 Okay, we are live. So thank you everybody for joining this hyper ledger meetup today. We are gonna be talking about digital assets in a multipolar world. First, I'd like to introduce the new host of the hyper ledger New York City meetup. This is a meetup being hosted by the hyper ledger New York City group. It has recently has a new organizer who has a lot of plans for the group. So if you're interested in hearing about that, I did wanna give Jamil Sheik a chance to speak a little bit about who he is and what his plans are for the group and then he'll introduce Vipin and we'll kick off the discussion. So thank you. So Jamil, welcome. Thank you for attending today. All right, thank you for having me here. First of all, thank you to the Linux Foundation, Hyperledger Foundation for giving me the opportunity to run the hyper ledger NYC community. Some of you may already know me. I run a blockchain NYC community, which I've been running since 2017. And part of my plans are to really bring some of the firepower that we accumulated in the blockchain NYC community into the hyper ledger NYC community and start to kick off and do some in person events. Maybe this year, but definitely a Q1 next year. If you have access to a venue or like to be involved in planning or supporting an event, please reach out to me or David our biggest hurdle is that if we do an event we typically get 80, 90 people, 100 people. And so we need to find a venue space that's appropriate for that. I think the hyper ledger community is long overdue for an in person event where we can all just reconnect, catch up on what's happening in the hyper ledger space. Clearly there's been a lot of developments recently across all of the product lines in the entire portfolio. Lots of interesting new people have come in, lots of interesting new changes. And hopefully I can get everybody in New York City that's interested in hyper ledger to come together and reconnect. So I look forward to doing that. So I'm not really going to take much more time. I want to introduce our speaker. So Glipin, a dear friend of mine, I've known for several years, one of the brightest minds in the space. I've been quite humble about it. I'm really looking forward to his presentation today. And I'm just going to read off his bio if you don't really know him. He's somebody you should get to know, Adam on LinkedIn. So Vipin founded DLT.NYC, a consulting practice at the intersection of DLT financial markets, technology, standardization, tokenization and regulation. Vipin is a Forbes contributor on the topic of digital assets. I read his articles religiously or due to check out his articles, he writes fairly extensively. Vipin's expertise includes technology and building capacity through technology to enable policy and governance implementation. Vipin is active in the hyper ledger as chair of the financial market CIG that is a special interest group and the identity working group. And I really look forward to working and partnering with Vipin on some of the CIG stuff he's doing and hyper ledger NYC. Beyond that, Vipin is technical. He's not just on the business side. He understands the business side of financial markets but also is it a full stack engineer being in the space and doing development for over 40 years and is leading different work streams at ITU and Stanford and has the masters in operation research from the Indian Institute of Technology. So with that, Vipin, I'm gonna transfer it over to you. Thank you for taking the time to be with us today. The show is yours. Thanks everybody for joining and in a minute, I'm going to turn off my video so that you're not distracted. The presentation is the main focus of this and I hope you can hear me properly. I had some problems with the mic but I think if you do have problems, let me know and I'll try to do what I can. Beautiful, Mr. Khoaja. So without waiting too much, I'm gonna turn off my video and I'm gonna go right into the presentation. So this is a very aspirational presentation that I came up with because of all the different activities happening in the world all around in terms of digital assets. There has been a lot of interest in digital assets as the community around cryptocurrency and other, basically the crypto world is experiencing some level of problems. And this is also things are maturing in the world. Can you turn off your mic, Jeff Babich, please? Because there is an interference. Thank you. Yeah, so what I'm going to do is, Jimmy has already introduced me but my main focus was on software in the beginning but now I'm looking at it from a holistic or a systems point of view. And now in this presentation, I go even beyond that into a whole world view. Obviously this is very ambitious presentation but I mean, I'm only going to come up short because the amount of time, the number of initiatives out there and everything that's happening in this space. Now, one of the things that I'd like to highlight is the interoperability team in the policy and governance working group in the digital currency global initiative. But remember that all the different teams, all the different functions have to come together to create a solution that is basically going to be public infrastructure or in this case, a global infrastructure that is going to be implemented in multiple places but has to come together to create a global market to create resilience during war, during pandemics, during all kinds of