 It's after the time so let's get started. I know folks are coming in. Good evening, good afternoon, good morning everyone. My name is Dr. Stephanie Herter. I'm a founding economist of Prism Group which is an economics and governance advisory focused on blockchain and distributed ledger projects. This half an hour is going to be an ask at the expert Q&A. I do want to start with just a couple of high-level slides talking a little bit about who we are and why I'm here. Let me pull this up. All right. Is that visible to everyone? Yes, we can see. Okay, great. So this half an hour is going to be about the economics and governance of blockchain networks focused on consortia but also open to other questions. So as I mentioned, I'm a founding economist of Prism Group. We're an economics and governance advisory focused on blockchain projects. So why would you need economics to think about blockchain? So at a fundamental level, economics and specifically microeconomics is thinking about the study of individual choice and strategic interaction under constraints. Right? So we think that individuals are making decisions constantly. They're making trade-offs. They're thinking about what are the resources that they have and how can they be used? And when we're designing distributed systems, when we're designing, thinking about how to decentralize a variety of different applications, understanding how individuals are expected to act and how they're going to interact with the system that we're designing is essential. So we as a firm work with projects across the entire blockchain and DLT spectrum, everything from top 10 cryptocurrencies to big four accounting firms to major educational institutions like Berkeley, Stanford and MIT. We also have pursued a number of research opportunities, presented our own research at places like DARPA and Cornell. So one thing I'm very excited to announce is that coming in the third quarter of this year, we're going to be offering a joint executive education course on the economics of blockchain and digital assets with the Wharton School. And this is going to be a great opportunity to work with the experts at Wharton to present what we've learned and how economics is a useful lens for thinking about the applications of blockchain and DLT. So for anyone who's interested in this, please don't hesitate to reach out and we'll be marketing this more in the future. But this is a very exciting, a recent development for us and we think we'll fill a significant need in the market for up-to-date, clear explanations of the economic benefits of blockchain and how it can be applied across industries. As I mentioned, when we work with different projects, we use a variety of different kinds of economics, depending on the particular setting. We may be thinking about the design of contracts and transactions. We may be looking at strategic interaction in a game theory lens. We may be applying monetary economics to think about the fundamental value of blockchain tokens and how they can be managed and everything in between. If I have a chance, I'll come back to this a little bit later, especially when we're thinking about how do you apply blockchain to a network or consortium? There's a multi-step process that we go through. When you're thinking about how do you build a network or consortium of independent entities, you have to think not only what is the blockchain doing, but how do we incentivize adoption, use, and ongoing contribution of resources in a way that solves any public goods problem and enables the network as a whole to function effectively. For those of you who might be interested in a little bit of reading, we do write on a regular basis. These are just, we have a medium post that has a lot of our greatest hits. We also gave a course now a couple years ago at the USC Biterby School of Engineering, which was the very first economics for blockchain course offered. I'm so happy to share any of these. You can also find these on our website. If anyone is interested in contacting us now, or I'll put this back up at the end, please don't hesitate to reach out. With that, I'm happy to open up for any questions that might be in the audience. Can I jump in here without you? Yes, go ahead, please. Oman, they just wanted to let you know Q&A is actually disabled here. That's why I jumped in here. Sorry, I thought I'll check on the Q&A sessions. That's fine. So, Stephanie, a question for you. When you're working with your clients on different projects which come through, is there a pattern that you see based upon the profile of your clients? For example, startups versus enterprise clients versus institutions, in terms of how do they approach the economic question around the blockchain project? I think that's a great set of questions and there's a lot there. So, I think the different types of clients, first of all, will tend to interact at different levels with the underlying technology. So, we have a number of startup clients that are protocols. They're thinking about the intricacies of consensus and the economics around there and how to design incentives. For many of our enterprise clients, there's going to be the decision about what protocol or protocols do we use and how do we build on them and how do we make sure that the economics and governance of those are aligned with what we want to do but they're not necessarily digging into designing their own system or even token sometimes. I think that for many projects, especially those that are funded through more traditional means, like if you're thinking about an enterprise project that's gotten started funding from a larger corporation, there tends to be very much a focus on the use case. Why are we the business putting the money into this? Whereas with startups, especially ones funded by token raises, there's a little bit more room for exploration and thinking about not only how is this going to be used but also why is this just a really cool and interesting project? I would say those are some of the differences. Is the Q&A functioning now? I still should be disabled. Right, it's working. Yeah, I just okay, great question here. So maybe something at your end. But yeah, if anyone else has any questions, please feel free to post questions. I can ask