 Welcome. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening. We'll get started in a couple of minutes just giving everybody a chance to come in. Feel free to go ahead and let us know where you are dialing in from. So today I'm normally based in San Francisco, but today I'm in New Jersey in the United States. So I'm going to post that in there. Good morning. Hi, Oakland County, Michigan. Welcome, Brett. Let's give everybody another minute. Sandy, you're also in Jersey. Welcome. James is in Berlin. He's one of our speakers. All right. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening for those joining us. We'll get started in another minute, letting everybody have the opportunity to join us today. Those of you who just joined, feel free to pop into the chat where you're zooming in from today. Give us a little hello. We'd love to see where everybody is from around the world. We're going to wait one more minute and we'll get started. All right, we got Jersey, New Jersey in Michigan and Kenya. Hello, welcome from Nairobi. Great to see you. We have Michigan and Massachusetts and London. All right. All right, let's go ahead and start the live streaming war, if you can. And I can go ahead and start welcoming everybody. Welcome everybody to our fireside chat, Wharton executive education program. Nice to see everyone. Once again, please greet yourself say hello in the chat and tell us where you are zooming in from. Welcome everyone to today's fireside chat focused on the recently launched Wharton education program on the economics of blockchain and digital assets. My name is Daniela Barbosa, and I'm the executive director of the Hyperledger Foundation. And I'm really delighted to be here today with our distinguished guests to show additional information about this executive program that is aligned very closely with our foundation goals to educate communities around the world on the importance of blockchain and blockchain related technologies. Before we get started just a couple of housekeeping items for us to be aware of here in the hyperledger community all are welcome, and we're committed to creating a safe and welcoming space for all. So please be respectful as you ask questions or do chats. And as always, all are welcome to participate and have a voice in our community. And also other housekeeping items just a reminder that all Linux Foundation and hyperledger Foundation meetings involve participation by industry competitors, and it's our intention to conduct all these activities in accordance with applicable antitrust and competition laws. If there's any questions, please view the full policy on the link there. And you can also just direct chat one of the staff members. Thank you for your questions during this webinar. Thank you for your appreciation of that. As a reminder this session is being recorded and we are also live streaming and Igor will put the live stream URL into the chat feel free to send it out in social and get people to log on to the live stream if they haven't registered for the event. If you don't have any slides for this session, it's going to be a fireside chat. But if, if you, if we do, we would have that. Just a reminder, these webinars are really, we want you to get the most out of it, out of it. And at the end of the session we will have an opportunity for questions and answers. There's three different ways that you can answer. If you have any questions you can raise your hand using the zoom feature, and we'll go ahead and call on you and unmute you to speak your to do your voice of your question. You can also ask any questions during the session in the Q&A chat and the panelists and myself will be watching that, and we'll be able to answer those questions. And last but not least feel free to use the chat and let us know if you have any questions or you have any comments as part of that as well. Once again, welcome. We all know that over the last few years as an especially now and here in 2021 and almost 2022, one of the biggest barriers to growth for the blockchain industry has been the talent gap for developers with the right skill and training. Recognizing that demand as many of you know in partnership with the Linux Foundation training, Hyperledger has worked for many years on developing a robust growing set of enterprise training and certification for developers. Across all Hyperledger online courses from the beginning blockchain essentials to advanced developer and administrative certifications, we have had over 200,000 individuals leverage those courses to advance their careers and meet the growing needs of our ecosystem. However, as a recent Hyperledger brand survey highlighted, the mainstream adoption of blockchain by enterprises also requires the training specifically serves business leaders. Blockchain technologies are driving new business models, reshaping industries and changing the flow of information and money around the world. C-level executives and senior management need to become fluent in this technology to define and redefine the businesses to find new market opportunities. And the Hyperledger Foundation is committed to advancing executive education as it is to developer training. And this is really why I'm excited about today's session because it really meets those goals. So let me first introduce you very quickly to the panelists. I know that some of you might have seen an announcement, previous announcement that Kevin Warbach, who's the Wharton School Professor and the lead on this course would be participating. The good news is that Kevin's actually was called to testify in front of Congress and he's in Washington DC today, testifying for the digital assets and the role of government sessions. So we wish him luck with him for him this testimony this afternoon that he does that and it's great. You know, Kevin has been such a champion in the enterprise blockchain world as well. However, we have the pleasure of welcoming Kathy Barra, who's the founding economist at Prism Group and blockchain program director at the Wharton School. Kathy has had a distinguished career including many economic advisory projects for Fortune 100 companies and leading startups. She has a master's in applicable mathematics from the school of the London School of Economics, and a PhD in business economics from Harvard University, where she studied under Noble