 Um, okay. Nice to see you all this morning. Um, how many here, uh, we're mining Bitcoin in 2009? Okay, great. Uh, why aren't you on a beach somewhere? I'm just kidding. Um, no, like most of us, I think, uh, this Bitcoin phenomenon has come across with some degree of, uh, we're not quite sure what to make of it, right? Because on one hand it seems like there's this amazing world of decentralized, distributed applications that are possible with, with this new technology. Uh, and on the other hand it feels like not only, uh, a currency speculation kind of thing, uh, it might also be the, the, the actual heat death of the universe if we all have to mine in order to just pay rent, right? Uh, run all these giant mining rigs. Um, but what it surfaced out is that, uh, uh, if people have started to focus on, on underlying technology within Bitcoin, within other coins, Ethereum, that sort of thing. And that's something called the blockchain. And the blockchain is actually not a dramatically new idea. Uh, you know, since it's a decentralized database, right? Uh, a decentralized database that is, uh, has multi-masters, right? Anybody can write to it. It's a ledger. Uh, and, uh, it's resilient to hostile actors. Somebody could try to corrupt, uh, the consensus-forming process of what's the next entry to write into the ledger, and the rest of the network would be able to recognize that and stop it. Um, and this decentralized ledger is, uh, something that used to be core to thinking about how we might scale up database systems. And then we figured out how to make the central, uh, single master kind of model work and scale up to, you know, internet scale. And then we forgot about it until Satoshi, until Bitcoin reintroduced this idea by helping us realize these different masters in this database could actually represent different actors, different organizations, different individuals, uh, perhaps even anonymously, right? So Satoshi took this like whole series of different ideas, including blockchain and, and, uh, uh, the district, you know, this kind of, uh, decentralized database idea, uh, and created a currency out of it. But in doing that, he kind of highlighted the potential to come back to this idea of distributed ledgers, uh, as this really interesting technology. Now what might you also use that for? Um, well, the distributed ledger that keeps track of, uh, uh, that is essentially the system of record, right? The source of truth in a community of participants. Um, you could use that as a way to build an immediate settlement network for a bank, right? Uh, where 20 banks might be writing into this ledger, uh, such and such traded with such and such, whatever, and then be able to go back and prove that actually all happened in sequence, uh, and not be able to refute that certain things happened as well. Um, you could also use it to implement a land title registry database for a government that people might otherwise worry would be corrupt and be tempted to go back and change the entries in the land title registry by building it as a blockchain. You build it publicly. You build it visibly. So, so there's been this emerging recognition of the importance of this underlying technology and plenty of books written about it. You don't need me to proselytize about it. Um, but one of the important things has been this realization that there are other ways to get to a distributed ledger and to the world of smart contracts built on top of that than proof of work. Proof of work is the consensus mechanism used in Bitcoin, in Ethereum, in these other technologies to decide what's the next link in the chain, right? Uh, and it basically runs a massive lottery by asking everybody to reverse a Shaw 256, uh, signature to, uh, figure out who wins the right to write the next block, right? Um, and this is not only incredibly inefficient, it's very, it's just not appropriate when you're not dealing with an anonymous network, the way that the currencies are. If you're dealing instead with a set of known actors, those 20 banks I talked about or, uh, the government that I mentioned, but with a bunch of auditing agencies and, you know, uh, private sector and, uh, and other nonprofit groups kind of watching, right? Um, all of this can happen in a setting where you can use a simpler consensus mechanism, something more quorum based such as, you know, the majority of people agree this is the next link in the chain. So let's go forward. All right. Um, uh, and it's also people started to realize, well, is, is Bitcoin going to be like TCP IP, right? Where there is really is only room for one and eventually people will just switch because it's lowest friction to all use the same, uh, low level networking protocol. So why not use the same low level, uh, uh, payments protocol, right? Or the same low level, uh, uh, blockchain protocol. The reality is we've seen is that there's not only a need, uh, and, and, and a role in, and, and this probably won't end for multiple public chains, um, such as those coins that you know, that you all see and know about some of them actually special purpose like name coin, which is a DNS oriented thing. Um, but room for millions and millions of private chains as well, right? Essentially anytime you have a group of companies or governments or institutions, whatever, that all want to maintain a common ledger, that's essentially a shared database and databases don't act like networks, right? That's, that's probably the realization people are moving to. So, so this, so this all created this, this