 So good morning, everyone. Yes, so I said I'm Chila Jigrin. I'm VP of Strategy at an enterprise blockchain startup called BTP. I'm also a former technology industry analyst, and I have the pleasure to moderate this panel. I think it's fair to say that the last time we saw each other in person in Phoenix, we have seen an acceleration in the adoption of distributed ledgers and associated technologies in the enterprise space. But at the same time, we have also seen or witnessed the demise of some pretty ambitious initiatives. So our panelists here have been working with DLT for many years now, I think, and applied the technology to a wide of use cases in different industries. And we're going to share their experiences with us. And why don't we start before doing that? Why don't we start with some round of brief introductions? Sure. Rob Palatnik, I'm managing director in our lead DTCC's technology research and innovation department. For those of you who do not know DTCC, we're one of the critical financial post-trade processing service providers in the United States for pretty much all equity and fixed income transactions. We provide a variety of global swap repository services for global trade reporting. And we've been very focused on figuring out how an incumbent consortia like DTCC that's been around for 50 years can look forward and say, what do we need to do to innovate to bring our entire industry along with us? Because we've heard and will hear how hard it is to create consortia, we have that obligation to help the industry move forward with this key technology. Thanks, Rob. I'm Bob Kruser. I'm the chief architect for Alliance Technology, which is the captive shared service provider for the Alliance Group, which is life and health insurance, which is P&C, specialty insurance and asset management with the likes of Global Investors and PIMCO as well. So we've got a fair range of technologies that we build for our group in supporting our customers. I'm also the global head of blockchain for Alliance Group. And we've been working on this since I joined in 2018, but obviously for longer than that. We've got some really good use cases that we are driving into production, and that's about getting real business for our companies, real business value for them. So working really hard and looking forward to deploying more. Thanks, Bob. Hi, everyone. My name's Chris Pilling. And as Daniela mentioned, Fujitsu is proud to be a founding member of the Hyperledger project. And for the last five years, I've been part of the business unit and the team within Fujitsu, along with colleagues like Shingo from Japan who's here with me today to really build a business that is allowing customers to talk to us and very quickly identify, have I got a use case for blockchain? And if it has, how quickly can we take it from thinking about business requirements to actually delivering something that we can deploy that brings a business process to life? Very much with a focus because of the blockchain element, with an ecosystem or a consortium field and business architecture to it. So that's me. Thank you so much. So let's dig into the blockchain in action. Why don't you share your thoughts on the state of the enterprise, the DLT in general, and also maybe some industry specific progress that you're seeing. Sure, from the state of the industry, there's probably, Daniela listed a set of industries and in our involvement with Hyperledger, and in my role as chair for the previous three years of the board, I don't know that there's any industry I've encountered, whether it's certainly financial services, healthcare, music, energy, airline parts. There's literally no business that I've encountered that hasn't had some discussion or there's not innovation from FinTechs and the core business leaders in that particular industry using blockchain and distributed ledger technology and Hyperledger is always among the top contenders in that conversation. Inside of DTCC, as I mentioned, we're working with the entire financial industry on what the right opportunities are and the right use cases. We're actually live as of two months ago with our first DLT application that's running as part of one of our core processing systems. We're planning to go live with a second DLT system in October that replaces a mainframe application. We're in the middle of development of a third opportunity with DLT that's a brand new business service for DTCC and is leveraging a Hyperledger component. We're working with the digital dollar project and Accenture on validating central bank digital currency models and we've worked on a prototype with them, the first wholesale prototype and we're gonna be coming out with a white paper on that soon. And we're working on three other opportunities with our industry partners on leveraging DLT for that opportunity that says it makes sense to use DLT. It's a multi-party workflow. It's a shared version of the truth. And how do we bring all of that together in the world that DTCC as a consortium can help do for the entire industry? Cheers. So at Allianz, we've been working in terms of the industry pushing forward sort of use cases around claims, around onboarding, asset management and the like. We have a, for the industry, we have a product live now for over a year and a half, our international claim settlement. So