 Perfect. I'm recording right now. By the way, I'll go through the reading of the policy as usual that I used to do. Limits Foundation meetings involve participation by industry competitors and it is the intention of the Limits Foundation to conduct all of its activities in accordance with applicable and trust and competition laws. This is therefore extremely important that attendees to these meeting agendas and be aware of and not participate in any activities that are prohibited under applicable U.S. state, federal, foreign, and trust and competition laws. Examples of types of actions that are prohibitive at Limits Foundation meetings and in connection with the Limits Foundation activities are described in the Limits Foundation and cross policy. If you have a question about this matter please contact your company council or if you're a member of the Limits Foundation feel free to contact Andrea of the Grove of Gassner of the Grove LLP which provides legal counsel to the Limits Foundation. Hyperledger is committed to creating a safe and welcoming community for more information. Please visit our Hyperledger code of conduct. Perfect. By the way again, welcome to this small community. Glad to have you here today and delighted to hear from you and I will handle the speech to you and please step in and take the word to time to speak. All right, very good. Can you guys hear me okay? Can you guys hear me fine? Okay, very good. So good morning and good afternoon to everyone and well thank you Andrea for organizing this session and I'm glad and I'm going to try in the next hour to make this session as interesting as I can. Actually that's the second time that I have an opportunity in the past year I think to talk to the Hyperledger special interest group. The first time was not in trade finance it was in supply chain but in some way I'm sure many of you will see some similarities in this process and what I tried to prepare so that the anti-trust overview that Andrea just went through. What I tried to prepare today and share is basically a mix of I think what's happening in the market from from all standpoint I changed that I can also what we've seen happening together with customer and partners and also a view of the ecosystem and basically the solutions and challenges around trade finance use cases that we've seen. So you know again my presentation is probably around as I mentioned to Andrea about 30 to 35 minutes maybe slightly longer slightly shorter but I'm happy to be interrupted if you guys have any questions. There are really three parts to this presentation. Some statement and some view of the market from my standpoint and then some of the challenges that we see in the construction of consortium within the trade finance area which I think is a fascinating topic if you would ask me because I think it's going to create amazing opportunity for some of you on this call and some of the companies involved with the hyperledger ecosystem and other ecosystems in the blockchain industry to basically create new processes automate these processes in some different ways and that's what trade finance is all about. So I'm really glad I'm given the opportunity to talk to you today. Let me make a short introduction of myself. Let me make a short introduction of myself. So I'm a French citizen but I've been living outside of France for about 25 years. I spend most of my time in between the west coast and east coast of the US for about 11 or 12 years and the rest of the time I actually spent in Asia in a beautiful place called Singapore and as many of you I'm sure on this call I don't necessarily come from the crypto world. I was not a miner I was not a Bitcoin crazy guy I was a very traditional software platform builder and most of my experience is really brick and motor technology companies such as Microsoft and Parallels and Acronis and as part of this you know I think I had the opportunity to talk to and understand many different businesses which actually led me back in 2016 2017 to be more curious and more interested about how blockchain technology and decentralized technology could potentially help addressing some of the challenges I was noticing or trying to solve within the enterprise space mostly in term of automation, tracking but also basically combining efforts and making sure that people could collaborate better because blockchain is all about network effect and it's all about collaboration and that's the first thing that struck me back in 2016 and since then you know I've been trying both in the public blockchain space and the private blockchain space to make sure we could facilitate some of the you know problems solving that that we manage and use technology to basically help these companies to do better. Let me start by a quick introduction on trade finance right trade finance is a very very significant and important part of the global industry and it has many criteria which are really interesting there is a fairly high fragmentation to start with and opacity in some way and also a lot of reliance on manual processes, paper processes which are basically driving the demand for applications that can operate from a single source of truth and and that's why since early 2016 you've seen many blockchain use cases, many consulting companies, many projects and software companies trying to address the trade finance issue. Here where we are based in Asia trade finance is even more of a challenge because of the fragmentation of the market right in Asia alone we have 11 different markets with different languages, different processes, different currency creating amazing opportunity to basically optimize some of those processes. Now if you think of trade finance from sourcing to manufacturing to financing to distribution and basically the seamless exchange of data and value being possible throughout all actors in the supply chain then you're looking at a major optimization opportunity across the board. You're talking of you know a few percentage point of margins that you can save and intermediary that you can basically manage better or reduce and providing a better solution altogether. In fact I think that Gardner, I took some notes because I had to search for this but I think Gardner back at the end of 2020 mentioned that much of the wholesale trade