Business Consensus May Be Blockchain’s Main Challenge

During a Unitize panel on Wednesday, Ali Loveys commented that the biggest challenge in  the blockchain space is not the technology itself, but rather whether the business model or values make sense or not. 

Dr. Ali Loveys, the Chief Privacy Officer at ConsenSys Health, has over 30 years of experience in emerging technology strategy, adoption, and optimization in healthcare. The insight she drew from her work experience was that: 

“The challenges are always less about the technology than about the business value and the people who are interested in using it or resistant to using it. [...] I don’t come in to sell blockchain, I come in to talk about business issues and where we find a good fit, and we move forward.”

Spending a lot of time on business value and discussing what people within the blockchain ecosystem felt was most important, Dr. Loveys emphasized:

“Because what’s valuable to one person in the ecosystem or one organization, the other member of the ecosystem will have a different value. So, how are we lining values across the ecosystem.”

Dr. Loveys believes if the business value doesn’t make sense, it is hard for technology to move forward.   

The talk also touched a new economic model called the “responsible data economy”. According to the other panel speaker, Dawn Song, the CEO of Oasis Labs, this model leverages blockchain to enable both data privacy and data utilization in all domains. Specifically, it emphasizes data utilization in healthcare — the medical industry’s most privacy-sensitive topic. 

As a Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at UC Berkeley and a technologist herself, Dawn Song agrees with Dr. Loveys. She too noted that finding the right business model is essential for helping new technology move forward.