Genevieve Leveille is the Principal Founder of AgriLedger, a UK blockchain outfit aiming to ensure farmers receive adequate pay for crops. The company is working with the Haiti Ministry of Commerce and Industry and ESIH on a DLT Pilot, which is also sponsored by the World Bank.
Genevieve has been nominated in the UK list of the top 100 BAME in Technology of 2019 by the Financial Times and is taking part in three sessions at this year’s Blockchain Technology World, 11-12 March, ExCeL London.
Ahead of her appearance(s), we picked Genevieve’s brains about blockchain successes, failures and her childhood ambitions…
What was your earliest ambition?
I don’t know that I really had so much ambition. As much as I have always wanted to do the best at whatever I do, I loved doing everything. So, I have over 16 years in music. I’m an art appreciator, and actually have a minor in comparative law, music and art with my degree in biochemistry. So, it’s never been about an ambition to do something in particular, rather an ambition to be the best that I can be at whatever I do.
What is your current ambition?
I would say my current ambition is the same. I was very glad the other day to hear about Forbes’s 50 over 50. That’s something I’d like to get into or at least is something I aspire to, because I believe that I am now at the point in my career where I can start looking at making a difference.
And what is different from when I was young, is that I can make a difference without having to be part of an organisation or a big, large corporation. As an individual, we can make a difference and also take others along our journey with us, something that we couldn’t do previously.
My ambition, therefore, is to really look at creating the mechanism and education for others to understand what the distributed ledger and blockchain technology can bring us, and how these can be an integral part of the fabric that makes our lives better. Disruptive technologies such as AI have created many fears, especially around machine learning and how the technology might lead to job displacement.
I think that there’s an opportunity to really help educate others about what the possibility of life holds for them. And also bring those who have been left behind into the digital realm and really remove that divide that exists.
If you were to tokenize one of your assets what would it be?
I don’t know what I would tokenize. In terms of assets, I have very few. I think that, I would actually look at ways of tokenizing, effectively, companies, because that’s the asset that I have right now. I guess that’s what the ICO tried to do: to get the crowd to actually fund. The only fundamental problem is usually the crowd doesn’t know what it wants. I still think that the whole asset class is still a bit out of whack, and I’m not sure I understand very clearly what I possess that others would want to have a fractionalization of. Maybe my brain.