 So, in 2006, I was asked by the government of Bolivia to help decolonize the education system using ICTs or information and communication technologies. Is the volume okay? You see, the government of Bolivia had been going through a revolution. Aval Morales, the first indigenous president came into power after months of protests and riots, after years of stagnant economic growth, and decades of minority rule. The population of the country is majority indigenous, and at the time, the population was among the poorest in the world, and yet the government didn't reflect or represent the majority of the population in the country. With Aval, this completely changed. And our task was to eliminate all of the references of Spanish culture and history from the education system. This was meant to institutionalize somehow the new political era. This meant that we reviewed all the curricula, we reviewed all the textbooks. It was a big job. And very quickly, we realized that it wasn't going to work. The teachers and students protested, schools were completely ill-equipped to deal with this transformational change. And instead of achieving the political objective, we ended up politicizing the education system and the technology that we were using to implement it. This is a photograph from the inauguration of Aval Morales. And I tell this story because I think it's an object lesson in how radical political politics can discord technological innovation. It creates a Frankenstein. It creates unexpected results. It places a political agenda above the needs of the people that the program is meant to help. And this is a lesson that I've learned many times over the course of my career. I have worked primarily as an advisor to governments on economic and education policy projects in the developing world, for the United Nations, for the Harvard Institute for International Development, for several countries directly, including Kenya, Rwanda, Namibia, Ghana, Ethiopia, India, and of course, Bolivia. And in the course of that work, my colleagues and I were often impeded by certain structural issues over which we had no influence. And in 2015, I started looking at blockchain as a potential way to deal with some of these systemic issues, that eventually it could help in environments with weak institutions, with a lack of access to the financial system, with a lack of privacy, a lack of identity, or even a lack of economic independence. So I come to blockchain not so much as a developer, not at all, in fact, and not as an investor, but really as a humanitarian, as someone who, based on my previous experiences, is looking for ways for this technology to help in parts of the world where other things have not. And this brings us to the topic of today, which is opportunities for collaboration between Ethereum 1x and Ethereum Classic, which, in case you don't know, have a bit of a complicated history. I'm here to say that, you know, let's leave aside the radical politics that have somehow characterized the relationship between these two chains in the past. Let's focus on technological innovation together. I'm also here to say that the Ethereum Classic community is wholeheartedly ready to be a full and constructive partner with the Ethereum community. I invite you to work with us to collaborate and focus on this innovative technology together. We're already starting to do this, and I'll talk about some of the projects we have going on in a bit. First I want to reiterate that we are committed to working with the Ethereum community. We share history, values, DNA, and increasingly technical functionality. We're committed to the future of both Ethereum and Ethereum Classic. And while Ethereum Classic will remain as a proof-of-work chain, there's ample opportunity for collaboration between the two. We all know that ETC was established in response to the DAO hack. And while this is important, it's impossible to remain a viable blockchain if you're defined simply by what you're against. You have to have your own identity. You have to have your own vision. For Ethereum Classic to survive and grow, it has to evolve. It has to collaborate. It has to grow. And so we're starting with our nearest sibling, Ethereum, to try to do that. In my outreach to the Ethereum community so far, I've met a number of really smart, interesting, creative people. I've made new friends. At the same time, I've gotten a lot of questions, healthy, thoughtful, tough questions. And so what I'd like to do is help answer some of those questions. And I'd like to tell you at least five things that I think you need to know about Ethereum Classic that will help you consider my invitation to collaborate with us. We established ETC Labs in 2008 after about a year of research and thinking. We operate an accelerator in San Francisco. And we have a dev team that maintains the blockchain. Our mission is essentially to build high-quality technology, to create communities of value, and to fulfill the social promise of blockchain. I'll talk a bit more about those in a minute. The one question we consistently get, or most often get, is why are you doing this? What's the motivation? And to put it simply, we have a deep and abiding commitment to the potential of Ethereum Classic and Ethereum. To these public blockchains that are truly unique, transformative, and will have, I think, enormous impact in the future. It's not really more than that. Most recently, I was dean of the, a dean at the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs, a pretty comfortable and steady job. I left that because I felt like this was an opportunity to shape how this technology will