Laureate Oliver Hart. Pretty impressive to say the least, Kathy. Kathy's work focuses on incentive design, token economics, modernization and governance design for digital economies. And she'll be sharing some of that today. She has also been an advocate for years on enterprise blockchain and the great supporter of the Hyperledger Foundation. So welcome, Kathy. Today we also have the honor to hear from some of our Hyperledger members who have been selected to be part of the Wharton executive course as enterprise case studies, and we're going to learn from them today on their use cases, how they were selected. And we'll hear both from an end user perspective on using the technology, as well as a technology and service providers perspective of working with customers in this ecosystem, and why both of those are important. So I'd like to also welcome Emiliano Vernini, head of ICT Innovation Strategy at Prosta Italiane, and James Edward, chief researcher at Cerimitsu. So once again, welcome everyone and a big welcome to the attendees. We will have some time, as I mentioned before, for questions and answers. So please start queuing them up for the panelists and I'm going to go ahead and share my slides. So welcome everyone. So Kathy, I'd like to start with you this morning and afternoon for some of us. Can you please tell us about your role at Wharton School and introduce us to the course and how it came together and why Wharton this course is so important now? Absolutely. So I'm the program director for this course, which is called the Economics of Blockchain and Digital Assets. I have worked closely and collaboratively with Kevin Warbach, who's the academic director to develop the content for this course. The course itself is a six-week asynchronous online program that covers six modules. We'll get into some details about what those entail over the next hour. And it's really meant to be a sort of in-depth look at blockchain and digital assets from an economics and business perspective. So perhaps going a little bit deeper than sort of alternative courses that might be available in the market and really looking at the trade-offs inherent in these technologies and the way that these technologies are implemented in order to provide the students, professionals who are working in the space or somehow touching the technology with a deep understanding of sort of the costs and benefits related to implementing on blockchain and the different options available for exactly how those implementations might look. So we're very fortunate. We've sort of opened up signups a few weeks ago and early signups, we already have professionals from 24 countries of mixed professional backgrounds, including financial services, professional services, folks coming out of enterprise, and folks coming out of sort of blockchain-native projects or startups. So we're really excited to get this mix of students in the course and have a discussion going regarding, again, sort of the various ways that this technology can be implemented. Kevin, can you tell us, you know, one of the core things about these courses are really the case studies that really drive to real-world case studies? Can you tell us a little bit about the process for selecting which case studies are presented? Absolutely, yes. So this course contains seven case studies that we're really excited about, and these were written exclusively for the purpose of the use in this course. The studies discuss the practical implementation of blockchain, digital assets, and related technologies. And we selected these cases to represent a wide variety of industries and applications in order to show the breadth of blockchain's impact. So, and in addition to illustrating the different contexts in which blockchain can be used, each use case also highlights a specific aspect of the technology. So today here we have representatives from two of our case studies, and those reflect sort of government and public-private enterprise use of blockchain. We also have cases from the permissionless space, including a case about Layer 1 blockchain network that focuses on the design of its consensus mechanism. We have another case about a DeFi project that focuses on its governance design. So these case studies really, I think, cover the whole spectrum of how blockchain is and can be used across a variety of industries and really highlights how the technology facilitates this value gain that can be had from blockchain, smart contracts, digital assets, and so forth. Well, it's really important to understand that spectrum of use cases across both permissioned and permissionless blockchains, and I think that the hyper-allegric community certainly has been addressing those across the board. So it's great to understand and I've spoken to some people who are, you know, some executives who are interested in the course, and because they understand that now is the time for them to start implementing these types of approaches as part of their new business strategies as well. So it's fantastic to see the adoption of that. So I'd like to shift a little bit now over to Emiliano and James on their participation in the course and some of the great work that they've been working on. And really, you know, maybe share with us a little bit about, you know, their own companies and in James's part as their customers understanding of why blockchain is strategic for their company and their ecosystem and how they're approaching it. So Emiliano, maybe we, you know, it's always nice to see you. So welcome once again. You know, hopefully soon, I keep promising Emiliano that I will see him in Italy, so hopefully soon that will happen, I promise. And can you please share with us a little bit about what, you know, post Italianis approaches into incorporating blockchain into your strategy and some of the projects you've been working on that are relevant to today's conversation. Yeah, yeah, for sure, Daniela. Thank you. First of all, thank you for having invited me. Good afternoon, everybody from from Italy. I'm Emiliano Bernini as Daniela said, and in post Italian, I'm the head of ICT is no issue strategy. And the mission of my team is to bring new technologies inside the inside the organization in order to speed up our business, create new business models. And, and also with blockchain as with with every other emerging