 So we have quite the panel today, so we're going to do our best to balance perspectives and speaking times for everybody, but it can be challenging, especially when Roman's on stage and tries talking more than everybody else. So quick intro, my name's Matthew Spoke, I'm the founder and CEO of a relatively new venture called NUCO, working in the enterprise blockchain space building infrastructure. But let me quickly switch it over to my fellow panelists here. To my left is Andrew Keyes from Consensus who heads up their global business development. Give it up for Andrew. To his left, Marley Gray from Microsoft, who is the head of the Azure Blockchain engineering team. To his left, Alex Leo, who is the CEO of Ami, which is a consortium of seven Taiwanese banks using blockchains to do all sorts of interesting stuff. And Victor Wong from BlockApps, also enterprise infrastructure. Henning Dietrich from the IBM blockchain team. Roman Mandeliel, creator of EthereumJ, everybody's favorite Ethereum client. So he says, and obviously founder of EtherCamp and then Ben Lu, CEO of Stone Ledger, building a consortium implementation of Ethereum for the Chinese market. So we have quite the selection of panelists up here. So I'm gonna try to keep it a little bit balanced. I think there's different perspectives up here, different kind of approaches to the enterprise market, which is good. First question I wanted to pose to the panel and maybe I'll kind of point it at people is around the concept of using the public network to do enterprise application development versus the creation of kind of dedicated private networks that have a node subset of participants on them. So maybe we'll start with Andrew since you're on my left. But give us your perspective and your thoughts on that. Sure, I think at Consensus we believe that there will be a few large public networks and then enterprises will have their own permissioned private networks. And then there will be constellations of consortium networks. I think with respect to the public Ethereum protocol, there are two main deficiencies at this current state. One is privacy and the other one is scalability. So what we've done is we've created with Microsoft and BlockApps, Blockchain as a service where enterprises can spin up an enterprise blockchain within minutes and deploy smart contracts and really start to understand what this technology does and go from a proof of concept into a production environment relatively seamlessly while the public Ethereum network matures. And maybe I'll jump to Binlu. You have a context that's a little bit unique being in the Chinese market. When you decided to build Stone Ledger, why the decision to create kind of a dedicated consortium chain versus, what was your logic that got you there instead of using the public Ethereum chain to do application development? Yeah, I think the answer is pretty simple because we cannot do on public chain. We are building a consortium implementation of Ethereum that connect and are compatible to Chinese legal system. So specifically, it is an ID, every account is a smart contract instead of address. And that account is associated with different addresses. And the one of address is a SM2 compatible USB key. And that USB key is your identity, your real identity certified by the Chinese CAA institutions. So according to the Chinese electronic signature law published in 2005, if you sign with that USB key, it's recognized by the Chinese legal system. So for example, if a small company wants to borrow some money on the platform and they sign that contract with the key. And if they default, the Chinese legal system, the court, will recognize that activity and enforce them to pay back. So we cannot do this kind of stuff on the public chain yet. So that's the main reason we are going for consortium chain. So you ended that sentence by saying yet, which I think brings up an interesting question. Are private blockchains or dedicated consortium blockchains, are they a gap filler until the public network is ready? Or are they intended to be kind of a long term solution that's absolutely necessary for scaling enterprise applications? I know Victor, you spent a lot of time working on this concept. So maybe your perspective on this. Yeah, so the way we look at it is that there's no going to be winner take all chain, whether it's public or private. What we're going to see is an environment where there are going to be multiple chains. There are going to be enterprise specific chains. There will be consortium chains and there will be the public chain. The key thing that we're focused on is interoperability between these different kinds of chains. And the best analogy I can use is if you think about the internet circa 1994. At that point in time, most of the interesting development in the internet was actually happening on internet. So fowsharing what's happening. All these kind of complex functionalities were happening there. And what was happening on the public internet was very basic. It looked like a brochure. But over time, I think what developed on these private internets is going to be more and more exposed to the public internet. And we see a very similar pattern following with the public and private blockchains. OK, so that's helpful. And Roman, I'll pick on you just because you kind of developed one of the well-known Ethereum clients, the Java client. And maybe I'll bucket you and you can tell me if this is wrong, as being kind of a public Ethereum guy. So maybe try to give a countering perspective, if