sense in at the end of last year that there might be a need for something different to where the, the Bitcoin and Ethereum communities were heading, right? Something else that created a sense for a need for something different was, you know, one thing that we've had in the history of, uh, uh, internet technologies and standards has been, uh, a separation of concern, uh, between three different kinds of organizations and it doesn't always start this way, but it tends to evolve this way. Um, and those three are the standards bodies, the, the implementers, and the global policy organizations, right? So take DNS for example. DNS started, uh, very, very, uh, very much amongst a small group of developers trying to replace Etsy hosts with something a little bit more decentralized, right? Um, uh, and it evolved to people who wrote the, wrote the DNS servers, people like Paul Vixie and Dan Bernstein, uh, to the standards, uh, set at places like the internet engineering task force and the policy organizations like ICANN. And it's always been very beneficial, you know, from, from the, like in the web server technology space, for example, to say at, at Apache, it was useful to be able to push certain debates and certain issues over to the IETF and say either it's already been solved over there or if you have an issue, take it over there, right? Um, and, and, you know, the W3C is kind of halfway between policy and standards, but, but basically organizations tend to fan out amongst these three. And the challenge with a technology project that's focused on a currency is that it's really hard to tease out the three separate kind of angles to this, right? Uh, because simultaneously you have to bootstrap and build in all three and you have some communities who are very firm that the code is the standard, right? Um, and that can make it really hard to try to track it, but also make it hard to try to separate out the technology debates from the coin debates. And you know, like the normal passion that we see on an open source developer mailing list will multiply that by having tokens in your pocket that the values of which are impacted by the outcome of that debate, right? That's, that's what makes for some of the very challenging environments that we have out there in the open source world around blockchain technology. Finally, there's this kind of recognition that, you know, this is a hard set of challenges. There's, you know, if you look at something like the, the DAO hack, how many people here know what I'm talking about, the DAO? Okay. Um, definitely Google it. Um, it's, uh, but it was an example where people tried to build a smart contract on Ethereum that was very ambitious, very, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, very much about trying to decentralize the world of venture capital, which looked really cool. 150 million dollars worth of Ethereum went into it. And, uh, it led to, uh, not only about three months of Sturman drawing in the Ethereum community, but now a fork between two different Ethereum tokens, Ethereum and Ethereum Classic, right? Um, a very challenging situation for that community that is actually creating tremendously cool code, but, but still hobbled by many of these challenges, right? Um, and, and it's cause we're still very early on in a lot of this. There's still a lot of good work to do in consensus mechanisms and how to write smart contracts and how to build these tools. And the answer doesn't seem to be in, in one, two tonic, you know, here is the answer. Here is the single platform, but in a, a sort of decentralized collaborative, um, ecosystem where, uh, uh, people feel much more, much less tribal about, uh, you know, where their development is going on and, and who's a part of which released mainstream, um, where, uh, things, uh, people perhaps can share code more willingly or allow their own experiments to die more willingly. Um, and perhaps be able to be innovative in a way that doesn't have them worrying about, you know, replacing the engine on a 747 mid-flight, which is how much of the, much of the debate can feel sometimes in these communities. Um, I'll also pipe in, there are a bunch of people who've been concerned about code provenance, right? So thinking back on, on Apache, for example, uh, we were very clear from pretty much the, the formation of the Apache software foundation that one of the things we needed, needed to be able to guarantee to companies and individuals using Apache software was that they were getting their code from the developers who had all the rights to make those contributions, that they knew, uh, where it came from. They were testing to it and you were getting it with all the patent rights included as well. And a really important part of the Apache license, right? So when a enterprise pulled down Apache foobar, Apache, you know, anything, they would know that it was, you know, you know, they didn't have to worry about waking up to a submarine patent issue later on or, you know, having to suddenly find an alternative. And that wasn't something that yet had existed in this space. So this is what drove the need for the development of something new. A set of organizations started to place calls to Jim. He started to host some conference calls and face-to-face meetings. And those companies included very familiar names like IBM and Intel. They included some brand new types of companies such as Digital Asset Holdings and R3 and included some companies that had never previously engaged with the Linux Foundation before, such