 There is no single entity today that can drive innovation like the open source community can. And so a part of what really, a part of what we want to do is embrace the community, provide opportunities for them to get engaged and help drive innovation around our core technology. Hi, this is your host, Saptan Bhartia, and welcome to another episode of Let's Talk. And today we have with us Andhra Vatkin, Chief Open Source Officer at Hedera. Andhra, it's great to have you back on the show. Thank you very much for inviting me. I'm excited to be here, truly. Of course, we are going to discuss Hedera and you joining the company. But before we go there, I would love to just talk about the company. What do you folks do? Because if I'm not wrong, I have met you before at one of the open source conferences when you are working with Vipro. But this is the first time we are talking to somebody from Hedera. So I'd love to know a bit about the company. So Hedera is a public permission blockchain. We are an enterprise focus and kind of what really sets us apart is our governance model. So we are governed by a council of 29 different organizations such as Google, IBM, Dell, Boeing, Standard Bank and many others. So we have a distributed council or governance model. That's a little bit unique in this space. What sets us apart a bit is our consensus model. So we are proof of stake like Ethereum as opposed to proof of work like Bitcoin. And in that context, our founder, Lehman Baird, created this technology for driving consensus that is very, very efficient, very fast and low carbon impact. So that's another aspect of our DLT that really sets us up. Being in the DLT space, it sets us apart. We are empirically one of the lowest carbon impact blockchains that exist today. Now let's talk about what attracted you to join this company. A few things. So Vipro, the company I spent nine years at before this as global open source, head of global open source there is a council member actually of Hedera. And in that context, all of the software at Hedera is open source under the Apache license. And they were looking to identify how to develop their open source strategy. So they reached out to a couple of council members and Vipro being one of them, Vipro said, well, we actually have someone who might be able to help you. So for about six months, I spent a few hours a week here and they're helping them develop their overall open source strategy. Actually ended up writing my own job description, which at the time I didn't know was going to be the case because they had decided that they did want to hire a chief open source officer to drive the strategy and the implementation at Hedera. So I had a bit of a benefit of getting to know who they are, the people, the organization and so on. It's a new space for me, right? I've been an open source for 25 years, but and of course understand the fundamentals of blockchain because it's all open source, right? Pretty much, but I didn't have experience in this whole web three space, but I had that opportunity to get to know the company and about four months ago, we had one of our council meetings in Santa Clara and they invited me to attend and I remember sitting in that room and there must have been 70 or 80 people there and at that time I was not considering this as an opportunity, but I remember sitting in that room so clearly and thinking these are some of the smartest people I have ever met in my career in technology. I want to be a part of it. And so then I reached out to the board and the CEO and a president and said, I would like to be considered for this role and it kind of went from there and here I am. And really happy, I'm excited. You know, I certainly enjoyed the work I did at Wipro and left on good terms with them. They're still a council member, but I am really, really excited to be here. There's so much cool stuff going on in this space. Thanks for sharing your journey. Now let's talk about the problem area, the challenges that Hedera is going to solve or Hedera is solving. Let's just talk about, you know, wider lens and look at this industry, how we have seen the evolution of technology like Web3, DLT in this space. So interesting that I did choose to join this space during what people are calling the crypto winter, right? But it doesn't shock or appall me to become a part of it at this time because I remember going through the early days of the internet, right? And how that evolved, how there's an incredible amount of churn and shake out and the entities that came through the initial stage one of the internet, let's say really were stronger organizations. And what I really, really appreciate about Hedera that helped kind of bring me to this, making the decision to join this space at this time is the nature of the distributed governance model here and the fact that we have so many big brands, big organizations that are clearly invested in making this organization successful. That was really important for me to see that they're not just a bunch of logos slapped on a page, right? We actually have real engagement. Now, one of the challenges going to the challenges in this space is we have a committed number of council members, but we need to also bring them to the open source community, right? That's why I'm here is to develop our strategy to grow a community. And we need to get our council members engaged. We need to provide a strong set of tools and environments and user journey to get the web three community involved. We have a passionate group of open source contributors. We have a lot of people that are writing apps on top of our network, but we need to help them get more engaged in actually participating in the community. And so that's one of the first actions that I'm focusing on. And then we are talking about distributed ledgers. We have to talk about open source. We have to talk about hyper ledger project. What kind of involvement Hedera has with this foundation, with this project and what kind of adoption you're seeing in the market? Yeah, so we're certainly a member of the hyper ledger foundation. And we are, hyper ledger fabric is integrated with our platform. We