technology, our first approach was to was to start in exploring the technology and in knowing more about the technology in deep. So we started almost four years ago. And we spend most of the time working on proof of concept pilot project in order to to understand how we can leverage blockchain to to innovate our businesses. And as probably most of you knows from, as you can understand from the name post Italian is the biggest logistic operator in Italy, but we are not just a logistic operator we are a multi businesses company. We are also a bank. We are the main payment service provider in Italy. We are the biggest digital identity provider in Italy you are an issuance so we have the chance to to face a lot of different challenges in applying blockchain technologies to very different industries. And so, it's really, it's really challenging. And back, but during the year I, what I can see is that the approach of the executives and people inside my organization that referring to blockchain has been changed over time. Because back in 2017 when we started, I have two different approaches. Some people identified blockchain with Bitcoin and with cryptos. So, and so they were quite skeptical about the, the application in post Italian because you know, there was lack of regulations and on the other side, some people wanted to use blockchain for everything. In every project, they put inside the blockchain and these two approaches was quite wrong at the same time, you know, today after four years trying to work with the blockchain trying to work with the technology. We spent a lot of time in sharing our experiences with all the company. I can see that there is a different understanding, and we are quite ready to, to leverage the full potential of blockchains in our businesses so to, to have something in production. Yeah, I mean, it's four years of hard work by you and the rest of your team as technology leaders within post Italian and within your ecosystem and educating those executives so the change that you see is change that you have created within. And I think what's so important about things like this, you know, this course is that we're helping facilitate some of that education with, you know, companies around the world to do that so it's a fantastic story. James, you know, you know, Sarah Mitsu has been an early player in the enterprise blockchain market, right. And actually, you know, in our own hyper ledger open source community. It's sometimes hard to believe that it was in September of 2016 that long ago that you donated the hyper ledger code base to the Linux foundation, and now it's part of the hyper ledger landscape of projects of DLTs and certainly has gotten a lot of adoption. So why has open source, you know, to start off been an important part of Sarah Mitsu strategy in the market. Well, it, it, it's an ethos thing first and foremost, our founder McCulloch talking Mia is, he came out of the open source community and he strongly believes in free and open competition driving forward innovation and a robust and well educated And this holds not only for the dev community, although of course as blockchain engineers first and foremost we're rooted in this scene of the developer community but we believe that it also holds true for the broader community of users in industry and academia and civil society. And as developers we love a community that has clarity on its goals that has clarity on its pain points and needs, because it's our job to iterate over those needs. So the more clearly a user can articulate their, their needs and their pain points the better job we can do in in So stakeholder education is a key part of the way that we approach the market and the hyper ledger foundation is a leader in stakeholder education in the blockchain field. So we're, we're proud and thrilled to be a part of it. Yeah, a lot, a lot of hard work but certainly pay off I think so we need that. And I think you know Sarah there's a ceremony team has really been creating the market, a lot of you know the market out there for this and educating executives on a, you know, on a customer by customer or you know, enterprise talk by enterprise talk and I know you've been very supportive of the hyper ledger community in that way. And recently there's been a lot of work around specifically around central bank projects that you're working on. I wonder if you can just share a little bit with us, you know how Sarah Mitsu goes and educates a very complicated ecosystem in in that industry in that market. We, yeah sense to we launched. So, for those of you who aren't familiar with our work in this space in 2019 we piloted and in 2020 we officially officially launched Bakong, which is the nationwide digital payments infrastructure is serving the National Bank of Cambodia. And this is a kind of a central bank digital currency adjacent project definitions of what a central bank digital currency is kind of shift month by month. And currently we're referring to it as a synthetic central bank digital currency because the tokens are backed by by fiat held in the central bank reserve accounts but that's kind of a technicality. What it is is a backbone payment infrastructure that links all existing payment rails and inscribes retail and wholesale transactions in real time on a distributed ledger hyper ledger at Ohio, which is hosted by the National Bank of Cambodia. And since we launched it, especially since the official launch of 2020 we've had a lot of meetings with central banks with regulators, as well as the commercial banks who are seeking insight as to how this new type of financial infrastructure might impact their operations and what new business opportunities might open up on top of this new infrastructure. And some of them are potential customers and some of them really aren't. But we don't see these we don't go into these conversations is sale sales pitches, we want to carry forward the ethos of the hyper ledger project and kind of open source our expertise and experience on a one on one basis. And we've had ongoing conversations with the number of central banks over the past year. And we've seen real gains. The technical acumen that's evident in the questions that we get from regulators in 2021 is totally remarkable when compared to 2020. They are doing their homework and these conversations have also given us critical