On this episode, Sabine VdL interviews Sid Chakravarthy, founder and CEO of StaTwig and a leading expert in emerging technology including The  Internet of Things, Blockchain, Metaverse and NFTs. Sid uses these to develop solutions that have a large-scale social impact.   KEY TAKEAWAYS There are big problems with drugs and vaccines when you look at the last mile delivery system or indeed getting to the people who really need them. They get damaged, spoiled, stolen in order to be sold on black markets, so I thought I could use my ‘Bay-area skills’ to solve some real-world problems and that’s how I started the company.  Supply chains are a very complex network of partners, so to speak, who are working together to bring a product to the final consumer. But there’s a lot of confusion and a lack of interoperability when it comes to sharing information with each other. They all track the product as it passed through their own company, but it stops when they had it onto the next partner. We provide end-to-end visibility of how the product is moving across the supply chain leveraging blockchain. The data that this technology makes available is scalable, it can be used by underwriters to figure out risks in each part of the supply chain: how much product is getting damaged? how do I write a policy for that? you can prevent specific claims from happening because you have full transparent visibility of key data points. And those show that there could be a failure in one part of the supply chain or another.  The Metaverse and NFTs are not that complex at all. Think of a gamer, he is involved in and essentially living in a full-time game, talking to people, buying and selling things, etc. Scale that up to non-gamers, imagine an alternate world where people can plug in and do what they want: shopping, clubbing, travel, building a home, anything. The possibilities are endless. That’s the Metaverse, a digital reality where you can plug in any time and live fully in there. NFTs is a certification of ownership of digital art, 500 million people might have that digital art on their laptop, but there’s only one certificate that says “this is the actual owner of it and all the copies”. Think about your Picasso or Rembrandt. Can you prevent the copies? No, but you may be able to in the future with NFTs! This gives you access to use, sell, brand and rent that product (digitally) for any kind of commercial reason. Think about using your digital art and assets within the Metaverse.    BEST MOMENTS ‘When I started the company vaccines were a very boring product, Covid made it very attractive all of a sudden! But by then we already had a solution to solve some big problems with Covid.’ ‘Internet access and blockchain technology have allowed the birth of a new kind of transparency and visibility. This could never have been done as easily before. Ans this because the customer is asking for it.’ ‘Once the product moves from one touch point to another ("airport to courier" or "from manufacturer to consumer") we are annotating the journey and telling the story of it as it moves along its path transparently. Each item has its own tracking number and lots of tracking data about each individual product within each container.’ ‘NFTs can act as a way of bringing your real-world products into the Metaverse by using what is called a true certificate of ownership allowing you to transact digitally within the new internet.’