more if there aren't others. I'm also happy to talk a little bit more about sort of how we think about design. But why don't you go ahead with one more question then if there aren't any more, I can talk a little bit about the phases of economic design. Sure. So the other question I had was from a token economics perspective, now that NFTs are getting a lot of attention, how do you envision that they might be of use from a strategic perspective for enterprises? They're seeing a lot of traction. They're seeing a lot of traction from creatives. But from an enterprise perspective, how an enterprise could use them to further their own marketing or strategy? I think it's a really interesting question. And I think for a lot of creatives, there's obviously excitement due to the potential for ownership and also due to the amounts of money that are going around. I think it's really important when you have an NFT or you offer it to understand what exactly does the possession of the NFT give you? So for example, it might be that the NFT gives you access to a URL and the piece of art or whatever it is that you've purchased is actually stored somewhere else. And so the question is, okay, so what exactly have you purchased and how do you enforce your ownership of that more or less? And so I think that just in general, being really, really clear about that is very important or else you're going to end up paying a lot for a broken URL and nothing good will come of it. In terms of enterprise applications of NFTs, I think it's still very open. One place we've potentially actually seen applications for this is in the gaming space because many of these gaming economies, for those of you who know, I mean, they're just absolutely enormous in terms of actual monetary value. And there is a facility in ease with digital assets that's already there. And so we think about how do we use blockchain and distributed ledger technology to expand property rights and allow people to maybe transfer assets across games or stuff like that. And so if you have non-fungible assets, they would be realized as NFTs. I think just in terms of the business applications, you really need to be in a setting where whatever you feel like, you're going to have multiple entities, which is why you need a distributed ledger. And you have a non-fungible asset that can be represented by an NFT. And I don't know exactly what that's going to be yet, but I think that if you go through and really understand what exactly does this give you, who's going to be controlling blockchain and so forth, I think it can help to put some limits on sort of what, where these might be applicable. Thanks, Stephanie. Welcome. All right. I have a question from Guy. It says, for people who consult and offer blockchain services to corporate customers, is IP typically something that needs to be negotiated? If so, can you speak to best practices? So I am not a lawyer. Please don't use anything I say as law. I think in our practices that the bespoke IP that we produce belongs to the client. So if we build a specific token model or something like that, it typically is, it's, you know, as with most consulting firms, that's the clients. In terms of general best practices, I, there are many fine IP lawyers out there, I chat with them. All right. I'm happy to just, I'll keep going down this list. I see a question from Ken. For industry consortia, while the concept of totally open governance is compelling, it can introduce inefficiency and decision making. What do you think about different membership models? All right. This is a great question. I think for whenever you're designing a consortium, there's always a question of who are going to be the different members? What do they get? And what do they contribute? Right. And there's going to be different level, like levels of membership. So for example, in a consortium, you could have sort of the founding members who are the initial set of organizations that come together. Typically, they're going to be taking higher risk. They're going to be putting in more money. They're going to be sort of putting themselves out there more. And they'll typically expect higher return. And that can take different forms. It can take, it can be monetary return. You know, they're expecting a share of revenues that come in from the use of the consortium products. It can be ownership of IP. It can be increased control, right? So having a higher level of governance. But I think that if we look across governance, even of standalone projects, if you look at the governance systems of DeFi products that are working like Compound, like Uniswap, what you'll see is that the governance is really, you know, the bulk of the participation comes from a relatively small set of people, which is not necessarily surprising. People are entities. And so I think figuring out in any governance project, sort of who are the, it's never going to be completely open. You're never going to have a thousand people contributing proposals to your governance system, right? So it's all about sort of who do you need to be in the group and how do you enable them to get what they want on need from the project. All right. A question from Carlos. For blockchain network monetization currently, what are the most common roadblocks and how do you tackle them? This is also a great question. I think so in any consortium project, the reason that there is a consortium is that the value comes from some kind of network effects, right? So the point is that if we, you know, if a single company standalone could offer these products or these services, which is typically sort of the sharing and aggregation of data in some way, if a single company could do this, then we wouldn't need a blockchain. And so all, you know, fundamentally these consortium projects are about how do we have different organizations come together and how do we introduce projects that increase in value as the membership increases, either in size or in type. And there are different kinds of this. What we find with most of these, you know, getting a consortium off the ground is incredibly, incredibly difficult as we know. And so really the challenge is how do you bootstrap the network to be sufficiently rich that the product you're offering has