you can. And if that's a fair assessment of kind of your perspective, what's your view on this public network for absolutely everything versus the creation of kind of dedicated private chains? Yeah. So first of all, thanks for coming to the park yesterday. So yeah, for us, we really been focused on the public blockchain and trying to make this vision possible from the beginning. And for me, it was a big surprise that all this domain of consortium and private chains emerge. So what we have done is basically providing our library to be customized any ways possible. So the people in enterprises usually speak Java. And we just give it without any licensing. And you can do it, take it in any direction. And what we have seen is that we basically study. We see what the companies are doing and trying to understand if it's going to make sense on the long run. And maybe we'll touch the question of tools and services later, but I think the best way to give something to be maximal way customized for these companies is the way to operate now. OK. And anybody have anything else to add on that? I was going to jump to kind of the next topic. So at IBM, I think what we're seeing, why people are really excited about hyperlider is because of the proposition that is made concerning who actually holds the key. And I think we cannot see people imagining that people are really going to manage their own private keys. So there's going to be a lot of CA infrastructure and all this integration into the zig-sling structure of the enterprises, which I think hyperlider is really strong on, which is obviously something that has to be taken into the consideration. And it's, I think, more on the forefront of people's thoughts even than scalability and privacy, which generally is researched and people feel like there are going to be solutions. What we're seeing, though, on the other hand, and the Blue Horizon team where I'm working is that we would love for the concept to be driven by the main chains, by the main net, because you have this interoperability. And that's really what you want, especially if you look at IoT, that's a dream scenario. On the other hand, a very concrete problem is that it's just too expensive to run something like Blue Horizon on the main net right now, given the price of Ether. Yeah, fair enough. So the topic came up a few times, or the comment about interoperability. And maybe a few perspectives. I think there's obviously, we're going to get into scaling solutions from POC into the production world. But when it comes to envisioning what a future looks like, where you have multiple chains running multiple different solutions, applications, different networks of companies, or different participants to these chains, and you need interoperability between these networks, how do you envision that emerging when you have so many different vendors creating so many different versions of protocols or variations of how blockchains should be built? To see how we're going to get to a future state where you have potentially chains emerging in China that are being built differently than chains emerging in Europe, but then eventually they need to talk to each other. So who's going to take the ownership of that process, and what does that look like in the future? Is it that one protocol has to win for interoperability to be possible? Marley, we haven't gone to you yet. Maybe you have a perspective on this. Let's see. I don't think you're going to get to, I think you're going to end up with meshes of networks combining together. You'll have different interoperability. I think it's very early to try to reason over how we get to one standard. We don't know what all the use cases are. So I think it would behoo the industry and all of us to continue forward. There's lots of great ideas. I mean, just looking at this conference, there's so many good ideas of how things can be done. I think we're going to just have natural evolution of protocols. And we'll get to a substrate of them that we can then address for interoperability between them. I think they'll largely go across consortium, enterprise consortium lines, into public blockchain lines. The real challenge is going to be having compatibility for skills, both the developers, the tools, to be able to move between the two, which is going to really dictate how quickly we can move in the space. OK. So maybe switching topics a little bit. And Alex, I'll get your thoughts on this. You're the CEO of AMI, which is a consortium of seven Taiwanese banks. We're seeing a lot of similar instances around the world, of not just banks, but just organizations that are in a particular industry that are starting to see reasons to adopt shared infrastructure. In some cases, maybe for grabbing fancy headlines in PR, because it's the hot topic right now. But hopefully, being optimistic, there's actually long-term value in what they see. So what's the challenges that you guys see to get from initial prototypes with a group of seven banks to actually meaningfully changing the way that they interact with each other? How do you get from that POC state that we're at today to changing the financial infrastructure of Taiwan, for example? Yeah, I think that's a great question, Matt. I think for that switch to flip, you really need to take a few steps back and to examine why we adopted blockchain technology, in theory in particular, for this purpose in Taiwan. What we're solving is primarily a market design or a game theory problem. There, between banks in Taiwan, exist ways to transfer