events that are upon us like climate change. So this, I mean, I know that many people do not believe in the same degree to any of these things but these are the realities of the world. We may have to focus on one or the other separately. But anyway, the roadmap is very simple. There's an introduction, there's some things about digital assets and then the multiple polls, what I call the multiple polls and then how do you bridge the polls and then project managing digital assets in infrastructure. Well, basically it's dam digital asset management. So project managing in the sense of creating a solution and having it's taking it to the final. I think some people have trouble seeing the slides. Could you just confirm that you're sharing them properly? Some people have trouble but does anybody see them or? I don't see the slides anymore. Oh really? Yeah, I'm not seeing them either. Okay, so I'll try to go back to the sharing. Yeah, try to share it again, please. Yes, I'm trying to share again. What about now? There it is, yep, look good. Hopefully everybody else can see it. Sorry about that because I think I went into presentation mode, it somehow got cut off. Yeah, I think we're good. Love the colors. Can you, can you? Okay, so colors are very simple. Colors are, I follow the Vibgior, violet, indigo, blue, green. I removed yellow and I just have orange and then red for Q and A. So most of the slides will have on top what part it is in. So that's my roadmap with the colors. Digital assets, anything that has value is created, stored and exchanged digitally. It's a very simple explanation and obviously people know that people, you know, this is not everybody agrees on this. So in the beginning there was a, the additional is the concept of ownership and actions that can be taken by the owner and the delegate. So the initial list is kind of lame, meaning they were the, what was considered digital assets in the beginning, photos, documents, videos. Mostly it is data or media or various types of email accounts and so on. But as we know with the rise of cryptocurrency, crypto assets, we have this new list which include deposit tokens and tokenized real world assets and tokenized financial assets and central bank digital currencies, of course. I like to show the slide in the beginning of the presentation usually because this illustrates a fable, a tale from probably from ancient India. It is called the, what's that? I can't, anyway, you can see the slides I hope. So this is an ancient story which talks about five blind or six blind men from birth who were asked by a king to look at an elephant and come up with an interpretation. So obviously each blind person felt a different part of the elephant and they all came up with different interpretations. So that is, one says the elephant is like a hose, the elephant is like a fan, the elephant is like a wall. Elephant is like a pillar and elephant is like a brush. So the reason I bring up the story is because we are, you know, the moral of the story is not that these people do not have sensitive hands but they only felt a part of the elephant. So it's our job. I mean, in that story, there are two variations. One is the elephant is, you know, they come to blows because they say each one has his own perspective, interpretation. The other one is they all sort of talk to each other and come up with the understanding of what an elephant could be like based on putting their perspectives together. And I think that that is a key thing in our business because everybody comes at it with a certain interpretation, a certain perspective. Now, I'm gonna go quickly into the size of the digital capital markets. I mean, digital, I mean, not digital but, you know, size of global bonds market. As you can see, there are four interpretations of what is the estimated market cap of global bonds from 129.8 trillion dollars to 305 trillion dollars. These are all based on different interpretations like the blind men and the global domestic equities are about 108.23 trillion dollars. I mean, you know, and then there's another figure one of 1.2 trillion dollars. All that is needed to know is that these are tremendously huge numbers. And right now, some of it is digitized but they are all in trapped in silos or within certain islands. And this is the commodities market and the number below it is the, you know, like 15 trillion dollars is the manufactured goods, those kind of numbers we are talking about huge. It's in billions and it's from 2022. So all of these markets are currently incompletely or very badly digitized. Some people say, you know, we don't need digitized money because commercial bank money is already digitized. But it happens to be trapped inside the bank silo if you're with Citibank, you are in the Citibank silo and it's a liability of Citibank. The other one is the numbers on global wealth. Again, these numbers are huge. Mostly the global debt figure should be interesting to us because it's bonds, global real estate which also contribute to bonds. And, you know, these are enormous, enormous figures. Cryptocurrencies are only 244 billion dollars but this was in 2020. So this morning I looked at the coin market cap and it's 1.34 trillion dollars. But these are market caps, not necessarily the trading volumes, not necessarily what's happening. So if you take a look at the one specific market, the bond market, which is the largest market, well, you saw that the