Alexander Beal, Missouri Notary Public

[alexanderjbeal]

POA Community,

I would like to formally introduce myself. My name is Alex Beal and I’m an active Notary Public in Kansas City, Missouri. I’m currently a UI developer in the insurance industry and have a passion for design and user experience. This passion started when I founded a clothing company in college and it’s the main thing that attracted me to POA Network. From my perspective, your mission is to improve the UX for developers, investors, corporations and basically every other relevant entity through improved functionality, horizontal scalability, interoperability and cross-chain transactions. I’ve been following the industry since 2013 and would love to actually get involved. Unfortunately, I didn’t know about POA when it first launched. Current validator Melanie Marsollier works with my brother and that’s how I (and Kaitlin) found out about the project and validator process. Since then, I’ve been following along and the enthusiasm around this community is electric. Watching improvements develop before my eyes is very exciting and I can’t wait to see what else the team is up to.

I graduated with a B.A. in Creative Business Design from Washburn University. Right now, I’m back in school at the University of Kansas focusing on Express, Node, Database Theory, Bookshelf, MongoDB and MySQL.

The company I work for, National Association of Insurance Commissioners, educates and supports state insurance regulators. I believe the POA consensus model would allow these decision makers to feel more comfortable with the tech at hand. We host and visit conferences all over the country where attendees range from elected government officials to some of the leading companies and InsurTech start ups. Given the opportunity, I want to try and connect our worlds to influence early adoption in any way I can. The insurance industry has already started to experiment with blockchain technology. This is most evident with initiatives like B3i, and most of the major carriers have tested distributed ledgers in some capacity. So far, network scalability has been the critical issue for enterprise applications. The POA Bridge (shout out to R&D) presents a clean and elegant solution, and helping bring that solution to market would be very rewarding.

On May 22, 2018, I started running a Sokol Bootnode to help the network and to better understand the commitment, process, and maintenance required of being a validator. I find incredible value in enhancing the security of this network and feel strongly that my geographic location will contribute positively to this overarching goal. I would be honored to serve POA Network from the state of Missouri and would like your consideration in becoming a validator.

Name: Alexander Beal
State: Missouri
Notary Commission Number: 18321524
Commission Expiration: April 30, 2022
Missouri Notary Public Search: https://s1.sos.mo.gov/business/notary
Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/alexanderjbeal

[igorbarinov]

Hi Alexander,
Welcome to the forum!

[alexanderjbeal]

Thanks @igorbarinov

Happy to officially be a part of the community

[alexanderjbeal]

As mentioned above, I founded a clothing company in college and was relatively successful for a couple years. Professional athletes like James Harden and Todd Gurley were seen wearing the clothing and business seemed to be going well for a while. Things didn’t work out, though. We had challenges scaling, particularly on the retail side, and ultimately shut down at the end of 2015. Along the way, I really could have benefited from blockchain technology and all the possibilities it can offer the retail industry. The ability to track, trace and verify products, record contracts and transactions while being able to guarantee the flow of data means that it can be utilized all over the entire value chain.

Payments implemented with smart contracts

• Karmaloop.com, an online marketplace that carried my brand started having trouble making their once-a-month payments. They eventually filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy leaving thousands in unpaid dues. Smart contracts recording product sales and storing the agreed upon percent of each sale in escrow or a virtual consignment wallet that executed monthly payments automatically would have been a lifesaver.

Connected supply-chain

• An end-to-end solution to order, trace and verify products from manufacturers. Follow, monitor and re-stock popular inventory items across retailers and storefront to decrease working capital inactivity. Payments initiated instantly throughout the process depending on agreements determined via contracts. It’s not uncommon for things to go wrong during manufacturing or before a customers purchase. Blockchain provides security and peace of mind to the entire supply chain.

• Companies like Provenance already use NFC enabled tags to track the authenticity of a products origin. Features like this are very useful to brands who pride themselves on transparency and if products are made in the USA or if items have high resale demand and are subject to counterfeit like Air Jordans or designer bags and accessories.

Consumer advantages

• Smart loyalty programs on a distributed ledger benefit the consumer and simplify the process of accrual, updating balances and management of points. It would also capture, store and verify customer details and behavior for a more personalized user experience. Shopin, a decentralized consumer profile, stores shopping data to share with favorite retailers who incentivize benefits and offer one-click checkout managing all aspects of a purchase through the users profile.

These are just a few applications. With POA Network capable of horizontal scalability multiple networks can work together seamlessly across the retail value chain. Order volume and royalty payments are efficiently recorded and distributed with high tps. The bridge would allow friendly transactions and make the payment process adaptable for both the industry and consumer.

[alexanderjbeal]

Set my dad up on Trust and sent him his first POA today.

He’s doing his Mark Watney pose.

Happy Father’s Day!