 Looks like we just had a few more people, which is great. So I guess we can get started. Thanks, everyone, for joining. Really appreciate it. Very excited to be here today with Adam Clark. We're going to be talking about Hyperledger Basu use cases. In this session, it's 30 minutes. Please feel free to drop questions in the Q&A. We're definitely going to leave time at the end to answer them, and also we'll try to answer them throughout. And we'll get started, I guess, with intros. Adam, why don't you go ahead? And start us. Hi, great. So my name is Adam Clark. I'm the CTO at a company called Finality International. And we'll give you a bit of an introduction to what finality is shortly. But I've been around in tech for about 20 years. So I'm feeling a bit old today, if I'm honest. But I've been working with open source software probably for about 15 years. And Hyperledger, basically now for a couple of years since we started the finality concept a few years back. Great. Awesome. Well, thank you for that. So I'm Grace Hartley. I'm a senior business manager for Consensus. I work on the protocols team there, which is the team that develops on and originally submitted Hyperledger Basu. I also sit on the Technical Steering Committee for Hyperledger. And I've been at Consensus now three years, but I come from a consulting background. So relatively, I guess, new to tech, but excited to be here. And I guess maybe I'll spend 30 seconds giving the Hyperledger Basu overview. And then we'll start asking questions for anyone in the audience who is new or hasn't heard of it or is just new to Hyperledger and trying to get a sense of all the projects. So within Hyperledger, there are different types of projects. Hyperledger Basu is under the DLT category, so Distributed Ledger Technology. Specifically, Hyperledger Basu is an Ethereum client, which is a Apache 2 license and written in Java. So the way that it's built, it has private and permissioning features. If you want to have a private use case, private chain use case, similar to maybe if you guys are familiar with Hyperledger Fabric. And then also, what's highly unique and of all the other Hyperledger projects is that Hyperledger Basu is the only project that runs on a public chain, on public main Ethereum. But that's the little spiel, so everyone kind of has a sense of where they are today. But Adam, why don't you tell me about your use case for Hyperledger Basu and more about Finality? Yeah, thank you. I guess probably the best thing to do is to start with what Finality is, because I'm not sure how many people will be familiar with it. So Finality has been around for about four and a half years now as a project and became a company just over two years ago in May 2019. It started off basically as a small consortium of banks, sort of big global systemic banks, looking at the post-trade kind of settlement process and looking at the risk associated with the movement of money after the trade, or to settle the money after the trade. And there's a lot of big inefficiencies and problems with that that sort of grown over many, many years. Swift tried to solve some of them. CLS Bank tried to solve some of them. But fundamentally, there's still quite a lot of risk associated with making payments in wholesale banking, or money payments in wholesale banking. So these are things like settlement risk, counterparty risk. There's all sorts of problems out there. And the guys got together and said that, can we, as Finality, what was called, utility settlement coin at the time, can we do something where we effectively use a DLT to try and reduce or fix some of these big issues and problems that we've got with wholesale payments? It went for a while. It kicked off with a small consortium of banks actually growing up to 15 global banks that are our shareholders today in Finality, including companies like Lloyds, Barclays, Santander, Bank of New York, Mellon. The list goes on. So small companies. That's what you're saying. Small banks. They're our shareholders. They own us. And so we've been taking direction effectively. And we came up with a solution effectively. That's why they funded us a couple of years back. And we've been working. And we're still pre-revenue generation. We're still working on building our products. And we really genuinely believe that we've got a way to solve a bunch of these wholesale banking problems. And we're doing so with Ethereum and initially Hyperledger Basu. So the problems that we're kind of solving effectively are it takes two to three days to actually settle cash if you're moving wholesale money. There's a lot of messages that go backwards and forwards. And that generates risk. What happens if the company that I've sent money to goes bust before they legally own it, et cetera? I've got to stand in the kind of list of creditors and try to get my money back. And the other way around as well, counterparty risk is a big thing where I have to use another bank or an organization has to use another bank to make payments on their behalf in a different currency, et cetera. That money sits on the counterparty's balance sheet. Same problem if they get bust. I'm just in the list of creditors trying to get my money back. So what we're trying to do is to solve