funds between each other, but they're so oligopolistic or even monopolistic that there's really a stranglehold. They don't really allow new non-bank players to emerge, as has emerged here in the last 10 years on the mainland. So there's that incentive bottleneck there. In the meanwhile, for newer applications, whether it's peer-to-peer consumer payments or person-to-machine payments, blockchain really is quite ideally suited for that. So to answer your question, I think the seven banks that have gotten together in Taiwan, I think they recognize that the market landscape in Taiwan was the way it was, and blockchain looks like it's gonna break the log jam. Now, the scalability and security questions, I think, privacy rather, they have to be solved, but I think they will be. I mean, I can give a few concrete examples when the discussion moves there. But going back to Ben's point, because that's another important reason why we build a consortium chain, as opposed to hooking directly onto the public chain. Identity management, I think when we look back on this 10 years from now, is probably the most important impact to consumer experiences. It's not the record-keeping or the ledger part. I mean, in Taiwan, we have five or six government-issued identities for one person, and they're siloed by industries, and what blockchain as a protocol brings as a fantastic opportunity is really to reorganize how we identify ourselves across various industries and various platforms. So, as the identity management problem gets solved, as privacy and throughput, which is important for our consumer applications, get solved in the coming years, that's what delivers the movement to actual product. Okay, I think I'll go a little bit of a stretch here and say represented on this stage and represented in this audience, definitely. There's a lot of really, really smart people solving some really, really complex problems. Definitely, the problems that are facing enterprise adoption are somewhat unique compared to things that might be relevant on the public chain, but I find that in a lot of the interactions that we have with potential clients and customers that are looking to adopt this technology is actually putting aside the blockchain and assuming that the blockchain piece will be solved, and that might be the easy piece of the puzzle. How do you solve integrating that into the reality of a large-scale organization? They have legacy systems that, in some cases, date back to the 1970s and all sorts of layers of technology that have just accumulated over the decades, and we're probably realistically not looking at a complete gutting of this infrastructure and are replacing with blockchains. So, how do you move from what they have today to what we hope they will have in the future? What does that progression look like? Victor, what are your thoughts on that? So, currently we're working with over 130 companies who have kind of gone on this journey, so we see a clear pattern. The kind of pattern we see is that, you know, nine months ago when we launched blockchain as a service, basically the first question was, what is a blockchain? So, the first thing is, you know, organizations have to wrap their head around the power of it. Then, the second phase is, they start to do a POC. So, what does that mean? They have an innovation group that's trying to do technology experiments and playing around with the technology to see where in the organization can blockchain really fit. And, but what we've really seen in the last two or three months is that there's an evolution where now different companies are coming up with real business cases. I won't steer the thunder of one of our partners, BHP, but, you know, they're gonna announce a pilot production system in the resource market on Friday. So, what we've seen is that these companies, as they've learned more, as they've experimented with the technology, they figured out where in their business that it really, really fits and where, and getting more and more comfortable with making bigger and bigger bets on this technology. And to dovetail on that, what we've tried to do is drastically reduce the barriers to entry. One cornerstone of consensus is what we call core components. And these are basically Lego pieces that we could put into applications so we don't have to recreate these parts of an application. Those are the cornerstones like identity, reputation systems, registry systems, token issuance and management systems. And you can start plugging these things into applications. Another thing that we've worked on in EtherCamps done a great job with building developer tools, block apps built block, we've built Truffle, we've also integrated into Visual Studio in order to drastically reduce barriers to entry. And with these types of cloud integrations, you can very easily create developer test labs. So, just education, education, education, like Bomber goes developers. So, on the topic of cloud infrastructure, Marley, the Azure announcement last year of the blockchain as a service obviously, was a really interesting shift in the industry to see a big player like Microsoft put their weight behind this space and this technology. In some cases, I imagine cloud infrastructure will be extremely important. But I can also imagine that there will be instances of more traditional servers wanting to be part of these networks. Is that a progression that we see eventually shifting completely to the cloud or a need for kind of hybrid networks that are supportive of more traditional server