as JP Morgan Bank, right? And after a bunch of conversation, they said, well, let's get this thing going with under the framework of the Linux Foundation's collaborative projects framework, right? A framing that has now been successfully used in 25, 30 different projects. It's growing all the time, actually. And this is a framework that allows for companies that identify, you know, a niche that needs an open-source solution. And a set of technology projects, maybe they exist, maybe they need to exist. And an emerging pool of developers interested in tackling that from those companies, but also potentially beyond those companies as well, to come together and build technology. And so Hyperledger was launched in December. The first code release happened in February. And that code was called Fabric, Hyperledger Fabric. Hyperledger Fabric is a code that initially started at IBM for about two years built internally as Open Blockchain and now released as Fabric. It's now under active development publicly. First at GitHub, now we move to the Linux Foundation's Garrett instance. And Fabric is an implementation of this kind of private blockchain model where if you have a set of known named entities, 20 banks or a government in a regulatory agency and NGOs and others who all want simply a shared distributed ledger and want to be able to layer on top of that a smart contract platform. In this case, smart contracts written in Go, although there's experimental support for Java as well as for Ethereum's virtual machine. And this platform can be used to build such a system. It is still pre-1.0, pre-beta even, but today you can go to hyperledger.org, find Fabric, pull down the developer environment and have, you know, if you're familiar with tools like Docker and Vagrant, have a four node private blockchain running within about an hour of pulling down the development tools. Getting the Go tools up and running is probably the biggest part of that. And it's still under active development. It's still something that is, you know, in terms of transaction rate, you know, that sort of thing is still being worked on. But it's the basis for what we hope will be actually a series of projects at hyperledger. There are a couple of others as well. There's one called Sawtooth Lake, which is a project that Intel brought over that implements something, a different consensus mechanism called proof of elapsed time, which is kind of an alternative to proof of work using some instructions inside of Intel's SGX extensions, which looks pretty interesting. And we're opening the door now to other projects. There's a graphical explorer for blockchains called hyperledger explorer that was just launched, a bunch of SDKs, that sort of thing. So the project has grown. We've got a couple of hundred developers on our different mailing lists. We've got thousands of people who have engaged on Slack. We have 140 people we've identified as contributors who are now voting in something called the Technical Steering Committee election. And this Technical Steering Committee are the group of about 11 core devs who look over the kind of the technical direction for the project. And that's something that we bootstrapped with a set of 11 from the companies that came together. But now we feel that a meritocratic process needs to actually establish who they are and that kind of relationship to the rest of the community. We're still very much a work in progress when it comes to the developer tooling and the documentation and all that sort of thing. But we're starting to make some waves out there. And the sponsoring membership has grown as well. Initially when it launched there were about 20 sponsors who said let's come together to get this kicked off. There are now 80 different sponsoring members. Everyone from companies like Airbus who are looking at using blockchain technologies to implement a transparency layer for their supply chain, interestingly enough, to a small Chinese startup company called Orange Magic Cube, who I'm still working to figure out exactly what their use for blockchain will be. But actually 15 of our 80 members are from China. I was there two months ago. I'll be there again next month. The level of interest and genuine interest, developer interest in China and in blockchain technologies, not just in Bitcoin, which we all know about already, but actually in blockchain technologies is tremendous. And I'm looking forward to trying to actually build a global developer community around the different hyperledger projects. But in the development of this, we're taking inspiration from the Linux Foundation's collaborative projects framework, but I'm also really taking inspiration from what we did with Apache. And I'll do a shout out to Cliff Skolnick who's here. I don't know if he's actually in the room. He was sitting towards the back. He's actually helping run infrastructure for the conference. Cliff was a co-founder not only of a company that together with me in 93, but one of the earliest co-founders of the Apache project, the web server project, when we spun it out from NCSA. And then Ross Gardner might be here as well. I heard who's the president of the ASF. And so at Apache, what we really figured out was that the code, not that it doesn't matter, it certainly matters and it certainly has to be category leading, but what matters first is building a healthy software developer community, right? That if you build a good community, one where the development practices are all public, where the issues are public, where