 Good afternoon. I hope you're all keeping well and staying safe. My name is Joyce O'Connor and I chair the digital group here at the IIEA. I'm delighted to welcome you to our webinar today and give a very warm welcome to our distinguished guest, Dr. Petrus Gil Galvas. He was head of the unit for digital innovation and blockchain in the European Commission, DG Connect. And he's also the chair of the European Commission Fintech Task Force. You're very welcome, Petrus. We're delighted to have you here today and thank you for taking the time to be with us. Petrus will speak to us on Europe's blockchain strategy, building blocks for the future for around 20 minutes or so. And then I will go to the Q&A with your audience. You can send in your questions through the Q&A function at the bottom of the screen. I would really appreciate if you gave your name and affiliation when you're asking a question. And then I'll come back to you after Petrus has finished his presentation for your questions. Today's presentation is on the record, as is the Q&A. Please feel free to join our Twitter account on the handle at IIEA. The European Commission has identified blockchain as having enormous potential for the public sector, industry and society, with opportunities for startups, large corporations, administrations and citizens. The EU is supporting blockchain across policy, regulatory and funding fronts to encourage governments, universities and industry to accelerate the development of research and innovation ecosystems. Another key aspect of the EU's approach is the focus on all member states on the development of digital skills and talent in the area of frontier technologies like blockchain, IoT and AI. The person who is driving and leading Europe's ambition to set the global standard for blockchain technologies is Dr. Peter Gizalves. Petrus will outline for us today the EU approach to blockchain, which is technology neutral, innovation first and holistic. He will explain the role of EU blockchain observatory and forum, which is a European blockchain partnership for the 29 countries. He will also explore the apparent tension between creating a regulatory framework and an innovation system. The role of a regulatory sandbox and the importance of the European blockchain services infrastructure. And he will also discuss standards and legislative initiatives on crypto assets, smart contracts, data and self sovereign identity. Dr. Peter or Petrus Gizalves is the head of the unit of digital innovation and blockchain and co-chair of the EU FinTech Task Force. He is a barrister by profession. He studied and graduated the University of Southern California in UCLA and Harvard University. He has published widely. He's previously visiting fellow at the University of Oxford and the World Bank. And he has been deputy head of the bioethics department of the Council of Europe and has held various position in the Latvian civil service in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Environment. Petrus, we look forward to your presentation and over to you now. Thank you very much for this very nice introduction and for welcoming me here. The only bad thing about it is I don't have the chance to be in Dublin and beautiful. So, very much a place that I cherish visiting and hopefully we'll be able to again, when we open up Europe. Talking a little bit about blockchain, first of all, perhaps demystifying it a little bit because not everyone in the audience might not be familiar in detail with blockchain. It is not simply Bitcoin, Bitcoin in a way was the first proof of concept and very interesting for that, where the white paper came out in 2000 and 2009. And then came online and started being both mined and traded soon after that. And now is obviously a little bit on the tip of many people's tongues with the rise in cryptocurrencies and then recent recent fall and perhaps stabilization for the time being. But there's much more than that. Blockchain, you can say is a type of database. It differs from a typical database and the way that it stores information. Blockchain store data in blocks that are then chained together linked together as new data comes in, it's entered into a fresh block. The block is filled with data, it's chained on to a previous block, which makes the data chain together in chronological order. Different types of information can be stored on a blockchain, but the most common use has been as a ledger for transactions, you can say a trustless ledger for transactions in the sense that you don't need a trusted third party. Different types of block chains, which are so called permission, which are run by a company and institution, a group of companies, a group of institutions or a group of citizens, they might only allow validators who are accepted by them. So there might be third parties, even though this is generally not centralized to one single party like a bank. These centralized block chains are immutable, which means that the data entered is irreversible. It is there permanently. Now to speak a little bit about some of the activities that we have. It was mentioned that we have a holistic, you could say a blockchain strategy. This is predicated on the idea that, as I mentioned at the beginning, blockchain is not simply financial services and certainly not simply Bitcoin. It has moved on further to being a technology that is what is called Turing complete, which means that it can be programmed to in principle do anything. There is no