 And I'd like to introduce first, Daniel Goldschirter, who is the founder of the Open Wallet Foundation. And I remember when he came to us and he said, I have a great idea, and this is why it needs to be at the Linux Foundation. So Daniel, if you can please introduce the Open Wallet Foundation, and we can get started with today. And thank you everybody for coming, and thank you specifically for Accenture for hosting us here today as well. Thank you everyone. First, thank you so much to Accenture for hosting us. When they said they have a room for 50 people, I thought, ooh, this is dangerous. Will we get 50 guests? So thank you to you for showing up. It's really great to see you and see a couple of familiar faces and a few not so familiar faces. We started with this idea less than six months ago. And it was really just a conversation of three small companies saying how about creating basic open source components for digital wallets together. And today we have over 350 companies from trillion-dollar companies to billion-dollar companies to startups, to nonprofits, to governments that are interested in creating shared open source components for digital wallets. I am super excited to introduce Ethan Vaniklasen, who's going to introduce our panel. Thank you very much for being here. So good morning. Actually, I guess we're after noon now. Sorry. Two days into this, I'm already losing my voice, so really grateful to have a microphone. Thank you very much. My name is Ethan Vaniklasen. I lead advocacy and communications at ID 2020. If the COVID pandemic taught us anything, it's that we're living more of our lives online from school and work to social interactions, financial transactions, kind of you name it. And for billions of people around the world, it's also the way that people are increasingly accessing government services. And so as this trend continues to accelerate, digital wallets are going to be the primary user interface that enables individuals to receive, store, and share government issued IDs, educational credentials, health data, money, and other digital assets. Where, when, and with whom they wish. So it goes without saying that digital wallets must be secure. They must be privacy-protecting, user-controlled, and interoperable. But given the central role that we expect them to be playing in all of our lives, excuse me, it's equally important that they're designed to work for all of us, that they're accessible and easy to use. So to be clear, the Open Wallet Foundation is not building a digital wallet. Rather, bringing together a broad-based coalition of folks, including nonprofits, which we really appreciate, to build an open-source wallet engine that will enable wallet providers to build better products that are not only secure and interoperable, but are also faster to build and at a lower cost. So it's easy to talk about being a broad-based coalition. It's much harder to actually do what we've learned. And so the fact that I'm standing here today as a representative of a small nonprofit really speaks to the foundation's emphasis on making this an inclusive effort. We're an international NGO. We provide tools, technical assistance, and field-building activities for the public-private development and humanitarian sectors to accelerate the implementation and adoption of forward-looking and, most importantly, ethical digital IDs systems. Since 2016, we've promoted the transformational power of digital ID as a key enabler of social and economic empowerment. And yet, our focus on ethical digital ID demands that we call out the very real risks that technology, whether it's AI, digital wallet, smart agents, et cetera, impose on people, and something that we take very seriously. So when it comes to something as fundamental as our identity, moving fast and breaking things can't be our modus operandi. I just can't. So we're delighted. We're proud to be here today, truly honored to be presenting such an esteemed panel of speakers and honored to participate. So thank you so much. And with that, I'm going to turn this over to Angie Lau. She's an award-winning journalist, a dynamic business thought leader, and the co-founder of Forecast Labs. With that, Angie, to you. Nathan, thank you so much. And God bless you for sharing your voice with us, because I know you've been doing it. It's almost gone. It's almost gone, and it's only the third day. All right. Is it? I've also lost track of time. It's great to be here, everyone. I've been watching this space for the past five years, the way that it has accelerated, and watched what David Treat and his team at Accenture Digital Dollar Foundation, all of this dynamism really catapulting us into the next level. And here we are today, talking about open wallets, thrilled to be here. This is a critical point in time. I would say it is an inflection point. Obviously, we take a look at the world around us and beyond crypto and blockchain. There's just a lot of challenges, and so we share that. But at the crux of the matter really is the person sitting across from us, wherever they are in the world. And how do we engage and how do we open up a world of digital innovation and technology for the person sitting across from us, sitting across the seas from us, and around the world? David, open wallets initiative, why is this important? As I think back of, what are my regrets actually? As I think back over the past five or six years of the work that we've been doing, I founded a blockchain practice and then merged in together our extended reality practice. We have worked for that and get to call it our anniversary business, bringing together all these concepts. If I think about as an industry, as an innovation community, we're thinking about digital identity and digital currency and digital objects separately. And really the value is bringing them all together and what brings