strategic direction with regard to our own product development so it really goes both ways we benefit. As much as they do from these from this ongoing kind of consult consultation and education relationship. Yeah, I think I made that comment before right wouldn't you wouldn't, none of us would be having these type of conversations with these key stakeholders four years ago that you know, and really been it's been a lot of work of our community and others you know our you know the whole from a blockchain perspective both in the public and permission to world that have really driven the education and the understanding of, of the, you know, the leaders in these different projects as well which is great. I'm going to shift back Kathy a little bit to the course specifically right. So what is different, you know about this course that people who might be interested, and, you know, your focus on executive training and give us some examples of, you know, but the coursework looks like and some of the things that based on what Emiliano and James has shared with us today. You know, we cover, or you cover in that course. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, I sort of as you noted 2021 has been a really big year for blockchain technology between the rise of DeFi and the proliferation of NFTs, there's, there's sort of been a lot of news, even sort of setting aside the progress that's being made with, with regulation and so forth so this technology is really spreading across a wide variety of industries and it's starting to as James alluded to to sort of touch people who maybe their own organization isn't even using or implementing a project with blockchain, but they may have to interact with it some some other way in their industry or with another partner, who is using the technology so I think that it's becoming even more important that that professionals really understand this technology and, and, you know, there's, there's been a lot of hype around blockchain for, for a number of years that that probably really came into the public consciousness and in 2017. And since then has sort of been in and out of the the general discussion about sort of where technologies are going. I think that, you know, there, there aren't enough resources that really explain at a detailed level exactly what the value is that this technology is providing, and how it does that. So, you know, there are one of the things that that we, we talked about in the course is, you know, so, so in the first module, we explain exactly how what watching is, and how it differs from it's it's closest alternative technologies. So, you know, project teams that are thinking about building with blockchain have a variety of options available to them which include sort of databases and other technologies that that aren't blockchain and, and we want to highlight why blockchain is different and how those differences drive value for the organizations that are that are going to be using it. Later on in the course in the third module and we'll talk a little bit about about the second module in a minute. So, in the third module, which really focuses on the use of blockchain by enterprises and NGOs. We discussed how sort of how how business leaders make decisions about, you know, whether to implement with blockchain and and also sort of what type to use how to how to implement it. So, so this touches on on issues, as we were discussing of, you know, do we want to be in the permissionless space do we want to be in the permission space. So what what features does our specific implementation need to have in order to drive values for the users of our network. So I think that that this specific course digs into those details. More so than than other content I've I've seen before. And we're really excited to be able to provide that level of of insight to the students of this course. Do we want to talk a little bit about the modules that supposed to tell you on and said I'm into contributed to, and absolutely, I would love to. Um, so I'll, I'll actually start with, I'll start with sort of me too. So that's sort of in chronological order. So, sort of as I mentioned the first module sort of digs into what what is blockchain what makes it different than than alternative technologies and how does this provide a new set of potential costs and benefits that folks might want to consider in terms of their technological implementation. The second model module really focuses on digital assets specifically. So we see that digital assets are being applied to different use cases, and different digital assets grant different types of rights to the holders of those assets. So in this module students learn about all types of tokens from payment tokens to NFTs tokens that represent traditional financial assets to tokens that are sort of blockchain native and may include some innovative right structures. So within this, this module. There's also a discussion of CVDCs. That discussion also does a little bit of a comparison between CVDCs and and stable coins, and talks about how that might impact the payment landscape so we were very fortunate to be able to include this this sort of me too case. And this this project with the Central Bank of Cambodia to provide students with a real illustration of how this will look in in practice. Yeah, and maybe James James do you have any any additional comments to add to that. I don't know if you all have been keeping on top of the developments in this space but it's very fast paced and very exciting and head over to the bank, the bank for international settlements webpage read up their their policy papers great way to start, and then read some of our own writing. Yeah, it's it's exciting we we find it notable that lower and lower middle income countries often show a more proactive approach to this space than the big boys kind of like the US and the EU. The first blockchain based retail payment system to go live was in Cambodia in 2019. The first direct to CBDC, which is to say a CBDC that isn't a direct liability of the central bank was launched in the Bahamas. And we think that the same principle could apply in the private sector. This is an infrastructural revolution it's a once in a lifetime chance for smart and agile small and medium size enterprises to leap frog their competitors. Just as Cambodia and the Bahamas have done. So