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A group of leading enterprise partners, venture capitalists, technologists, start-ups and academic Institutions join forces to better leverage blockchain to pioneer the next phase of The Web

The 18 global founding members of The Convergence Alliance include; Deutsche Telekom Innovation Laboratories T-Labs, SAP, InMotion powered by Jaguar Land Rover, Smart Dubai, Imperial College London, Frankfurt School of Finance & Management, MOBI Foundation, Datarella and Outlier Ventures

They will initially focus on an open source stack of 15 protocols making up 15.5M lines of code including Sovrin, Fetch.AI, Ocean Protocol, Haja Networks, Agoric and SEED

What is the Convergence Alliance?

The Convergence Alliance’s mission is to accelerate and diffuse a more equitable, scalable and usable Web 3.0 to affect a new open data economy based on the sovereignty of the user. Countering the platform monopolies of Silicon Valley and enabling a more evenly distributed value creation from AI.

Founding members include Deutsche Telekom Innovation Laboratories T-Labs, Jaguar Land Rover’s InMotion Ventures, SAP, Imperial College London, Frankfurt School Blockchain Center, the Mobility Open Blockchain Initiative​ (MOBI, which includes 100 of its own mobility members), Datarella blockchain solutions, Smart Dubai and the Fab City Global Initiative with 1,000 labs for additive manufacturing. Each founding member represents a key stakeholder group that is critical to realising the vision of a more open and equitable Web 3.0

Raimund Gross, Innovation Manager from SAP talks about joining the Alliance– “At SAP we put business value at front and centre, hence the solutions we provide often involve several technologies. The Convergence Alliance allows us to collaborate with peers from the industry, share knowledge and gain a comprehensive understanding of the opportunities arising from emerging technologies. This endeavour will help us identify new ways of enriching business processes and eventually create new business models in service of our customers.”

The Alliance connects technologists pioneering Web3.0 with industries such as IT & telecommunications, mobility, industry & manufacturing, utilities and smart cities that have already undergone a rapid process of digitisation. However, they now face challenges in unlocking return-on-investment from their experimentation in blockchain or turning big data initiatives into meaningful commercial advantages in AI.

What makes it different to the many other blockchain think tanks and consortia is that it doesn’t focus on blockchain and distributed ledger in isolation. The Convergence Alliance is instead centred on the concept of ‘convergence’, where technologies such as blockchain are best understood in the context of the wider technical landscape, and in particular, how they combine and accelerate with AI, Big Data and IoT.

This has led The Alliance to explore the adoption of a curated stack of 15 open source technologies with 15.5M lines of code, called The Convergence Stack, which includes hardware, routing, distribution, interfacing and the application layer of the internet. As well as assessing standards they may require and how they would integrate into legacy business processes and IT systems.

Transitioning from a centralised Web 2.0 to the decentralised Web 3.0

Web 2.0 has by now highlighted the value of data but has concentrated into a handful of platform monopolies with extractive and intrusive business models and insecure data infrastructure. Where Google, Facebook or Amazon have become a direct competitor or overly dominant cloud AI vendor to the majority of companies and industries. The recent launch of Facebook Libracoin, a public permissioned consortia planning to issue their own digital currency, has mobilised many industries to accelerate their thinking about their place within a new data economy, acting for many as a ‘burning platform’ moment.

The Convergence Alliance will facilitate collaboration at both a technical and commercial level to solve these data challenges. Its founding members have already led their respective industries building solutions leveraging The Stack including the Jaguar Land Rover IOTA-powered car wallet, where car owners earn credits by enabling their cars to report data on road conditions and traffic congestion and Deutsche Telekom’s T-Labs and Fetch.AI who are working together to build and deploy autonomous economic agents, that can be integrated into IoT devices to provide them with the authority and autonomy to organize themselves free of human intervention.