derivative market is huge but the bond market is enormous. So it's divided into colors based on where it is, meaning Asia, North America, Europe, rest of the world, Australia and so on. But I think these are not real numbers because the size of the Indian market, for example, is 1.3 trillion dollars. But I know for a fact that that is much more than that and it's not visible. So this is another problem in this whole exercise that there is lack of visibility into the size of the markets. This is another view of the markets through a window known as the new, you know, for trying to figure out how efficient the market is. In the end, there is only one rule, which is the transaction costs. And institutions here are not just regular institutions, but rules of the game, as they say. And so governance is what matters. And it is, you know, the old theory was an endpoint theory which means that the development stops at markets. But we are seeing structures that are far beyond regular markets, which is why we have this view that with decreasing transaction costs and increasing rule of law, that we will have lesser and lesser transaction costs. The DAOs, for example, do not completely regulated. So they're probably, this is probably more of a future state in which those automatic market makers, those decentralized exchanges, those program-based trading, and all of that will be regulated or at least legalized and then create these, create, you know, efficiencies by decreasing transaction costs and increasing the rule of law. This is the other side of the equation, which is the payment, payments, which are, when you trade something, you have to be able to make payments. And this is from McKinsey and they claim, of course, projecting a trend line that they are claiming that this will go up to, you know, 38% of banking revenues by 2027. It also, of course, divides the world into Asia, Pacific, North America. So what I'm saying is the payment leg, which this is showing, I think it's going to be, if the payment leg becomes more efficient and less interactive, and less intermediated, then this trend line will be not true in 2027, maybe, but we have to look at what's going to happen five, 10 years in the future. So in order to make digital assets part of, you know, in order to create true digital assets, you need tokenization, then we talked about payment systems and linking them are usually programs. And of course, we hear all the different ways in which this can be done as payment versus payment, DVP, you know, everything atomic. But I think the revolution is going to come when you can make a deferred net settlement payments because the compression, that is a compression in the sense, let's say that if there are two players in the market and they carry on 100 trades after netting with multiple other participants, that becomes about two or three trades. So that efficiency has to be realized through some automatic means. There are some, there is some work going on in there, but most of the today's digital asset players only talk about DVP and PVP and, you know, atomic payments. Credit has to enter the picture, which is what normally happens. That means nobody buys anything with their own cash. So credit has to be expressible on the chain as far as possible so that you can have both the transaction, the payment and the asset leg on either the same chain or a chain that can be reached through bridges and various other mechanisms. You have seen this many times as the stack of DeFi stack, which again is another way of looking at the architecture of DeFi, another blind man's view of the architecture of DeFi. In all the cases, the base is a blockchain of some sort, but you don't need a blockchain as we have seen from experiments in the digital asset space, especially in several countries that have adopted some kind of distributed database, maybe with cryptographic backing, but blockchain is not absolutely essential, but something like a blockchain, meaning, can you create ordering? Is it immutable? Is it visible to everybody? Is it replicable? Can everybody use it as a source of truth? So if you can replicate those qualities in something else, then of course you don't need a blockchain. And on top of that will be the tokens and on top of that would be smart contracts and lost, but definitely not the least link in there is the way to interact with this whole stack, which would be wallets and APIs. And this is a new look at it, meaning you can have instead of just having those four layers, you have an audit and control layer, which we'll come to with various token standards that have been proposed. And you can see that some of this reporting and control, control being the most important and reporting also includes at this point with some kind of monitoring. So those are important tools to integrate into DeFi if it has to be adopted by regulated exchanges. This is just another view of inputs and outputs of trade processing, which is how digital assets would be traded using regular trading processes, order orders being translated into trades backed by reference data, market data, all the main players in the data space, for example, Chainlink is also working with regulated enterprises, not just in the public blockchain space. So slowly things are turning around for from a 1.34 trillion cryptocurrency market to a global market for bonds, $300 odd trillion dollars global market for equities, 200 and 80 plus and