 Okay, hello everyone. So my name is James Lutton. I'm the technical lead for the Blocksburg Project, which was initiated by Mox Plunk Society and more specifically the digital library of the Mox Plunk Society. For those of you who are unaware, the digital library essentially takes care of all the publications, dealings with different software licensing groups for the entirety of the Mox Plunk Society. In addition to this, we also develop different applications for researchers. So this is where kind of the inspiration for our blockchain kind of begun at Mox Plunk Society was what applications can we develop based on some of these new technologies like AI and blockchain and how can these make an impact for researchers? So with this basically seed of idea, it quickly grew and now what we created is a blockchain for science that is run by scientists. So as you can see in the bottom left, we call this a trusted research infrastructure and I would like to show you a little bit about what exactly this looks like, some of the applications that we're developing and how this actually benefits science. So this is a quick overview of the Blocksburg infrastructure and what we've done is basically used a fork of Ethereum and then added a different consensus algorithm called Proof of Authority and in the top left hand corner, you can see some of the different technical specifications, which allows for more scalability and a better user experience because these are of course very important, especially when we're dealing with people who may be unfamiliar with blockchain. So what exactly does the Blocksburg infrastructure retail? So you may be familiar in a regular Ethereum blockchain that basically the nodes who are confirming blocks are solving some cryptographic algorithm and then validate the blocks based on the solution to this. In our example, we're using Proof of Authority, so it's a permission blockchain and basically each research institution is enabled to validate blocks. So any research institution, if you do fundamental research, can apply to become a Blocksburg member and figuring out the exact definition of a research institute is definitely a tough challenge, but nevertheless, each research institution can apply to be a Blocksburg member and then has different governing rights. So this includes things like voting on different governance models, voting who actually is allowed to get added to the network and different applications. So instead of any of the data submitted, it's actually validated with all these different research institutes and each one of them is running a node. So of course, we all know how blockchain works by now and it's important to point out because I get this question a lot that Blocksburg is a permissioned public blockchain. So this means that the block confirmations are done by these research institutes and this is governed by a smart contract for access control. So it is permissioned in this sense. However, anybody can actually use this infrastructure. So startups, third parties, other research institutes that aren't part of Blocksburg can also use this blockchain infrastructure to develop applications for scientists on top. So ultimately what we are trying to do is we have different applications mainly targeted to scientific applications that could utilize blockchain technology. So we work with various third parties, like I said, startups in different departments and research institutes to develop scientific focus applications that can use the Blocksburg network. And so right now we're working, for example, Artifacts has a topic next and so we're working with them and they utilize the Blocksburg infrastructure as well. And so we like to extend this out to many different parties that are all working with this. So who exactly created this research infrastructure? And back in February we had the Genesis, if you wanna call it that, of the Blocksburg network. And so we all went to a castle in Southern Bavaria and created the Blocksburg network with these 11 institutions. And here you can see they're from a fairly diverse and cover much of the world. So for instance we have Africa, the United States, Europe, et cetera, all participating in this blockchain network. And so these are the founding institutes who initially created the blockchain. And since February we've almost tripled in size so we have about 30 institutes now added to the network. So we're growing quite fast and if anybody would be interested in your part of a research institute, feel free to contact us and we'd love to talk about how you can get involved. So a lot of times we're asked why exactly did we actually do a different blockchain and why specifically proof of authority? I think this is a very common question and especially people who are into the blockchain technology always question how decentralized really is it? Does it fit all these different models and so forth? So hopefully I can shed some light on that. And the two other most famous consensus algorithms that are used, proof of work and proof of stake, generally you're staking some type of resource. So in proof of work you're staking kind of computation by solving some algorithm, proof of stake, you're basically staking the amount that you have invested in the network and this kind of ensures that you won't do anything to disrupt the network. And then similarly in proof of authority you're staking your identity. You'll notice that of all these different algorithms the only one where you can actually see the identity of the participants of the people confirming blocks is in proof of authority and the rest are either anonymous or pseudo-anonymous. And ultimately what these different consensus algorithms result in are the incentivization or de-incentivization mechanisms for different behavior on the blockchain itself. So by staking