difference with Bitcoin, which basically is a transaction with Bitcoin. That's what it can do. So it's not Turing complete. The Turing complete language came with Ethereum, which was a later blockchain. And then also an important point because you get in a way a misconception and in a way a truth that blockchain can be wasteful of energy use. This is true of the original blockchain model. As I said, it's going back to 2008-2009, so relatively old for software, which is called proof of work, which is basically a mathematical race, a race to solve mathematical equations by computers, which actually in the original design of Bitcoin was going to be something that people could do at home just with their PCs, but then it turned out to be these massive computer farms set up to just do the mining, many of them in China. This is not at all good in terms of energy efficiency. So what has been thought of since then are a lot of different kinds of consensus mechanisms is what this mining does. It is a way of having consensus on a block saying, okay, not necessarily that the data in it is believable garbage in garbage out, but what was inserted was what was inserted on that date. And that is immutable. And these new consensus mechanisms are like regular ICT, like regular information technology, so not necessarily much better in terms of energy efficiency, but no worse. And these are called proof of stake or that's perhaps the most well known one. So in these political initiatives, we have the EU blockchain observatory and forum which was mentioned. It's basically a think tank, working for us at the European Commission with the support of the European Parliament who helped finance it for us. And it is open to all of you, if you want to know either simple introductory things about blockchain. There are videos. In depth in reports and workshops, they are there as well. There's also an expert board that answers questions that come up either from the community from the stakeholders from us the Commission. There are some interesting reports that you can find online blockchain and innovation blockchain and the general data protection regulation blockchain and e identity, and one which is coming up sometime today. It's going to work for us but not directly there. They're an autonomous think tank, but one is coming out today on a central bank digital currencies, and the use of distributed ledger technologies and blockchain in that context. So I think that that's going to be a very interesting one is based on a workshop that we held with the European Central Bank, and with the Bank of Japan and the Bank of Canada. And there are things that I can be not so happy about about our present way of working, including for instance right now not being with many of you together in Ireland. A nice thing there it does make it easy for us easier for us for instance to bring Japan Canada, the European Central Bank and the European Commission together in one meeting so that workshop is also recorded, you can find it online. There's an upcoming workshop on decentralized governance, how to govern these decentralized entities I mean what is the practice up until now. I've mentioned Bitcoin I mentioned the theory and there's other blockchains other governance models. You also have examples like the next subject I'll go into the European blockchain partnership, which is all 27 EU member states so obviously including Ireland, and Norway and Lichtenstein. So it's all together at ministerial level declaration that they were interested in developing blockchain together and halving a cross border public services infrastructure of blockchain applications where justified we are have never been carried away about the that blockchain is the solution for everything. We think it's definitely a good technology for a lot of use cases, not all of them. So there's a process of choosing those use cases. And it's basically done democratically all the member states together with together with us the European Commission. And right now we're the funder, though member states will be coming in with investments for their recovery and resilience funding, the plan for the recovery that 750 50 billion that right now is being planned by the member states together with the commission. And so this blockchain partnership, it has one also worked as a regulatory sandbox with us, because we're building something together in the public sector a blockchain services infrastructure with decentralized identity, recognition or certification of the recognition processes separate of course done by the blockchain and also audit document publication and reg tech regulatory reporting for value added taxes and customs exercise. So these use cases will be deploying this year, we've already moved into the deployment phase within early adopters program. You can also find this online you just need to put in your favorite search engine. European blockchain services infrastructure European blockchain partnership and then the official sites are the ones that give give some information on where we are now. And there will also be more events coming up hopefully physical events eventually so we can also talk to some of the programmers and policymakers again who we used to meet with regularly and have been meeting with virtually during this time. So that's quite interesting it's been done in a regulatory sandbox context in the sense that this was neither allowed or not allowed by existing legislation blockchain was simply