it's kind of an instructive example that has been said. Let's move on to the next module. Yes, absolutely. So after discussing digital assets. We have module three, which is focused on use cases sort of outside of the financial sector. So this, we touch on on those sort of enterprise use cases and and NGOs. So within this and excuse me, I also should mention, so this this module also introduces the topic of smart contracts and discusses how smart contracts can add functionality to blockchain implementations. So, within this module, we actually have two case studies that's it's a longer module because there's so much to discuss. And the first of those two case studies is the post Italian a case study. So this is in a section of the course that sort of talks about data and sort of digital identity consumer loyalty programs issues of David privacy and how new blockchain implementations are sort of attacking some of these problems and bringing organizations together in order to better serve consumers in the market. And we have this great example of post Italian a loyalty program within that part of the module. Maybe a million you can tell us a little bit more know we have a public, you know, we've, we've spoken a bit about the work that you've done but specific to this loyalty case case study. For sure. The goal is to as as Katie said to to better serve our, our customer. So today we have in place our reward program that it's basically a cashback program. So if one of our customer pays using one of our credit card in a network of physical or e-commerce merchants, then the user gets rewarded with a with a percentage of the amount that he has spent. Then we started thinking how we we can let me say include other services and our also mechanics and dynamics into our loyalty programs. So to reward the users if we buys a parcel or delivery. But also we we want to make more effective our reward program. And what we think is that trying to pay the rate together different programs could be a good option. Because, you know, probably most of you have have made the exception to more than once or reward programs. Each of this program is a silo. Okay. And this is it is difficult for the users to manage all the different programs and to get rewarded for something that is valuable for them. And so we think that putting together and federate maintaining the independence of each loyalty programs could be a good option, giving the user the opportunity to manage all the loyalty programs from one point. One point I will let up and to swap points between the different the different programs and for for for this reason we think that blockchain could be the technology that enables that model. This is really a some way to summarize what the work that we are doing because it is still in in progress is still a pile of project this is not in fully production today. But it's an important leadership and then Kathy I know that there is some other use cases that are relevant to the hyperledic community as well maybe you can share with us those. Yeah, absolutely. So, so later on in the same module, in particular, after we introduced smart contracts as I mentioned before, we have a case of Sony music entertainment Japan, which is operating on on hyper ledger using Amazon Web Services blockchain. And, and so that sort of highlights. They. So this project is basically using smart contracts in order to facilitate coordination between the numerous parties who are sort of involved in music streaming and and facilitating the royalty payments back to to creators in music streaming services in Japan so I'm trying to streamline some of those relationships using blockchain technology in order to better facilitate these payments so again this is sort of another example of a use case. Very, very different from from the other two we're discussing today, but where blockchain is being used in an enterprise context and again highlighting sort of a different aspect of the technology and sort of these different functionalities that that it can provide in order to to add value within one of these sort of specific context. Fantastic, I'd like to highlight right now is that we actually you know for those of you who know the hyper ledger landscape, we have you know 17 different projects, six DLTC six distributed ledger technology frameworks, and even in this course itself. We have representation on the use cases from three of those projects. So we have the bank of bank on with hyper ledger Roja, we have post Italian with hyper ledger Bezu, and then this AWS stony case study with hyper ledger fabric. And, you know, I, you know, it's one of the things it's sometimes it seems like it's very complicated with, you know, all the different projects within hyper ledger, but it proves that having that optionality having those choices, having those strong communities behind those projects that are supporting the development of these open source code bases and adapting them to different use cases right there are different needs across the enterprise. And each of our DLTs really focus on so it's a nice mix and when I when I first saw the courses and the selections for the case studies, I was obviously delighted that hyper ledger was well represented, but also that it had a nice mix of hyper ledger fabric hyper ledger Bezu and hyper ledger Roja. Congratulations Kathy for you know the team and selecting really a comprehensive view of our ecosystem there. So we talked a bit about the case studies that are in the the courses, and maybe we can spend a little bit of time talking about other projects that both Emiliano and James are working on that are, you know, interesting that based on our discussion today so James I'll start with you. If there are some current other use cases that you'd like to share with the audience today. Sure. The most recent use case that we have spent a lot of time on is our entry in the monetary authority of Singapore's global CBDC challenge, Global Central Bank Digital Currency Challenge. We were one of 15 finalists selected out of over 300 applications so that was good and challenging. Our competition was fierce. And several of the competitors kind of took two different routes. Some of the competitors basically submitted their fully fledged CBDC systems as their entry as their solution and other competitors submitted applications or