Q&A with Nik Scharmann, Project Director at Bosch

The first blockchain engineering conference built for reengineering trust in the enterprise. Rethink Trust, taking place in Amsterdam this Friday on June 29th, boasts 27 speakers, 18 talks, and 3 workshops.

IBM’s CTO Chris Ferris and ING’s Global Program Manager, DLT, Mariana Gómez de la Villa, are keynoting the conference, and speakers from Coinbase, Bosch, Oracle, Delft University of Technology, We.Trade, Applied Blockchain and other companies are doing talks and joining our panel discussion “The Future of Business Blockchain” at the end of the day.

In advance of “The Future of Business Blockchain” panel discussion featuring Nik Scharmann, Project Director at R&D project “Economy of Things” at Robert Bosch, we spoke to Nik about the business needs his research is focusing on, the technologies stack and how members integrate the blockchain solutions with their enterprise software stacks.

What are the key business needs for your research?

Providing alternatives to today’s platform monopolies, because the monopolies might lead to market failures.

What brings the Economy of Things/Trusted IoT members together?

The will to make IoT better.

What are the technologies that can address the business needs?

We believe that distributed ledger technology, multi-party computation backed by a decentralized governance system are the relevant technologies. All these have to by viewed via the lens of “algorithmic mechanism design”.

How do the members integrate the blockchain solutions with their enterprise software stacks?  What are the challenges there?

Step-by-step. Bosch, for example, is setting up productive DLT nodes with interfaces to the enterprise IT. Apart from the technical challenges, there are interesting legal problems. For example “how to deal with a smart contract run on an enterprise node that to not belong to the company running that node”.

What kind of knowledge you accumulated in your research is specific to the IoT business verticals and what set of findings are transferable?

Transferable are all our findings regarding the above-mentioned mechanism designs. The IoT agents themselves are very domain specific.

What are some of the most interesting things you want to share with other enterprise participants at Rethink Trust, and what do you want to learn from them?

I want to share the idea of competition. Cooperation between companies on the DLT layer, competition on the IoT products layer. I am keen on learning from the other enterprise participants what they think how the governance mechanisms of a productive DLT system would look like.

Don’t miss Nik Scharmann and the panel discussion “The Future of Business Blockchain” at Rethink Trust conference on June 29th. Book your ticket now.