them all together is wallet infrastructure. And so we're very motivated to really think through all the business model change that can come from that and really get to a model where the winning digital business going forward is the one that earns the most trusted access to my individual wallet with a consumer at the heart of it, thinking through what lovable experience where you really have safety security at scale and user agency over as I think it's even said it very well, with whom do you share what for, how long and that ability to revoke it. So we see massive business model change. We're excited to bring together what have been far too independent domains of identity, money and objects and excited to be with just incredible, incredible, an incredible community that's forming to start to think through how to do that better with the end users really in mind. What's exciting for us with the open wallet initiative is really codifying I suppose open source ethos and development. One of the things that we struggle with in the digital currency space is interoperability. Are we building with shared standards? Are we working across chains? Very similar as we're thinking about wallets and how do we live in a world with multiple wallets and wallets that don't just hold payment mechanisms but also hold healthcare information or hold your day to day cards that you might want to use. You know, most valued person card at the grocery store, for example. But really looking at how do we come together collectively to build what we define as the public good, the infrastructure that everybody's building innovations on top of in a way that allows those innovations to flourish and prioritize as the end user's needs. It's the user's needs that I think Robert Mahari over at MIT Labs you've been really observing what those needs are. You've been tracking the innovation space deeply. Why now for this effort? It's a little ironic that in a decentralized world we do have to come together and figure it all out. Totally. So what's especially exciting for us is not just this technical interoperability but also kind of the regulatory legal interoperability. There are certain sets of legal challenges that as we try to digitize and use these kinds of products we're going to have to solve them and it makes no sense for everybody to go out and solve them by themselves. And so the idea of coming together and figuring out how do we address privacy, for example, in the context of a digital wallet or compliance in AML or any of those kind of things and how do we combine that with the technology and move away from these paper paradigms, regulatory paradigms to automated compliance, automated privacy, privacy by design. That's really quite exciting. And then once the digital wallet is out there it seems like it could be an incredible vehicle for data sharing, for using users' data in much more responsible ways. So, for example, enabling data trusts or data cooperatives and letting people say, you know, I'm happy for these organizations to use this kind of data in this way. Or actually to say we're going to do computation on the wallet itself. The data never has to leave at all and we can do some really exciting, innovative things. And so at MIT we're thinking about these things and kind of trying to forecast what is the frontier here and what are the open research questions, both technicals and regulatory and social. So, appreciate you being here. Thank you so much, Robert. And Patrick, you know, over at Pin Identity it is something that's toppled mind for you and your team. Why are digital, well, it's so important to digital societies. Great question. So for those that don't know, Pin is a U.S. software company to provide its identity management sort of products to large companies that you deal with every day, whether it's banks or healthcare companies, insurance companies, retailers, car manufacturers, airlines, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We've been doing that for a number of years. We've been asked for many years actually that these companies would prefer not have to deal with identity. They'd like to actually push it back and make it the responsibility of the user, but then it's a risk that they have to take. So for us, this is really the foundation, the starting point of putting identity back in the user's control. We're happy to provide the technology to these companies where they can issue digital credentials or verify, consume digital credentials, but in the middle of that is a wallet. And we feel that wallet is critical to the success of this and we're looking to see sort of an open source of reference implementation sort of being a foundational starting point for getting that right, I think. So to have really these end-to-end digital processes in place, we have to close the last digital trust line. So we have to enable our customers to use all these services and these processes in a trustful manner. And that's why it is also important for Swisscom to enable our customers with a wallet where they can hold their credentials self-soring and that they have full control about their data. This was a very important element to close the last mile for digital end-to-end processes. The trust is critical here. How do you think we achieve that as an open wallet consortium versus a standalone answer? Where do you all see that? I think we've had a really interesting window of time where the technologies have advanced to a point where we can contemplate things like embedded agents operating within the data that sits within the wallet that then would give the user a whole new level of control to basically sever our relationship by kicking that agent out of the wallet. Instead of this notion of my data is somewhere else, I would have to trust them to delete it if I wanted to be forgotten. There's some really interesting