In late 2015, I initiated to set up a taskforce (only 3 people then) to study and explore how we can embrace and capture the opportunities to be introduced by the Blockchain technology. After two years I think it is a right time to write a short and personal article to recap how I started my Blockchain journey and express my sincere appreciation to a few people.

Compared to my mentors and friends in the Blockchain community who started with Bitcoin mining using PCs back in 2013, I am merely a new comer and first learnt about the "dark magic" technology in late 2015 when the first Blockchain Summit was held in Shanghai. It was not until I met with Sunny Lu (now CEO of VeChain) and his team that I started my real Blockchain journey and participated in various landmark projects such as VeChain, Qtum and ZMC.

Among these projects, I would like to highlight VeChain because it is the first Chinese Blockchain project I was aware of and I have been involved deeply till now. I still remember my first meeting with Sunny Lu (CEO of VeChain) back in February 2016, which we had lunch at a Chinese restaurant near our Xin Tian Di office. The original agenda was what accounting service we can provide to BitSE (Sunny was the CFO then). However, we spent less than 5 minutes on the accounting matters as both of us were more passionate about the technology and how it is going to change the world. Unlike other Blockchain discussion I had before, we did not mention Bitcoin at all but only focused on how to use Blockchain to help companies and organizations to solve their trust problems. Also, nearly all "proof of concept" cases at that time were financial industry related (e.g., R3, Hyperledger), Sunny held a very insightful point of view that it would be much easier and faster to implement Blockchain in supply chain management and counterfeiting as financial industry is strictly regulated and its systems are dominated by traditional technology companies. The problems of retail, trade, manufacturing and logistics are immient and the traditional companies are eager to adopt new technologies to make a foundamental difference. He told me he was leading the development of VeChain which aims to address all these problems. With years of working experience in international companies like 3M and Louis Vuitton, Sunny is very business oriented and realises what Blockchain can do and its limitation. So shortly after the lunch meeting, we set up multiple follow up workshops and developed a business plan on how we could go to the market together and leverage our resources. We were not always succesful but both myself and our team members enjoyed and leart a lot from the process.

Within PwC, we organized marketing events, internal workshops, trainings etc. on Blockchain and innovation, Sunny and his team are always helpful and willing to support us when they are asked. For exanple,VeChain is the first permanent demo application set up in our Shanghai Innovation Center. We are now finalizing a few initiatives which I cannot disclose the details now. What I can say is they will be completed in due course and they are very innovative and "first-of-its-kind", not only for PwC but also within our profession.

Lastly, I would like to say thank you to Kevin Feng, Cary Sheng and Noah Huo who are my best teammates and togther we completed the landmark projects I mentioned earlier. They will continue their Blockchain journey in another role. But we will still be working together, in an innovative manner.....

To be continued.