growth actually for 2020 and later would come from the use of cases in trade finance where automation of the process can create significant efficiency across all parties and that's what basically trade finance is all about and I'm going to go through you know some of those use cases that we see but it's all about significant efficiency in automating processes and across multiple parties which is very difficult to do today in a more traditional setup. So the digital transformation process that I started is fascinating by itself. I think you hear every day and I have many examples in my presentation about entities, consortiums, banks you know some of you with your company I'm sure on this call have similar ambition to basically help accelerating this digital transformation process and make sure that trade and supply chain will be better documented or well documented and that distributed application and network will bring together a disparate and very diverse number of parties that are involved through trade finance. So I think at this stage I'd like to not really give an example of what trade finance or an exhaustive view of what trade finance because I'm sure you guys are well aware of this but I wanted to share a little bit more about what we have seen and also what we have touched in Chainstack in the past year 12 months 18 months and they are basically organized around four different type of use cases right. One case which we see more and more recently is basically to build a more efficient capital market process right and here you see such use cases as digital collateral and compliance use cases you also see optimizing OTC derivatives and post-trade processing right and I think these use cases you know for a few years you've seen a few and what's interesting here is just an acceleration of many banks especially in Asia that are interested in improving both digital collateralization and the compliance aspect. Now a second type of use case we see is basically building digitally native trade and supply chain processes and that's the most common I think that has existed in most of the consortium and most of the trade finance use cases that we've been involved with for probably four years even five years right starting back in 2018 2019 it was already fairly developed and here you're looking at two separate track I think one track is really on traceability and trusted data across the supply chain which I think is what has progressed the faster simply because tracking and creating audit trail and trusted a certain level of trust within the supply chain is probably a very natural criteria for blockchain to be based on and it works very well. The second use case is trade-based money laundering and we've seen some use cases here in Asia I think in the Philippines you've seen some ideas around this some of the central bank I've thought about this as well it's not as developed but we see this happening then of course the third use case which will be a very big one together with the last one is basically building a next-generation post-trade solution I think this will only come into play later after you basically build a digitally native trade and supply chain process that works and that is already relatively automated and then the last use case that we've seen is really around building next-generation payment infrastructure which I think is a you know a beast by itself because it will require distributed infrastructure for real-time and faster payment but also building a modern and real-time payment platform which I'm sure we take quite some years to achieve but all together these four use cases I think have gained a lot of merits in many ways and and you see them happening in many places across Asia certainly we see it happening in the US in specific conditions and we also see it happening over Europe in Western Europe countries even though it seems to be a little bit slower than what we see in Asia. Now so that's trade finance and I'm sure you guys can come up with multiple other examples of project that you might have been involved with or that production that have gone live in the past years but that's what we have seen as far as change stack is concerned. Now the reason I wanted to set the stage is because every single one of those four different example are basically conditioned by a very active and very digital and more automated collaboration and collaboration is imperative in trade finance and I'm sure all of you have noticed if not experienced firsthand that this is a very complicated process to make all these different players of the trade finance area work together. Now what blockchain brings and what decentralized solution brings is basically a certain level of collaboration based on trust right and I'm not going to give you a one-on-one class on how blockchain creates trust but I think it's important to make people remember that there is an interesting aspect in the technology itself which is that it creates immutability and certain level of auditing which makes collaboration easier and the reason I stress this is because it seems that specially in trade finance trust is one of the main inhibitor across the board in order to accelerate the process of transforming trade finance and this trust is basically between different parties sharing documents or sharing data or sharing information that needs to be basically verified and better authenticated in some way or all tracked so that it can actually be used across the board on more platform and I think that's important and the reason I mentioned this is because true collaboration does not always happen. Now one point that we noticed which I think is interesting is the fact that collaboration in trade finance already exists right I mean one could argue that trade finance by itself is already a big supply chain and full chain of successive collaboration working together most of them one-to-one or some one-to-many and that basically allow people to create certain level of efficiency however and that's probably why by the way trade finance was one of the first things that people thought blockchain could help now however you still have huge inefficiencies because most of those trade finances starting the use cases that I mentioned are basically managed in silo right data are basically in