Maryam Ayati: An energy maverick's vision for tokenizing the entire supply chain and its footprint

We sit down with energy industry maverick and market innovator, Maryam Ayati, who leads NEO Holdings. NEO brings established industry giants together with the climate and entrepreneurial ecosystem in mutually profitable models. Together, they identify and operationalize tomorrow’s most valuable new commodities and business models, reinventing energy and extractive supply chains such that they serve planet, people and profit.

Earlier in her career in private equity settings, she has led at-scale deployment of novel clean technology including some of the world’s first downstream liquified natural gas value chains to replace diesel and fuel oil: LNG-fueled drilling, mobility, marine and mining. In addition to overseeing world first monetization of landfill-gas to mobility, flare-gas-fueled microgrids and flare-gas to mobility in N. America.

Maryam also spent over a decade as an executive at Royal Dutch Shell. There, she created and led multiple global lines of business and organizations. These included Shell Trading's Origination & Investments practice across global crude and oil products, pioneering the LNG to downstream and marine concepts for the energy company, creating Shell’s Global LNG Regas organization, leading the business model design for Shell’s New Energies business and various others. With Shell, she also co-founded the industry first enterprise grade blockchain platforms Vakt and Komgo, serving as the founding board chair of Vakt Holdings.

About this episode

Maryam Ayati doubles down on Robert Friedland's vision of grading and trading commodities based on ESG aspects but describes it as a first step in a transformational but rapid redesign of commodity supply chains, financing and pricing. She describes how the entire commodity supply chain could be tokenized using stable tokens and distributed ledger technology, and how commodities could literally be traced to their source with the journey to end-user captured in almost perpetuity, using new data tech which applies molecular-level digital fingerprints to almost any commodity.

What to listen for:

There is a land grab for the highest value assets of the economy’s next iteration on traded markets, commodities and resources.
This future is being designed, built, legislated and monetized with big tech, data and crypto leading - without the burden of a legacy of competitive advantage to protect or preserve. The traditional market and commodity players are not at that table.
They should be.
The next iteration on resource and commodity markets will have origin, source tracking, environmental social attributes built into a single tokenized version of the truth. Priced in for the market to choose.
There is a time-bound opportunity for tip of the spear leaders in established industry to take a seat at the head table to collaborate with the new economy’s pace-setters. They earn that seat by leveraging a century of lessons learnt, a wealth of know-how, experience, relationships and distribution channels that can be deployed to create new competitive advantage.

Click here for the transcript to this episode.