Mihai Ivascu, Modex CEO, at Bucharest Forum 2021: Value without trust is meaningless

On December 9th, Mihai Ivascu, Modex CEO and Co-founder, was one of the speakers at Bucharest Forum, a high-level event organized annually by the Aspen Institute Romania and the German Marshall Fund of the US, Bucharest office in partnership with the Government of Romania.

Since 2012, the mission of Bucharest Forum has been to create a multi-regional platform for innovative, forward-looking thinking on economic and security policies, and for promoting an action-oriented dialogue between governments, private sector and civil society. Modex’s CEO spoke about digital transformation, how blockchain technology can bring much-needed changes in the public sector, also highlighting Modex’s innovations when it comes to protecting one of our most important assets: data.

Digital transformation in many sectors

“We have a lot on our plate at the moment”, stated Mihai at the beginning of his speech. “I would like remind everyone that 90% of the global data was produced in the last 24 months. In the governmental sector, it’s even more than that. We need to look at new ways of protecting our most valuable asset. For many governments and organizations, what they have stored in their data represents their core asset.”

“We started Modex from the clear frustration of the fact that whoever controls the database is the owner of the truth. So we’ve asked ourselves: ‘How do we leave our children a better world, a better way of communicating, storing and interpreting data than by ensuring that the data is real?’ So we tried to bring trust to the users of any type of database. And I think there’s a real need in the government sector to make sure that the data collected and used to make strategic decisions is indeed the valid data!”

Modex focuses on applied innovations

Modex’s CEO added: “Over the past five years we had numerous case studies from telecom, banking, government sector and other areas. We are very passionate about the governmental sector because there you can see the real impact of applied technologies. While most of the concepts are pure concepts, we focus on applied innovations. We really want to make sure that fiscal regulators, national banks, governmental agencies or related institutions can use blockchain technology without the complexity associated with the adoption over the past years.”

Growing importance of blockchain globally

“We wanted to make blockchain digestible and we are happy to see that trust is becoming the new currency. Nowadays, blockchain is playing an important role globally and blockchain is most powerful when it is not felt. So technically, a technology applied extremely well is most useful when it’s invisible; when you trust a regulator which collects the data from all the financial companies reporting to it just because in the backend there’s a properly designed blockchain database or a pure blockchain infrastructure that makes sure the data is accurate; it makes sure that everybody’s reporting is based on a clear set of rules that was hardcoded and encoded.”

Zero Trust, a new technology trend

“In the United States, there’s a new technology trend right now called ‘Zero Trust’. Basically, all of the zero trust infrastructures are becoming critical for governments 3.0. We are thrilled to team up with the best technology companies in the world and we’re happy to tell them where they can use blockchain and where it can add that extra layer of trust and security to data, logs and important information. At Modex, our team of 100 is fully dedicated to bringing blockchain to the masses and making sure that governments and large enterprises are benefitting from what we think is one of the best technologies empowering the Internet of value, as we move from the Internet of data. I believe that value without trust is meaningless.”

The need for a significant shift

“If we look at the challenges of blockchain over the next 10 years, there’s a need for a significant shift because quantum computing poses a significant threat to blockchain, to enterprise networks. Further development of quantum-proved blockchains is one of our key areas of focus in the coming years. And we’re pretty sure we are going to launch a very good solution, especially for governments, which are happy to implement private blockchains and private networks that allow them to achieve the Holy Grail of data: system interoperability.”

What comes next?

Keeping an eye on the future, Modex’s CEO concluded: “I hope the public sector listens more to the private sector like they do in Israel, in the United States and in several Asian countries. I would love to see that happening more often and I always say: what’s better than a top technology? An expert using a top technology. So don’t be afraid of top technologies in the governmental sector. Spend more time with private companies and learn from them!”

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