silo what you're going to see across companies and the way they share this information or the way information is being shared across multiple parties is still very much organized in a central and difficult way for people to collaborate more freely and that creates basically a situation where you have layers of intermediaries that add some limited values right and of course you know it's kind of easy to say intermediaries create limited values when you talk to the people today in the chain of say a trade finance documentation all together you know every probably single chain of this big chain creates some level of value but the value they add also creating efficiencies and potential optimization which I think is why blockchain can truly make trade finance look better than this picture right I mean this picture is probably a good example on how people discuss our view and come together now the reason I chose this picture here is because I'd like to explain that for people to collaborate it's not only a technology agreement it's also a scope it's also a governance it's also a way to work together and frequently especially in the early trade finance use cases that really involve it looks like people had not really think about how this could be scaled and strive as network creating network effect which I think in trade finance will be amazingly powerful so blockchain is offering partially a solution to trust and to basically improve collaboration all together by providing certain level of verification traceability maintain privacy and remove intermediary so all the bugs are checked when it comes to trade finance and in fact this is probably why you've seen so many trade finance consortium developing in the past five or six years right I mean you have you know some familiar name here I'm sure most of you know trade lands I'm sure most of you know we trade I'm sure you know and you are also familiar with some of the R3 consortium in trade finance which are also based in Asia like Contour and Marco Polo now if you look at this ecosystem which I think is a good view of the ecosystem even though this is dated 2019 so the ecosystem has changed a little bit but I did not find a better representation of it what you can notice already is that several of those consortium here are basically trying to address the same issue right either in the way a trade is organized around shipping or freight right or in the way documentation of later of credits bill of leading etc are being passed down through different players or how commodities are being traded or you know how KYC can actually be organized and many of those consortium if you look at the detail of the different use cases they're trying to address right each of them are probably addressing three to four right depending on their level of maturity anywhere from documentation to invoicing to better collaboration basically those consortium they also compete together and another thing which is kind of interesting in the construction of these consortium is many players are actually part of multiple consortiums right a little bit like an enterprise would basically open multiple bank bank account to mitigate each risk right so that's kind of the landscape and I was I think involved in many discussion with at least six of those five I'm sorry of those different protocols and I was very bullish back in 2018 2019 that they would basically grow and organize themselves very fast well in fact depending on whether you look at you know your glass being half full or half empty one could argue that the formation of this consortium was very fast another one could argue that the scale and the number of partners involved and participant involved with this consortium has not grow as exponentially as what some people thought and I think the reason for this is mostly linked to the challenges of creating a consortium and and I don't think those are naturally trade finance related consortium issues I think those are issues linked with consortium but what's special in trade finance I think is that you have a mix of different industries that are supposed to collaborate together in anywhere from shippers to builders to manufacturing to banking and this creates basically different industries process ecosystem and for them to work together and we see and at least that's what we experimented four type of issue in the way those consortium basically aggregates and what I'd like to do in this you know third part of my presentation is basically go through some of those detail issues we saw some of our customer and some of people we work with facing so that you can maybe avoid them or basically build a solution for so the first issue we see in the construction and establishing a decentralized consortium is really the scope of the consortium itself and I think this is somewhat linked to governance in some way and I'll come back to this but the first thing that we see is basically the scope of what the consortium is supposed to build and deliver right initially most of the consortium were built across a very large mandate of basically addressing a very large problem and I think what we see today is many of those consortium focusing on key pain points and narrower use cases so that they can actually deliver value and as they do this then they need to think of how the network itself is going to become a trusted entity and will basically be operated and here you see multiple examples and multiple constructions around key players in the industry either building something that we call a business network operator which is actually the operating entity of the consortium we also see some consortium organizing themselves around their foundation or a more open governance but business network operator seems to be one of the most developed way of organizing your consortium today now the second one as I mentioned is having a foundation I think the difference around these two concepts is that a business network operator and I'm not I'm not preaching for it but I see some benefits to it around the operational aspect of the business network operator which seems to be very useful for the member of the consortium and I think that's important to take into account because that way you can basically manage all your operational issue of onboarding your partner