Fueling innovative software
July 15-18, 2019
Portland, OR

Blockchain for good

Herman Smith (ixo)
2:35pm–3:15pm Wednesday, July 17, 2019
Blockchain beyond Cryptocurrencies
 Location: E143/144
Secondary topics:  Data Driven
Average rating: *****
(5.00, 3 ratings)
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Who is this presentation for?

  • Developers and blockchain enthusiasts

Level

Beginner

Description

ixo is the blockchain for impact, helping individuals and organizations around the world to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. It gives everyone the power to deliver, evaluate, and invest in sustainable social, environmental, and economic development.

Herman Smith explains how ixo enables all measurable changes to be transformed into verified impact data with cryptoeconomic proof of impact by using blockchain technologies and Web 3.0 standards. This is recorded in real time in an ecosystem that is owned by everyone.

Anyone can register as a member on the ixo.world site and, after passing know your customer (KYC), create projects or become a service provider on existing projects. Project funding takes place by means of ixo ERC20 tokens on the Ethereum network. The entire project is open source, leveraging Tendermint for its Byzantine-fault tolerant state machine replication (or blockchain, for short). User interaction with the blockchain takes place from a React-native mobile application and a web-based distributed app (DApp) where interactions are cryptographically signed by the end user using the private key associated with their Sovrin distributed identifier (DID) by means of a browser extension.

Further interesting aspects of the project include off-chain data storage by means of Elysian, which is a project data store (PDS) allowing third party project creators to be in charge of their own data and where it lives. The ixo stack includes AWS, Docker, JavaScript, TypeScript, MongoDB, Ethereum Smart Contracts, Cosmos, Tendermint, and LevelDB.

Prerequisite knowledge

  • A basic understanding of blockchain

What you'll learn

  • Learn how blockchain technologies can be used to solve social challenges, eliminating the need for centralized authorities and removing the risk of corruption throughout the value chain
Photo of Herman Smith

Herman Smith

ixo

Herman Smith is a developer at ixo. Previously, he was a senior software engineer with Trustlab, the primary development partner for ixo.world, where it has undertaken the ambitious goal of developing a blockchain platform for impact investment. His primary passion is getting things to work, ranging from alarm clock radios to convoluted source code. He was a self-taught software developer from a young age and earned his BTech IT from the University of Johannesburg. He wants to change the world through the innovative and appropriate use of technology, and his passions include outdoor sports and travel, which he tries to combine as frequently as possible.