Sandra Ro - Global Blockchain Business Council - “Blockchain has already changed the world” (Odyssey Hackathon 2019)

This is the third and final episode in our series of three talks we did at the Odyssey Hackathon in our home town Groningen, earlier this year. Today’s guest is Sandra Ro, a derivatives-trader-turned-crypto-evangelist, entrepreneur, angel investor, and CEO of the Global Blockchain Business Council. GBBC’s mission is to educate governments, regulators and executives at large corporations about “this thing called blockchain that can be very confusing at times”. We talk about peer-to-peer transfer of value, tokenization and incentives models, provenance and anti-counterfeiting and about ecosystem development. We also talk about regulation: “Of course there has to be regulation. There have to be rules to the game. Self-regulation does not work. The greed is real.” Sandra is enthusiastic about the opportunities blockchain offers to repair the shortcomings of capitalism: “The system today does not work very well when you are poor. This technology can change that.” She also shares an interesting cultural observation: “The culture in this [blockchain] space is much more cooperative, much more about growing the pie together. And it is very interesting to see [here] that this culture is now starting to impact big businesses. I have already seen cooperations that I never thought would exist. Blockchain has already changed the world. It has already changed mindsets, and that is often the most difficult part of change.”