 Hi, this is Yoosupil Bhatia and today we have with us Daniel Gohcedar, founder of Open Wallet Foundation. Daniel, it's great to have you on the show. Great to be here. Thank you. Let's talk about the Open Wallet Foundation, which, if I'm not wrong, was announced last year at Open Source Summit in Europe, if that's correct. By then, we were like, if we had a vague idea what this foundation will be all about now, we are officially launching it in February. So if I ask you, what is Open Wallet Foundation? Let me start by saying what the Open Wallet Foundation is not. The Open Wallet Foundation is not a standard development organization. We are not trying to compete with folks like the OpenID Foundation or the Decentralized Identity Foundation or the W3C. And the Open Wallet Foundation is also not in the business of publishing wallets. What we're trying to do is focus on what's between the standards and the wallets. So essentially, we have one goal and one goal only, and that is to create amazing open source software that allows anyone to publish a multi-purpose wallet. Wallet can mean different things for different people. There's a wallet on my iPhone. I have two kinds of wallet, one which actually holds my money and wallet which holds my identity. So when we look at Open Wallet or when you say wallet, what are we talking about? The Open Wallet Foundation will not be one monolithic project, but rather enable a lot of different projects in very different categories. And you're right, wallets, in our opinion, are incredibly critical pieces of infrastructure. They are important for identity use cases and payment use cases. They are important to grant access to cars or to physical doors and probably to your home in the future. They can be containers for credentials pertaining to your health or give you access to an airliner or hold NFTs or crypto tokens. We are hopeful that we can start to address more and more of those use cases by bringing developers to the table that are interested in those use cases and that start to develop components that are enabling those use cases. And then if you're interested to publish a wallet, it's really your choice which components of Open Wallet code you are going to use for your wallet. So if you're interested in tokenized credit cards and debit card, but not interested in car keys or phytopath keys, that's what you'll use. If you're interested in a wallet that can address as many use cases as possible, you will hopefully have that choice. First of all, Linux Foundation, you folks do a lot of projects. You also bring a lot of communities together. On the other side, since you have a lot of communities already there, it also becomes very easy to spring new foundation because the stakeholders are already there associated with Linux Foundation in one capacity or the other. But if you look at Open Wallet Foundation, what was the real pain point that some of your members or other players or the partners or even the large industries were facing where you felt like, you know what, we have to create this now? I think when you look at wallets from a holistic perspective, there are so many standards involved. My favorite example is car keys and physical doors that are not attached to cars. They use two different standards. And when you look at it from the perspective that you're interested in providing access to physical doors, as well as credit cards and debit cards, as well as things like pass keys, which hopefully are going to replace passwords, you're dealing with an immense number of different standards. So today you have to hire a lot of amazing engineers that know all of these standards in order to implement them. And the hope is basically that we can come together as a community and we can build the fundamental core software that is going to enable those use cases. Again, without competing with the SDOs, the standard development organizations, and without an intent to create a wallet ourselves. Of course, you folks are officially announcing or launching the project this month. Talk a bit about the structure of because Linux Foundation organizations, they can choose their own governance model, their own style. So talk a bit about what does the structure look like? The Linux Foundation has been an amazing partner from the get go. I actually reached out to them without knowing anyone personally at the Linux Foundation. And they responded immediately. They took an interest in wallets and the Open Wallet Foundation. And what you say is exactly right. So we're part of the governance structure and the legal structure of the Linux Foundation and more specifically the relatively new Linux Foundation Europe. So the Open Wallet Foundation legally is going to be based in Brussels and not in San Francisco. But we have our own governance structure. We have our own budget. We will have our own board of directors. And we also have something which is relatively unusual, I think, for LF projects. We'll have a GAC, governmental advisory council. So we're trying to bring together the private sector from young startups to various established, very large companies. The non-profit sector as well as individuals from the public sector. Because it is our conviction that success will depend on successful cooperation and fruitful cooperation of all those groups. When you talk about engagement with the public sector, government sector, it's also because if you look at the European Union versus the US, there are a lot of open source projects in the government. They are doing a lot of work in those spaces as well. Is that one of the reasons that you will also have one of those units within the foundation? Or do you want to engage with them? So what is the driver behind this initiative? You know, governments are acting in a sovereign fashion and that's the way it should be. A government really should be in a position to say, if you want to