Rethink Ledgers
Democratizing the Value Proposition of Ledger Technologies

Having held leading positions in Capgemini as the global lead for Blockchain in Financial Services and then with IBM in their IBM Blockchain services division in North America, Bart Cant is an expert on the nuances of digital ledger technologies that entail the likes of blockchain, distributed, decentralized, and centralized ledgers. The game-changing potential of ledger technology manifests a huge demand for consultants to help companies undertake transformational Blockchain initiatives, which Cant observed. “The objective of ledger tech is to enhance transparency, security and provide cryptographically verifiable proofs of data entered into any type of ledger. It provides higher levels of accurate information sharing and a verifiable historic transaction record for a single entity or between participants in an eco-system or network,” elucidates Cant.

Leveraging his industry-wide expertise in the technology for over five years, Cant opened the door of Rethink Ledgers in 2019, where he joined forces with Mitra Sheikh Alavi, who would be the co-founder and CMO at the company, brings with her over 20 years of experience spearheading marketing teams, and a deep passion in cryptocurrency, blockchain and ledger technologies.

Rethink Ledgers is a boutique ledger advisory and consulting firm that provides business strategy advice and development consulting services to well established and emerging companies in the financial services sector and healthcare industry. The company focuses on blockchain advisory, technical architecture, business design, and consortium building, helping clients navigate and leverage ledger technologies to their fullest and apt potential.

The company has carved its niche in democratizing the potential of Digital Asset Modeling Language (DAML) by Digital Asset Holdings, Self-Sovereign Identity solutions, and Verifiable credentials. DAML is a privacy-enhancing, smart contract language that guarantees privacy by coding the solution as rights and obligations. Information is stored inside smart contracts and cannot be accessed unless the party accessing the data has been explicitly configured to access it. Being one of the few solutions to support interoperability across networks, DAML smart contracts can easily be deployed on a variety of blockchain networks (e.g., Hyperledger Fabric, Sawtooth, Besu or R3 Corda), centralized ledgers (e.g., AWS QLDB), or traditional databases (e.g., PostgreSQL). DAML also allows parties to atomically transact across enterprise boundaries without making a specific decision on the underlying ledger tech running the network.

Self-Sovereign Identity solutions is a new set of Self Sovereign Identity developments and solution designs originated from the initial development by the Hyperledger Indy community and the stewardship by members of the Sovrin Foundation.

Verifiable credentials, on the other hand, is a new W3C standard serving a new way to exchange verified information about people, organizations, and more. It brings back the concept that people can control their own data, which helps establish trustworthy digital experiences while respecting people's privacy.

We used DAML to execute and store Smart Contracts whereas Verifiable Credentials were used to send Covid-19 test results to patients

By leveraging these technologies to their full potential, Rethink Ledgers has scripted several success stories for its clients in the financial services sector and healthcare domain. In one of the recent projects, the company built a prototype as part of the COVID-19 Credentials Initiative that combined both DAML and Verifiable Credentials. Its “State Surveillance COVID-19 Solution” was used to securely transmit COVID-19 test information from health clinics to its patients providing a safe and secure mechanism for sharing COVID-19 test data that allowed the recipient to control their data and decide on what to share and with whom. To explain, Mitra says, “We used DAML to execute and store Smart Contracts whereas Verifiable Credentials were used to send COVID-19 test results to patients.”

Recently, Rethink Ledgers has been working with an ambitious Healthcare Startup to improve the tracking and tracing of medical supplies, inventory costs, and speed up the financial processes between vendors and its healthcare provider. The company leveraged a ledger tech solution based on DAML that will help improve trust and transparency and significantly reduce overall costs by cutting out waste, eventually benefitting the patients.

In light of these initiatives, Cant believes there is enormous growth potential in DAML and Verifiable Credentials technologies and can be further used in mortgages, settlement of transactions in the capital markets industry, private securities, transactions between hedge funds, and different trading businesses. Another area the company is working on is a product component that will help manage ledger tech solutions in a more centralized manner and allow multiple parties to do authentication and integration to various existing back-office systems. “We want to grab the opportunity as a partner to build holistic solutions for businesses ranging from start-ups and well-established firms,” concludes Cant.