Yokip Consulting has partnered with Horizon State to develop the RemTECH Blockchain Voting Application for the RemTECH Awards 2018 judges vote and first-ever industry vote. We hope the added transparency furthers the credibility of these well earned awards, highlights the innovations the remittance industry needs most, and improves understanding of appropriate blockchain use cases. We’re really working hard to make good on the RemTECH Awards’ mission of bringing remittance innovation forward.
Did you rig the awards?
“How do you make a judgement call on which one is the best? Versus the commission you get?” Blunt questions from Faisal Khan to me on his podcast Around the Coin — and the backstory as to why we had to use blockchain for the RemTECH Awards 2018.
I was promoting a different money transfer awards last year that was based on testing all the online money transfer applications we could find and was funded by an affiliate international money transfer comparison website. For reference, affiliates are online marketers that showcase products and services on behalf of others and receive kickbacks for directing visitors to the products and services through links.
The conflict of interest begged the question, but we knew building credibility for our reviews of our products was necessary as part of the long-term strategy of this comparison site. You have my word.
But that is the problem. You have to trust me. Or redo the painstaking research yourself. What if there was a way anyone could validate that the reported information was not tampered?
Did someone say, “blockchain”?
Blockchain is simply a method of structuring the recording of data that is very difficult to alter because the information is recorded and stored is not kept in one place. Instead, multiple stakeholders keep the data requiring more than half of them to collude with each other to change it.
Okay, before we get too carried away with blockchain fever, applying technology to my research, which included sending real transfers (not on blockchain) and recording their speeds and costs, would be very difficult to achieve meaningfully and expensive to build.
However, I was invited to co-chair the RemTECH Awards this year, a remittance innovation award with a much more straightforward winner selection process. Candidates must nominate themselves and fill out an application to participate. And winners are determined by a judging panel that scores each entry on six different criteria for six different categories.
The need to protect credibility, the simplicity of the winner selection process, and the innovation-focus of the awards lends itself perfectly for blockchain. As a result, Yokip Consulting with the blockchain technology of Horizon State developed the RemTECH blockchain voting application that verified voters and publicly stores their ballots on the Ethereum blockchain. This public blockchain has over 20,000 nodes (at the time of writing this) that keep the data decentralized and safe from manipulation.
The voters are assigned an identification number that they know but others do not keeping voters anonymous while allowing them to verify that their votes counted and are casted accurately. To balance transparency and our relationship with the entries, we decided to make the entries anonymous as well. They, too, get an identification number that they can look up, but others will not know (unless they want to share) in case their scores do not pass the approval of their marketing teams.
Why didn’t you rig the awards?
Unlike the affiliate marketing backed money transfer awards I directed last year, the RemTECH Awards is developed by the International Money Transfer Conference (IMTC), the largest and most established cross-border payments conference in the world. Still, businesses that have sponsored IMTC events may have also submitted entries into the RemTECH Awards.
And because the director of IMTC and the RemTECH Awards, Hugo Cuevas-Mohr, is a particularly trusted and respected member of the money transfer community, you may assume that the integrity of the awards selection would be less of an issue.
However, when the results of the inaugural RemTECH Awards were released last year in 2017, a handful of entrants who did not win voiced their disapproval to Hugo, “Why didn’t I win?” Although there was a separate judging panel that determined the winners, some candidates seemed to take it personally that Hugo did not manipulate the awards in their favor or that the verdict represented Hugo’s opinion. Others wondered if the winners, instead, received favoritism.
So when I pitched the idea of using blockchain for the judges vote in this year’s RemTECH Awards, Hugo admitted that this would be a relief. There would be a verifiable record that he could point to that demonstrates that the judging was in fact independent. Turns out, even when you have the trust of the community, dispute over the fairness of the award results can get contentious.
Remittances is actually one of the first industries to adopt blockchain technology. The visionaries at startups like Ripple, BitPesa, Bitso, Stellar, and Bitspark have been honing their business models and operations for years, as early as 2013, in the real world working with and as real MTOs. We’re excited to introduce another blockchain usecase into the industry that helps mitigate the types of stakeholder trust problems blockchain is designed for.