# Supply Chain Traceability On and Off Chain

- Channel: [Ethereum Denver](https://streameth.org/ethereum-denver)
- Date: 2024-10-09
- Duration: 15:36
- Topics: blockchain, web3, ethereum, Entertainment
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt--WHjOtYEgxg
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WHjOtYEgxg

## Description

From the European Union Product Passport to the UNECE Res. 49 for Transparency at Scale, regulatory pressure is mounting for provable traceability.   Web3 developers can support and benefit from this movement by implementing emerging high-level standards in a decentralized way. 

Speaker
Golda Velez from 3box, Ceramic Network, LinkedTrust

## Transcript

composable data models but I'm not here to talk just about ceramic um you could probably put me in the space more in terms of like the region society change people and I think that there's actually a lot more I'd like to see blockchain do than just be like a bunch of crypto tokens so we're going to talk about Supply Chain Face ability and why that's important um why does it matter uh first of all you know there's a ton of greenwashing you got all this thing where it's a ESG you know climate this climate that and you and I think you probably have heard that the carbon credit Market tend to be totally fake anyone can just claim that they're doing anything how do you prove it so you need to have traceability you need to have some way to combat that human rights impacts are huge um I'm actually uh on the UN committee for Cobalt Mining and Cobalt mining in the DRC in the Congo you know you have a lot of violence you have a lot of people being abused and and being able to actually demonstrate that that is or is not happening again is very important for putting that back pressure so how do you that pressure suppose we care about this you can get regulatory pressure the EU the European Union is putting in regulations about it but how do you enforce them because usually what happens is the middle is is people just they they kind of say oh yeah I told my subcontractors don't do that I'm sure they listened and and they really don't take that responsibility so you get regulations but they have to be enforcable and then the European Union is putting in some actual traceability requirements and that's actually also a business opportunity for web 3 developers because those are going to be implemented with cryptographic signing so you have uh kind of this whole very moving ecosystem that's not just uh kind of the nfts and the token economy but we're actually using it to demonstrate things about the real world so this is just talking about tackling greenwashing this is a slide and I'm borrowing slides from some people I collaborate with uh but yeah 42% of of Environmental claims were considered deceptive you really have a huge huge problem with we've got these problems where people are just lying about it um this is kind of a worse problem uh actually a couple people who work with me on a project live in Myanmar they told me the military actually actually she just told me she's got to leave me andar uh two days ago because they're conscripting every single young person men and wom and uh they also kill a lot of people so that's a problem but how do we address it it's oh it's over there but you know Chevron doeses Business with them so how could we press Chevron to actually press for change or maybe disinvest so that they're not funding the jenta in Myanmar how can you actually demonstrate that again you get a lot of lip service not a lot of action how could you demonstrate it um so the European commission uh is coming up with something called the digital product passport uh which means that they're going to actually have a traceability like from mine to laptop this laptop has a battery in it that has a lot of cobalt that was mined in the Congo now right now I have no idea whether it was mined by an artisanal minor who actually had rights or whether it was a slave labor I don't know I'm just using the laptop so the tra the product passport goal is to have that capability and right now they're doing stuff about recycling but they're trying to get the mine and the the pressure can come because if you want to sell that laptop in the European Union you'll have to obey that standard and actually do that traceability so that puts the back pressure all the way back to the mine if we can do it right so uh there's a committee uh and there's a recommendation at the UN recommendation 49 for a transparency protocol there's some smart folks working on it it's not just blockchain but it it will have to do with blockchain because blockchain is useful for having that distributed Ledger um all the data will not be on blockchain and we'll get into that but but there will be some some use for it I'm going to this is a complicated diagram we're going to look at it twice um I'm just going to go over it briefly now and it's going to pop up again but the idea is that a person could look at the barcode and and see some kind of product passport it would have some kind of credentials attached and some kind of traceability events it would not have every single event that happened in the chain because there might be thousands and thousands and thousands of them so it's not going to have them all sitting there for you to click on with your mobile phone but the idea is that those are shown to to someone and the business then shows them to someone who's maybe an auditor who maybe is an organization in this field and that auditor looks at all the data and maybe makes a credential saying yeah I looked at it and it's good and maybe here's a hash of that so you can't change the evidence later if someone else wants