and your members and making sure that they run as part of the network and giving them the service that that the consortium we need to operate in a decentralized way in a much easier fashion than if you are open minded about it and having a more loose and I don't mean loose in a negative way I mean more in a open source way so to speak and having your foundation managing your governance so we see these two constructions of how those networks grow and we you know I'm not sure today you know what's the best model I think business network operator seems to be kind of the best way of doing it from my standpoint but it does not check all the boxes when it comes to some of the challenges and issues and one of the issue that we see a hundred percent of the time and this is also our business so that's probably why we we kind of you know we are exposed to this one of the issues that we see all the time is basically the infrastructure requirements and compliance and security and regulatory aspects especially in trade finance being one of the largest constraints of the consortium growing and assembling and growing right and the infrastructure is really focused around what is it going to be what is it going to take for a participant to basically join a consortium and operate as part of the consortium so you you have a business network operator you have some governance the value it delivers on the use case is good now you need to assemble in the case of trade finance we we had discussion with some banks in asia that have tens of thousands of trade partner and of course not all of them need to run a node not all of them need to learn to run their own infrastructure but many of them actually need to connect and and operate as one of the participants of the network and how do you do to onboard them and basically we see a lot of discussion around what level of security and compliance how decentralized the infrastructure of the consortium should be or might be or will be in what part of the world will nodes be running who will administrate them what will be the security around it and all those questions are basically questions that as you go from one consortium to the other you always discover new requirements because this is in reality work in progress and I think that's what makes it fascinating so what we do and that the only slide where I talk a little bit about chain stack but what we do at chain stack is we basically provide a managed services that you know the business network operator or member can basically acquire and use in order to build and deploy and manage their nodes in a way that they don't have to basically take care of it so we provide full managed services for those nodes and we also provide an automated onboarding for people joining a certain consortium so that's that's kind of the solution we build now I wanted to come back on this other view right this view is you know as a lot of you know common names but they they're more visible because you you see the actual name of the project or name of the application using it again this is back from 2020 so I think it's not necessarily a hundred percent up to date but I think it gives you a good view of some of the areas especially in supply chain management supply chain finance part of the trade finance where you see most of the protocol I'm sorry where you see most of the projects that I've made the most effort and if you look at some of those names in the way as they're trying to go to market you will notice that many are actually dependent upon adding thousands probably tens of thousands of partners coming together so that large banks large financial institutions and and the like of them for insurance company like you know the case of B3i for instance would have large networks where optimization and trust could actually be established and and I think the infrastructure is really key in this process now of course now the last two issues that we see are basically how does that scale right I mean how do you scale your use case with one partner one too many and all the participants and then of course how does this scale and what does this scale mean from a scope standpoint and an infrastructure standpoint and here you know what what we see is basically the best way to to look at this would be to basically create a process where anyone in the trade finance space could basically join any of the consortium and basically become a participant in some very fast option and this is the level of automation that we are not there you know we're not there yet but this is a level of automation we need to see and we need to build if you want these large trade finance consortium to operate and be truly decentralized striving and growing exponentially from a number of participants then finally and quite briefly the last point is really the the governance on how some of these consortium have assembled themselves in trade finance and how they will potentially collaborate together across multiple use cases and multiple protocols and I think those are very basic questions I'm sorry I used an R3 example here for Corda because I thought this graph was quite meaningful but you know start from who is allowed to join and who can vote and who can decide what and who can enforce changes and then of course interoperability and I think what's what's interesting in this governance is that this is something that we see emerging in discussion now for the past probably 12 months and the set of questions has changed right it's not anymore let's let's gather everyone around one ID and on board everyone let's be open-minded and have a start on something that works especially in the private permission chain and let's make sure that what we build will be able to scale so that we can accommodate the growth and and the projects that we're trying to develop so that's what we see in this space I think you have all you know noticed some of those names that I'm sure you guys are very familiar with I wanted to share that with you today I promised my presentation would be about 35 minutes I think that's exactly what it was and I would be happy to answer a question and try to answer a question about the formation of the consortium or maybe on the infrastructure side what we've you know what we've done that might be interesting for for