value, right? I think that's, you know, and then once you have, you know, the different participants and you have a robust network and you can really offer stuff that no one else has, then it gets into a pricing question, right? So sort of, let me be concrete here. So, you know, there are a number of different consortia that we're attempting to use blockchain to facilitate healthcare data sharing. And so, for example, one of the applications in the US is something called coordination of benefits. And the idea is that if I am a patient, and for those of you who aren't in the US healthcare system, this might all sound very strange, but bear with me. If I'm a patient in the healthcare system in the US, I might actually have multiple different insurance providers who are willing to pay for different things. So I go to my doctor, I go to a hospital, and I need something done. And my doctor says, okay, who would be willing to pay for this? What insurance do you have? And frequently, I have more than one insurance provider. And some of them are only, you know, willing to be backups, right? They won't be the primary payers for specific and varies by procedure and varies by all sorts. And so, in sort of pre-blockchain, what you would do is you would have some, you know, poor person at the doctor's office calling all the insurance agencies and trying to figure out how to coordinate this. One of the key proposals in a lot of healthcare blockchain based networks is can we set up some kind of distributed ledger based data sharing system so that some of this coordination of benefits querying is automated. And obviously, you're not going to take every element of healthcare data and put it on a blockchain. That's insane. But you can sort of facilitate the finding of this this data and the checking of it in the coordination using a distributed ledger. That only works if, I mean, that would be incredibly valuable, but that only works if a sufficient density of healthcare providers and insurance companies are in this network, whatever it is, right? And so that would be incredibly valuable thing to sell. People would be very, very interested. It would save a lot of time and money. But in order for there to be value, you need to have enough adoption across the relevant networks. And so I would say that that is currently the biggest monetization challenge. In terms of how do you tackle these, you know, it's really around, I think, incentive design and bootstrapping incentive design and just being realistic about, you know, especially when you're dealing with a consortium of corporations or organizations, what are the real tangible benefits both in the short term and the long term, right? So if you show up and you say, I have this great consortium that's going to be super valuable in a decade, you know, it's helpful to have sort of more tangible, you know, benefits and risk mitigation closer on to facilitate adoption. Any additional questions? Again, feel free to jump in if there are. I think I'm going to deep your curating the question. So I'll look out for those. I think, you know, another thing just to raise having worked especially, you know, with a number of different projects is one of the most fundamental questions we get from enterprises is sort of how do we know that we need a blockchain, right? And I think we've all seen that flow chart that's very short that says, do you need a blockchain and then an arrow and that says, no, you know, we're not there. But I think we have what we call a three C's framework. It's a coordination commitment and control. And these are what we think of as the three economic benefits of blockchain DLT and related technologies like smart contracts. And so, you know, before we even dig into bootstrapping, you know, consortium or a network of organizations using blockchain, we stop and think, you know, what is the value that the distributed ledger is bringing here? That's the first box up on the upper left of this slide. But, you know, thinking about, you know, they're different, you know, but DLT has different features, right? So one feature is the distributed consensus. What's the point of that? Why is it necessary? Why do we want multiple people updating this multiple entities, updating the ledger at all? What is the economic value of that? What if you're going to have a token? Why do you need the token? Right? What is the economic person purpose of that? Are you going to be using smart contracts? If so, what are the real economic benefits of the smart contract? Are they going to, you know, reduce administrative costs? Are they going to increase the ability to credibly commit to things in the future? How does that interact with the specific use case? And then finally, the third thing is control. Sometimes you'll see, you know, applications of zero knowledge groups around here, but just how can the technology facilitate the coordination of data while still allowing entities to retain some privacy, you know, without sort of having to upload everything to the same server. So that's one of the pieces we think about before we even go into, you know, who are the network participants and what do they want and all those other pieces. All right, we have a question from Lester. Comments or observations on the initial tokenization issue and entitlement based on size of membership in a private cryptocurrency. Lester, could you clarify? Could you say a little more? Feel free to use your microphone. Oh, hi, I didn't know it was live. Can you hear me? That was my question. It is. So we've been doing writing, but it would be helpful if you could clarify a little bit what you mean by your question. Yes, I appreciate having the microphone. Yeah, we have a large distributed national democracy clientele and we want to entitle and incentivize our membership for education participation purposes to form a value system around particularly communities of disadvantage neighborhood, locality, state district based, so that they can build a sense of value system around their own community. That's true distributed democracy in my view. We have the issue now if we're going to create a cryptocurrency investment in each other in that neighborhood and we have a list of targets now, South Bronx, East LA and so forth. I'm