something like identity which makes sense for a scientific focused blockchain because reputation is kind of the currency in science then we can actually incentivize and de-incentivize different behaviors and how people interact with the network in order to secure it ultimately. So now I'd like to talk about some of the applications that we're focused on developing. One of the first ones I think common to basically everybody who has done anything with blockchain is simply hashing research data and storing it on the blockchain. So this is a fairly common use case but one that we got from our scientists. So one of our scientists basically had a very large intellectual properties agreement and they actually had to bring their lab notebooks with their handwritten notes to court and show what time they came up with a certain protocol. So they wondered from us, is there a way that I can certify this maybe in a more legally valid sense very early on in the research process and this is where the initial blockchain use case came from. So of course you generate some hash from some data. In this case it could be research data and we store it on the blockchain with some timestamp and this just proves that we created at some time. So this is not exactly novel but I think what is novel is how it's used in conjunction with Blocksburg. So it can basically use to certify some raw research data like I said very early on in the research process. If you have data creation disputes then you can use this for basically in the legal sense and you don't have to expose sensitive research data. So this is a common problem is you can't actually validate anything without exposing it and using the hash mechanism you can. And I think what's most important for usability is you don't have to change a researcher's existing workflow. So a lot of times they, my experience a lot of researchers have been doing the same thing for 30 to 40 years and they don't want to change how they've always done things. And so using our implementation we can integrate this into existing tools that they already use to make it very seamless of how they're using blockchain technology. So as a proof of this concept we integrate this into one of our sync and share tools. So you can think of it sort of like Dropbox or Google Drive, it's called Keeper at the Max Planck Society and basically we just have a simple button that's integrated with each PDF or each file. And here it just calls a blockchain transaction and then you can actually see the transaction listed on Blocksburg. So this is a live production application and we've integrated it into it. So this means that any scientist who uses this for their research can easily generate a certificate and timestamp their research data appropriately. So it's very seamless integration and makes usability much easier. So the next one that we're focused on is scientific blockchain identity. This is a whole research topic in itself but personally what we've done is created a application to basically link any of the validators who are confirming blocks to a real world identity. So in this case, instead of having some random string of numbers and letters here we can actually take the full name and the research institute and then add it to the BlockExor itself. So instead of receiving a transaction from 0x59 whatever, here we can see that we actually just have a regular string identifying who is actually running this node in the institute that it belongs to along with some other metadata. So this makes it a lot user friendly of who can actually see who is confirming blocks, who is validating things, and who is participating in this network. So the next one that we most recently are tackling is peer review and science. So this is currently a work in progress and what we'd like to focus on is that peer review has quite a lot of problems basically exchanging this data between different people. So a lot of scientists agree that by instead devising the peer review process we can actually encourage it and make it better. And so a big problem with this is that you can't actually evaluate peer reviews that easily because a lot of them are contained in different data silos. So if you're a funding institution it makes it very difficult for them to realize that I did a peer review for external or and then I did another peer review for yjournal. And so a lot of this data is actually siloed between these different players. And so here you can see an overview of kind of the peer review data infrastructure. And until fairly recently this peer review infrastructure didn't really exist. So there was no connections between publishers, funders, institutions, all these different stakeholders to really see what data and what peer reviews I've done for specific journals. And it makes it very hard to evaluate. And so of course this is a perfect use case for decentralized data infrastructure. And in this case we can replace kind of the peer review infrastructure currently now that's fairly centralized between a couple major players and replace it with a decentralized infrastructure. And what this means is that all these different stakeholders can basically take part in this infrastructure and receive all this information without necessarily being beholden and keeping their data secure. So this is something that we're looking into right now. And currently we have most of the backend and the smart contracts developed as a short example. This is something like what the front end can look like in an early stage. And here's just a simple dashboard kind of aggregating all these peer reviews from different journals together. And then this means that they can export this to their CV. So if they want to increase basically the legitimacy of their CV so they can export their peer reviews and get to actually credit for all these peer