Welcome to The Good Block !

The Good Block is the best way to learn about companies and initiatives using blockchain technologies for a positive impact. One article per week, every Thursday in your inbox! Receive your first positivity shot by subscribing now! 🙌

This article is very different from the ones that will be following, as it is our first. We’ll cover: Who we are, our purpose, and what you can expect in the coming months. Let’s dive in ! 👇

Let me introduce ourselves first. We are three friends - Paul, Thibaud and Nicolas - who met while finishing our studies in California. The three of us are French and will be co-writing the articles, leaving one or the other more space depending on the subject.

During our classes, we had a big focus on web3 technologies (even an NFT& Metaverse class - yes, it’s a thing). Every week, speakers and entrepreneurs introduced the different opportunities of Blockchain. Yet, despite this objective of giving us a big picture of the technology, only a handful of initiatives were really trying to support a cause that made sense to us. Everyone was building another metaverse, another NFT collection, or a P2E. Which is 100% fine. Every major technology goes through this cycle and this first wave of speculative application. (and kudos to you if you take profit in it, I guess 👀).

But we thought Blockchain had more to offer, and that it was a solution to many problems we don’t seem to be facing today.

So we decided to interview as many people as possible about the subject. CEO’s, employees, builders, and investors. All gave us their insights into how blockchain could have a positive impact on our society. (Look them up at the bottom of the article, you may spot a few companies we will talk about in the near future )

Let me sum up those conversations: Blockchain does have amazing potential.

Now, all the rest of the newsletter is going to be about deconstructing what that means and giving you concrete examples, in a compact mail, once a week.

Here are some examples of initiatives we came across during our research:

💰Help refugees cross borders without having their money stolen by smugglers in Rwanda.

🍫To follow the route of the cocoa from the Amazonian farms to the sales points in Ecuador.

📜Securing 1.5 million land titles in Georgia.

🫀Fight organ trafficking by improving the traceability, transparency, and efficiency of research and matching between donors and patients.

🌳Setting up an agroforestry project involving small farmers in Peru and Bolivia.

🦐Fight for more responsible fishing by monitoring the fishery and its supply chain.

👤Build and deploy digital identity solutions for the 1.5 billion people that are unable to prove their identity.

… And many more.

We aim to go on the field. Visit companies and speak about them here. Meet the founders, employees, and final users to measure the impact.

Next Thursday, our first article will be published, and it will be focused on Blockchain and the fishing industry! Subscribe to learn more about it in a week 🎁

Please let us know if you have any subject you would like to speak about here, if you know anybody doing something great with blockchain or if you just want to say hi!

  👉 [email protected] 👈

Here is a non-exhaustive list of the people we had the chance to talk with. We want to thank them greatly for taking the time of supporting us in our initiative :

Unity Stoakes - Founder, StartUp Health; Luke Kowalski - VP, Oracle; Rushi Amin - Vice President, Group Technical Program Manager, Morgan Stanley; Marc Lijour - Blockchain specialist, French Tech Toronto; Tadii Tendayi - Founder, Bitflex Fintech; Pico Velasquez - Founder and CEO, VIIRA; Frank Eric Tiambo - Founder, KimboCare; Jake Leve - Partnership director, Leaf Global Fintech; Daan Archer - Founder and CEO, Copyright Delta; Dwayne Desaulniers - Director Web3 Blochcain, Associated Press; Gilles Martin - Founder, PMP Consulting; Bhanu Prakash Kandregula - Blockchain Research Engineer, Miracle; Natacha Crooks - Distributed System Teacher, UC Berkeley; Jennifer Tanner - Director, NuPay Technologies Inc ; Léo Lustig - Senior Blockchain Consultant, IBM ; Lawrence Liermann - Co-founder, MM Blockchain Academy ; Jim Kyung-Soo Liew - Founder, SoKat Consulting ; Darrell W. Gunter - Author, Transforming Scholarly Publishing With Blockchain Technologies ; Patrick Consorti - Executive-in-residence, Schoolab ; Michael Morris - Lecturer, UC Berkeley; Nicolas Gallardo - Bitcoin Educator at La Nueva Moneda ; Harold Graham - CEO, Social Impact Investment ; Daniel Baeriswyl - Founder, Science Card.