Health, Well-Being and Blockchain
In the months following my chat with Ambrosus CEO Angel Versetti, the spotlight has been on Bitcoin and Litecoin’s meteoric rise, and Ethereum’s cryptokitty darlings. But little has been said about Ambrosus, which seeks to improve our health and well-being through a refresh of existing supply chain technology using blockchain technology, speeding it up through automation, improving transparency through traceable origins of the food/medicine that we consume, and building up the underlying ecosystem that would make this possible. In short, the Ambrosus token is bonded with data, which is collected through sensors that follow these food/pharma products through the entire supply chain life-cycle; from farm to fork. They are also building the infrastructure in which the ecosystem and all its players will interact within, more details found here. For the fellow geeks out there, Ambrosus is named after the ancient Greek word “Ambrosia”. “Ambrosia itself is an ancient Greek word that served to describe a nectar of the gods and the gods consumed it to get immortality, strength and stamina. How apt.
So what is Ambrosus? Quoting Angel himself:
“Ambrosus is a platform that assures quality, safely and origins of products. Our two main industries we focus on are food and pharmaceuticals, although the protocol itself is a general purpose protocol so it can be used for a variety of other industries. The more people actually develop use cases for it, the more applications there will be. Besides the protocol itself, we also develop solutions to integrate sensors into the blockchain, as well as creating a variety of different applications. Distributed applications, open-sourced, that any stakeholders and supply chains can use.”
Angel worked in the UN and that was when he first saw that food was one of the most pressing issues without viable solutions. Fast forward to today, the Ambrosus core team is now 23 people strong, not including some of their key partners/advisors in Parity who have been working closely with them to realise this ambitious and meaningful mission they are looking to accomplish.
An important question in my chat with Angel back then, and something which still continues to be a priority for the team is related to regulations and legalities. One outstanding characteristic of the Ambrosus team is their focus on being transparent and taking regulation requirements seriously. They took their KYC (Know Your Customer) processes seriously, to the point of giving up an additional USD 30 million of funding that they could have gotten if they had bent the rules for some protective contributors.
The entire project’s philosophy is based on trust and transparency and they are being true to those values they look to promote, not just in the money-losing transparency they displayed in the above example, but also in open sourcing their tech.
On the tech side, they are definitely building their product using agile methodology which is a collaborative approach to software development, unlike the old archaic waterfall methods that push out releases every 1–2 years based on old requirements. It’s good to see that the Chief of Product himself understands the importance of making sure their code is well-tested, especially since they are going to work with major corporations with massive technical load. The code that they produce, they intend for it to be open source via github here. All that the team has worked on with Parity is licensed an MIT Open Source License. Chief of Product Dr. Vlad Trifa is close to releasing v0.1 of the platform for the Ambrosus network for all to see on Github.
They’ve already worked on multiple pilot projects with products such as Argentinian steak, olive oil and wine. And one important point to note about supply chains is that it’s a “very archaic, outdated and sometimes technology-deficient sector” (from the words of Angel himself), so it does take time. There have been companies that have attempted this 3–5 years ago but have gone nowhere.
Ambrosus have always been clear that participating in the token sale or TGE (token generation event) is a means to support the project, but is NOT offering any investment opportunities, and they discourage against speculating on it. This has been done to ensure things are being done right, to ensure the longevity of the project, as well as the success of the project by being a fertile ground for large institutional investors like corporates, banks and government to be brought on board.
This focus on being transparent is unfortunately not very common in the cryptocurrency space today. There is a strong undercurrent of anarchy in the space right now, with people championing positive societal change and revolution citing decentralisation as the way to do so. Yes, there is much power that is currently centralised, corruption is rife and the world is imperfect. But to institute real and lasting change, there needs to be widespread adoption. For widespread adoption from corporates, banks and government, safeguards and a level of certainty needs to exist in the solutions that blockchain tech presents. For certainty, value of these solutions need to be proven.
Like the wise Yoda himself once said, “Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, and hate leads to suffering.” If the powers that be fear that this technology intends to decentralise them out of power, they will do whatever in their power to suppress the advent of blockchain. If these same powers that be see value in how blockchain can and will help them to progress onward, they will have every reason to at least give it a fair shot.
This project’s vision grabbed my attention, and their commitment to their values and execution has cemented my faith in it. They’ve also held an AMA on reddit recently, maintaining that same level of transparency with the community.
I’m really looking forward to the day I can have myself some trusted, clean lambrosus chops.
Disclosure: I am currently a holder of the Ambrosus (AMB) token. This article is not paid for by the Ambrosus team in any way.
This article was first posted on mediumfork’s blog, I’m one of the main writers there. Want more? Check us out here!