be implemented and how it will impact people's lives. I've staked my career and my reputation on this mission. So I'm in it, and we're here to fulfill it. I'd like to say we couldn't do this work without the partnership of the Ethereum Classic Cooperative, Bob Summerwell and Yaz Kuri, I think you're here somewhere. Thank you for your help, your full partners in everything we're trying to do. The first thing I'd like you to know about Ethereum Classic is that despite what you might read on Twitter, it's growing. By external measures, the hash rate has grown, you know, about 40,000% since 2016. The community has reached about 15,000 members in Asia alone. There's probably another 5,000 or more in the US. And I think it's refreshing to see that these two key metrics show an increase at the same time that the market cap has declined since December 2017. This means that the growth is organic. It means there's fundamental things about the blockchain that people are seeing beyond speculative investment. It's also growing by internal measures. Our dev team is hard at work. You know, when ETC was first established, there were a few resources. There were not a lot of developers to build or to share. It took a while for the blockchain to really get itself organized, to get the community to a point where it could actually innovate. But more recently, that's changed. Our roadmap consists of maintaining compatibility with Ethereum. In the past, this was perhaps a default choice, but now it's a strategic one, so that we can be in a position to cooperate more fully. In September, we implemented the Atlantis hard fork, which adopted the Byzantium changes from Ethereum to Ethereum Cossack. We're well on our way to adopting the Agata hard fork, which will bring the Constantinople changes to Ethereum Cossack. And later in 2020, we'll do the same with Istanbul and so on. At the same time, I'm pleased to say that we're also pursuing several projects that we think are forward-looking and innovative, that will contribute to both ecosystems. The second thing I'd like you to know about Ethereum Cossack is that we're here to collaborate and contribute. And I'm pleased to announce three partnerships that represent this commitment. And the first is Gitcoin. Gitcoin is deploying on Ethereum Cossack. In 2020, we will have a regular series of hackathons and bounties that will be available to both the Ethereum Cossack and Ethereum communities. And as I understand it, this is the first cross-chain deployment for Gitcoin. So a warm and hearty welcome to Ethereum Cossack. And for Ethereum Cossack, this is the first platform for crowdfunding developer projects. And we feel like with Gitcoin, it's with a trusted partner in the right way. Another partnership that we're pleased to announce is Swarm. As of yesterday, ETC Labs and Swarm will be working together to help develop their prototype and help implement their roadmap. We've had a chance to spend a good deal of time with the team. We're comfortable and excited about what they have planned. And we'll be contributing both funding and developer resources to help them achieve it. The third partnership that I'm pleased to share is that ETC Labs and Block have announced and will launch BlockCod Connect. This is a managed infrastructure service that will help developers build on top of Ethereum and Ethereum Cossack. It'll be available to both networks. It will provide a single API with support for DApps and Wallets and Endpoints, and it'll be free for the first two years. There's also an enterprise plan available. Ethereum Cossack needs this infrastructure in order to grow. We can't really grow without it. And we thought, if we're building it anyway, why not add on some extra and share it with the Ethereum community as a gesture of goodwill? It really represents an expression of our commitment to making sure the developers have what they need to build. And I'd like to thank Block and recognize Matt Lam, who's here from Block today for their cooperation with us in this. We look forward to launching this in early 2020, and I hope you'll use it. The third thing I'd like you to know about Ethereum Cossack is we're committed to building high quality technology, especially if it helps address fundamental long-term questions that we're all trying to answer. One example of this is our collaboration on developing a prototype for a stateless client solution with Alexei Akunov. I'll let Alexei talk about his work. He can do that in much greater detail and much more accuracy than I ever can. But we're really pleased to be associated with this project. And I should say that this isn't about advancing Ethereum Cossack. This is about working with leading developers who are answering the big questions. This is something we're interested in. We think it helps everybody, and we think that this project fits squarely into one of those big questions. A second project that we're engaged in is looking at ways for Ethereum Cossack to help address some of the scalability issues in Ethereum. And what we've done is started a research project to find a way to use Ethereum Cossack as a short-term data availability layer for Ethereum. This grew out of a blog post from Vitalik over the summer on Ethereum Research. And given ETC's 14-second block time and lower gas fees, this seems like a viable solution. There's obviously some challenges. But we think that it's a promising start. We'll start with fly client support to reduce gas costs for ahead of verification. But fly client support is not enough on its own to solve the problem. We have to think carefully about proof-of-work verification and what that