the special interest group it comes at the right time I mean this is one particular because I'm personally engaged in this even a project that you know is aiming to report all the seeds you know in an inery where the process is happening so you know that we're climate-sick we're there with capital markets you know in order to collaborate or delivering global harmonized solutions anyway you pointed out some very interesting topics about trade finance in traditional trade finance well you see the nature of trade finance which you know has been so served by let's say problem trouble for the old industry to scale up and to get digitized at least pictures so I do share your concern and your your view to this anyway I will leave the audience a matter of way I'd love to to introduce Julien Hauden which joined us during this speech welcome to welcome to right again to to to make questions to to Laurent hi how are you so that was a great presentation great presentation thank you I think you're having slight I like your your slight bandwidth issues I think with your wi-fi and yeah so are there any questions yeah a really nice presentation I do have one if I may please please go ahead Matish thank you so I'm just wondering that how do we support interoperability between different networks of blockchain because I'm just going through the change that website as well as as Nestle covered in the presentation today as well that change tax support the infrastructure deployment as well as management of different blockchain networks I'm just curious to know do we have some kind of interoperable solution as well which ties the knot between different networks and if so then how does that work thank you thank you so no we have not resolved alone the entire problem of interoperability I think we should consider interoperability to be to be basically conditioned to three things right number one it's not going to be a full interoperability across all different protocols and you know consensus that you can think of I think most of the challenges we address today are relatively simple but when you think of the construction of them from a compliance and infrastructure standpoint we allow people to use multiple cloud multiple nodes multiple on-prem multiple hybrid type of deployment to connect together right so that's kind of an important point because it allows large banks for instance in the trade finance use case that's that we are dealing with today to basically operate a chain stack on premise you know and that's how they want to operate it and at the same time connect it with and get members you know using public cloud or using hybrid cloud to basically also connect to the same network and that creates an opportunity for scalability which is the reason why we built this solution so having multiple networks and also multiple provider of nodes not only change stack but others to basically work together on this and I think today the solution is relatively good and stable now we don't know or I do not know any case of anyone that has done work on true interoperability of some of those blockchain consortium but I can clearly see in the trade finance space some consortium converging maybe into addressing the same use case on the same protocol and maybe at some point join forces together and it's not really happened yet but I can clearly see that some use case and some commonalities might make sense at some point sounds good thanks that's great any other questions I think interoperability is going to be a challenging one for the future I think yeah yeah so long so maybe I asked a question right so I think what you're saying is that governance and there's a lot more to it than just the tech right so what kind of proportion would you say or what would be the big experiences you think that people should take how should they be if they want to set up a network or connect a network what are the kind of things they should be thinking about so I think they should be in trade finance I think they should be focused on one area of the trade finance I mean if they're focused on documents and documentry or good tracking or is it focused on the digital payment aspect of the trade finance now I think those are different industries all together and it would be great to solve them as one which is what many of the consortium are trying to do but I think we have to start and be humble about the ways this can work and in some way you have part of this already addressed in supply chain management use cases and I think being narrow in the use case that you address is great now the second thing is the construction of the consortium I mean we've seen early consortium being created four or five years ago that that probably have issues today to grow not because the idea is a bad idea or the technology is bad technology but simply because the way the consortium members can actually join might be too restrictive or might appear to be too much one-sided and the incentive and the benefits of the reward offered for people to join as members is basically not big enough and part of this I think and that the third point comes from the idea that you know the the infrastructure management and governance probably need to be something that everyone feels comfortable to and it was probably underestimated earlier that includes the infrastructure right and if you if you run a consortium and you run the infrastructure and the only choice is for members to to basically join your infrastructure and that's you know take it or leave it then you kind of take away some of the benefits of the true decentralized model and also take away the potential of scalability so I think those three components are are important a narrow use case that is a key win and you have a lot of companies I'm sure you know some of them in Singapore here that that are very narrow objectives and and I think are doing well and and will do very well in the long term and then make sure that you scale or you get ready for scale be open-minded about about the ways the consortium can grow and make sure that it can actually be fitted in the infrastructure in a way that can be truly decentralized I think ultimately it will have to have a certain level of decentralization even in the private permission chain blockchain space and I think that's what's