not foreseen in most cases. We first tested, but then invested and built together, seeing how existing legislation or areas where legislation didn't exist. We as public services in the content, along with supervisors, where we'll say monitoring also our actions in some areas would give us the signal that we can do it in this way or this is a better way. So very much a live experimentation laboratory you could say but moving to deployment, not simply not simply testing. Now as we move into what's called the digital Europe program in our new budget. The European blockchain services infrastructure will be receiving some 50 million plus euro and moving to really full deployment of these four mentioned use cases as well as new ones coming up with a silent procedures with social security card and SME financing utilizing blockchain. So those use cases will be developed a little bit later in a second wave we've started already now but they're not advances those first ones are. And there will also be a formal regulatory sandbox I said we had a kind of, you know, way informal one. It was just us the commission and the member states working together to do this including a lot of legal thinking over lawyer embarrassed for myself and working with other lawyers, both within the commission other institutions and in the countries to see what is the way that we could legally do this and finding legal solutions to challenges that we perhaps faced. But now they'll be a formal regulatory sandbox also for outside use cases. So for instance, developers and entrepreneurs in Ireland, working perhaps with French partners, etc, etc, want to see how this use case with those regulators and perhaps with some European level policymakers would be seen in terms of possibilities for experimentation live testing. This is not in any way removing regulatory requirements, but despite the image sometimes I mean we are not I would say in most cases, and over regulated and everything regulated continent in fact I'll come up with a couple of legislative proposals that are on the way or or have been adopted, where kind of rather massive great areas with the very much request of stakeholders that we do this were brought into the regulatory ambit. So there's a lot of things you can do but often investors or regulators who may be asked is this fine what I'm doing might feel on ease, is this legal what happens if something goes wrong, who's responsible, different partners. So this this regulatory sandbox will help to find find answers utilizing the principle of proportionality, and also I mean what is existing in some of the countries with the experimentation clauses, and here and there generally as the European Commission, with some exceptions, like competition, I mean we're not a regulator, who is who is monitoring implementation of the law ourselves. So there's less opportunities for us to say well, you know you can do this in an official way, but we're useful. The perspective of the of the European Commission will be involved there as well. In addition to this we also have initiatives coming up on our on underway on standardization. We're active in ISO technical committee 307 for instance which is the global level on blockchain standardization to ensure that we don't have some separate blockchain in Europe that doesn't communicate then with our partners and friends in the US and Canada and Australia and Japan and Korea and other places. At the same time, ideally reflects European Union values and democratic democratic structures. I mean, there are probably some of the, the less democratic countries globally that have different ideas also about sometimes the future development of the internet and the rights of the citizen in terms of privacy so it's not all simple collaboration that sometimes very much actively defending defending our interests, and a fundamental rights approach to the citizens engagement with the technology. We also work in this context with the International Association of Trusted Blockchain Applications, which is a stakeholders organization companies and foundations and so on. The Commission isn't a member but we're in the governmental advisory board with most of the European countries, also Canada. The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization so we participate there right now where the co-chairs of that. So that's something if you're in a company or another type of stakeholder you might want to join this organization that's a place where there's a lot of discussion about informal standard standardization. So companies think about upcoming legislation in the US or the US, I should say also the US, the US government, the Federal Reserve is actually in the governmental advisory board. So also US legislation, but in that case the kind of the central banking community and in Canada in Australia and in other countries that are that are active there. So there's this regulatory dialogue that goes on in this context. And further we are active also in the area of skills. I mentioned that we have a project or I didn't mention yet we have a project called Chase, which is intended to increase the level of blockchain skills advanced skills but also regular skills to make the best of this technology in Europe. And there's also a skills alliance for digital skills across the board, which is something that we support in the European Commission. Moving on quickly to some of the legislative instruments. We had the markets in crypto assets regulation