means and what we can do with that to prevent bloat in the network. So please stay tuned for more news about this project as we develop it. If you're interested in learning more or if you're interested in collaborating with us on it, please let us know. It's being led by Isaac Artis, who's a member of our core development team. We're also supporting the EVM infrastructure with LLVM. We aim to provide front-end support for programming languages beyond Solidity, and to provide LLVM-based tooling for developers. We're adding support for Rust, for C, and C++, and we can add other languages as well. This will enable the LLVM infrastructure to support EVM along with IWAZM, and making a future, you know, full-proof chain for developers. The project is led by Alan Leaf, also from the ETC Labs dev team, and he's here at the conference, so if you want to see a preview of the compiler or you want to learn more about it, please talk to him. And then the last part of our commitment to building high-quality technology is really the core dev team. We're organized into three groups, the client team, which works on the protocol in partnership with Chainsafe, the EVM team that works on LLVM and other projects in partnership with Second State, and then the tooling team, which has launched OpenRPC and the J3 of tools. I should also mention that we partner with WhiteBlock, which develops, you know, a test net and a live sandbox for things before they go to main net. The next thing I'd like you to know about Ethereum Classic is that we're committed to creating communities of value. And by communities of value, I mean creating value through financial and data independence. The kind of which you can only derive from peer-to-peer censorship-resistant, trustless exchange. We're also committed to communities of value that rely on the kind of integrity that you can only get from a public blockchain. One concrete example of this is the accelerator that we operated in San Francisco. We've hosted more than 20 projects over the last year in our space there. We provide equity investment, we provide business development, tech development support. In addition to that, we've invested in over 30 projects and partners throughout the year. And these are not ETC specific. They may benefit ETC, but more generally we're interested in helping the ecosystem grow and develop. Here's a sample of some of the projects. I won't talk about all of them, certainly. I'll just highlight two. So Saldo operates a stablecoin peg to the Mexican peso that enables immigrants in the U.S. to get their payments home to Mexico without the cost and time required with other payment services. Or Original My, which uses the blockchain to record notarized documents, notarized signatures, and voting outcomes in Brazil to reduce corruption. If you want to learn more, I can share this later. And then the last thing I'd like to share about Ethereum Classic is we're committed to fulfilling the social promise of blockchain. People define this in different ways. We define it, I think, in a unique way. We think a lot about how the technology, while it's important, needs to fulfill a social and economic need. It's the only way that it will see mass adoption. And in thinking about that need, we consider three fundamental transformations taking place in the globe today. This is a map of the global distribution of population by the year 2050. And it demonstrates the first transformation, which is demographic. By 2050, there will be about 9.8 billion people on the planet. The majority of those people will live in developing countries in Asia, South Asia, and Africa. At the same time, that concentration of population will coincide with mass urbanization. So for the first time, most people will live in a certain part of the world, in a certain sense. The second transformation is financial. Most people in this part of the world will not participate at all in the formal economy. They'll earn their living in the informal economy. They probably won't have bank accounts. They probably won't earn a paycheck or pay taxes in the way that many of us, or at least some of us, do today. And the third transformation is digital. I think you're probably all familiar with that, and being here today is a testament to your recognition that the digital transformation taking place currently is going to continue and change the way people engage with each other and the world. For us, this all paints a picture of a world where the majority of the population will live in areas where the necessary infrastructure isn't in place, where they won't make use of the current financial system as it's currently constructed, and where their lead digital lives. They may live in the edge of cities without regular electricity or plumbing. They may not get a paycheck, but they'll have a mobile phone. To me, this is an exceptional use case for blockchain, and it's a long-term use case, one that we should start building towards today, and I hope we can start building towards that together. To sum up, I would just like to reiterate our commitment to collaborating with the Ethereum community. We're here for the long term. We're sincere about this collaboration. We mean it. You know, the Ethereum community is, to my mind, one of the most creative and innovative communities in the world. It's strong. It's resilient. Look what you've built. I think we have something to contribute, and I think the community here has something to gain from our contributions. Please come and work with us. Get to know us, and I hope that you and me and my colleagues from Ethereum Classic into the Ethereum community. Thank you.