patterns, architectural patterns and policy patterns and usage patterns that it's important that we explore because I think we have a very narrow window of time where the next version of the digital world that we live in is going to emerge and if we don't come together and have the conversations around the values that we want to apply and have those transposed into law regulation policy, if we don't do it now, we will then be subjugated to another innovation wave that then in retrospect we're going to try to fix in hindsight. We have a really interesting window of opportunity right now with a number of innovation waves coming together where we're about to have business model change. We're about to break away from our digital world being constrained to a single plane of glass that you walk to your laptop or you hold up your phone and our digital world is going to spread enormously. So critical that we get together and have these conversations and try to drive towards an outcome that we're going to value community by community. What is the value of opposition at the end of the day? This group, us here, we talk about it very esoterically. Somebody in, pick somewhere in the world. Average town, hard working families, and they're rushing off their kids to school and they grab their digital wallet. How is this going to improve their life as they engage in a digital economy? What is that world going to be like and why do they get to do their things better as a result? So I can take a short of that. This is all going to come back really to visual experiences. I mean the world is going digital. All the interactions you have with companies today is all going digital. One of the things we're going to solve is all the issues around identity theft that we've been facing for the last 15 years or more. It's more about data data that's sort of lived inside these organizations. But people aren't going to adopt this unless they see value and whether organizations see value. So an example I gave previously was the notion of renting a car and can I online present a digital driver's license to prove I can drive then a digital insurance card, if I'm going to insure it, then a digital credit card to prove I can pay and then maybe a digital loyalty card to get by discount. Can I do that quickly and easily and make it just more efficient for people or more privacy preserves and more secure? That's what we'll see in this adoption. I also think there's an inclusion aspect here. So just to broaden the conversation, I do think that is a future, but that is a future. In this current day, why it is so important to have so many stakeholders, very diverse range of stakeholders in the conversation now, is because improving the lived experience is very individual. So I would, to use a payment example, we talk a lot by, oh, if it's digital, we need to figure out what an offline solution might be because there will be moments when a system goes offline. Yes, I agree. And also we need to think about connectivity and digital divides. So how are we strengthening the systems and the infrastructure that will enable a fully digitized experience or lifetime and investing in those places too. So that we're bringing everyone along and not creating multiple systems that are serving other people better. But the point to come full circle is that that is a different experience for an individual and you have to understand that use case to be able to prioritize it as we're talking about these design choices and the other systems that need to evolve to support them. Maybe just a comment every day, one, two. When was the last time you moved house? How many different places did you go to update your home address? Like 100, 100 plus, right? Every service provider relationship, every authority relationship, right? And in the U.S. context, there's actually a single source of truth for your home address until you actually go fill out that card either online or in person at the U.S. Postal Service. You as a human are not definitively associated with that address, right? And so the whole notion of actually, you know, just taking the whole notion of changing address, right? That ability to hold that single source of truth address token from the United States Postal Service in this U.S. context example, right? Then wildly powerful because now I don't have to call 100 different providers. It's actually just automatically updated because actually we could then have a model where I don't have to tell the retailer, I want to buy something a retailer, I don't have to give them my home address. I don't have to tell them that my delivery organization of choice, FedEx, UPS, U.S.P.S., I just have to have them tell the delivery provider to give it to me. They're the only ones that need my address. So just wildly powerful, you know, different architectural business and policy models that we can start to apply that will simplify things like change of address. And then to Jennifer's point, to address the needs wherever they are in the world, in India where you don't even have identity, let alone sometimes even a cell phone. And so in America, absolutely, right? That's the system that we have in place. In Europe it's a different system. In much of Africa, across Asia, there's different and disparate ways. How are all the teams working to get there? This is almost a governance question. You know, when people are coming into a room and they're participating in what that open wallet, open source technology is going to look like, what the base layer of that technology is going to look like to create, hopefully, a much more standardized, elegant way in which we can all kind of communicate with each other. How do you overcome maybe some of the challenges? What are some of the challenges? And, you know, how do you overcome it? So from a pink's perspective, identity has been an