3:

but one, one sort of aspect of this that I'm always puzzled about really is that we talk about a Bitcoin's blockchain being immutable. Yeah. And so this is great. You can rely on it, you can trust it and so on. But of course it's only as trustworthy as the connection between what's put onto the blockchain and the person who's putting it on or what's going on in the real world, isn't it? I mean just cause it's on the blockchain, it doesn't mean that it's true. Right, exactly.

Speaker 4:

So it's a, like we say shitting shit out or through thin through thought. So if you put foul false information in there. Yeah, the the, the good thing here is that everything you put on the blockchain, you are signing with your signature. So you actually signing your own fraud if you do that. Right. So, so I have to prove, I can prove that you made a fraud. And, and also if, if we have, if most of the supply chain is in the system and all of the different providers in the supply chain or are using the system, then it gets very hard for one actor to, to manipulate the information. Because if, if there suddenly comes a raw material from somewhere without the source, where did it come from? Where is it not from the original line?

Speaker 3:

It's opposing. It's opposing. I have a supply chain and it's all fully Bitcoins using your system. And I suspect that something is not quite right. Somebody is, it doesn't add up somehow. How easy is it for me to go through and find out who these bad actors might be? I mean all I've got is a lot of Bitcoin addresses. I won't know how to go from there. Back into the real world. I

Speaker 4:

exactly. So that's one of the services that we are going to provide that you can, you can like we, we have these services already today, like a coin Ally's coin. Ally's is a company used by FBI and on all government organization too to track bad Bitcoin addresses back to the real people behind. No, they actually tracking it two times for this address to see if, if that address has been used in some illegal activity somewhere in time. If it has been. So you're on a case list, it kind of can be some kind of black there. Uh, so we are, we are planning to do the same kind of data analyzes on, on addresses so that a company could just ask for information on an address and we can provide that where it is coming from. And uh, and the history of that or, but we, we make it on a, on a level higher. So we deal with on a product level. So instead of just an address, a Bitcoin address, we do it on a, on a digital twin ID. So we want to put a digital twins on everything or have a digital twin that is representing everything. So if you have a fish, it has a digital twin in the blockchain where you have all these information connected to it. And while why that fish is moving in the block in the, in the real supply chain, in the real world, the digital twin is moving into blockchain at the same time and changing owners and getting more information's connected to other digital twins and so on.

Speaker 3:

So if something goes wrong, you'll be able to say, well, it must have gone wrong between here and here,

Speaker 4:

how's going wrong? And it could be, it could be a wait, if suddenly a fish is coming to one stage and it goes from one Keeler to five kilos, then then you see something happen there. What did it actually process the fish to, to add that weight? Or was it just a fraud? Right. And, and, and as I said, then the, the company or person who did that has actually signed at the transaction so we can prove that he sat it, he did it. And of course, what we also can do is, is to, to put, uh, uh, machine learning and artificial intelligence analyzes on this information to see all like temperatures or, or weights and so on to see is this a normal weight or normal temperature for this environment, for this time of year for this. Everything can I love to say and also give us a value on, on a, on a through the ability or, or reliability is scale. So you can say this, this value is 95% secure or 99% percent secure and so on. So,

Speaker 3:

so when the product is sort of mature and people are using it, how much will they be aware of or have to deal with anything to do with Bitcoin or will that all be buried for nothing?

Speaker 4:

Nothing at all. Uh, the users shouldn't be aware of yet. Of course they can be aware or the customer can be aware, but a normal business user just making it an order or working in in a, in a production plant, they don't have to know anything about Bitcoin or blockchain that's just in the backend and just like, like we are using internet today, everybody is using internet, uh, on, on a, on a browser. Even people even don't know what the browser S some of them they are just using internet. Yes. And this will be the same day. We'll just use their, their ERP and its system like they do today. But in the background we are using the blockchain techniques.

Speaker 3:

Well I think you can even see in the development of the internet that in 1995, yeah, people were writing down at HTTP colon slash slash. Slash. And you'd have that written up on posters even saying, you know, go to this address. Whereas now, um, you know, even even with Google in the old days, you might, you be told, put this word in and then write the word and, and then that word or put it in brackets and stuff. Whereas today, in fact, Google says, just write your question. Yeah, what is a, something like that and yeah. And so yeah, the technology does get buried over time that

Speaker 4:

all the user problems we have today by using a wallet and, and a long beat on addresses and so on, that will be totally hidden from, from the users. So, so a company today, they would simply, just a, like when we get the payment functionality done, they would just pay with Fiat currency or Euro or dollar or Norwegian Cromer's in the background. We are using Bitcoin to do their payment, but, but the receiver would receive it back in euros or dollars or whatever.

Speaker 3:

Yeah. I was wondering, I mean, does Bitcoin as money come into your system at all? Does it matter? Does it make any difference whether BSV is worth, you know,$10 or$1,000?