if you take your car for a drive across Europe and you're unfortunate enough to meet an accident, somewhere in Italy, for example, Allianz Italy has to solve and settle all of that claim in situ, but there's lots of paperwork to do to reprocess that claim back to your country of origin like the UK or Ireland or Germany. And so we've been running that for about a year and a half, where it's like the F merge where we're counting down to our two millionth transaction in the next couple of weeks. And it's been revolutionary for us. It really has, we've been really focusing on where we get business value for the organization. We've set a very high bar, like that product now administers hundreds of millions of euros across Europe in 25 countries and then settling tens of thousands of claims. And we've made a rod for our own back, of course, with the bosses like so, every new product now has to deliver at least double digit millions in savings. So we're really putting it to work for us. And Hyperledge of Fabric is one of our two reference architectures that's gone through our, all of our groups to security standards. We've got its claims information, remember? So it has to be GDPR compliant and so on. So the industry and the enterprise is really focusing now on business value. Experimentation is less talked about. It's more about rail production use cases for us. And that's where we see it going. And we've built on DLT to enable us to go wider into the enterprise. So other enterprises, so, you know, car crashes mean repair shops. So, you know, expanding into that broader network, that's network of networks. And that's why it's so important. DLT enables those networks to connect to each other. And that's why one of our founding principles for building on DLT was to enable those networks. And it's still early, I would say, for enterprise, but I think we're really starting to make progress now in real value. And for me, if I think about the states of the world or the states of the industry now, one big thing I'm noticing is whereas previously we'd sit down with the customer and they'd bring a list of technical requirements. We sit down with customers now and Melanie really touched on many points around this. We're at this pivotal stage now where customers sit down with us and bring a list of business requirements. And technology is almost, you know, pushed to a secondary discussion. So specifically around hyperledger fabric, the maturity of the product, the strength of the product and the use cases that we can now show to a customer give us that entry point into talking to business stakeholders, maybe even the board level members of a customer because they just know that we've got a tool set with hyperledger fabric and Shingo, my colleague is working heavily on cactus. You know, we've got this tool set that just lets us focus very precisely on business requirements. And because of hyper, you know, as I say, that the hyperledger fabric momentum is given us that opportunity. And that for me is a really pivotal in terms of the state of the industry. Both mentioned hyperledger fabric, but beyond hyperledger fabric, what are those other hyperledger technologies that you are using? Why are you using that for what kind of use cases? We're just solid on fabric. We want to get real value up and running. And, you know, the deploying on the latest versions, like we're on 2.3.2 at the minute, but really making use of all of those new features and functions that are coming from fabric itself to for real business value. And that's our focus at the minute. We're looking at identity and Meroa a little bit. But that's something that is our experimentation, if you like, for self-sovereign identity. And for us at Fujitsu, we've grown our business out of hyperledger fabric. We've got a use case that uses Beisu, very successful use case. And that's got the potential to grow very big in the near future. My colleague Shingo is focused heavily on cactus. We've got a project signed now. We've got a real-life project underway, but we're going to use cactus to allow interoperability between different chains, of course, for a really exciting microfinancing project with a global footprint through our botanical water customer. So we're really looking at the wider portfolio of hyperledger. I'm personally very focused on some SSI type use cases for UK government. And that automatically brings up an opportunity for Indy and that little ecosystem around Indy for SSI use cases. So we're really looking to use as much of the portfolio as we can. We're using Beisu in one of our development projects. We're looking at Indy and Aries as part of some of our SSI and identity initiatives. And we've been looking at cactus and some of the other things for interoperability. Excellent, thank you. So now let's talk a little bit about the challenges that you're facing, the pain points that either you and your teams have, your customers have, and also maybe a little bit of lessons learned from, from projects that did not make it. Sure, I'll give that a start. So first, and the top of the stack for probably everybody is business case and making sure that you have the right fit and it's not just a hammer and everything's a nail. I think we've moved well beyond that and it becomes kind of a narrower, is there enough criteria that this