Los Angeles (September 15, 2017) — “So BCG Digital Ventures (DV) is a digital consulting company owned by the Boston Consulting Group (but operates independently). DV is mainly interested in entering newly emerging markets within the digital technology sector, and launching new startup companies with their larger clients.
One of their newest initiatives is to specialize in Blockchain, which aids their consulting work for potential clients that want to utilize Blockchain technology into their own businesses.
The weekend Brian, Stephen, Neel and I worked on a hackathon in DV’s Manhattan Beach Office, we were one of 20 teams trying to come up with a unique way to leverage Blockchain for different digital business purposes. We spent about 6 hours brainstorming a dozen different ideas and the one that stuck out the most to each of us was utilizing Blockchain as a platform for signing contracts between small businesses and Instagram influencers.
Brian and Stephen had experience reaching out to Instagram influencers for a startup they previously worked at, and found it to be a tedious, uncertain process. For example, it is impossible to guarantee that the influencer will do their part of the contract once you pay them. And it is also very difficult for small businesses to seek out influencers with the right audience.
Blockchain offers a system called “Smart Contracts” where the agreement is both legally bound and bound by computer code. The programmed contract will determine if the contract has been met, and whatever escrow that is placed onto the smart contract would be dispersed according to how the code is written.
While none of us had any experience working with blockchain (despite being in a room full of people who seemed to know a lot about blockchain already), we took this opportunity to learn everything we could about how blockchain worked, how to write code for it, etc. In the process we discovered a lot of limitations and paradigm shifts with the technology that is directly in conflict with our experiences — for example, blockchain doesn’t run on a single computer server but rather is run on a decentralized network of hundreds of computers — which forced us to reconsider what we know and embrace a totally new concept.
That part was the hardest part–realizing that you can’t write code the way that you’re used to. But ultimately we succeeded because we had no idea what blockchain really was, and came up with an idea that was very far away from how developers within the blockchain community is thinking about using the technology.
So to some people our idea was probably absurd, but the part of the challenge was to come up with ideas that haven’t been considered before.
To give an example of how this works is: let’s say a small bakery wants to reach more customers, and submits their business to the blockchain with an amount of cash they are willing to pay per influencer
That cash is automatically locked into the blockchain, which we call “escrow”
A social media influencer who is browsing the app might want to visit this bakery and promote it on their Instagram.
The bakery wants the influencer to keep the post up for 7 full days, and the influencer wants creative control over the content that she uploads
Since the contract is programmatic, we can programmatically verify that the conditions are met
If not, the money is returned to the business. But if it’s appropriately met, the money is dispersed to the influencer’s wallet
If the contract is well written by the programmer, there is no way for either side to take advantage of the other, making this a fair marketplace process
We would write a contract system that can be reused and is completely transparent to the users of this service
And since the blockchain is decentralized, it is unhackable and doesn’t ever crash or lose data, making it very secure”
-Andrew Jiang