various numbers that are multiples of what's happening in the cryptocurrency space. So there is a lot of inefficiencies that have to be worked out in these various digital assets transformation of the regular instruments to digital assets. This is also a vision of the FMI that is needed to FMI and ancillary systems that are needed. Many of those systems will become more simplified by the addition of digital assets into a global ledger or a ledger that is spread out among a group of participants. Obviously, this is not going to be a single global ledger for the whole world, it's not going to work. So we are seeing the development of these processes of these infrastructure in multiple localities, multiple poles, which we go into soon enough. So it has to be possible to do similar things in a real world asset or a token as a digital representation of a real world asset. Well, in this case, it is not the only way that a token works. Maybe you can say that it's also a digital representation of value that is not linked to a real world asset, but real world assets like houses, like commodities can also be tokenized. But in this case, you have the pre-issuance issuance, primary trading, settlement, secondary trading, and expiring, which is reflected, for example, in the ERC-20 standards, maybe not one to one, but it's definitely reflected. So now I turn to the various groupings under which these developments are taking place, the multi poles, the global banks, global institutions, global conglomerates. When I say global conglomerates, what I mean is big companies like global companies like Apple or IBM or people like that. And private and public blockchains, nation states and groupings of nation states. Why do I have some of them in bold? Because I'm focusing more on those. First of all, one hour is not enough to go through the details of activities happening in all of these different spheres. So I just thought I'd pick a few. And when I say the global banks, they have the current problems on the left, which is the regulatory KYC, asset to stuff, the reliance on intermediaries, expensive infrastructure, and so on. City has, for example, City has 1.365 trillion in customer deposits. JPMorgan has this similar about one more trillion dollars. So they both independently came up with this concept of a deposit token. JPMorgan has been working on it for a while. So in this section, I'm going to talk about the actual projects that are happening in these different kind of poles, the global banks. But all of these deposit tokens are essentially trapped inside a single bank. For example, the city token can only be used within the city ecosystem. It can definitely be used for doing FX, that meaning I can make a payment from New York to somebody in Tokyo. And in JPMorgan also, which uses, I think, the ONIX system, which is a development from Quorum, and of course it is a variant of Ethereum itself. So the aims are to improve KYC, improve transaction costs, and also come up with new products because of the emergent nature of some of these technologies, I mean, of these effects. Global institutions, I'm only taking two here, the World Bank, IBRD, International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Their outstanding bonds are about $257 billion. The issue about $45 to $55 billion per year. IMF is more on the capacity building track, and they are crucial in socializing or kind of trying to advise countries how to manage their monetary system. Usually they have a very vested in, well, I wouldn't say vested, but there is a Washington consensus and market-driven technologies are, I mean, market-driven ideas are what drives IMF. But in terms of the IBRD, which is actually a bank, they can raise money with low fees. They have a very high credit rating, but they do have a reliance on intermediaries, inefficient Swiss systems, even though they are sort of quasi-sovereign in the sense their members back their bonds. So currently there is a project which is issuing, I think about 100 million euros in sustainability bonds for IBRD was announced just a week and a half ago. The details were announced, and this is integrated into the financial market infrastructure, Euroclear settlement systems, which we saw earlier. So any transformation in the digital assets space as to come with changes in the financial market infrastructure, they have to be integrated. The important thing here is to see that they integrate also the DNNs, which are basically a representation of the euro on chain. So you can do DVPs on the Euroclear infrastructure. And Euroclear is building out the infrastructure. Euroclear is a huge financial market infrastructure player. And in the IMF functions, the improving transparency part will come with, with any kind of a share in the infrastructure. With any kind of a shared ledger with proofs that can be easily gathered. So the nation states, now we turn to the other sort of division, another look at it from a blind man perspective. This is the first one, of course, preserve USD as the sovereign currency of the world, which is a U.S. aim. The other countries in the world want to $D rise. They're also trying to create alternatives to swift payment systems because they have found that with the dollar trade, as well as with the payment systems, that certain countries like the U.S. can essentially censor other countries. We are not going to go into the politics of whether that is appropriate or