hardware products or other things that would ride on top of a CBDC. And we kind of, we were debating when we when we first shortlisted which direction to go because we do have a fully fledged CBDC system. Bacong is a fiat backed variation on that system, and we could have submitted it and that would have actually been the lower. It would have, it would have been less work but we decided to challenge ourselves and go the opposite route and the reason we did so is because we firmly believe that the business opportunities that a company CBDC do not begin and end with the construction of CBDC infrastructure itself. There is a massive business opportunity that will grow up around that infrastructure. And you think of, for instance, the the implement the telephone grid or or wireless grids wireless network 5G whatever the building the infrastructure is is only the first step, building on top of the infrastructure is where things start to get really exciting. So we decided to develop an overlay application that worked on top of a CBDC or worked on top of Bacong, the fiat backed variation. And we developed what we developed was an application that allows financial institutions to query a blockchain to get data that could testify to retail end users propensity to pay in various contexts, and use that data to assist in credit underwriting for micro loads, because currently the process by which micro loan underwriting is is is done in developing countries is extremely inefficient. Often it involves like literally sending someone out to the person's house with a with a paper checklist to check off boxes of what property they own. And it costs a lot of money, and those costs get passed along to the to the lenders in the form of interest rates, and this has knock on effects across the entire economy. So if we can improve the efficiency of underwriting we could see significant economic gains, both for institutions and for end users. So that's the direction we went and it's an interesting solution we will make that the details public we encourage you to take a look at our website. And what makes it interesting is that we developed it in such a way that it uses Booleans it uses true false queries. So credit institution lending institution can gain propensity to pay data relevant to a specific underwriting task without having to see the actual transaction record so it preserves the privacy of the users while simultaneously meeting the needs of the financial institution. And, and this is the kind of. This is the kind of solution that we think we will need to build expertise in going forward developing for a CBDC or a block or another comparable blockchain driven infrastructure, because the amount of data out there is vast, the capacity to misuse that data is also vast. Companies will have to pay attention to the risk of data monopoly to the benefits and also the drawbacks associated with network effects at scale. So the challenge gave us an opportunity to think through these things in a very pragmatic user oriented way. So that's one example. Another example which also has to do with data sharing and privacy protection. We're working with a consortium of telcos to develop a blockchain based fraud intelligence sharing system. So telcos can report fraudulent activity, log it on the blockchain, their contributions are tokenized, and they can use the tokens to access premium services like analytics of the fraud data that has been submitted by both their own by by them and by other peers. So this will incentivize contribution because obviously this kind of data sharing platform we tend to have a free rider problem, people will come in and access the data without actually contributing. So tokenization helps us to solve that free rider problem. And it also helps us to integrate the data itself with the analytical services that which are actually allowing the telcos to act on this data. And to mitigate the risks associated with fraud and to block the fraudulent numbers. So that's another data sharing privacy kind of balance project that we're working on. We have a couple of other things in the pipeline that I'm not really allowed to talk about. You guys always do. It's great, you know, I love and James and I had a conversation about this yesterday just the, you know, the, specifically on the CBDC is it's solving one specific option, you know, problem, but it's also creating whole new markets so Sarah Mitsu is certainly ahead of the game and thinking about those markets and how the technologies is going to benefit those. Emiliano, I know you've done a lot of work outside of loyalty points as well in at post Italian and can you tell us a little bit about some of those other projects you've been working on. Yeah, yeah, for sure. We're working actually on two two main projects. One is named IBSI stands for Italian blockchain services infrastructure. We are working with other companies and public organization in Italy to build a blockchain infrastructure. To develop services of public interest. And this is a way to to sustain and speed up the digitalization of the Italian country. So we're working with a lot of public administration to build this infrastructure and then for sure to build also a layer of services on top of this infrastructure. And we are we are putting a lot of effort also in digital identity. You know, it's a very hot topic in Europe, but I would say all around the world. This summer that was a public announcement by the the president of European Commission who first told about the European digital identity wallet upon European so a digital identity wallet for every European citizen. And and we are trying to work in that direction and building a necessary a sense of identity solution. And so a solution that is privacy preserving that puts all the data in the hands and in full control of the of the citizen. We are working on our own wallet. But again, working together with public administration and with other company, we are developing use cases that that use the identity wallet as the starting point. But also allows the the the Italian citizen to collect very valuable credential about their diplomas or attestation professional attestation and and so on. So there's a lot of stuff going on with digital identity. It's really really challenging. I mean challenging but it's so impressive what the European Union