faced with the creation now of that cryptocurrency in practical economic terms about let's say we have 15,000 people in that particular neighborhood of disadvantage. How do I size the initial tokenization? How many tokens should be reserved? That's what I mean by the initial tokenization and economic sizing of that ICO if you want to call it that. Okay, now thanks for the clarification. One thing I think this is an interesting question. One thing I would recommend, there are these things that are not block-simulated that are called local currencies and they're very interesting. Some of them have existed for almost a century but they were basically communities of different sizes introducing an alternative complementary currency to whatever's being used for a variety of different purposes and just because they've been around for so long they highlight some of the challenges that can arise. I think when you're introducing a currency to a community, the most important question is actually what can you do with this? And if you're thinking about there are different models that can take place. You could think about this as a currency that enables time exchange. You could think about this as a currency that can be used to purchase goods and services from actual stores. Figuring out first exactly what it is that derives value is sort of the first step and then from there once you think about how often will this be used? Will local merchants accept this? Why does this have any fundamental value? Then you can start to figure out sort of about how much business is going to take place in this. What do we think? And then you can modulate the total supply to that but I think we typically focus if you look at these complementary currencies some of which have existed for almost a century the biggest challenge is getting merchants to accept alternative currency right because their suppliers don't necessarily live in the neighborhood and they don't necessarily accept them keeping you know books in a second currency can be challenging. All right. Do we have any additional questions? Yes. We've got two minutes left. Yes. Oh you go ahead. It's relatable using hyperledger for our voters. Thank you. Hello. Yes. So I see a question from ST. Yes. Hi. Hi, Stephanie. You just talk about okay if you want to take a picture a big picture about you know how blockchain can govern and what are the things we can expect. There are three things right one is called coordination one is commitment and one is control and can you use more example to showcase that what are possible use cases or what are directions for us to explore their innovation? Yes. So this is a this is a framework that we use a lot you can read about it on our medium but when we think about this sort of the coordination piece is really around one of the most standard you know types of benefits that you see talking about a lot which is how do we transfer information or make payments between organizations more quickly more simply how do we reduce administrative you know burden and access data more easily and that can come across a lot you know that can come benefit potentially a lot of different types of applications the question there is really about you know what's on chain what's off chain how do you make sure that you know whatever you know system that you're using can actually you know query across disparate different you know database systems and that you know what's being provided is accurate and up to date and sort of integrated and how precisely is it going to work but we've seen this is sort of we've seen applications and healthcare you know this is one of the key parts of applications and trade in terms of commitment commitment has you know when we think about the benefits of commitment it's really around smart contracts right so if we think about how contracts work without blockchain typically we have some kind of illegal agreement and that if it is you know not enforced there's always some risk that the other side isn't going to do what they want and then we appeal to whatever legal jurisdiction we're in you know obviously if you have a smart contract you're limited by what can be programmed into the smart contract and the inputs but there are certain ways in which you can automate certain types of transactions and so here we're really thinking about what are the types of things that can be credibly automated and there's a concept called contractual incompleteness which basically says that you're never going to be able to fully automate every transaction in smart contracts that's impossible but there are just sort of what are what are sort of very automated you know types of transactions that could be enforced in code and then control is around thinking about solving something called the holdup problem so if you're forming a consortium it can be very risky to say that you're going to take whatever data you have and fully hand it over to somebody else right that's costly that's risky you might have to convert it to a different format and then you know what happens if the consortium doesn't work out what happens if you've converted your data into some proprietary format and you've decided this consortium is not working for your organization and you want to leave and you've made this huge investment and you have to figure out how to basically unwind it blockchain doesn't solve this but it can help to alleviate some of the drivers of that situation so within that just the particular application really depends on having you know domain specific expertise in a particular industry or problem and thinking about how those potential benefits might be useful yeah thanks a lot so uh so the slides here you talk about those are papers so do you mean by those are academic publications or those are like the users cases the stories you know in the in the industry um it's a combination so we do a combination of case studies and popular writing and also um full on 30 pages of math all right I think that is the end of the session um thank you guys very much for joining um and I will put up the our uh contact information uh one last time if I encourage you to check out our medium if you're interested and also to reach out with any questions all right thank you very much everyone