important. You said it perfectly by the way Laurent uh trade finance is not an industry it's more than an industry it's so many industries get together each of them you know the cross path that has its own specific which is payment is documents handling it's you know financing which makes the picture even more complicated and of course the governance in this case follows the same pathway gets more and more complicated in divers there's a question from them here he is asking who will supervise northeastern APIs in an interoperable ecosystem on and off blockchain so I guess nobody knows right we have to ask I guess I can I can tell you that that the consortium we are involved with where a financial institution is involved the financial institution wants to make sure that that whatever they run regardless their partner will will be compliant and okay from a regulator standpoint and and that's probably the first you know security reliability issues that people are going to look at then participant could be different but this is not even interoperability to start with it just like how how this is all going to work and I think we you cannot go away from compliance and regulation maybe I'll ask a quick question so do you see things happening seeing as your asian base things they're happening in different parts of the world what do you see at all kind of happening in a similar fashion because long you have about you have a sounds like a global kind of perspective well so we we the largest consortium we have been exposed to and we are working with today are all in asia but I think that's also the nature of the fragmentation of the markets here which creates this opportunity which is fantastic so if they if they crack it I think it it will be the biggest reward we see a few in Europe probably not as large or not as significant in size at least from from what we see we have less visibility in the US Julian but what what we've been trying to do with most of this consortium is basically provide an automated way to onboard their members and you know some of them require this today because they are growing some of them are not yet at this stage and and for me you know bringing change stack to a level or for us bringing change stack to a level where you can basically be part of the business network operator and and deliver and automated on boarding of any new participant to a trade finance use case whether in documents or in payments or in you know capital market and and provide this in a few click seems to be a super nice value proposition and and that's where we had the most discussion in Asia there's another question uh always from Dan and still from Dan why does Singapore seem so far ahead of adjuice dections and digitizing free plan to give one I mean um it's pretty difficult to answer maybe is because of geography I mean in my vision the position of the country itself but I'll leave it up to you Laura no I I I mean this is probably uh uh economic or and industry based question I I think um Singapore historically like Hong Kong had a lot of regional companies right a lot of regional banks and because you have regional banks and of course Singapore and Hong Kong being uh big some of the biggest harbor they have a lot of trade and supply chain so they naturally I think are more inclined to to favor this and that's why maybe you have more activities here that would be my explanation yeah and I think there's been also been a lot of very good government intervention right in across many countries in Asia trying to work out if you're a kind of like hub like Singapore or Hong Kong you have to perceive the future as well right work make sure you're competitive so I don't know if you've seen that yeah true yeah I mean honestly why why would a government not favor this right I mean optimizing trade finance seems to be like a super good idea right I think we'll all agree that Krishna is saying small please and please do listen to what financial institutions ask for to a major extent I'm from Singapore yeah I agree with that it's also the former government that favors this absolutely so any other question please nobody else perfect all right what's up I think maybe just one question we can ask Laurent if anyone wants to get involved in Chainstack you know what do they what how do you do that what's what's the way to get involved or connect with with you or your organization well thank you Julian for this opportunity so please I mean if you guys are building or if you guys are developer just come to Chainstack.com you click on try there is a free developer plan for a week you can you can try Chainstack inside out and there you can actually deploy both public blockchain protocol and private permission blockchain like Hyperledger and you know you can actually deploy your node and and everything that goes with it for Hyperledger and then you can start building or you can actually start growing and and connecting with other members so that's what we do if you have any question about this please go to support.chainstack.com or send email directly at at chainstack.com and and we'll be happy to help you today we have a little bit over 8000 developer at the end of September using Chainstack on on monthly basis we have hundreds of customers running in production both in public and private blockchain and we have probably you know six or seven large Hyperledger project either testing experimenting or deploying in production in Chainstack today across different time zones we support certain different regions in Asia in Europe and in the US and you know please come and try us and we'll be happy to help you if we can if you want to build your best application with Hyperledger. Okay excellent thank you. Right Andrea Julian thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to to share some sort about consortium if anyone would like to get access to my presentation I think I shared a copy with Andrea and and I welcome any question thank you very much guys. Yeah and this will be on YouTube and you know well the next meeting we're going to hold this in two weeks time on the 19th on the different times lot that to have you two days around it was really really insightful one. Thanks everybody for joining us. Talk to you. Take care everybody. Take care. Bye. Thank you guys.