across all states there are doing, especially Italy as well. And we see a lot of activity with some of our other hyperledger members in in Germany, for example, with Siemens and Bosch and ID now ID Union, as well as in Spain with telephonic and France with open start. So it is fantastic. We're watching obviously very closely in our hyperledger Aries and hyperledger Indy community are very active and contributing as part of that. So, you know, kudos to post Italian and to be leaders there and it's it's fantastic to watch from our side of the pond and I hope that we soon will see some of the similar things over here as well. Kathy, you know, maybe, you know, one of the things we've we focused, you know, the last 50 minutes or so talking about hyperledger specific use cases and the courses. Tell us a little bit more about some of the other course content that, you know, people should be interested in, you know, hyperledger today is really, you know, the continuum, whether it's defy or NFTs or a lot of these projects were involved in as well. What are the other things that, you know, the students for this course will will learn about. Yeah. So, so after moving through through module three, which is sort of focused on enterprise use cases that are not in the financial sector specifically, then we have a module that that talks about the financial sector specifically and talks about sort of how defy is is disrupting that that sector. I thought some of the points James made earlier about building, building functionality on top of a CBBC are on top of, you know, a digitized currency, I think, I think is really important. So, we're sort of seeing a lot of these building blocks being put in place, whether it's by governments or by financial institutions in order to facilitate some basically more usage of payments and financial services via blockchain rails. And it will be really interesting to see how, how these sorts of services can compete against, or I should say maybe defy compete against those more traditional types of services so we have a module that sort of specifically looks at those financial services at what is happening in the defy space specifically decentralized finance which which sort of currently has a lot of limitations in terms of its functionality. And then, then in the fifth module we move on to thinking specifically about valuation of digital assets and how this may be similar to may differ from valuation of traditional financial assets. So, sort of reflecting back on on module two of the course, you know, all sorts of digital assets grant the users different rights. That has an impact on what does the demand for that token look like what do people, what is it about the token that that people are going to value specifically. And, and we present for the first time methodology for looking at the fundamental value of a token. And so we're really excited to present that content in an educational setting. So folks are can sort of start thinking rigorously about, you know, how to value these assets and how that might compare to the types of financial assets that that we've seen historically. And the last module sort of wraps everything up and brings everything together and positions the student to be able to think about launching their their own digital asset or sort of being inside a company that might be launching a digital asset and what that might look like. So within that module, we have a discussion of layer two solutions, which are important for some applications, thinking about scalability and and transaction costs. And we also have a unit that looks at regulation. So it's just in the US, although there's a lot of activity by a lot of different regulatory bodies within within the US, but but also globally, since these assets, of course, move across borders. So all of those things have an impact on how a startup or company might think about implementing these technologies and how to get the most out of them so we really want to position students across industries to be able to think critically about the technology and be able to make choices about how to to implement it and how to best serve their customers or end users. I think the one other thing that that I want to highlight is that this course gives continuous education units. So that makes it eligible for reimbursement by a lot of employers so that I think a win-win for a lot of enterprises who need to get their employees up to speed on this technology as it proliferates across industries. So we're really looking forward to welcoming cohort of students across a variety of industries across a variety of countries we already have, as I mentioned, a very diverse student body in the early signups and we're looking to we're looking forward to welcoming students more students from those diverse backgrounds. And I think an important aspect of what you just said, Kathy, is some enterprises are not going to be ready to implement some of these technologies and use cases. But as executives, as you think about your five to 10 to 20 year strategies, this is just a required education piece of it as well. So we're excited. We're excited about all the education that's going to go on and makes our job much easier as well and out there in the ecosystem. Great. I think we have a couple of questions. We have a couple of minutes for questions. Once again, if you have a question, please raise your hand if you want to do a voice question. Go ahead and pop it into the Q&A or in the chat and we'll do that. There was a question, James, I think from Elizabeth Green, specifically, there was a question about understanding the IBSA. I think you meant the report that you referenced earlier. Can you just clarify that? Was that question for me? I think so. Yeah, the IBSA put the who in charge. IBSA. I think that might be for Emiliano, actually. Yeah, probably the question for me is EBSI, EBSI in Italian that stands for Italian blockchain services infrastructure. Was that the question? Just about the name? Yes, she didn't understand the words. I think not to put words in the lives of its mouth, but I think that clarifies it. Elizabeth, if you have any other questions, feel free to just know the control. Who's in control of the identity, is that? Yeah, the user is in full control of his own identity. So he's in full control and no others, just the user. And