to look at it and we'll get into that too um and there might be some some some of the events might get anchored into the passport so you kind of kind to get all that connected um so anyway it's an interoperability Proto protol not platform a lot of people have been saying protocols not platforms recently that's the whole motto of the Blue Sky you know that's kind of the motto of web 3 um and this is just another reminder that it's going to either be a race to the top or a race to the bottom if we actually put credible pressure in place then everyone's going to have to do better and better and but if greenwashing is really prevalent you won't be able to make money without doing it so it's really a decision we have to make to invest in that uh so anyway it's a w 33 standard um if you're familiar with that you know those are the standards that built the web um and it it's basically a vocabulary okay but where does this all connect to the blockchain so it's not just blockchain just because you put something on the Chain doesn't mean it's true I can write stuff to you know ethereum all day long that is just lies and still lies even though it's written there you just know that I wrote it I can't say I didn't write it that's all you get so that's helpful but it's not enough and also there's a lot of data here we don't want it to be more expensive so you don't want to like create you know if you were coming here hoping that there's going to be a supply chain chain and you can like speculate on it no that's not the way it is but there's a standard that does want there to be some type of maybe anchoring to chain cryptographic signing maybe a hash to the evidence and this standard is actually being developed right now um You can actually participate in the committee if you want to um so now these are my thoughts these are not shared by everybody in the space but I want to share them uh cuz this is kind of where I've come to in it one of the very important things if I claim that this laptop battery was not built using slave labor I should make an address for that claim like uh this Mac you Apple should have to say the Mac the Macs that were made in this batch on this model number were not made with slave labor and actually address have an address because anything with URI I can talk about it and I can talk about it permissionless now the other thing is that if you actually anchor them at a time in a geolocation say maybe there's an Evidence in the mind that this was actually this Cobalt was mind at this location on this date aha now somebody who was at that location at that date can say oh wait I was there no that sucked they killed like three people that day you know it it's like you can actually make adversarial attestations if you anchor to the real world um and I'm going to try to make sure we have time for for questions so there's a lot going on here um you're going to have to have some zero knowledge proof um you should be able to make permissionless chain claims you do not want high volume data on chain but you might have a a Big Blob of high volume data and you take the hash of it and you could put the hash on chain because that way somebody later who's looking at it they can't change it before they show it to them so so there's a number of things that are useful and now we're getting back to this again I just wanted to walk through that again so maybe these are being written somewhere and now I work at Ceramic I'm I'm not doing this talk to push ceramic but I actually think it might might be a good place to put it because it's a lightweight way to have signed things that can be anchored in time that can that can change little Merkel tree um and then they get anchored to the chain so it might be on ceramic it might be on some other uh equivalent thing um you know there's there's a bunch of competing things so I won't list them all um where you could you could write cryptographic blobs cheaply and anchor just the hash so that might be a way that this happens um and then the credentials will actually be verifiable credentials now that's a separate World from blockchain but actually any blob of signed data if we just get techie for a second if you have a blob of signed data you can basically make it be a verifiable credential if you just have a signature over the right organization of the data like if you put it in the format of the verifi credential and sign it you can store an extra signature so anyway stuff on chain can be compatible with verifiable credentials that's that's a point um so this is an example of the battery passport you can see there's all these Steps From the mine to the refiner to the factories and then you get to the end users and then they also care about did that actually get recycled that same battery and right now they are tracking whether it got recycled so they're actually tracking this part but they're not successfully tracking this part yet but we're going to do some pilot projects to demonstrate that it's possible so this is now the argument for ceramic uh you know I actually think it's a good idea I do work there but I tend to be critical of my own stuff but I actually think it's a good idea uh it's it's lower cost than an L2 uh because it doesn't put everything on chain um and it we have this whole composable thing that's sort of like mongodb so you have shared models and two people could publish and they could both consume the data that's published we have data pools so there's a number of of things in ceramic that may give you some convenient tooling for this possible thing of shared data and there's other things you could use too you know some people might want to use the graph which is on ethereum but it's a little bit heavier