the roadmap is public, where the conversations most importantly are public, then good software emerges as a natural byproduct, right? And that community dynamic is something that some communities take for granted. It's something that the Linux kernel mailing list has always had in spades, right? Other communities, people who start those projects, that's second nature to them. It's like a fish taking the water. But most of the companies that we're working with are companies that have previously never really engaged with open source, right? A company like JP Morgan Bank has certainly ingested a lot of open source before and they've worked with companies like Red Hat and others to push any changes they might have need back upstream. But this is the first time that a company like that, a bank, is saying, no, this is a core technology for us and we have our own devs helping push the platform forward. We don't just want to be a consumer way outside here. So help us understand how to make that work. And that's the biggest challenge is taking developers whose previous, you know, collaboration experience was sitting in the same room and having a whiteboard and bringing them to how open source communities work, how to use an issue tracker, public repository, not mechanically how to use Git, but how to really use Git and Garrett and those for a real public workflow for the development process. That's the thing that we have to get right. That's our biggest challenge. But I think if we do that, we build scale, where we build not only an awesome fabric, but we build potentially a series of technology projects that become category leading. And then wrapping back to these other communities. So I think over the long term, projects like Bitcoin, projects like Ethereum, come to be seen as standards and global policy kinds of plays, kinds of organizations, right? And if you remember that kind of three-way kind of branch, there's no reason why down the road we couldn't see projects at Hyperledger, for example, that implement those standards or that could participate on those networks, right? And those types of projects, you know, would be welcome today to go through our project proposal and incubation process. And so that to me speaks to a future for Hyperledger that's actually pretty broad. So with that, I just wanted to say thanks to the Linux Foundation for hosting this project. Thanks to you all for listening to me. And I'm really jazzed. I hope you guys take a look at the project. Thanks. So I'm the one that talked, I talked you out of a life as an investor to come back from the other side. But you know, when you and I first started discussing this project, and we've been looking at this blockchain space for a while, you know, one of the things that I think this audience should get a sense is, is the dizzying impact of this technology? Because it is a somewhat complicated topic and you described a dizzying array of smart contracts, supply chain management applications, you know, tracking conflict diamonds was something we heard about yesterday. But let's just to give everyone a sense of the impact here. Describe a little bit about just in the financial services industry, the back office today taxes the financial services and back office mean you can do a nanosecond high frequency trade, but it takes you a week to actually get your money. The back office is the week it takes to make the back office sexy. It's an 80 billion dollar impact. I mean, try to do it really in 2008, when the home mortgage and real estate kind of market, you know, disaster unfolded, the biggest reason for that panic selling was the fact that you had companies selling tranches of risk and mortgages, which meant that somebody's mortgage might actually be owned by 100 different banks, right? If their mortgage had been sliced and diced by by many of the operations. And the problem was as things started to fall apart, no one could find the paperwork. And when no one can find the paperwork on your house, you can't sell it. Or if you can, you have to sell it for pennies on the dollar, right? Like, like this became a real nuts and bolts, real asset emergency. And part of that was because there wasn't a way to quickly look this up. There wasn't a record of these transactions that could independently be be gone through. And I'm not saying blockchain would have solved that because there could have been bad applications or incomplete applications. But many people say that this is the kind of technology that could try to help keep the next major disaster like that from being about a paperwork disaster, right? To try to rootenize and automate more of the systems of the world so that they become more transparent and hopefully more accountable to us. I'm personally really engaged by the idea of this as an anti-corruption tool, right? But at the same time, if we can get it as an efficiency tool, as a way to make the systems of the world run better, faster, then it seems like all sides win. Yeah. I mean, one use case, $80 billion impact just on the back office, the financial industry. But I remember what I taught, the way I talked to you into this was let's go change the nature of trust on the internet. And for those of you who aren't familiar with blockchain, really that is an ambition that this project has. This is one of the fastest growing projects I've ever witnessed in terms of developer moments and in terms of organizations. So if you're not familiar with blockchain or hyperledger, go check it out. Thanks, Brian. Thanks today.