is a multi-party workflow, that this is a shared version of the truth, that there are enough different parties that would benefit from distributed ledger that it makes sense. One of the interesting things that we're seeing is governance. Once you have multiple parties involved, you run into the entire issue of what are the standards gonna be, how are firms gonna adopt a node, if they want to adopt a node. What we're seeing is it's a mix of firms wanting nodes, firms wanting us to host a node, firms wanting an API, or firms not wanting to change at all. So there's that level. At the tech side, there's upstream and downstream systems. DLT does not stand alone. It integrates with other parts of your ecosystem. So you have to figure out what those integration points are and where they'll meet your resiliency requirements, your scale requirements, your performance requirements, your boundary security conditions. Integrating with your internal stack, your CI CD pipeline, how does Solidity and Kotlin and other languages fit into your CI CD pipeline for versioning, for code review and code scanning and skills. If you start using lots of different ledgers and lots of different languages and lots of different ecosystems, you're gonna have to develop lots of different skills. So we've been building out a whole DLT curriculum to bring skilling up to inside of DTCC from business to tech, and we're actively recruiting, so please send your resume. One of the first questions, like I said previously, it's early. One of the first questions I get asked is like, oh, we're building a blockchain. Is that not gonna kill the environment? Like at Allianz, we're sort of leading at the COP26, for example, for net zero, and that's the first question I get asked. It was like, so when we released to production, I also had to release to production my sustainability paper alongside it to say, our hyperledger fabric deployment is using one in 800 million times less energy per transaction than the Bitcoin blockchain, and provable mathematics and so on to do that. And that was really important for us because when we look at it for green IT and to be more than just paperware or just sort of green washing, we need to be able to prove that we're using languages that consume less energy in the microservices like Golang and Zeta Java and so on. So sustainability is a big issue for us especially after all of our sort of announcements on the ESG frameworks and so on. So we have to live it in our technology deployment. So that's always a first question for us. And then of course, yeah, getting it to go live, like getting one entity to go live with a new product that really solves a problem is hard enough. Getting 25 to go live on the same day and then close down our old monolithic application on the same weekend and migrate across 15 years of claims. When you have a car accident, sometimes a claim can last 20 years. If you've got healthcare and so on to pay and so all of those claims have to come over successfully. So that migration and as you said, like the nuts and bolts of application development, how you set up your stack and so on. These are the real challenges, but as Chris said, business cases, everything. It has to be, it has to start paying. We're past the time of throwing blockchain at every problem and seeing what fits. Now I would echo both Bob and Robert in that the biggest challenge we face in terms of product, sorry, project deployment or project envisioning is the integration. And the moment that I say to a customer, what are we integrating with? You sometimes even get maybe even a blank expression. What do you mean integrate? And one of our mantras at Fujitsu is, as Robert said, blockchain is never a standalone solution. It's never a standalone entity. And that's when you get into the real nitty-gritty of where you need to integrate with this and that. Well, and sometimes the answer is we don't know what we need to integrate with. We know we've got this data somewhere and that's where the real kind of hard work starts. The crystal ball question to finish this off with. So what does the future look like? And I mean the future in terms of the technology itself and again, it's not just one technology but all the associated technologies. So what's the future like with that? What is the future with the adoption of it all? And also, what can the Hyperledger Foundation do to stay relevant in the upcoming years? Oh, that's a lot. Sorry, there are three questions. We have like seven, eight minutes. So the first one, I'll start. Nobody said it yet, which surprises me. So I'll be the first one to sell this deadline. But two and a half years in Phoenix, drinking a Corona, who could have imagined that in two and a half years you could be drinking Guinness? What an evolution. So sitting where we are today with Hyperledger at this conference and pushing out another two and a half years and considering two and a half years ago, it was POCs, pilots, we're moving past this, we're moving past that. But there was very little you could point at. Today, almost every other week, you're reading about a production application, not just we tried out a bond between three different firms and it was successful and then you never hear about it again. We're live, we're going live with another one in a few months. We know some of our