instability problem for 20 years. And we've invested in open standards in different open standards organizations to essentially ensure that if you are going to participate and use this technology, you weren't going to be locked into pink software because nobody wants to be locked into just pink. It has to work across multiple implementations from multiple vendors. So I think this is just an evolution of that. We're sort of now working on standards to make this all interoperable in organizations like the ISO, IETF, places like that. All those vendors are comfortable participating there and we're going to come together in the Open Wallet Foundation not to work on sort of the standards per se, but essentially on sort of a reference implementation of how to use those standards. So the same people will be there working on that as well and contributing in code and stuff like that. Andreas, how does the telecoms space think about open wallet and to bring that conversation back to the industry? I think, as I said, right, for us it is important that the user is in the center of this world and for us this wallet is really a naval factor. And I think as long as it is an open foundation as we have it here, where probably the best brains work together to find the best solution, I think that's the ambition that we should all have to have such a critical element in place which enables also the global society and you mentioned the inclusion, right? I think that's our all goal that we build a solution which everyone can use where we have this inclusion in place. Can I, you just sparked a thought for me. I'm going to invoke MIT here. I think one of the ways that we get there, that we have done in the past but I don't think we've done frequently is really heavily investing in public-private partnerships and being able to use the resources and the expertise of the private sector that really has put that user experience at the center of what they built for a long time now. And I think having both technologists and policy makers at the table together, so taking the technical conversations out of the open wallet foundation and bringing that forward and exposing our policy makers and helping educate them and giving them a voice at that table as well so we can understand the push and pull between law and tech or regulation and tech, right? It's very important and MIT has done a great job with that. Thus far with the project Hamilton work, right? It's a real life use case that we've seen in action. Yeah, in general it seems like there's these kind of genuine design questions here, right? So for example, you know, when we've tried to approach privacy we said we want people to have more of a role, we want people to give their consent and form consent, but it puts a lot of onus on the user in ways that are sometimes just inconvenient but other times kind of unfair, right? Because we ask people to take the reins in ways that they might not necessarily be able to do. And I think it's a very similar context here where we're thinking about, on the one hand, we want a trusted system. On the other hand, we want self-sovereignty. We want people to be able to consent to what's being done and what's not being done. But we also don't want to put too much of an onus on users and there's some kind of degree of, I don't know if you want to not be paternalistic but at the same time keep people safe, especially with this inclusivity piece. And so kind of doing research on that, which includes kind of bringing people together or having focused groups, doing panels, doing seminars at MIT, things like that, I think generally adds value and it helps us solve some of these problems in more informed kind of data-driven evidence with the driven ways. This is actually where I see the opportunity with the Open Wallet Foundation is to really drive a lot of innovation in how wallets are going to work. What's the user experience going to be like? A comment I made before is that we're still living with browsers today. It's a paradigm that was created in 1994. It hasn't changed. So I think there's, I don't know what the right wallet experience actually is because I think there's so much to do with user experience, privacy, making it simple, but you're hiding a lot of complexity behind the scenes and ensuring that we don't deal with this common click-through problem that we've had as well. There's some big challenges and I think it's only in sort of an open forum we can actually drive out a lot of innovation in that way. I think it's also, I mean just, with Daniela here on the front row, I think the other thing that makes us incredibly excited and confident in where we're headed, it's that convening the right groups, step one, but doing it within the Linux family and the support that we get from and the, you know, the place to run open source projects and the governance that comes along with that is just amazing pulling that together with obviously MIT's capabilities and convening and the open sources. So we just, we have the powerhouse group together, so just that's a huge confidence builder and then Daniela's wonderful. Do you think it's going to be like the super app that we're seeing pop up in Asia? You can't do anything it feels like unless you have one of these apps to buy anything, get around, public transportation, you name it let alone banking. Is that something that's a relevant framework? What are the observations that you've made what you want to improve on and or what you think is a good reference? I'm just starting to go back to that. It's a technical question. I think building on the comments if it isn't lovable it's not going to scale. It's got to be intuitive it's got to be easy, it's got to be lovable to use and I think the feedback where we, some of the wallets that have recently maybe have not been as lovable as they need to be, I think being