have some plugins there. And so we certainly are both users, producers and consumers in that space. We're actually talking with IBM and other members about the new project that was recently raised to full project status called cacti. So one of the big issues around the whole space that we're looking at is interoperability. That's a big, big challenge. At the end of the day, there's not going to be a single universal blockchain no matter what some folks may say. There will be different blockchains for different purposes with different use cases, essentially focused on a particular blockchain. So interoperability is really, really important. Interoperability that allows you to transact across different blockchains for different purposes with different types of permissions. Interoperability in wallets today is also one of the big challenges. We're joining the open wallet foundation, which is another Linux foundation project because we believe we have a lot to offer there. So one of, if you look at Fabric or Basu or Cacti, one of the core kind of tenants I feel of Hyperledger is to provide the ability for more interoperability between different blockchains. And so that's what I think is one of the absolute core values and one of the reasons that we're invested in it. How important is open source for the head right self? Yeah, so it's a part of, we're really focused on being a true decentralized organization in this space, right? And that's why we have a decentralized governance model. And that's what we believe in the software. We bought the rights from the founders a few years ago to the hashgraph consensus algorithm. We made it open source under the Apache license and we're really working hard to build a distributed community around it. Because as you know, Swapno, being at the Linux foundation, there's no single entity today that can drive innovation like the open source community can. And so a part of what really, a part of what we wanna do is embrace the community, provide opportunities for them to get engaged and help drive inner innovation around our core technology. Open source is better, as you know, is better for all. And that's really what we wanna do is provide a functional, innovative blockchain that is based on open source principles and best practices. Since we are talking about open source, I do wanna talk to you as you're an industry veteran, some of the disturbing trends, though we keep seeing these things, you know, over a period of time ever since the FSF or open source license came to exist. But when we look at the things that hashgraph is doing or when Red Hat tried to do something that's sent to us, which may be seen more of a miscommunication than a malicious intention, but things are changing. How do you look at these trends and what role you see foundations like Linux Foundation, OSI can play here. Of course, this time, Linux Foundation, they did come up with open tofu. So I want to hear your thoughts on that. So a little bit of perspective. First off, if you look back at my career, for me, it's always been bringing a practical approach to open source. I was probably one of the very first people to actually wear a suit in open source way back when, because that was what was needed at the time. I've worked on with dozens of organizations on their open source related business models. So there is, I get the rationale, I get the reason for why some of these organizations have made some of these license changes. And to me, it's been a little bit less about the actual change, although creating licenses that aren't OSI compliant is definitely not something I support. But I get the rationale, I get the concern, I get what they're trying to do. I think a lot of the failure has actually come about in the execution of how they've gone about that, how they've messaged it, how some of these communities have been blindsided. And you're always going to lose in that case, right? So I think it's really about continuing to listen and engage with your community, get their feedback. At the end of the day, I think we all recognize that for some of these really cool, innovative open source technologies to continue to grow and be available, there needs to be commercial value proposition behind them. And that's a part of what I'm working on, actually, with our community, is helping a lot of these people who are building applications that run on top of the network, understand the commercial rationale for actually getting involved in the community, right? My observation, my three and a half month observation in the web three space is that there is actually less understanding of the commercial value of open source than there is in what we might think of as the web two community. Before we wrap this up, of course, I wish we had more time, but I have to get into another recording. So I will wrap it up quickly. Sorry for that. Sorry to our audience as well. But I want to talk a bit about web three. Of course, there's a lot of communication, there's a lot of miscommunication, there's a lot of information, there's a lot of misinformation. What is web three? And what kind of new use cases that you see it will enable that we're not possible without it? What I'm perhaps most excited about is the opportunity to improve our planet through web three technologies and new business models. It's, there's certainly a new way of doing finance and it's bringing sophisticated financial capabilities to the disadvantaged, the unbanked, that's going to happen. But that's going to happen whether or not we have, essentially I believe whether we are not, we have this technology horizon called web three. But it is really enabling a lot more opportunity to help improve the planet. The use cases that I'm seeing around sustainability are just fascinating. And so that's something that I'm really excited about also. And you thank you so much for taking time out today and talk about these wide range of topics. And as I said, there's so much to talk about, we don't have time today, but I would love to have you back on the show. Thank you. Swaminal, thank you very much. Great conversation, good questions and I look forward to continuing.