Jack Shaw is a globally recognized technology futurist, digital strategist, and one of the world's leading blockchain speakers. As Executive Director of the American Blockchain Council, he has spent decades helping Fortune 500 companies navigate emerging technologies — from artificial intelligence to Web3 — with an eye toward competitive advantage, operational agility, and digital trust.
With over 30 years of experience advising global brands on enterprise innovation, Jack's work sits at the intersection of business transformation and technology. He has led major initiatives in fintech, supply chain, and data analytics, and his deep understanding of blockchain infrastructure has made him a key voice in the evolution of decentralized finance (DeFi) and tokenization.
In this exclusive interview with The Champions Speakers Agency, Jack breaks down the real-world utility of blockchain beyond cryptocurrency — exploring its impact on supply chain transparency, fraud prevention, and secure data management. He also shares insights on misinformation, smart contracts, and how AI, IoT, and blockchain can together reshape the digital economy.
Q: Beyond its foundational role in cryptocurrencies, how do you assess the broader business and societal potential of blockchain technology today—and what use cases do you believe will drive its most significant value in the coming years?
Jack Shaw: “Cryptocurrencies are just the tip of the iceberg of potential applications of blockchain technology. Because pretty quickly after Bitcoin emerged in the early 2010s, people looking at that underlying technology said, "You know, the real key to what blockchain is doing here is it’s providing a shared version of the truth to multiple people."
“There are a lot of problems we have in business and society that this underlying technology could help us solve that have nothing to do with cryptocurrencies facilitating financial transactions. Let me give you a couple of examples. One is in supply chain management for manufacturers, distributors, retailers and so forth. And the other example is in the news.
“So, let’s take the first example. One of the problems in supply chain management that has been there ever since there have been supply chains—which date back at the very least to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the early 19th century—and realistically even before that. You had manufacturers, and manufacturers bought parts from other manufacturers, and those people bought materials from either manufacturers or people who were mining materials, and so forth.
“There were multiple tiers by the time you started with the extractive industries, went through various levels of manufacturing and distribution and retailing, and they finally would get into the hands of end-user individuals or organisations. And the problem is you never knew—it would be very difficult to know—whether your manufacturer, who’s your immediate supplier, is going to suddenly not be able to fulfil their orders because some parts and materials that they depended on are not being fulfilled by their suppliers. Because those suppliers, in turn, are having their operations disrupted by problems—whether it’s meteorological problems or whether it’s geopolitical problems and so forth—further up the supply chain.
“So, people were constantly having to make decisions about what they could order, what they could make, and what they could sell based on incomplete or inaccurate information.
“With blockchain technology, all of the relevant players in a supply chain can share information across a blockchain so that everybody can see all of the relevant information that they should be authorised to see. So, if you’re a buyer, for example, you don’t want two different competitive suppliers to see the prices that their competitors are charging. But you do want to be sure that they are both seeing exactly the same information that you are providing in terms of, "Here’s what is our anticipated set of needs over the next x number of days, weeks or months," so that they can provide you valid quotes.
“And if you accept those quotes, you can confirm the information, and you can agree on this electronically. You can use something called a smart contract, which is basically the same thing as a written contract, only it’s now done digitally. And with blockchain technology, it can’t be arbitrarily changed by either participant in the contract.
“So, you are all seeing the same information up and down the supply chain, and that can facilitate the flow of information. It can take cost out of supply chains, which can lower costs for manufacturers, distributors, retailers, and end individuals or organisations that are using these products. So, there’s a great potential for blockchain to enhance supply chain management, for example.
“Secondly, you can have the example of Internet of Things technologies that we talked about with the truck driver turning off the air conditioning in their truck for most of the drive. Well, if their truck is capturing that data, and if they’re part of a larger, more sophisticated system that again is unscrupulous—let’s say—then what’s to prevent them from capturing the data in the truck of the temperature and then changing the report on that data to report invalid information instead of the actual information? Showing that the temperature was allowed to rise to an unacceptable level while the meat, say, was being transported?
“Well, now, if that Internet of Things technology sensor data is loaded onto a blockchain immediately, then you don’t have one entity or one organization or person that can arbitrarily change it without everybody being aware that, "Wait a minute, they’ve gone in there, and they’ve made a change to this data—there’s something wrong, we need to investigate this, there’s a problem here." And blockchain technology can facilitate that.
“So, I like to think of blockchain and Internet of Things and AI as three legs of a stool that can enable fully digital, valid transactions. Where the Internet of Things technology captures data from the real world of all kinds that we need to know, and it is then validated and verified by blockchain technology to make sure that it has not been arbitrarily changed by a particular entity that’s involved in this process. And then AI to continuously monitor this huge flood of data that we couldn’t possibly afford to hire enough people to continuously monitor themselves and make recommendations as to how best to be able to act on that data.
“This is going to completely change and make much more cost-effective the distribution of physical products and just a host of other applications across both the private and public sectors.
“Now, a second application that I referenced earlier briefly is news. And we have seen the very negative impacts of misinformation and disinformation—especially in political systems around the world, and especially in countries like Russia and others where we have authoritarian leaders in place who are determined to stay in control regardless of the desires of their populace.
“They can manipulate and change data and information to make it look like things are true that really are not true. And with AI, it’s easy—relatively—and quickly becoming relatively easier to create videos and audio that make it look like things are happening that aren’t really happening.
“Well, it turns out—and again, I’m not going to get down into the technical details of how exactly this can be done—but using blockchain technology, you could validate whether a video, for example, was actually recorded originally by sensors with that data stored on the blockchain. This means a sensor, which is basically a video camera capturing images and sound, is actually showing what a real person said and did—or whether this was something that was created by an AI to make it look as though somebody said and did it.
“By capturing that data immediately on the blockchain, you can validate that no, this was not created by AI or changed or edited by someone to make it look… I mean, for example, during the recent elections in the United States, one of the things that were happening is that comments made by political candidates were being taken—and even though AI wasn’t being used to create this from the beginning—they were being edited out of context, with keywords and phrases removed, and then those strung together to make it appear that these candidates were saying things that they never actually said.
“I mean, they did speak those words, but they didn’t speak them in the order that was presented. But it made it look like they were doing that kind of thing. Well, with blockchain technology, you could validate from the time this information is created, who created it, how it was created, and if it is a legitimate source of valid information.
“And that minimises the possibility of disinformation and drastically reduces the possibility of misinformation. The distinction is that disinformation is when somebody intentionally puts incorrect or invalid information out there with the intention of misleading. Misinformation is when people share information that somebody put out there, thinking it’s correct, even though it’s not.
“And that inadvertently ends up getting disseminated, and people think that something has happened that hasn’t happened. It may not have been created with the intent to deceive, but the end result is that people are unintentionally deceived.
“However, blockchain technology can drastically reduce that likelihood and can come close to eliminating the possibility of intentional disinformation being disseminated around the internet.
“Now, again, it’s going to take a long time to put all of these tools and technologies in place. But as they become stronger and better, there’s a tremendous amount of potential value for blockchain technology. And again, to reiterate my opening point on the topic—this is entirely outside of, and above and beyond, the utilization of blockchain technology to enable cryptocurrencies for financial transactions.”
This exclusive interview with Jack Shaw was conducted by Mark Matthews of The Champions Speakers Agency.
For More On Jack Shaw’s views: Think Of Crypto As A Transactional Tool – Treat It Like A Speculative Investment, Says Blockchain Expert Jack Shaw
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