Digital Strategy Consultant with a solid background in smart contracts, blockchain and AI

10 min readOct 27, 2020

I’m an independent consultant, looking to extend my client base

I am an independent consultant with enough programming and IT skills for rapid prototyping and helping the implementation of solutions effectively, focusing on the business model innovation potential of emerging technologies. In the last three years I was mainly exploring the business applications of smart contracts and blockchain, and also looking at the business potential of AI and ML.

My consultancy toolkit

Consultants need to avoid “the law of the instrument”, meaning an overreliance on familiar tools, which can be expressed by the psychologist Abraham Maslow’s words: “I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”

If the only thing you have is a hammer, it’s tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail.

In contrast, I have a rich toolset, which consists of:

Requirements elicitation and rapid prototyping practice, using interviews, requirement analysis, discussion with problem and solution stakeholders, Design Thinking methods and the DAML smart contract platform as a prototyping tool.

Business process implementation with smart contract and enterprise blockchain platforms (DAML, Corda, Hyperledger Fabric).

Agile tools and methods, based on extensive experience with Jira, Sharepoint, Slack, Trello, Asana, Workplace by Facebook customization and instruction.

Business model creation / analysis and strategy, based on MBA studies and banker training, using the Business Model Canvas, the Invincible Company tool set and the whole business innovation arsenal of Strategyzer, as well as the Playing to Win Strategy tool set.

Extensive knowledge about consumer and technology trends, focusing on the technology side on blockchain and AI, on the consumer side on the Trendwatching megatrends framework.

Project management. I know and use the PMBOK framework for project management, when I’m in that role. Some people, even project managers, find its complex and rigorous framework an unnecessary overhead, but I think it pays off handsomely.

Teamwork and leadership, honed by coach training, lateral leadership, and improvisation theater.

Excellent written, oral and visual communication, honed as a blogger, conference speaker, workshop instructor, journalist and teacher.

Curiosity and analysis supported by numerical tools, methods and models, honed as a consumer and technology trend researcher, working as a journalist preparing numerous interviews and investigative reports, and as a researcher of the history of mathematics and philosophy.

Here is the map of all the options of how I can help you:

In the following sections, I explain to you what I did and learnt in the last three years.

Business potential (or deper) level knowledge of public and enterprise blockchain platforms

I know the business potential, and the use cases and technical details of a number of public and enterprise blockchain platforms:

DAML and Canton (business potential + developer certificate)
Corda (business potential + preparing for the developer certificate exam)
Hyperledger Fabric (business potential + basic chain code development)
Ethereum (business potential + basic Solidity development)
Sovrin Self Sovereign Identity network (business potential)
Blockcerts credential issuing and verifying platform (business potential)
Ripple (business potential)
KSI (Blockchain) by Guardtime (business potential)
Bitcoin (working mechanism)

I built a production system module and several prototypes, and designed business solution concepts based on these platforms, such as:

Business solution concepts:

General token registry (implemented in Fabric)
Diploma certification (implemented using Blockcerts and Ethereum as a PoC for the University of Pécs)
Vehicle registry concept (based on DAML)
Energy community and exchange concept (leaving the enterprise blockchain platform for implementation undecided)
Collector coin registry and exchange (to be implemented in Fabric or DAML)
An eDelivery solution using DAML and Amazon Quantum Ledger Database

Production system module and prototypes:

The blockchain module of the Integrated Delivery by Digital Assistance service, developed and provided by a consortium in which Blockchain Competence Center is a member. I implemented the blockchain module using the DAML on Fabric platform.
A prototype of a centralized driving license issuance process. I have implemented it as a DAML package.
A prototype of a decentralized driving license life cycle management system. I have implemented it as a DAML package.
A prototype for a land registry. I have implemented it as a DAML package.

I held numerous workshops, wrote papers, gave university lectures and conference speeches on the business applications and technical background of these platforms. I also edited a newsletter covering the blockchain applications in the business and government sector.

Comparison of blockchain platforms

I have made extensive comparative studies on the capabilities, in the first place “business friendliness”, of the leading enterprise blockchain platforms. I have made two general observations:

Some of these platforms achieve distributed consensus via a Nakamoto style blockchain data structure, others don’t. By “Nakamoto style” blockchain I mean (borrowing the term from the Corda technical white paper) the data structure which achieves immutability by packaging data into blocks, and chaining the blocks together by hash pointers. Other platforms use other kinds of authenticated data structures, and achieve consensus in a different way. My observation is, that sticking to the original idea of Nakamoto is not a good indicator of business friendliness (let alone GDPR compliance).
The current popularity rank in a developing field like blockchain is not the strongest indicator of business friendliness. For emerging technologies it is often not true that “the early bird catches the worm”, but rather that “the second mouse gets the cheese”.

Neither using a Nakamoto-style blockchain data structure, nor the current popularity rank is a strong indicator of business friendliness.

Below, I summarise my level of familiarity with the leading blockchain platforms. The depth of my knowledge reflects my assessment of the business friendliness of these platforms.

I have DAML and I’m not afraid to use it

I have the deepest knowledge and developer experience with the DAML platform and its companion cross-domain synchronisation protocol, Canton, created by Digital Asset. (I am a certified DAML developer associate.)

I have been focusing on that platform because it fits very well with business applications (see my publications below). It is “business friendly”, meaning highly supports the collaboration of domain experts and developers, through its high level declarative programming language and rapid prototyping capabilities.