adopted at the level of the Commission it's now under discussion in the European Parliament and the Council in our democratic European system it is the European Parliament and the Member States who adopt the, the legislative proposals and then they become law becomes an applied regulation. It is intended to tackle fragmentation in the digital single market, and to have an EU regulatory framework that will provide legal certainty support innovation consumer protection market integrity financial stability, and mitigate risks to monetary policy transmission and monetary sovereignty. It addresses all crypto assets that don't qualify as financial instruments, the ones that are financial instruments securities are covered by method which some of you might know the ones that aren't covered that were in this gray area are now under the markets in crypto assets. There are payments tokens so called stable coins to call that should reference tokens in the regulation utility tokens and two important moments there, it's a passporting regulation. So once you pass through the regulatory requirements in your country of operation, you can offer the digital assets in the entire EU and the entire single market. So the biggest single market for this type of legislation globally when it comes into force and secondly is risk based as it's a less risky digital asset for instance a utility token or a payment token that doesn't have a very high significance in the market. The requirements are quite low. And as the risks rise for instance a globally significant stable coin, they could affect monetary policy on a national or even global level, then there's a more stringent level of regulation and more requirements that have to be met. It's accompanied by the pilot regulation which is called a regulatory sandbox plus and why is it called a regulatory sandbox plus, because it is actually different from a regular regulatory sandbox even lifting some requirements. So the market infrastructures on distributed ledger technologies that are going to be implemented there will not have to, if they qualify, have to have a centralized securities depository SCSD for a time period and possibly permanently if it's shown to be a useful, a useful change to the business model the market infrastructures model. A very new legislative proposal was adopted yesterday. And this was the regulation on digital identity. And there is a part that I will say a few words about, which is on electronic ledgers. So you have the legal effects of electronic ledgers this is something that people in the community tend to call basically self sovereign identity, where the individual can manage him or herself completely is her identity. Obviously this can be linked to your government identity which stays with the governments. I mean, this is a, a approach that we of course still have and and blockchain is not changing. But this can be in addition to it and we of course have many identities doing things on the internet for e-commerce, something we may do at work. We might be have licenses in sporting associations for tennis or golf and other things that we might want to keep the fishing licenses. So these can all be kept in your self sovereign identity. And also there is another part on requirements for qualified electronic ledgers. So I think this is something that is quite interesting. It's a step forward. So a little bit of a also disintermediation and a decentralization of the internet, which was actually its, its origin, going way back into the, the ARPANET with the first email from UCLA actually to the Stanford Research Center and the academics and the National Science Foundation, which came soon afterwards, putting us not all just at the behest of the platforms, which of course will all use to some, to some extent in the future but having, having more choices for European, European citizens. And then another thing and then it'll probably my final point is I think I'm coming to my, my 20 minutes and I want to leave time for either comments or questions. It's another thing that I miss about this more, more virtual world now, engaging with the stakeholders very, very actively. So at least hopefully engage with you virtually is that we have a consultation on the data act that was published today. This is a data act and the amended rules on the legal protection of databases, which might sound very techie and rather specific, but this is actually managing your own data and the data of companies, startups and so on. And the part that's particularly interesting for me, I mean the whole thing's interesting, but exactly with my work is a section three on tools for data sharing smart contracts. So these are the smart contracts and distributed ledger technologies on blockchains. So if you're interested or want to find out about it but obviously if you're interested if you're an entrepreneur or a public sector innovator who are who are working with smart contracts please set your, send us your opinion and answer your answer the questions that we ask there because it is really the way that we call better regulation and moving forward that we don't just regulate things in the commission on the basis of what we think, but on the basis of evidence, and on the views and needs of stakeholders. So I think that's something that I would very much encourage you to take a look at. And thank you very much for your attention and then I'm obviously here to answer your questions or to hear your comments as well.