reviews that they've done. So it makes it a lot easier for different organizations to evaluate this. So now I've shown you a few different applications that we're working on. We're working with a lot of different third parties over across a lot of different scopes of exactly what applications can be developed on Blocksburg to basically enhance science. So the ultimate vision is we are developing kind of the underlying infrastructure which is not so fun to basically develop itself but we work with a lot of third parties to basically do the more sexy applications on top of it. So here we have something like we're working with a blockchain journal to integrate actually peer review into the journal itself. And so how can we actually do peer reviews onto a blockchain journal? Things like research data sharing. So Ocean Protocol gave a more thorough overview on this but how can we use this to integrate this and use Blocksburg as an underlying layer? Of course, scientific identity is a common one and then how do we bring kind of the web 2.0 world or the real world into the blockchain world and integrate all these existing mechanisms and metrics into the blockchain world? IP and data protection, we kind of went over this about basically certifying different data and how can we make this even more thorough? So does this involve a certified authority doing some time stamping, maybe a notary process? So many different applications can be built on top and then what I just went over with peer review so different incentivization mechanisms or even different methodologies of doing peer review in general. And then the last one is of course research funding which we've already had a few presentations about and how can we basically distribute or decentralize research funding? So instead of just a few institutions giving large amounts of grants to different scientists maybe we can decentralize this a little more. So ultimately, this is the vision is to have many different applications and then Blocksburg governed by scientists running underneath it and then that way they have influence over how the network develops and actually some say over the current scientific infrastructure. So with that said, I would like to briefly give a little pitch if you are a research institute, a university or you're developing a scientifically focused app feel free to contact us at InfoBlocksburg and we'd love to discuss more and if you're interested in joining, yeah, you can feel free. Yep, and thank you, any questions? Sorry, it seems to be me all the time. Why only scientific institutions? I mean, there's a ton of biotechnology companies out there for example, who have more of the problems arguably than the academic institutions looking at IP for example, which is a huge issue. Academic collaborations, which I personally run like dozens of. You see, all that peer reviewing, IP protection, authorship, validation stuff is arguably more relevant even in collaborations between industry and academics. So if I as a biotech company appear and want to become a member of this, would I be excluded? Are you for profit? Of course, yes that's what I'm saying. Then yeah, so I should definitely Yeah, but the question is why? Yeah, so I should definitely note that even though you can't necessarily become a member, you can still use all the applications. So you can still get the benefits without the governance basically of the network. Now the reason for this is because we quickly realized early on in the project we debated, okay, should we let pharmaceutical companies, they're doing basic research and biotech companies, I mean, they're doing basic research and we quickly realized when you open this door up, then almost anybody can feasibly argue that they could become a member. Yes. And it quickly escalates out of control. So for this reason we wanted to focus on primarily non-profit organizations that are doing fundamental research without opening up to every company to try to influence it. Because this could include things like if publishers want to, they see this as a threat in some way, then maybe they could also apply because they're doing research in some way. And this is what we wanted to get away from when we started it. Okay, it makes it easy, but you're losing a lot of potential. Yes, I don't know, I understand your arguments. That's not a problem. What about an academic researcher who is in a power on power relationship with an industry partner gets paid by that partner and basically is in a dependent position? That's a fringe case. This is why when, so I kind of brought up as long as your research institute and kind of laughed about the debate between this and when we initially created this back in February, there was long debates about what classifies as a research institute, research organization. Right now we have a definition in our white paper, but ultimately we went with something like EU definition and it's quite difficult to define exactly. And I think even the EU could not define precisely what this is, so. Okay, thank you. Are you a Max Planck Institute person? Yeah, yeah, I work there. Where are you located? Munich. Okay. See you there. So while you're leaving, I just wanted to say all your examples, they can still use the network. So it's really not a problem, just the governance question. So it's open to all those more industrial focused users or industrial research. So I don't see the problem there, zero. Correct, yeah. Thank you. Actually a user myself of your platform, I was just wondering like how legally tangible is the time stamp? Let's say if I put my data on it, would that be me preventing from filing that in the future and would it be, would it hold legally against somebody else filing it before I file it? Because I could argue I have it on the blockchain. And the other thing is, how visible is