Lebanese Entrepreneur launches Blockchain startup for data Management

UNLOCK interviewed well respected Lebanese Blockchain evangelist Mr. Mahmoud Dgheim. Mahmoud Dgheim is an entrepreneur. He started looking into Blockchain as a technology after he invested in Bitcoin back in 2014. Dgheim studied chemistry at the American University of Beirut as well as renewable energy technology in addition to taking advanced MIT program for technology and innovation.

He first dabbled in blockchain when he utilized the Interplanetary File sharing System on the Blockchain which to develop a file sharing application which was sold to another investor after receiving pre-seed investment. Today Dgheim has launched a new project called Castalise, based out of Switzerland. Dgheim is using Oasis Labs Blockchain platform for Castalise. Oasis Labs allows clients to use data without liability, collaborate on shared data without risking privacy or losing control. Founded in 2018 by Dawn Song, an award-winning professor at the University of California at Berkeley, Oasis Labs is backed by investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, Binance and many others.

On the Oasis network, all data moving through the system will be locked into encrypted bundles. Researchers will be able to run the data through their machine learning algorithms and prove that the calculations were done correctly without ever actually seeing the underlying data.

Castalise is a consent management service for healthcare businesses and pharmaceutical companies that have a wealth of data to protect. It allows them to run machine learning on the Blockchain. As Dgheim explains, “Our project uses Blockchain to develop consent management service for healthcare sector and pharmaceutical companies to share data while protecting their core service and privacy, enabling them to run machine learning on the blockchain. One example is clinical trials where pharmaceuticals could leverage this data through machine learning, with data from actual patients bound by consent of patients and doctors without the data ever being exposed.” Currently Dgheim and his team are in the validation phase after building the pilot. Dgheim is working with a fortune 500 pharmaceutical group on this project, and hopes to have it launched in the next six months.

Dgheim is currently in Spain working with a media intelligence solutions group. As he explained, “We are building a survey solution built on top of Blockchain computation with Black Box GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). Castalise smart contract is completely confidential. In other sense, all computation executed by the smart contract are done in a “black box” invisible to the admin, user, smart contract and even the operating system used by the user to access the service. When we proposed this to the client, we didn’t even mention the word blockchain, because when we pitch we pitch the solution and business use. We ditch the buzz and go straight to the service, the tool, the user experience.

Dgheim looks to move his company to the UAE. As he states, “We are present in Switzerland but we have plans to establish ourselves in the UAE, the sooner the better as we have heard it is one of the best places to be in for those in the Blockchain sector.”