not. But people are obviously want to create their own resilient systems that they cannot be, they cannot be stopped. So it's an ideology and culture driven situation with some leapfrogging built, built into the system. And they are also building up non-USD reserves, mostly in gold. Last year was the highest amount of gold bought by the central banks. Then the other question, of course, is whether to create a CBDC or not. Then there are regional and global networks being set up like Belt and Road, like G20 with India creating a network with Saudi Arabia or with UAE and with MAS, with Singapore. So all of these last bits like war, pandemic, and geopolitics are both splintering as well as converging, forcing the countries to converge. So this is the whole thesis of this presentation which is that these two forces are simultaneously in play. And the only way to get around this is to have, of course, everybody is going to build their own, but the last bit is all about exactly how to project manage such projects. I cannot go into too much of technical detail in any of these because I would be just spending the whole time on talking about one project. So I go country by country. I think only one or two countries, I look at China and India mostly. China is going into a cashless society. They want an alternative to private payment systems. There is reduced cash use. They are a manufacturing powerhouse, but they are facing real problems. Of course, they are central planners, so they can easily say, oh, let's have a CBDC called ECNY. Then there is the Belt and Road Initiative through which the ECNY can travel abroad through the Blockchain Service Network. So they do have a project to take the ECNY or the Blockchain Service Network outside China into other countries, mostly on the Belt and Road Initiative. But the Belt and Road is interesting because it's not just the old Silk Road, but now it unites countries across continents. But China has also been in problems because of the credit management has been a problem for China. And they are working with IMF to manage that. India, of course, everybody talks about the India stack, which is a bunch of national infrastructure projects that have been in production for a while. And it includes ADAR, the Digital Identity System. Of course, people complain about the problems with ADAR, but it has had a tremendous effect on stopping leakage and paying people directly and collecting taxes at source. So these are all the IMF, usual IMF recommendations to be able to be more efficient in collecting taxes and in improving the breadth of your distribution network for benefits. I mean, this whole system, the India stack, is now being exported, again, like I said, after the G20 to other countries. And the India stack includes UPI, the Universal Payment Initiative or Infrastructure, I'm not sure, but it also contains other things like walls and personal walls for documents that you can use to share. One of the big caveats with that was that India has already got some problems with its well-connected conglomerates that are basically politically boosted big organizations and the policies that favor certain groups in the sense that there is a religious component to that. And India is also resource constrained because it imports a huge amount of oil. So natural alliances have formed between Saudi Arabia, Russia, India and China because of the energy trade. And I think the trade is moving into Reminbi or into Rubles or Indian Rupees, which is a major move, if you think about it. And all of these countries have, including Saudi Arabia, have a CBDC project. So what happens when these CBDCs come into the system? Anyway, I have some examples of interoperability in limited areas like in the Middle East, North Africa region, which is, excuse me, Saudi Arabia and the Central Bank of UAE. Now they have had Chinese into the picture. In technical terms, they create a CBDC that is outside the currencies, also a CBDC called Abair, that is outside the Central Bank digital, I mean, Central Bank currencies, Fiat currencies of Saudi Arabia and UAE. It uses a hypoallergic fabric and it's got channels for privacy, et cetera. Added China to the experiment. Mariana is a similar project that was done by BIS with the Bank de France, Monetary Authority of Singapore and Swiss National Bank. So they all have different currencies and the FX is implemented as an automatic market maker using principles from DeFi. In FX, the volume is something like $7 trillion a day. This is, again, more about the project that we talked about, about the bonds. And this integrates the bond issuance with the CBDC, you know. So they prove that post-trade operations could be conducted on the blockchain with the CBDC. So these are ways in which we can have token standards, interoperability standards, ISO 2022 for payments, LEI for identity and the common domain model to manage life cycle of any digital asset. So unless we have some form of these, then it would be difficult for us to have interoperability between these different poles where whether they are nations or nations state groupings. We now talk about token templates, which is basically a way to create a token template using a simple formula and then from there to functional spec with unifying the views of technical folks, business analysts and business people. Now the way to get around the blindness is to have a way to talk to each other about the same thing. So