Giovanni Franzese: It’s time for corporates to turn to public blockchain solutions

For more than two decades, Giovanni Franzese has been working for the telecoms giant Ericsson where he served most recently as Head of Blockchain Business Development. As an engineer, Giovanni liked to experiment with different types of technologies, but it wasn’t until six years ago that he decided to use blockchain technology to develop a product solution.

The product, Ericsson Customer Acceptance is a big win for Ericsson. As he explains, “it's a big product, it's very successful, and we have we have a very vast adoption.” 

As he tells Charles Miller on this episode of CoinGeek Conversations, innovation from within a corporation is extremely complex. “Innovation comes through acquisition, it's much easier: you buy a company which has a brilliant idea,” he says. 

In Giovanni’s case, his idea to use blockchain didn’t happen overnight. He admits that transforming his idea into a viable product was a struggle at first, but he worked  ‘under the radar’ and step by step: “it’s like Lego bricks buildings, the first one and then the second, and then it was a good building at the end,” he says. It also helped that he found an internal stakeholder to sponsor his idea.

Ericsson Customer Acceptance is backed by Hyperledger Fabric, a private blockchain technology. While building the product, Giovanni wasn’t aware of any public blockchain with secured scalability and high transaction rates per second. On top of that, he was wary of proposing the use of public blockchain which he colleagues might fear would potentially expose corporate data.    

As Giovanni explains, the challenge continued as there was resistance to a product that had the word blockchain associated to it. As he points out, “at the very beginning nobody wanted it because it's not a secret that blockchain is still a little bit controversial, especially when we have such scandals like FDX.” 

Despite the roadblocks, Giovanni’s blockchain-based solution was deployed to several Ericsson customers. At the end, he says “the benefits were so evident.”

Giovanni left his position at Ericsson to join nChain where he plans to expand the BSV-supporting global tech company into a consultant service company. Only a few weeks after taking on the role of nChain executive partner, Giovanni had the opportunity to speak at the recent London Blockchain Conference. He highlighted his experience in developing, implementing, and eventually providing blockchain solutions to big corporates. 

In his talk, he shared a significant career-lesson to his audience: “I don't regret what I did and the decisions I took six years ago when I decided to embrace blockchain and use private, but my message to the audience today was, if you have to start now, then don't do it in the way I did with the  use of public, use Bitcoin SV, because that is the right choice today.”

Giovanni is impressed with BSV’s capability to do 50,000 transactions per second and compares it to Ethereum which can only do an average of seven transactions per second, he says. He then compares the two blockchains to modes of transport saying BSV is like a Ferrari while Ethereum is like a little bike. 

As for discussions on using private vs public blockchain, Giovanni says, “now is the time to go public.” He supports public blockchain by saying that private blockchains are for the most part centralized, costly and it don’t exploit the full capabilities of blockchain technology.