infrastructure? No, we're totally on more of a hybrid approach. I think if you look at the evolution of these things, the cloud is gonna be tremendously impactful for distributed systems. How we get these enterprises to move out of the legacy systems. Most of them are moving their core productivity to the cloud. And we're seeing even their identity moving up into the cloud. Getting out of their core business. And blockchains is a natural fit. And when we launched blockchain as a service, we sort of backed into realization that holy crap, this blockchain thing fits really well with cloud. Because they kind of mirror each other's footprint. But you're also gonna get to the point where we're in 30, I don't know, 36, 37 different regions around the globe with massive data centers. But we still are gonna be selling mini-clouds or private clouds. So we have something called Azure Stack, which, again, the commonality is you wanna have the same skills, the same tools, and the same, I can take things that run in the cloud but then also can then run them and target them in an internally owned system. We look at that at a national level. So we have the Azure Stack issues in Taiwan. We have them in, we were talking about them in Russia and in other places where you have to put, the data has to physically reside within the borders of that country or that region. So we're gonna eventually run out. And so we absolutely believe in the hybrid model and we're building everything from that standpoint and from blockchains to distributed systems, that's a perfect combination. They're built for resiliency and built to handle these types of distributed and hybrid systems. Let me just give mad props to Marley and Microsoft, I mean, in Taiwan, yeah, we're using exactly that. I mean, we're using the hybrid cloud system where maybe very sensitive identity information is on-premises and hash data, maybe the validators are running on Azure and it works really well. They just need to build a data center in Taiwan. So we'll work on that. Can I add to that? I would like to, yeah, we're totally in the hybrid area here in the moment. However, I mean, I worked at Cloudend at IBM and the first thing actually though happened after Cloudend was acquired by IBM was that we created a Cloudend version that was a hybrid version with leaving some data on-premise because the reality is that a lot of data has to stay on-premise and I think in the long run where we're going from this hybrid era and the blockchain is gonna be a crucial element in that is that we're going to realize the actual vision of the cloud because the cloud is called the cloud because the idea was it's decentralized and it's like a fog that some other company now branded their stuff is everywhere and nowhere but the reality of the cloud today is it's completely centralized, right? So the blockchain is giving us the tools now to actually realize the cloud at a new stage where the sharing of resources of the endpoints and the edge is actually what's happening thanks to the blockchain that the actual place where things happen is moving to the edge and that's the future and that's going to leave the kind of hybrid model that we have it now behind where you have a hugely centralized rentable cloud and on-premise stuff that's to together creates the hybrid for a new architecture that is going to be a connection of the edge. And on that topic of kind of data residency in cloud versus kind of more traditional infrastructure Ben, you operate in a pretty unique market being in China. Is there a contradiction between the concept of distributed systems and the concept of regulatory jurisdiction and data residency and does that take away from the long-term potential of a blockchain-based system if you still have national boundaries that may not apply in the digital space but apply in the regulatory space? Ben, have you kind of encountered that? Yeah, that's a good question. So I think we still view the boundaries of countries, right? So in our use case, we are focused right now in Chinese markets so it's not a problem for us currently. About the, I think we are going to have issues for interoperability issue because now the sharding, I think sharding is a very good method to solve the cloud-based problem. Right now, the blockchain still suffers a problem that every node processes every transaction. So if you still, if you have a single blockchain then you would have a bigger database. So in that case, you have to store that data in some cloud but if you can distribute that responsibility across different nodes, like in different space, sub-space. In that case, you can just have regular computers and the processing be part of the infrastructure. And I think that's the direction we are probably gonna end up. And for that, in our case, so we are going for database first because in the ERP-105, we will have, we will solve the scalability problem, I think in one year because after the serenity in the C++ implementation, the enterprise platform can just add more CQ4 to scale the throughput. Yeah, okay, thanks. Roman, a question for you. Is this on? Okay, Roman, question for you following up on that. I've heard a lot of discussions around regulating and applying rules to the blockchain versus using the technology itself to just kind of create or to remove the need for regulations, to be able to build into the tech the right amounts of privacy, the right amounts of security so that you don't need to be kind of applying a set of external rules to the technology. You've had a lot