able to get to that point is going to be a critical part of this. I think from why participate in how should brands and companies with their service providers think about why to lean in on this I think it is also then the competition frontier. I think the notion of what a winning business in the previous digital period was was could you harvest the most possible data off of a network or buy it or secure it and then we high five each other if we get a 4% hit rate on the bag campaign, very blunt and ineffective and at one point one of the credit unions had my year of birth wrong and I was getting all sorts of happy if you haven't signed up for the AARP yet and I was, they thought I was a hundred and two but you know we have a very blunt, ineffective system right now because everybody, we have to give away our data at every relationship and then all the outtrades and so I think the reason for everyone to lean in is I think enabled by this, ironically enabled by the end users having control over their own identity money and objects actually provides a whole different basis to try to earn their trust and it will change the nature of marketing and branding and not a six point font basis for the exchange of information right, of terms and conditions that no one ever reads and you just have to and so being able to rethink marketing branding and the relationships is going to drive a huge amount of lean in, that doesn't mean everyone, it would be dystopian if we had a wallet per thing, we don't want that I think it would also be similarly dystopian if we only had one wallet in total you know there's some mix but we're going to get into a really interesting period where we can have a much more valuable relationship between end users and the service providers and authorities they work with and how much fun will that data figure out and work together I was going to say I actually think one of the goals for Ping participating is actually for us not to be in a position where there's only two large entities providing wallet infrastructure for the world the goal here is to allow for user choice and for different wallets to exist that users take advantage of and sort of have different reasons for using different ones and stuff like that so we can start there I mean generally speaking the world always consolidates to one but I don't want to start with the one or two let's at least start with an open play But see that's the brilliant thing about the open wallet participation it really in a way democratizes as best it can in a private manner of corporations and organizations made up of people in the most diverse way possible to create a universal operating system I'm going to add both of those and I'm going to take it one step beyond which is to say I just forgot my thought totally forgot it on a panel it'll come back it'll come back to me I'll interrupt someone we don't want a wallet for everything we do want to teach you so my hypothesis and it's the same for digital currency there's two pieces if we develop the bottom layer openly and together we raise the bar on the standards which raises the level of trust right I would wager same with digital currency whoever figures out how to protect privacy and make that presentable in a very plain English way is going to win over the masses because I think that is where we are seeing a lot of diversity right now in how we're prioritizing and balancing the choices between security and privacy how we're reflecting our individual country's principles right through privacy it's the same concept so I'm super excited about the innovation because I will hypothesize next year we'll come back see how far we've gotten has privacy been an edge for anyone in terms of adoption or development share the vision what's the vision you all have a wrapped audience including myself what does my wallet look like in future what does it look like for my family what does it look like for my children child so what does that what's that vision ultimately as you do the important work right now if we had figured out all the issues and had the most number of participants even from the regulatory level what is the ultimate goal I think I try I think it is really about my vision to digitize trust so whatever is related to a physical document right now which creates trust so that we have that with the same functionality with the same feature as we know it from the offline world in terms of privacy to have the control to have it with me to decide who has access to these informations that we can replicate that to the digital world and of course some additional features where we can decouple certain attributes from a document and just show the relevance one maybe also put some logic on top of it so I think the benchmark is what we have right now in the physical world but then put on top some add-ons which make more better and not worse I don't have to file a hundred applications to tell them that I changed anything so that's the challenge that is the challenge what you just described is the challenge not a design person but if we're making something that users have to think about it has to it's going to have to be intuitive it's going to be something that it's going to be very natural to them to use it probably won't even feel like a wallet won't even call it a wallet they might not even understand it as a wallet but it might be their personal data store as an example of some word people used before and it's got to be something that is failsafe because if I lose my phone I can't be I noticed there's a few crypto companies here I can't be using a 24 seed phrase to recover my wallet for this to scale as an example so there's a lot of challenges and stuff we have to sort of solve but it's we've got to rethink that the state of the art today isn't good enough and it's going to have to improve but optionality to get