IOTA’s Julie Maupin at the OECD
OECD, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, held their Blockchain Policy Forum on September 4 and 5. IOTA’s Director of social impact and public regulatory affairs Julie Maupin was part of a panel discussing “Development Co-operation: Blockchain for Sustainable Development”.
The panellists included:
Piet Kleffmann, Head Task Force TruBudget, KfW Development Bank
Jane Thomason, Global Ambassador Centre for Digital Transformation, Abt Associates
Ric Shreves, Senior Technology for Development Advisor, MercyCorps
Julie Maupin, Director of social impact and public regulatory affairs, IOTA Foundation
In a very interesting talk, Julie not only talked about DLT in general and what it enables for sustainable development, but also provided insights as to how the IOTA Foundation is working, what their goals are and what obstacles the Foundation had to overcome so far. Here are some examples:
- Being a startup has the advantage that donors are willing to fund failure; interestingly enough her example was about her conversation with the European Space Agency (ESA) which recently launched a fund to do co-matching grants for projects that want to experiment with how you can combine DLTs and satellites (How can you use blockchain in space?). She called it “refreshing” to speak to them because they looked at the usefulness of the outcome rather than at the actual result which could, possibly, include a failure. Of course, it is interesting to see that not even space is an area where IOTA wouldn’t be applicable…
- She mentioned Fujitsu as a partner who is already developing the means to reach even remote areas which are not connected to the internet as we know it (e.g. by means of sensors which have long-life batteries).