Jamie Burke, Founder of Outlier Ventures and The Convergence Stack thesis comments: “The last 25-year computing cycle has been dominated by The Platform & The Cloud, with obscene value creation for a handful of corporations. However, there is a growing awareness about the trade-offs of the cloud platform and a developed understanding of the benefits of decentralised technology, unlocking a new truly peer to peer value exchange. The Alliance is the first manifestation of a counter-narrative and a signal of the paradigm shift that’s about to come.’ “We’re excited to work alongside the Founding members of The Convergence Alliance to accelerate and diffuse a more equitable, scalable and usable Web3.0, centred around a New Data Economy and the cognitive revolution. Bringing together open-source protocols, enterprise, academia, and start-ups to realise Web3.0 by defining, building, financing and integrating the Convergence Stack. We look forward to bringing meaningful ROI and impact form the promise of blockchain across a variety of industries, expanding the Stack, and we welcome partners to join building Web3.0. ”

Alliance objectives and activities

The Stack has been in development for several years, and now with the formal launch of the Alliance, there is further collaboration around interoperability. The Alliance is facilitated by Outlier Ventures, and the inaugural summit of founding partners was launched this month (02/07/2019) where members agreed upon a set of core objectives which would then be opened up to the active participation of a wider membership of partners and peers.

Standards Peer Group: With a rapidly expanding technology ecosystem birthing numerous emergent protocols with the potential to build upon the foundational innovations of HTTP (website browsing) or SMTP (email), members want a curated forum of peers to understand and explore different approaches around areas like interoperability or privacy to inform how they engage with standards initiatives.

Ecosystem Guidance: To collectively agree and communicate the technical and commercial needs of alliance members from The Stack to help direct innovations in protocols, applications, and support services, as well as the venture capital required to bring them to market.

Dissemination & Education: To effectively educate the ecosystem of developers, businesses as well as technical academia through targeted events, content and research to accelerate adoption. Helping the industry to ‘cross the chasm’ and diffuse the innovations of Web 3.0.

Philipp Sandner, Head of the Frankfurt School Blockchain Centre, on the Alliance objectives- “As one of the leading think tanks in Germany, it is an honour to participate in the Convergence Alliance. Convergence is about new business models for startups, corporations and investors – driven by blockchain. The Alliance brings together key people with business, IT and academic background, that will shape the fundament new business ideas driven by blockchain, IoT and data analytics.”

Outlier Ventures previously communicated that it intends to deploy $30m worth of support for The Stack through its venture platform over the next 3 years.

The Alliance will finance its own activities such as working groups, summits, developer conferences, research and the creation of educational content through annual membership fees. However, core to the philosophy of the alliance is the careful curation of members who must demonstrate an advanced level of technical maturity and c-level commitment to business model innovation and the meaningful deployment of Stack technologies.

Ecosystem of partners unlocking $1.5 Trillion by 2025

The founding members represent a wider ecosystem of participants that are required to shift the industry from a period of experimentation by early adopters to cross the chasm to the wider market and unlock an estimated $1.5 trillion by 2025 according to IDC and IBM. They believe this will be achieved by the Alliance’s objectives to:

Inspire visionaries within large enterprise innovation outposts, venture teams and labs to gain applied learning through pilots and early stage investments;

Connect these innovations to strategic goals at the c-suite of highly digitised industries and technically mature organisations;

Onboard and enable middle management, as implementers and budget holders, through effective usable solutions and tooling;

Venture financing of early-stage startups and research groups to bring technologies to market;

Empowerment of both the technical and commercial talent market, including new entrants and professionals looking to reskill and upskill to advocate and effect change.

How to join The Alliance

We want to partner with, support and invest in projects working to realize the Convergence Stack whether early-stage startups, later stage projects, corporates, governments, and academia. To join the Alliance find out more here.

Please contact partnership@outlierventures.io to join the Alliance.

This article is for information purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. This article does not amount to an invitation or inducement to buy or sell an investment nor does it solicit any such offer or invitation in any jurisdiction.

In all cases, readers should conduct their own investigation and analysis of the data in the article. All statements of opinion and/or belief contained in this article and all views expressed and all projections, forecasts or statements relating to expectations regarding future events represent Outlier Ventures Operation Limited own assessment and interpretation of information available as at the date of this article.

No responsibility or liability is accepted by Outlier Ventures Operations Limited or Sapia Partners LLP for reliance on the contents of this article.

Outlier Ventures is an Appointed Representative of Sapia Partners LLP, a firm authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).