of hands-on experience with the development of Ethereum and the tools that you've been building at EtherCamp. What's your perspective on kind of technology and the limitations and uses of it rather than kind of external forces regulating it? Yeah, so I won't briefly touch interability, scalability, stability, high availability and I will come to the tools. So because all the subjects are here and they are kind of important and I will do it very fast and don't want to take all the time. So interoperability is, I think it's easy because the different blockchains want to be independent decentralized but the interoperability between them don't have to and all these enterprise companies usually they don't seek the same level of inter, the same level of decentralization that we love on the live network, right? So it's not that jungle. So they kind of okay to solve it on the level of API so you kind of do something on one chain and then on the other and it will be okay. I believe it will survive at least the first stages. About stability, high availability. So I kind of agree with Victor about this metaphor of internet, of early days of internet but with one nuance. In the old days of internet, the direction of movement was from the enterprise toward the live web because the enterprise was the most interesting place to do stuff and the internet was young and still ugly. Today, what we see is the live network is the cool guy in the neighborhood and enterprise kind of, hey guys, what are you doing here, right? So it teaches us how to do this in home, right? So what I'm trying to say is, this is awesome what Microsoft and Victor and consensus doing, trying to help find business cases for these companies actually and try to push this technology into enterprises. It's really great movement. What really going to happen is that the live network will solve the first, the scalability and high availability and stability issues. Why? Because to compare this environments is like, to compare a war zone and a water pool, right? Because the amount of chaos and the amount of problems that we solve during trying to fight all this jungle of live network, it's enormous, right? It's uncomparable to any environment. So all the time we spend, I think eventually it makes the goal, the job, the rest much more resilient, much more strong to provide real solutions. And I think this is going to, this is already can solve most of the problems, right? At least the business cases that exist today, real business cases, not like imaginary business cases trying to push to blockchain. Blockchain is not for everything, right? We're trying to explain this in the last month. Do blockchain when you need blockchain. Less subject really, I run briefly, we are out of time. So the less subject is tools. Again, tools, we have designed all these tools for the live network. And we've been on rush to provide these tools for everybody. And suddenly I noticed this, a lot of people knocking on my door and saying, hey guys, we are inside the enterprise, a live network is not for us. Bring us these tools. This is why we started Ethereum Harmony. It will connect to any Ethereum network, private or public, with very open source and decent license. It will solve most of the tools problem and most of the profiling problems. Go and try it. And Ethereum Studio is a Microsoft marketplace. We also hope to eventually bring it to you so it will solve all the development inside the enterprises. Maybe, thanks Roman, that was helpful. There's a lot of analogies that get drawn between kind of the emergence of blockchain systems and the internet, the internet. I'll pose a question and maybe Henning, you can give us a perspective on this. If we can compare kind of for a moment the public network of Ethereum to potentially a next generation of the internet, new functionalities for public use and for enterprise use alike, could these private networks that are created, could they be kind of along the evolution of what ERP systems will become in the future and maybe not so much the fact that everybody needs to be online using kind of a public network? Is that kind of a fair analogy to draw to? Yeah, thanks Roman. We can't forget that. We can wish for whatever we want. People are doing stuff right now. There are things that are growing. We have, for example, hierarchical networks already because people have started to isolate their network they use for their Google Nest from the rest of their internet connection. And I think the diversity that we have also among the clients, like we have Haskell here with Java here, at the Blue Horizon we can't wait to test parity out again to use the like client there when they have it. And that is all a reflection of how we are really multiple parallel tracks that will not see a unified solution, something that's made up on the drawing board, but it will keep growing. There's going to be a lot of weed, a lot of it will have to be weeded out, a lot of technical debt, a lot of prices to be paid, years to be cried, but in the end I think we will have automatically a competition, a competing system that will see multiple different architecture extending alongside each other. Okay, thanks so much. So, I mean, we didn't necessarily solve all the problems up here in this 30 minute slot, but there's a lot of exciting developments happening. We have the right people to solve them just by looking at this group here. So thank you very much to our panelists. Thank you very much to the audience. That's it. Thank you. Thank you. Take care.