Interview with Enrique Alcazar Co-Founder and Blockchain Architect at NutraSign

I had the pleasure of interviewing Enrique Alcazar, he is Cofounder & Blockchain architect in NutraSign

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you share with us what NutraSign is?

Nutrasign is a new application that leverages distributed protocols, (IE, blockchain and IPFS) to fix some of the biggest problems food supply chain for both the user and seller:

The first one is focused around the user, and it’s food provenance, we all like to know where our food comes from, and some of us even make choices based on it, for example, you may like to buy from free-range farms. The problem is that, with the current food supply chain, that information can be easily faked, the good news is, thanks to nutrasign’s mobile app you’ll be able to scan every product you buy and see it’s full provenance.

The second one is related to every member in the chain. Currently many buyers have to trust each other on the product’s provenance, and in catastrophic events such as a product carrying a disease, it’s really hard to identify, we can barely determine the country, for example where a particular batch of peppers came from, forcing all farmers in the country to seize production, or mislabeling where they came from and expose more people to the disease. This exact example happened to Germany with some Spanish peppers which ended up not being Spanish.

Can you tell me How blockchain can improve food traceability?

Let’s say we have a supply chain with 3 participants: 2 is selling to 3, then 3 has to trust 2 with everything that happened before him, barely any information is kept right now and is not directly associated to the products.One the only other solution would be for 2 to openly disclose all information about 1 and let 3 check that information, but that’s really time consuming and could be a horrible business decision, we propose a much better one:

Use blockchain and take advantage of its traceability and easy tokenization:1. We create identities for all members, and every authorized participant, can create claims about them, IE: John’s farm is free range and has X license.2. Every time a new product is created, we create a token representing it, every change made to the product is represented in the token, even morphing into new ones. IE: sugar tokens from John and lemon tokens from Ana were used by Alice to produce lemonade tokens.3 We limit the information that we want to be accessible. IE: as a lemonade manufacturer, maybe I don’t

want the next buyer who my supplier’s are, then I can only register in that product the properties I want to expose instead of the full identity.

Will Blockchain bring trust back to the food industry?

I think it blockchain tech will bring new levels of trust to markets we are not expecting, and certainly, the food industry is one of them where we need it urgently, not only to fix all the scams that are happening right now,

but to improve our health, reduce risks, and give better visibility to all products that come from better sources.

How do you feel of being part of top 100 SouthSummit Startups finalist?

I’m ecstatic, it was a team effort, but certainty we have Abraham (Nutrasign’s CEO) to blame for this. Thanks to everyone, here we are, working on a great idea that aims to improve a part of the world for everyone, and at least for me, that’s the dream.We are really thankful to the organization for seeing the potential of our product, and we will keep working on it to put it on everyone’s hands as soon as possible.

What are the 5 things that most excite you about blockchain and crypto? Why?

Only 5, that’s hard, I’ll go with the classics and give my own take.

1. Scam prevention: I know this seems almost paradoxical nowadays with tons of ICOs being scams,but, if well used, thanks to the transparency it provides, it can clear up many processes, and you canbe sure of who is executing them.

2. No middle-man: For a very long time in most business we have the figure of the middle man, someentity that’s just putting 2 people in contact and takes a cut for it, it helps because it eases the trust, it’s easier to trust one person, but at the end of the day, that’s still one person hence a point of failure because of many reasons, one thing we can trust is code, and the more we perfect the behavior of blockchain code, the less middle man we’ll see.

3. Global identities: wouldn’t it be nice if we owned our own identities instead of governments? Of course they and everyone could attestate things about it, but having an international identity could ease tons of things (private communication, access to resources, voting, identifying people in risk such as refugees).

4. Decentralization of processes: From payments, to services like Uber, in some years, we’ll move to use Dapps, or at least I hope so, I think this could really help everyone, would reduce costs, give opportunities to people in risk of exclusion, delete inefficiencies… Basically just define a set of basic rules, and everyone that abides and has connection to a node can play, blockchain will make sure those rules are applied.

5. The internet of value: This is the biggest one for me, and only enabled thanks to free micro payments: being paid for add consumption, paying to delete adds, pay tiny amounts to your favorite creators, being payed for the time you spend on your videogame… This basically means an internet where we stop being the product, instead we get rewarded for the value we contribute to the network.

What are the 5 things worry you about blockchain and crypto? Why?

Unfortunately, is also hard to list only 51. Lies on reach: Blockchain won’t cure cancer, and neither will solve other problems some of them are

claiming to fix, there are too many people spurting lies about almost everything, and obviously, users don’t have the time to check every detail that comes out, and that leads to misconceptions about how far this tech can go.

1. Marketing: Tons of screaming with no substance, lots of projects just “put in a blockchain” for marketing purposes. Virtually 0 times is absolutely needed, rarely is used properly and most of the time is there just for show, that only gives it bad repo.

2. Fake know-it-alls: I’m really not sure if they like to fake it, or it’s the Dunning-Krugger effect, but I’ve met tons of people that claim to be experts and then don’t even know the most basic stuff, everyone that claims to be an expert is either a liar or one of the “creators”, an even then that’s questionable and we can see it in the:

3. Internal wars: This is a really young tech, and doesn’t have one single leader, this results in many discussions about where should blockchain go, and right now, they are doing more bad than good to the technology.

4. Scams: Yes, right now there are too many scams, they tend to be consequence of adding all the points, some bad apples take advantage and create scams to trick people and steal their assets, fortunately right now, there are tons of people working on fixing this.

How can our readers follow you on social media?

I don’t tend to be very active on social media, but I can be found on most places by my internet’s nickname, kikoncuo.At the end of the day, if you want to contact me or the project the easiest thing to do would be to try @Nutrasign in the main social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn)