Todd Siena, Block Aero Technologies

Hello everyone, Jeff Jerge on the Oyster Aero PearlCast and today I'm joined with Todd Siena, Block Aero Technologies. Todd, how's it going? Doing great. Happy to be here in Florida. Yeah. So, um, how's summer going so far? The official start of summer happened a while back. Yeah, bit hot. You know, I'm here in Wellington, big equestrian community, so a lot of that kind of slowed down in the last month, but uh Yeah, for sure. Yeah, it's it's still I still enjoy coming here. Uh my family's here and yeah, it's been a good time so far. Good deal. Where do you live? Do you live in Wellington or? So, I'm based in uh Bangkok, Thailand. Uh I I I set up when I set up Block Aero, uh we established our headquarters office there. So, we have all of our developers, designers, and uh you know, the management team like myself. We're uh we're primarily based in Bangkok, but we have also kind of a growing team here in the States. Uh a little bit of a nucleus in uh Florida at this moment. Good deal. I think even though we're virtual, you've won farthest traveled on the Oyster Aero podcast. So uh you know, furthest away from It is a long trip. I took the uh I took that Singapore Airlines flight on the way over last time. So, from Bangkok to Singapore and then it's I think it's the longest flight in the world about 18 hours. Wow. All right. That's that's fun. All right. So, um let's talk about Block Aero. What are you guys doing?

What are you trying to solve for? How's it going? All that good stuff. Sure. Well, you know, I I started out also in the aviation uh industry. Um and my first job, it was in my family's parts distribution business. So we had a here in Wellington, Florida electromechanical consumables, expendables business where we would uh sell those to airlines, MRO's all over the world. Um, so that was also part of my my job and uh I I went on from the distribution world to also kind of trading smaller assets and as I uh kind of you know got 10 15 years into my career started realizing like it really is bad the way we uh manage and treat our data and I've always kind of felt like there was something wrong with that. And so what happened was in 2016 I joined a um a kind of community called entrepreneurs organization and it's a it's like a peer group of of entrepreneurs and we we were all kind of exploring crypto at the time in 2016 and uh it it kind of planted the seed in my head is you know for this amazing uh revolutionary technology of blockchain could that be a better way to potentially organize the same data data that we look at in the aviation industry. And the reason why I was thinking it makes sense is because blockchain uh can be a uh identity linked, immutable, persistent uh database that uh in its nature is a bit more resilient uh more reusable uh more standardized across all the the participants in the creation and network of that database. And so, uh, it made a lot of sense to me when I put those kind of concepts together. And so, I launched Block Aero with that mission is how can we, uh, help aviation asset managers, uh, be, uh, better by providing them with a chain of custody solution that

helps them to standardize, to access, and endorse highquality aviation data. That's really cool. Now um you know I I guess it and it's not denying the technology but a lot of marketing firms will latch on to things right so you see some big marketplaces and they'll say oh we we have AI and then we've have blockchain and and all that so the problem is I think the technology is awesome the words have been overused by marketeteers perhaps so um as far as providing you know the actual service if I'm interested in getting into blockchain, where do we start? Right? So, um you know, with Block Aero, uh to use blockchain, we do all the heavy lifting in terms of how the blockchain is deployed for aviation companies to use it as an application. So, uh in the terms of the experience with Block Aero, you're going to use blockchain as if you were using any regular type of SAS. Um now the way that it works in terms of you create what we call a digital asset which is essentially a kind of ID and value of the asset on a network. Um and and and we uh we enable the uh uh the users to access that based on what their role is with that digital asset. So if you're an owner or you're an operator, you can have access to all of the airworthiness back to birth records that would be appended to that particular digital asset. Uh and in the similar way, you can um uh you can also create documents in kind of like a transactional workflow with those same assets. And we use the blockchain to make sure that there's like a a shared uh source of truth, a shared record between those organizations that documents the status change of the asset or how the transaction proceeds. Got it. So the myth that it had to start at the OEM isn't necessarily true. We can start the I mean that's the perfect world, right?

Is that we start from the time a part's [unclear], but you know we can add something to the blockchain. you can append um all the traceability that you have and then from that point forward um it's it's fully like fully traceable not that's right that's right so there's like a date that the block is created and then there's a date that the record is reference to so the way we look at it is we see our assets move through uh moments in time where they're in a custody from somebody who's a trusted uh party in the in aviation probably because they have some kind of credential like an ASA certificate or a part 145 license and then those users uh with their with you know their reputation and the credentials they can uh state that an asset is at a certain you know status a certain record and and that's how we look at like re building data into our into our blockchain. Interesting. Who do you find if you look at the supply chain from manufacturer all the way to operator and everybody in between, who do you find is probably like what category of customer types are most are speaking with you most today?

Would you say um you know I think a lot of it is driven by the use cases that our our platform has been able to address through like using blockchain to create a end-to-end solution. So we have a couple of solutions which have been more focused on the MRO and the aftermarket. Uh uh that is indeed where I think a lot of people look at blockchain and the potential pain points it can solve and they say hey if I had this asset in the aftermarket I want to recover the trace data. Yeah I'd love to have it on a blockchain. So it's natural for people to feel the pain point and look for a solution of that uh area. I would say the OEMs have also, you know, since blockchain kind of took the world by storm, they've also all done their own um kind of initiatives or projects in an exploratory way to uh test out the technology. Some of those we participated in, some of them we didn't. And uh I do think OEMs is a very good place to start. But at the same time uh there's other reasons why OEMs or certain players may not be the best one to init to manage the blockchain for the everybody else. Sure. Sure. So, um the big coalition that you know was launched on false parts because of um the big scandal that's happened recently or not so recently, but um as far as just part traceability and making sure you're getting real parts, I mean, is that I'm sure that plays into um maybe the urgency a little bit more. How do you um how do you manage to get Block Aero involved in that process? Well, for us, and I believe you're referring to the aviation supply chain integrity coalition, uh, launched in the wake of AOG Technics and other, uh, issues that were going on for quality, uh, in the supply chain and, uh, fortunately, I I was, you know, uh, I was definitely following the, uh, kind of committee

that was putting together the the report as they did it. Uh, they did reference blockchain and a few other things that are, you know, definitely covered by us. For example, the unique IDs um as well as uh you know managing accredited vendor lists. So uh indeed that coalition was nice to have more authoritative figures talking about the problem and then mentioning uh blockchain. The way we would involve in that is more through like the ASAPs of the world who we also have partnerships with and they uh kind of uh I think are the best voice to speak to those uh kind of groups uh as and with us you know as a technical support. Sure. Sure. That makes a lot of sense. So you're really the the roll out is um I don't want to say aligning closely but ASA certainly would be the best known standard for suppliers. So um that's that's really interesting.

Well good. How's how's it going since you've launched? When did you launch the business? We launched in the end of 2017. So uh the basically the company was formed then by 2018 mid we had pretty much got the co-founders and uh founding team together uh then you know through through those first few years uh the company really was faced with the R&D task because we built a platform not on traditional technology that is quite fast and easy to build on but we were doing something fully new and hadn't been done before. So uh so there were a lot of lessons to learn you know we started for example on Ethereum as a a blockchain uh kind of framework in the early days we we then moved that into what's called hyperledger fabric. Uh it's a different type of one of the pri the previous one was kind of more geared to cryptocurrencies whereas ours was kind of more geared towards data and high speed. Uh and so we uh we we spent those first couple years doing like PC's smallcale projects with with some pretty reputable brands.

So like for example Singapore Airlines, Rolls-Royce, Etah uh SAD um uh these players uh were all exploring blockchain just like we were at the time and we kind of uh went went through them to kind of look at where some of the uh initial use cases may be. Our biggest breakthrough came in uh 22 when we went live with a subsidiary of JAL called uh Jallu. Uh so they really kicked off a lot of our and still to this day push a lot of demand and uh uh kind of transactions through our platform. So they work together essentially doing repair management type of transactions for their uh heavy industries uh you know Japanese companies and and airlines. And so uh through the partnership with them we've onboarded over a couple hundred thousand assets at this point uh supporting thousands of transactions and uh so that was a a great big kind of first uh you know brand name to win.

They also made a a small uh investment in Block Aero for um for our equity and uh and and I think the next big kind of development for Block Aero was when we launched our registry as a service solution. Uh so we have on top of the blockchain network itself the platform has like MRO manager for our you know Japanese customers and others. Uh we have also a product called registry manager. And what registry manager does is it allows kind of uh anybody who's managing a consortium or managing an ecosystem to define a kind of standard set of data and to enable a standardized request using the digital assets or just bringing it on for the first time into Block Aero. And uh and then it this is really where I think we're making a lot of breakthrough. We've finally opened up our platform to be accessible for companies that are not necessarily yet a customer of Block Aero and we uh we basically have a kind of free portal for people to do queries to validate this the status of a given uh asset that you're looking for. What was the record uh that is available on Block Aero?

Interesting. Okay. So you can look up um maybe like the last inventory or repair paying on the blockchain basically. Yeah, you could search the blockchain for like if I know the identity of an asset by part or serial number, I want to submit that query. What results do you have for me on a given registry? So the first registry we did was really about remove parts and solving a traceability problem uh for the aftermarket in terms of tear down materials uh that are specifically flowing from the US, the EU or anywhere overseas into the China market because China their regulator has some uh specific higher you could say or more difficult requirements. uh and as they are uh getting into USM which is a new thing for them still uh they are looking to kind of have a a strong oversight and control on what exactly is coming into the market. Sure. Wow, that's really interesting. Well, I know that this is way quick. I mean, we try to keep these at about 15 minutes or so. Um but I wanted to at least meet you and let everybody else kind of hear what what's going on. And so, um, you know, we'll work more on maybe how to help you kind of get out there, but I mean, beyond what you've already done is incredible, especially with, uh, Jallock. So, um, great to have you on today, Todd.

Thanks, Jeff. All right.