this data? Let's say my data set to the members, right? Do you have any internal protection that maybe one of the blockchain, the Blocksberg members, would they have access to the data or is it so encrypted that you guys wouldn't even see what I store? I assume off blockchain or somehow encrypted? Yeah, so I'll answer the second question first. So basically we are only storing the hash of the data itself. And this is because most research institutes already have a process in place to store their data for long periods of time. So this problem is generally already solved by most research institutes. And for those who not, like for instance in the keeper solution, which is the sync and share tool, the data is already in there, and then the hash is just in the blockchain. So no data of the actual file itself is located in blockchain, so nobody has access to it, except you in principle. And then the first question was regarding the legal validity. So there are quite a few, I can only speak to Germany as that's what I'm most familiar with now, investigating this. There's quite a lot of court cases actually coming out that are citing using blockchain time stamping as a valid decision for a court case. So this always differs between countries, between jurisdictions. So it's hard to give a overall kind of glimpse of this, but there are been court cases in Germany at least that sites blockchain time stamping as a valid legal proof. And you guys wouldn't know yourself which daytime storing. There's no way you could access that data in turn in the consortium. No. Super, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So of course pending future research developments that we can't really predict right now, whether they'll come to fruition or not, but right now we're using the latest hashing algorithm. So according to most of the world, this is fairly secure. So as good as it can basically get. Any other question? Hi. Maybe you can talk, are you for profit, nonprofit? Non-profit. Okay. How do you finance yourself? Well, basically so the Max Planck Society receives funding from the German government. So yeah, basically we receive funding from Max Planck Society based on various criteria. I mean, we can also apply to different grants and things like this, which we are doing and in the process of. Essentially the goal in the future is to have something like the archive foundation that sets up donations from different member institutes. And there's various ways to secure funding. But right now it's mainly from funding received from the Max Planck Society that ultimately comes from the German government. Since you're POA, there's no coin. So basically on the underlying, we call it Bergs, which is analogous to Ether in a regular Ethereum blockchain. Now the difference is, if you have an application that you would like to incentivize using a token, you're free to do this. So based on a certain criteria, if you would like a peer review token or something like this, then you can have it on a per application basis and then all the usual things that go into incentivization mechanisms. And just final one, like when an institution joins the network, what kind of TLC do they sign on? So right now it's fairly loose because officially we are a research project and we don't have a legal entity and we don't want to make all the, basically the organization's legally responsible. So officially we are essentially like a research project and we're in works to basically make this a more legally binding. So we have some legal entity that can protect the members in case of any dispute or lawsuit or something like this. Yes, so I'm a commercial publisher and you have a lot of information about peer reviews and so actually the peer viewing normally is done in our peer viewing systems. So have you been talking to like Springer Nature, LZV and all of this to have an interface from their peer viewing systems into Blockshead? Yeah, that's exactly correct. So basically something that we are doing slash would like to do more is aggregate all this peer review data because currently some different for profit companies have deals with Springer Nature, Elsevier and so forth and they aggregate some of this peer review information but in a completely centralized way. So they kind of take all this data that they received from Springer Nature and now they have it on their platform and they can use it for profit as they please. So Springer Nature gives the data to this other company. I don't think that this is necessarily sustainable for a long time, I think. No it's not. Yeah, so I think if I was a publisher I would be very wary of doing this because I think this is very valuable information and I think a much better solution would be to have something like a decentralized infrastructure where you can share this data when you want but not necessarily give all of it over and lose this control. I think this is fairly promising. Yeah, especially when Elsevier purchased their peer viewing system of Springer. Yeah. So do you have transaction fees on the network? I guess yes, and how are the native currency? How is it distributed? So right now we have a faucet so anybody can request Ethereum to basically or perks to deploy smart contracts, interact with the blockchain. Yes, there's transaction fees in order to prevent against DDoS attacks. So this is still important to have something like this but there's only a limited amount that's distributed and of course the miners also receive some reward for every block mined. So essentially the research institutes have access to the ether and if you're a public user you can only get so much per day. So anybody can use it but you can't just attack the network by gaining a million bergs and just sending a bunch of nonsense transactions. All right, I think that's everything. Thank you. Thank you.