the functional spec and the token template are interlinked and it creates this pathway. This is an example of a formula that is used in TDF. So is it a fungible or non-fungible token? What is the behavior? What are the different behavior groups and what is the property set? This is a way of assembling certain basic Legos into a full-fledged token that you can define. And we did this with the ETALA project. This, of course, is the effort from Ethereum to come up with the tracks, the token for regulated exchanges. What does all this mean? I mean, must be ERC-20 compatible. It means that you have to implement that interface of minting, burning, and so on. But in ERC-20, I think it is not there. So there is a lot of effort to extend the ERC-20 token. If you go to open Zeppelin, you will see that a lot of samples that extend the ERC-20 is available. And it needs an on-chain identity system. Any rule or compliance required by the regulator has to be within this token, must have a recovery system. All of these highlighted items are anathema to most Bitcoin maximalists or decentralized maximalists. Now we come to project management of this stuff. There are a few principles here that these are obviously going to be national or global infrastructure projects in any enterprise. 95% of them are subject to cost overruns of time and money. So the only way to deal with them is to have these principles, meaning think slow, act fast, all these different principles that you actually put into practice during your project. So I'm going to just focus on a couple, but you get the idea. There has to be methodology behind implementing huge projects. It cannot be pushed by individuals saying, oh, I want to leave a legacy. I want it done tomorrow. I want it done yesterday and so on. It is unrealistic. So for the technical folks, this is very important. In a flow chart, you proceed from left to right. But in this case, you have to look at the goal. Why are you doing this project and ask your users? These are all simple things, but people are mostly left to omission. Thinking slow and acting fast. Thinking slow does not mean just planning, planning, planning. It also means building prototypes and testing. For example, the BIS, cross-border payments, project a bear, all of these are ways in which the prototype is built and tested. Iterate over the different prototypes. This is taken from a very interesting book that has come out this year, how to get big things done. We better listen to people like the project managers of big projects if we want these enormous projects to succeed. Some principles here and then use modular components. Usually open source, like I said, open Zeppelin, patterns and standards and build small and assemble. This is from, adoption is basically a long game. Rapid improvements take place in technology, but to get the product out takes countless experiments, measurement and actually trying out things. Failure is basically teaches us. I hope I have not gone across all these different areas without turning off your attention. Even if I manage to communicate 20% of what I set out to do, I will be glad. Thank you for listening. If you have any questions, I'll be glad to take them. Jameel had a drop, but I'm happy to help. Thank you for that. If people do have questions, feel free to type in the Zoom chat, use the raise hand feature, come off mute. Any questions people have, please feel free. I guess somebody did put something in the chat, but I don't. If somebody earlier said would be helpful to speak out the meaning of these acronyms, there are so many. Thanks. I tried to do that, but it's difficult because the scope is enormous and hopefully I compressed it enough and provided a vision about the future, meaning we are going to get more and more digital assets which are tradable on a financial market infrastructure and it is going to be interesting to watch the space. Everybody, if you look at the publications from the consultants, McKinsey, reports of resources that we should read to get up to date on macroeconomics and future trends. Usually with BIS, they have a whole bunch of papers. World Bank also has, I mean, more than the World Bank, it is the IMF than the World Economic Forum. BIS is a Bank of International Settlements, which is known as the central bank of central banks. That is where all the central bank has come together to talk about not just monetary policy, but actually about what exactly should be done in terms of technical and other implementations. I don't know if you are seeing the chat, but some other questions have come in. For example, how does XRP fit into this? Well, XRP was part of the HKEX Hong Kong exchange. I think it was part of a payment rail there. IMF and the other one that I mentioned is the BIS, and also the I said something about the IBRD, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. I think we are at time, and you can always ask me questions. I will be sharing my presentation with David. If you send me the presentation, I can e-mail it to everybody. If you need to go, that is fine, although you can have the room for longer if you want to address any other questions that have come in. What other questions? Are you seeing this chat? I can read them if it is helpful. What are the reports or resources we should read to get up to date on the macroeconomics and future trends? Yes, I had mentioned... Hold on a second. Let me just stop my share so