At the 2017 Asia Pacific Cities Summit (APCS) & Mayors' Forum, more than 2000 city leaders and key decision makers met in Daejeon South Korea to network, build new connections, exchange ideas and best practice, drive commercial outcomes and seek investment. We were laser focussed on ensuring that Blockchain was firmly on their agenda. On Tuesday, our Panel “The Blockchain Revolution and Cities of the Future” spent an hour envisioning Asia- Pacific cities about how Blockchain can help them make their cities more efficient, more secure and more transparent for their citizens.

We laid out how Blockchain will enable them to deliver services faster; be more secure; more efficient; transparent, eliminate need for “trusted” third parties and improve interaction between cities and citizens. We discussed key city use cases including:

· Crypto-currencies and fast payments

· Health records

· Transportation

· Energy

· Tokenising welfare payments

· Land titles

· Registries

· Supply chain

· Provenance

· Voting

· Taxation

· Government engagement with citizens

· Industry creation

Rose Chan (former World Bank Digital Economist) spoke eloquently on the future connected city, with paperless digital layer for transactions; secure permissioned access to data; auditable and tamper proof records; easy on boarding of citizens and additional jurisdictions, integrated licencing systems and easy access for data sharing. Ayako Miyacuchi (Kraken Exchange), a leading figure in cryptocurrencies, explained the Blockchain basics, three great uses cases were then presented: a voting platform by Jamie Skella of Horizon State; permits and licenses by Katrina Donaghy from Civic Ledger and documents and records by Liesl Eicholz of Consensys.

A lively panel discussion followed, with probing questions for all of the Panel, with questions on security, regulation, how to get more information, potential to scale, where cities are already using Blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and how Blockchain will interact with IOT and AI. The audience went away hungry for more information, but probably slightly confused. Most has never heard of the technology prior to the Panel. We still have a way to go to present Blockchain in a simple, digestible form to novices. It was a great opportunity to showcase this disruptive technologies to cities, who will certainly be key adopters in the future. It was an awesome Panel of likeminded people determined to educate and share the benefits of Blockchain to cities – where by 2050, 70 percent of the world’s population will reside. Congratulations to Daejeon and Brisbane for an outstanding event!