partners in the industry, some of our clients, some of our peers that provide our services in Europe, in Asia, have gone live, we know and we've heard about the project in Cambodia that is live with central bank digital currency. And in other parts of the world, they're moving forward on that. So things are gonna go live and people are going to learn and experience from those successes and those failures. One thing we're fairly certain is that none of our client firms want to adopt 10,000 nodes. I think coming up with 10,000 different solutions across the industry is across one industry or multiple industries and many of our industries are interconnected. Nobody wants thousands of nodes, nobody wants to manage thousands of key chains, nobody wants to manage thousands of different protocols and ecosystems and nobody wants to hire thousands of different skill sets. It's just untenable. So somewhere it has to come together. The thing we loved about Hyperledger from its founding day and we were founding members, I hosted, we hosted the very first startup that had been referenced, very first meetup of Hyperledger at DTCC's Jersey City and getting people to come to Jersey City is no easy task in the US. I don't know what the equivalent is in this country, but I'll leave that down. Probably Manchester. But in the first month of 2016, we hosted all parts and the beauty of that was the conversation, the fact that the dialogue in Hyperledger is completely open. It is the center of gravity of conversation across the industry. It has components up and down the stack and it's got almost half a dozen technology stacks. It's got fabric, it's got Bezu, Roja, it's got Indy, it's got stacks that connect only in permission networks, stacks that connect to some of the public networks. We're not an organization like some of the others that have kind of this trial out there. You could use the open source, but it's really scaled down and it's really limited. You really have to go to the commercial version. There's no conflicts of interest in Hyperledger. Our goal is an open conversation and bring all parts of the community together and this is the only place where we can solve that problem of interoperability and really solve that problem for the industry's benefit, for every industry's benefit of a cohesive set of standards and set of models and set of reference architectures that make sense for everyone. So the crystal ball says we're going to make progress along that front. There's not only gonna be DLT projects, but there are going to be linked DLT projects and whether that's using central bank digital currency to settle wholesale security movement or pay for Aliens. I'm going on a trip. I'm gonna reserve a plane ticket on a blockchain solution with my payment on the solution and I'm going to buy insurance for that same solution. So hopefully we see these pieces coming together. For us, we've taken the decision to take blockchain and DLT out of the innovation lab. It now sits in our core technology division. It has to stand at its own two feet and I think that's, for me, that's the future as DLT as part of an overall technology stack choice. Like our solution that only, you know, blockchain sits at the middle with three smart contracts. The rest is nice front ends, UX. Databases on the back is a GDPR compliance. It's very important for us as a regulated industry. And I think if we look into the future for what it holds is, you know, in my slide deck to my superiors, it's like when CVDC becomes a reality, then we really start to see the engine motor here, I think, because we can tie payment settlement on ledger to those claim settlements, for example. We don't have to off chain that to an SAP ledger, for example. So I think that's the real future. Once we can settle up on ledger, that'll be a real kicker for us and certainly in the financial services industry. I look at my own organization, the conversations we were having around insurance use cases in 2018, those same conversations are now happening in the asset management divisions of the company. So their thinking is now at that spot and it'll be a much faster adoption. So I see asset management use cases getting deployed at scale and we're, you know, I'm talking, if we're talking hundreds of millions for claims, you're talking 10, 100 times that in the asset management world, which will be real drivers for efficiency and for gains for a company and for the whole enterprise. So that's where I see it going in the future. Some last words, Chris. And for me, with that crystal ball view is that we'll even maybe get to a point in the near future where we stop identifying or talking specifically about the blockchain because it's become so integrated into the ecosystem. We get to a point where, you know, people will say, well, of course we use blockchain. How else would we record transactions? Of course we've got blockchain. How else would I pay for the policy from Allianz with my favorite token without blockchain? Of course it's there. And we get to that point where it's just so embedded that we stop talking about it. It just exists because it needs to exist. That's what I'm hoping for in the very near future. Thank you so much. Thanks for sharing your experiences, your knowledge and I hope this was useful for the audience. And yeah, thank you. Thank you.