that I can turn on my... Okay. Yeah, I did mention what you should read to get up. It depends on the depth you want to go to in terms of macroeconomics and future trends. Future trends is always a problem, right? I mean, the only way we can know the future trends is to look at the number of articles being published on a particular topic. There are... Yeah, somebody has posted some sub-stack links. I do read Adam Tuze, who's an economic historian, who teaches at Columbia and is very prominent and he's also on sub-stack. But I can't pay $5 for every person, $5 a month for every sub-stack writer who could be useful. I mean, they all talk about different things. So it seems like the world is splitting into two different systems. Will the BRICS and Allied Nations not be integrated? I think it is a question of what exactly the context is. In other words, they want the BRICS and others do want a system where they're not completely sensorable, right? In other words, they should be able to trade without geopolitical pressures being put on them. So on the one hand, yes, they are dividing not just into two, maybe into three or four or five, depending on the context. But my take is that they all need to come together for certain purposes, and they better think about that before they start breaking away. I mean, before they start saying, oh, we don't want anything to do with the other group. That's probably a bad idea. Anything else? This is, of course, the third real question whether everybody would embrace VTC, ETH, or fight them and promote centralized CBDC. Well, the point is that both will exist. There may be some regulation of VTC and ETH, especially if they want to be traded on public markets, or at least of the companies that stand as intermediaries, like Coinbase or some exchanges. And they haven't proven to be robust enough to support a global payment system. In fact, Bitcoin, I would say, has strayed from that path and has become a den of hardlers. Satoshi, if he did come back, or if she did come back, then he or she will see that it has strayed a lot from the initial Bitcoin paper. Any truth in XRP being used as a major currency in the USA here in the near future with the US government? Well, XRP is going to definitely be part of the ecosystem, but major? I don't know. As long as there is no control of issuance, which is what their biggest problem was with XRP, US is an exception only because I think US, it says many countries are doing the work of setting up a reliable regulatory framework. The US is an exception, thoughts. Unfortunately, in the US, we are used to, let's say, improvisation. Because that seems to be the order of the day. There is no, for example, there is no digital identity system. Instead, they use the social security number as a proxy. So that creates so many problems, right? And there is a culture war about CBDCs. Everybody thinks CBDC is a way to bring in government control. And I see many of these people posting on LinkedIn. Had they looked at what LinkedIn actually does with whatever data they are putting out on LinkedIn, LinkedIn monetizes that data, collects that data, and obviously is going to hold on to it for a very long time. So it's not just the governments that we have to be wary of. Commercial banks, will it make the commercial banks obsolete? Commercial banks are the main source of money in any country, right? Because they are, you know, this question is, do you think US commercial banks are opposing the move to CBDCs? Because it would make commercial banks obsolete. So without credit creation, which is the proper, you know, role of commercial banks and commercial banks create 80 to 90% of the money in today's system. I don't see how going to CBDCs will remove commercial banks from the system. Maybe, you know, there will be limits on how much you can hold in your, how much CBDC you can hold. Otherwise, it would be so easy to have a bank run right into your CBDC wallet. But remember, commercial banks are the credit creators and they will always be. Unless there's another mechanism for creating credit. And I don't see that mechanism coming up in any of these experiments. So I think it's a, you know, abundant information on that project come point to one CBDC project. Well, actually there is, but it is project Hamilton in the US and it's an open source project. It says, can you point to one CBDC project that will further our understanding of how blockchain technologies used. One there is where there is abundant information on that project. So project Hamilton is what I would suggest, but project Hamilton is hamstrung by the fact that it's in, it's in the US. And there doesn't, you know, there doesn't seem to be any CBDC project in play in the US. The other ways in which you can look at it is by looking at projects like BESU, which are open source, which are being used in multiple CBDC projects, and you can see how it is being used in these CBDC projects. I guess that is the last question that, you know, was there so I will try to close the session and thank you everyone for coming and attending. Great. Thank you. Thanks to everyone. And as we said, I will send the link to the recording and the link to the slides once I get them to everybody who registered. So, and if you have any additional questions, certainly hoping to continue the discussion. So thanks everyone. Thanks a lot. And you, David, thank you. Of course, happy to help. Yeah, thanks everyone.