Moreover, using DAML you can defer the decision on which underlying storage platform you want to implement your business logic. It has been integrated with a number of underlying storage platforms, some of which are blockchains, others are centralised or distributed databases:

The project:DABL cloud infrastructure by Digital Asset
Corda
Hyperledger Fabric
Hyperledger Sawtooth
VMware blockchain
Amazon Quantum Ledger Database
Amazon Aurora
PostgreSQL

DAML is a smart contract platform, which has been designed to implement distributed, multiparty transaction system, which observe the principles of contract law:

DAML ledgers follow the offer-acceptance pattern of the contract law, and thus ensures that all ledger contracts are formed voluntarily.
Rights, expressed as contracts, cannot be taken away from the right holders in the form of contract archival, unless the right holders approve that move.
On-ledger obligations cannot be unilaterally escaped.

As mentioned before, I have designed several applications and prototypes utilising the business rule implementation and rapid prototyping capabilities of DAML:

The blockchain module of the Integrated Delivery by Digital Assistance service, developed and provided by a consortium in which Blockchain Competence Center is a member. I implemented the module using the DAML on Fabric platform.
A prototype of a centralised driving license issuance process. I have implemented as a DAML package.
A prototype for a land registry. I have implemented as a DAML package

In a business context, you probably won’t need Bitcoin’s censorship resistant transfer mechanism

Preparing for the Corda Developer Certificate exam

Corda is another enterprise blockchain platform which aims at implementing distributed business applications, following a partly similar, partly different approach from DAML.

Corda separates state objects, contracts and flows, which together implement similar constructs to DAML smart contract templates.

Both Corda and DAML implement need-to-know-basis privacy. We can implement the propose-accept pattern, one of the cornerstones of DAML, also in Corda, but in a less straightforward way.

In Corda you can write contracts in Java and Kotlin, which is less business-friendly and less elegant than DAML, but has the benefit of a larger developer community. (DAML is Haskell-based. Haskell and functional programming in general has a solid and growing followership, and I’m confident that the elegance and security guarantees they provide will prevail in the near future. At the moment the more old school programming languages are more popular.)

Given Corda’s solid capabilities to implement distributed business applications, and its growing popularity, I have decided to extend my horizon and learn it at a developer level.

I know the basics of Hyperledger Fabric chain code development

The first low-coding platform, which demonstrated the business potential of enterprise blockchain, was the Hyperledger Composer Playground. It helped to understand how business objects (called “assets” by IBM) can be created and transacted following business rules expressed in JavaScript, and had a domain specific language to express fine-grained access control rules.

IBM deprecated Composer, so now only chain code written in Go, Java, and Node.js can be used to express business objects, business rules, and access control.

I know the basics of the Fabric contract API, and can write basic chain code in Go.

Ethereum

I know the basics of the Ethereum Virtual Machine and Solidity smart contract development.

I know tools like the Remix browser based IDE and the SolidityX typesafe superlanguage.

I know how to use the ERC20 token contract template, and the OpenZeppelin reference library of secure contracts.

Libra and CBDC

Corporate and central bank digital currency is in the requirement elicitation and prototyping phase, so it’s ideal terrain for an experimenter like me.

On the technology side the landscape is divergent, some approaches which seem to be relevant are:

Facebook’s Libra
The e-krona pilot based on Corda
The DAML and Canton based CBDC concept

Stablecoins

A stablecoin is a cryptocurrency that is designed to fluctuate as little as possible from a specific value. That value pegs to that of another asset, such as the US Dollar or gold. Stablecoins are therefore ideal for payment, exchange and trade settlement. (Source: tokens-economy.com)

It’s more of an economics than a technical challenge. The topic is on my “to be explored” list.

Ripple

Ripple is a global payment network, used mainly for cross-border payment, challenger of the SWIFT system. The practical exploration of this technology is on my todo list.

KSI (Blockchain)

KSI (Blockchain) is the core technology of Guardtime of Estonia. This company and their technology is the reason why Estonia is sometimes referred to as “the blockchain nation” or the “Digital Republic Secured by Blockchain”.

I have put the “blockchain” part in parentheses because the company itself has an ambiguous relationship with the label.

They started to develop and market their KSI (Keyless Signature Infrastructure, aiming at intrusion detection and integrity check of large data sets without the use of signing keys) technology several years before the Bitcoin whitepaper came out. When the blockchain hype began in 2014–15, and developers and venture capitalists started to look beyond Bitcoin towards alternative applications of the technology behind it, the company’s founder, Mike Gault wrote an article under the title “Forget Bitcoin — What Is the Blockchain and Why Should You Care?”. At that time they rebranded their technology to “KSI Blockchain”.

The websites of the Estonian e-government services still refer to the technology this way, but Guardtime itself almost entirely abandoned the label, citing the reason that they find that blockchain’s focus is cryptocurrencies, not that kind of enterprise problems they aim to solve.

Either called blockhain or not, the KSI technology is important and successful, so I’ve put its practical exploration on my todo list.

Bitcoin

If you are interested, I can explain — or even demonstrate — to you how Bitcoin’s consensus mechanism and Bitcoin mining works, and why it isn’t protected against 51% attacks other than having a distributed miner community. Also, how the simplest form of “smart contract”, Bitcoin script works, and how it enables Lightning Network and cross-chain swaps.

In a business context, you probably won’t need Bitcoin’s censorship resistant transfer mechanism, but it’s worth understanding why it is so expensive in terms of computing power and low throughput.

Exploring AI and ML

Besides blockchain, I’m actively exploring the technological development and business applications of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.

I can see huge potential in combining it with blockchain, where both technologies bring unique capabilities to the table:

AI and ML provide the automation of pattern recognition (implementing in software the “fast thinking” capabilities of humans).
Smart contracts and (if the distributed setup justifies it) blockchain provide the strict implementation of business rules.