we use the blockchain as an anchor and as a public registry to check for the validity of verifiable credentials released by trusted issuer and owned by the user. And Emiliano, you're utilizing Hyperledger Indie in Aries? No, we are working with Hyperledger Besu. Besu? Because we want to use, let me call it a general purpose blockchain because we don't see identity linked from other applications like the financial one. So we're trying to build an ecosystem of services using the same technology. Okay, there's some interesting work with Hyperledger Besu and Aries happening as well. So to take a look at that. On to the Q&A chat, James, there was a question from Brian Ricci if you can take that one. Yes, yes, very, very exciting, interesting question, a challenging question. So for those of you who don't know, Sora Mitsu also works in the DeFi space. We contribute to where the main contributors to a decentralized community called Sora, which is a, it's an ambitious concept. Basically the concept is of a decentralized central bank, wherein a body of Sora citizens of peers who are chosen via the procedure of sortition that the classical Greek democratic procedure of sortition can make decisions as to the creation of new tokens, new assets and the allocation of those assets for productive purposes, specifically for projects that are put forward and proposed by the community. So it incorporates some aspects of crowd loans or crowdfunding. It incorporates some aspects of a decentralized autonomous organization. It's a very interesting project and I encourage you to check it out. And if it were to really take off, then yes, it would be a competitor to central banks to the traditional model of the traditional model by which currency is issued and put into circulation and regulated and utilized. But we don't see that necessarily as a fight on which you have to take a side. A lot of the most radical social innovations like democracy itself grew up in the margins of other dominant social institutions. Democracy revitalized and grew up in cities and large towns in Europe under the auspices of feudalism, of centralized monarchies, etc. And eventually it outcompeted those dominant systems and gained the upper hand and became the dominant system itself. We're firm believers in competition and we see the future financial landscape as one in which on the one hand the adoption of DLTs by governments and traditional institutions like central banks, it will improve the security and resilience of critical infrastructure. It will enable more public participation in decision making. It will enable more public participation and resource allocation. It will bring more people into the financial system. But then on the other hand, the growth of decentralized economic and political communities in parallel to those traditional systems will open up new possibilities for self organized value creation and self governance, kind of in the cracks and on the margins. And we're excited to contribute to both of these positive trends. We see both trends as positive and we see our enterprise and our decentralized finance work as interlocking parts of a future economy that's characterized by diverse resilient payment instruments, diverse and resilient asset management systems, and diverse and resilient communities with a variety of different ways of creating and allocating value that are dependent on the needs of the members of those communities and determined by the intentions and interests of the members of those communities. So we see the work as maybe competitive in the short term, but complimentary in the long term. That's the short answer to this very complex and interesting question. Great. Thank you, James. I know we're at time and there was a couple other questions in the Q&A, you know, a couple of things and I'll wrap this up. You know, James, Emiliano and Kathy, maybe if you are willing to put your email address or your contact information to the chat if people want to ask those questions directly of you to continue that conversation that would be wonderful. I want to just let everybody know that if you registered for this event you also get an email from us with 15% discount code that Hyperledger has partnered with Prism and the Wharton School to do to provide for you. So please be on the lookout for that. And we hope that this piqued your interest and feel free to share that with others in your organization as well. So once again, I want to thank the panelists today for this great conversation. I encourage everybody to take a look at the course. And I know we're putting the course link into the chat there as well. And if you do have any questions, please contact the panelists or myself would be happy to assist you. So once again, Kathy, Emiliano and James, thank you so much for the time today. Just as a reminder for everybody, we do have upcoming webinars and projects that you can participate in. In the January-February timeframe, we'll be doing some project workshops very, very timely around digital identity, specifically with our Hyperledger Ares and Hyperledger Indy projects. So please be on the lookout for that. We'll be announcing those workshops over the next few weeks. Also, we have some webinars that are coming up with some of our other members. On December 1st, we'll be welcoming Splunk, who's be talking about Hyperledger Fabric Security Monitoring, and Christopher Cordy will be running that presentation. So please do join us there. And then on November 25th on Thanksgiving, but because we are a global organization, we have events all the time. And we're going to be talking about Demystifying NFTs. So it's actually a very interesting use case that they'll be talking about and how they're using Hyperledger in the NFT space as well. So please make sure to sign up. We also have lots of sessions on demand from our global forum, including topics that we were discussing today. So please do look at those sessions. And last but not least, we are an open source community, so feel free to join us. Take a snap of that QR code, and it will provide you some more information on how to get involved if you're not already involved. So once again, thank you everybody for attending for joining us today. If you have any questions, please do reach out to us. And thank you for watching and participating in today's Hyperledger webinar.