provide a wallet for driver's licenses or for identity cards or passports in the future, here are my rules. And whether it's the United States government, whether it's the European Commission and member states in the European Union or any other government around the world, that is really the function of a government to decide that. And we certainly don't want to compete with that. Now, some governments or multinational institutions are also looking to provide reference implementations. And I believe that the Open Wallet Foundation can be useful in a couple of different ways. One way is that we can provide software components in addition to that kernel, basically, that governments are going to provide. And then eventually there is also a question of what's the home for the reference implementations that governments themselves want to see. And I certainly hope that the Open Wallet Foundation can be a good home for some of those implementations as well. Can you talk about what are the things that are in your immediate pipeline? I will also talk about the long-term pipeline, but what I think that you are like, hey, these are the initiatives that we should start now. There are good examples, I think, in this space. So when you look at ISO MDL, for instance, which is a lingo for mobile driver's licenses and basically the standard that we're using today in order to put driver's licenses on smartphones, there is code on GitHub. In this case, code that Google wrote and that they made available on GitHub. But it's essentially one company. And I know of a lot of companies that are really grateful to Google for making that code available. So just in the case of ISO MDL, imagine if it was not just one company, but if there were a lot of companies and nonprofits working together to maintain that code, to add new functions to that code, it would basically be useful, I think, for everyone in the ISO MDL space. And I believe that the way to differentiate your wallet, if you want to compete in a wallet space, should not be the core components. And it should be the user interface. It should be questions of how simple it is to use a wallet. But I strongly believe that the core components, the guts of your wallet will benefit if they are shared by many different vendors. And we see a role model here in the browser world. When you look at major web browsers, for instance, Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge and the Samsung Internet browser, they're all based on the same browser engine or rendering engine, in this case, something called Blink. And when you look at the Safari browser from Apple, it too is based on open source software, in this case called WebKit. So what we're trying to do is essentially to mimic what has happened in the browser space and to say that on top of the open standards that you're using, it is quite useful to have shared open source software that competitors can agree to use and they can differentiate their products, but still use the same fundamental software. Now let's just go back to the point of what this foundation will be producing. As you said, you will be creating open source software. So do you have any kind of not necessarily roadmap with things on the pipeline that what that software will be called when we can expect the first release? This is going to be very much a bottom-up approach. It's not going to be the board of the OpenWallet Foundation to say those are the things we're going to do first, but really the other way around. The idea is that members as well as nonprofits or companies that are not members of the OpenWallet Foundation will come together and say we are interested in car keys or FIDO pass keys or tokenizing credit cards or debit cards. And that's essentially how these projects are going to start. And then of course, we'll need folks to contribute code. We need folks to be interested to join those projects as developers. And this is also going to ensure that it's not just a few people at the OpenWallet Foundation deciding which protocols or which credential formats are going to prevail. It is very much a meritocracy or what my friend Brian Bielinger calls a duocracy. It is something where essentially projects that produce amazing code that is fitting a need in the market is going to prevail rather than a top-down approach where we're trying to come up with one perfect format for credentials or BBF protocol. Everything that can be done bottom-up I think should be done bottom-up. You mentioned Brian Bellendorf and I'm a huge fan of Brian, which also brings me the point of that. What are the other open source or solid foundation projects that you folks are looking at? Of course, blockchain is there, hyperledger is there, but is it too early to talk about it? As you said earlier that the desire for the software will come from the members and then we will see which software is needed. That's exactly the approach. And whether that's a standard where that is part of the Linux Foundation, like hyperledger or whether it has something to do with EMV Co., for instance, in the payment space, which as far as I know has no ties to the Linux Foundation, doesn't really matter. We are trying to look at wallets truly holistically and the Open Wallet Foundation is not going to decide top-down on protocols or standards or formats. It really should be driven by the community. So if you are working on something and you think that it would be interesting for you to partner with other companies or nonprofits to create open source software for that particular project, we hope that you will consider the Open Wallet Foundation whether or not that is based on a standard or a project that is a part of the LF today. Daniel, thank you so much for taking time out today and talk about the Foundation. And as usual, I look forward to talk to you again soon. Thank you. Thank you very much for having me. It was a pleasure.