Speaker 4:

No, not at all. No. No. Uh, because we are, we are just using the Bitcoin as an internal payment in the transaction. So, uh, we, we don't or the customer wants to see that at all.

Speaker 3:

And what about for you as a business though? Do you have to hold Bitcoin SV and therefore are interested in how much it's worth?

Speaker 4:

No, not really either. No. So, so it doesn't matter.

Speaker 3:

You're really just using Bitcoin SV as a, a sort of database product.

Speaker 4:

We are using a, the data layer that, that the Bitcoin blockchain provides. And of course we are using Bitcoin all the time in each transaction, but just as a, as a payment for the transaction itself. So like if you want to store a lot of information in the blockchain, we, we are paying more Bitcoins but we are charging our customers in, in you're paying to the minors. We are paying to reminders with Bitcoins, but our customers are paying us then with, with the U S dollar,

Speaker 3:

that's really, instead of having to pay Amazon web services or one of those other types of storage providers,

Speaker 4:

still each customer will have their own Bitcoin wallet, but they won't know about it because it's all hidden into the software. Right. But they're still having their own keys and their own. They, they, they uh, they have the responsibility for their own money, so to say. So, so we never store the money for the customer. They do that themselves. So we, we are never on a bank or something like that. You're not even a money transmitter. We are just providing the, the, the network to do it.

Speaker 3:

It's interesting, isn't it? We've seem to have come a long way from the time when Bitcoin was sort of basically you're going to be instead of your dollar or whatever. Um, and then, Oh, it's quite interesting. You can actually store stuff on it. Right. And now we seem to have gone completely to in the Bitcoin SV worlds. Yeah. I mean, do you think there's, do you think we got too far in that direction or where we, that the way it is,

Speaker 4:

that's really, really where it's supposed to go? I find so instead of being this digital currency that we were talking about in the beginning, we have evolved done and it's now a data layer, but it's not only a data layer. The unique thing with this data layer is that we have built in payment systems, which means that we can now start monetizing information. So internet has revolutionized, revolutionize the, uh, by giving anybody in the world have the availability to, to publish information. But we also see the backside of that, that if anybody can publish anything, we also get a lot of very bad information in there, valid bad comments and add fake information, fake news and so on. So what we actually need to make internet do it again is to actually value information. So even if it's just a, like on a social media, that should actually cost me like a center two or 10 just so that I, I don't just like anything, but I actually, I think once before I like something, or even if I, if I write a comment that should cost something because just to, right, you're an idiot. If that cost me 50 cents to do that. Maybe I stopped doing that after a couple of, uh,

Speaker 3:

I mean, I'm, I, I understand what you're saying. I'm slightly skeptical about that because in a sense if you get paid for attention, then there is a danger that you will write something extremely controversial because that will attract more attention. It's, it's not like, it's not necessarily that virtue is rewarded. It's, it's just attention that's rewarded.

Speaker 4:

Yeah. But the important thing is that the reply and, and to, to use that date, those is also have certain costs, which means that, okay, you can publish a, something really radical, but it has to, it, if it has a value to people, they will pay for it.

Speaker 3:

It may have a value to people, but in a bad way. Yeah. It might be fake news that they want to spread for it.

Speaker 4:

Yes. But at the same time, what we can do with the blockchain is down to trace. Where is that information coming from? So it could be that you just publish something about if you have no source that is traceable on blockchain, you don't own any money on it. But if you can, you can, if you can prove that this is coming from a certain source, then maybe you earn more money on, on your article. Right. So, so that, that connects really back to, to, to our supply chain for the fish for example. So the, the problem that we see now is we have all this big multinational companies coming to Norway and, and, and breeding fish in a, in a very industrial way. And maybe not always thinking about the ecologically and health aspects and so on. Uh, but we have a, a lot of mid sized companies, mid size fish producers in Norway who is actually producing very high quality fish. But they have a problem to, to get out in the market with that because today they cannot prove that they have a good product. It's just the price and the package that they can, they can provide. But with our system they can now give a proof of the quality of the, of the product.

Speaker 3:

I mean I think it's interesting that sort of going back to the big picture that what you talk about with social media and valuing things, that there is a continuum between a sort of very personal comment that I might put on social media or something and really some very just dry factual information that might be on a supply chain. The principle is the same that it is information that is useful to people and has a value. Is that what we mean by the metal net or is that something slightly different?

Speaker 4:

I would say that met Annette is a protocol that we can use to, to structurize data in a good way. So, so normally users will never see meta-data use mathematics just in backend functionality. But it's, it's very useful for us to structure the how we are storing data in the blockchain.

Speaker 3:

So the matter net is a series of mechanisms that you would use in your product, is that right?