there because it's going to take a while and there will be bridging for a long time so if I want to fully immerse and operate with my wallet that's great if my husband doesn't then he has the option to turn on and off what functionality he wants through his wallet as well and without it being an obstacle to any standard thing of engagement we don't have to sign away anything including our first child to get on bridging to this future is key because no organization is suddenly going to jump to this we're going to go through a transition period so how do you deal with the transition period where some people have well, some people don't how do we handle that experience so again it has to be somewhat of an evolution I don't think this can be a revolution no matter how exciting it is because nobody's going to adopt it everything's been said and I'm going to reference a colleague and chat in house rule style but at the fantastic point that we haven't talked about this is also not just about the individual human but the identity of things identity of things I'll go to pets and then the nested relationships I'm going through some very complicated identity things that have incredible intensity in my household right now I'm going to talk to the managers and the realization that we signed on with their gamer IDs were on my email address and now they want to have the parent-child relationship the things that this is a big space in our ability to rethink it so that we can make it can make it a simplifying force for business model transformation and user experience so lovable, simplifying, engaging but I can't think of a more important one as we get into the next digital period and something that you're engaging with regulators on hopefully and in the future what kind of experience education that you think that regulators need to understand as the open wallet efforts move forward I think that everything that's wrapped up and fears around crypto and money loss as soon as you say any of these things but I think you ask what's the vision and I think there's this intermediate vision for me which is to have a menu of components that have been designed with regulators, with designers with whoever is kind of relevant to say can we import GDPR I want to build a new wallet import GDPR, import Bank Security Act import whatever kind of things I want or lovable design or simple design or things like that and then allow people to go out and create wallets for different kind of contexts whether that's a developing country context where you're saying we want to be able to do it without smartphones or whether that's a context where you're saying we want a corporate wallet for a company with 100,000 employees they're going to have wallets too and they're going to look different but they're going to have some of the same components and it feels that sunlight is kind of a good disinfectant here and then they can be packaged up and we know kind of what the ingredients were but then you can have a standalone product that people can use for different contexts so that's to me really exciting and can I add to the regulatory question because regulators are people just like us I'm going to exaggerate so I just called to action here they need to learn we know the best way to learn is through relatable use cases by taking safe places to touch the technology and learn about it and breaking things up into small sizeable chunks so we can't go to them and say this is the regulation we want that will allow us to do all of the things and it should work for the next 50 years but we can go to them and we can say we would really like to lean in on global standard setting we think it's very important for X country to be a leader in this conversation deploying CBDCs or we need to have government wallets this is important and it's a foundational place for us to participate that is manageable and then through that experience they learn so I would encourage everyone to reach out to your regulators to your policy makers your legislators and talk to them and any opportunity you can get it might feel a little groundhog-esque day, groundhog day, I don't know if that resonates in a global audience but it will give you results and they're hungry for it they're just limited in how they can reach out that's my PSA for the panel I suppose if I channel that also if I add to that also do it where we're not stuck in a swim lane because I think too many of the conversations we're having we're in the digital currency swim lane and it's stuck there or we're in the digital identity deep and it's stuck there and our ability through this effort to really say that with most everything the transaction or interaction you have at least a combination of two or three of those things between identity currency, objects and services the interrelationships between the two and have a framework to be able to have that discussion drive that education and have standards that apply across the board we need to have that foundational layer to then get to simplified digital inclusive and everyone on this panel is looking to get it right to include as many voices at the table so that we can serve the greater whole and make it lovable thank you very much everyone thank you once again thank everyone for coming we were talking about digital trust and the open wallet foundation is a new initiative at the Linux foundation around digital trust so I hope everybody here in this room scans the QR code it just goes to openwalletfoundation.org we are convening our members many that are here on stage many that are here in the audience as well and we welcome you to participate bring your developers bring your strategy people we are here and we're going to build digital trust and open wallets together so thank you all for joining us today and feel free to ask any of us questions that you might have thank you