weight it's not the only thing but it's a thing you could use and you should look for something that's lightweight um so again about the ceramic what is ceramic since I'm here they paid me to come here I probably should talk about them um it has a property graph you can do graphql queries against it um it's pretty scalable um also we anchor for you so it's free to use right now um and then this is actually a group that I advise that builds on top of ceramic but this is bringing up another point that I think is important which is the social graph because this auditor dude if we go back to that thing if we go back to this thing where this competent author this auditor looked at all the data and said yep that's right but how do we know he wasn't paid off so he needs to have a reputation and I used to actually work risk at Postmates and fight credit card fraudsters and one thing I learned is that if you have cross domain data and a lot of Rich data about people in their relationships it's easier to catch the frauders so if we can put in a graph those Auditors and we know other things they do we know stuff about them and stuff how they behaved in the past and we kind of have this metadata about them I think that is really where it's going to go but first we have to do the main part so what's the world like right now it's it's very um nent um in cows you can do it like the cows in Australia if you buy beef in Australia you know which cow it was and what the cow was doing and how much methane it breathed but you don't know that for Cobalt and we're trying to get there um right now there is this thing called Data stake where people can make incidents at mines and they make a reporting and then the people who control that data actually can monetize that data by selling it to someone who needs to demonstrate it but it's not Unchained it's still a centralized platform and yeah just remember there are real people and a lot of that Cobalt that's in those batteries is being gathered by hand by people who are actually subject to violence because they don't have the right to gather it but they're doing it anyway and then they get all kinds of different you know people start to try to hit them up for money and there's a lot of stuff that goes on so it needs to be regularized and monitored um and then how do you make the change really happen actually I know we're covering a lot of stuff here I'm kind of running through it fast um can be through conversations and this is actually a different platform but they also may want to decentralize and use cryptographic signing to measure their impact this is a Varity platform that um they make engagements so if a corporation is doing something they actually have somebody meet like maybe we could actually get somebody who's in DRC who I know who knows somebody out of mine to talk to the laptop manufacturers that might make this more powerful we can talk to a woman who speaks Swahili who you get a translator who actually is at the Mind site and have her talking to the CEOs of the laptop companies that can be very powerful because they see it differently when they see a human being so this so this is kind of a a mixed message here because this slide is about the macro level right now everybody just estimates the macro level they're like well they made a commitment and they wrote it on a piece of paper they're probably good or well in this industry usually on the average it's this um but what you really want is actual meetings that happened at a date and a time that occurred and the person who was at the meeting can attest to it and then say there was or was not followup and then you can gather that into a data stream and that can actually be part of the data stream which is yes they actually had an engagement yes they actually met yes the person who came from this stakeholder said there was a followup and once you get very granular you can actually make little changes which is how we get big changes sometimes or sometimes you just make a big you know there's other ways to make big changes but sometimes you can make them bottom up um so the standards are just emerging right now uh this is actually an opportunity to help Define them um there's going to be a feedback process that happens over the next couple months um and I'm hoping that it's a very open standard um I know the people working on it they're good people um and we want it to be scalable transparent and also privacy preserving uh so this is the uh un committee that's working on it as you can see they just kind kind of got the drafts done and they're now trying to do the pilot and actually see if this will work um and you know you guys may not be in mining but you know people are welcome to come as stakeholders or observers or you know kibitzers and say what you think um and there's you know there's going to be business in this there's there's going to be maybe jobs for trust Architects there's going to be people who have to implement this there's going to have to be people who have to make the bridges between the current supply chain centralized stuff and and the traceability standard so there's going to be work for people it might be worth learning about um and that is it uh for the presentation I wanted to have five minutes for questions does anybody have yes oh thank you I really appreciate it yeah I I think stuff that affects people is important and you know in today's world if you're not friends with people who might be in danger of getting killed you need to make more friends no I'm just kidding okay well I guess I will release you all five minutes early you can go play on the playground but if there's any questions feel free to come ask me all right thank you very much