Speaker 4:

Yeah. Yes. So, so you can almost say it like it's a, it's a layer on top of Bitcoin. You have Bitcoin as the lowest layaway, which is a PR is a protocol in itself, how to send a information or how to, how to send transactions securely. On top of that, we then have the Metronet layer just telling us how to use that layer in is Bitcoin layer in a specific way to connect different data points to each other. And on top of that, we are building our units of layer, which is then connected to to the enterprises. So it's, it's all layered on top of, of the Bitcoin protocol itself. So the higher up you come on on these layers, the more abstract it gets from, from the Bitcoin itself. Uh, just like, like internet is today, you have the TCP IP network layer, you had the HTTP and so on. But on the end it's just a beautiful website.

Speaker 3:

Yes. I see. So this is exactly the same now, but when you go to big potential customers and talk to them about this, is there a sort of PR problem in terms of Oh my God, Bitcoin, you know, and all the sort of, you know, the negative images associated with, with it in people's minds. So when we

Speaker 4:

go out to companies and telling about our solution, we don't start with mentioning Bitcoin at all. Uh, we are mentioning Bitcoin, sorry, blockchain because that's still, it still had a mass marketing value, but we are more selling the enterprise functionality with be able to, to uh, monetize your, your information being to buy and sell information, be able to very reliable and cost efficient exchange EDI messages with BDI. Then of course, the questions comes up. What kind of blockchain are you using? And most of the big companies today have already been educated by IBM and the big companies that, that you should have a private blockchain. And then we have to start educating them in the problems with private blockchains and why we are using a public blockchain. And in the end the, the question is comms. Okay, what public blockchain are you using? Then yeah, then we are saying Bitcoin. And immediately the same question comes up but Oh, it can't scale. It's only five to seven transactions per minute. It's only used by criminals. You can't store information there. So then we have to tell them again. So it's, it's really educating mostly then the technical people who put these questions up, they can be very knowledgeable in blockchain in general, but for some reason they have not followed the development of, of Bitcoin and beat BTC. Ah, sorry. B E. B. V. yeah. So when we then are telling them that, no, actually it's not used by criminal B as V even less use by criminal. Uh, because it's, it's all targeting enterprises. Um, we are doing today like 15,000 transactions per second and we are storing Tom[inaudible] information in, in each transactions and then they're really, the lights goes off for them and they, Oh, I haven't followed that, that blockchain and uh, most of the time w we, we, we get a positive outcome from that.

Speaker 3:

It makes me remember that sort of famous saying nobody ever got sacked for choosing IBM. Exactly. Yes. That still applies. That still apply very, very much.

Speaker 4:

Yes, yes. But, but, but I also see that when we go out to customers, when we present this actually most of the customers we have today has come to us asking for for information and they already have some knowledge about blockchains and maybe they have already tried a private blockchain and see that it comes out that it doesn't work. So then they come to us and ask if we have a solution and then we are showing our proof of concept that we have done and they are stunned. And then they asked what blockchain we're using and then we are telling them of course, what would be the most useful

Speaker 3:

thing to happen outside of your own company that would make your business move forward even faster.

Speaker 4:

It's adoption, it's adoption a that that some big company or organizations should start using this.

Speaker 3:

So, so if you could go around and say, Oh well, you know, Google's just started something using BMC or something, that would be exactly just like you look at,

Speaker 4:

look in Libra, uh, cryptocurrency has got much more attention. Seems them. That doesn't seem to be going very well. No, no it's not because it's threatening all the economic systems in the world and they are trying to work with, with them. So,

Speaker 3:

yeah, I mean I know the labor thing is interesting in a way cause it's that sort of like, okay so if you want to sort of ease conventional business into blockchain, then maybe this would be the kind of halfway house that might do that. But actually in a way it seems to have gone the other way. All it does is expose the problems of not going all the way kind of thing too. Yeah, I think so too. You see, you get attention

Speaker 4:

and then exactly the people see the problems with that and the next logical step is to to go all the way in and actually use an open public blockchain. So it's, it's still a mystery to me that that's so many smart educated people are still using BTC or or, or a Hyperledger or Ethereum and they are not looking into what actually is available today. Scaling security, instant transactions and everything that that we have currently today in our system, they're still waiting for that to come.

Speaker 3:

I mean it seems to me like you are even more optimistic today than you were a year ago, if possible. Yes. Well, look, I hope it goes incredibly well, and I hope we can speak in another year and you'll be even more optimistic. But

Speaker 1:

thank you very much, Stephanie. Thank you very much. Very nice to speak to you again. Thanks very much to Stephen Nelson, and incidentally, Unisoft stands for universal source of truth, and you might think there'd be plenty of demand for that today. Please join me for another coin, get conversation next week. Thanks for listening and goodbye.

Speaker 2:

[inaudible]

Speaker 5:

[inaudible].