those problems by actually generating a truly decentralized payment system. So we're not a coin in any way, shape or form. We're just a payment system, just a payment system. And what that allows us to do using a DLT is effectively get rid of a lot of those decentralized problems and create a true peer-to-peer network. And what I mean by decentralization here, because you'll hear me say decentralization quite a lot, but what I mean by decentralization here is there's no single entity running the DLT. The nodes are run by the banks and the participants themselves. So while there's an oversight and a regulatory side of things for the finality organizations to deal with, effectively what we're doing is to decentralize everything. So all the nodes sit out within the banks themselves. So it's truly peer-to-peer, they're running it. The consensus algorithm is running in the banks and then they're peer-to-peer. So how this works is... And that's fairly typical requirement just for regulatory purposes. And particularly a lot of financial institutions want to run on-premise and that's kind of one of their major requirements. I think sometimes that they think, and correct me if I'm wrong, that that's not an option, but it really is, you know, what you are doing. And sometimes I think that kind of gets misconstrued in requirements building. I agree and it's so important to our use case because if finality has effectively can control or manage the network, we're not truly decentralized. You've got a single point of centralization, right? So you're kind of almost missing the point of a DLT. You've got a notary in finality. So we're trying not to do that effectively. So the banks run the nodes. And how it works is we've just had a sort of a major milestone within finality. And that is that the Bank of England recently published a new policy allowing or widening our access to central bank accounts. And we've put our application in to get our first central bank account, which we're working with the Bank of England on now. And that's a major milestone for us. That means that we can hold a central bank account and when organizations or participants of our network fund the finality bank account, we will effectively tokenize that money and give full ownership of that money back to them immediately. And that effectively removes the counterparty risk. They don't have to move money through a counterparty. But also they can then use the DLT to move money between participants instantly with legal settlement finality and not have to worry about a two or three day settlement period. So that's our killer use case effectively. And then when we've got one network in the Bank of England, we're looking to move to the ECB, the Fed, we're looking to build out multiple currencies to create like a global, what we call it the finality global payment system and not unreasonably to allow cross-border payments effectively, instantly and with legal settlement finality. Very cool. No, that's so exciting. Thanks for that overview. I obviously know you guys work, but I didn't even appreciate kind of the inner workings and how I knew it was a very big deal that Bank of England came out with their new requirements for you all. And that really opens up the use case. And I think it's interesting. I think a lot of other central banks will be following their lead if they haven't already. And I think by them kind of giving the stamp of approval, I'm optimistic, which take it with a grain of salt, that others will be following in their footsteps. We're sunny as well, for obvious reasons. Yes, for sure. No, that's awesome. And yeah, that's really cool to hear kind of the evolution of the process too and kind of finding that right fit and getting those big players on board too is, you know, humongous. So congratulations to you all, first of all. Thank you. But I'd love to hear. So we talked about the use case. I think a lot of people then, once you identify the use case, a common next step is what DLT should use. And there are, you know, it's kind of funny. I like to say not all blockchains are created equal, you know, and you think, you know, and if you're new to the space or you're new to Hyperledger even, there's, you know, many different options and many different ways you could go about it. I'd love to hear kind of your process for choosing the right DLT and then maybe talk about how you ended up at Basu and what was important for your use case requirements that matter didn't or just love to hear that kind of evolution. Yeah, and I can sort you through that. So there's a number of things that were key for us. The first one was that we needed a private permissioned network, effectively. So we needed to look at something that all we decided to look at something that was enterprise Ethereum Alliance spec compliant and we're a big member and influencer in the EA. Well, you know, we're very keen on the organization and of course, basically being one of the clients that is compatible with the core spec there at the EA. So that was one of the first things, private permissioned blockchain network or DLT so that we can effectively manage the access to the network. It has to be closed. It has to be permissioned. It's not gonna, we're never gonna run this on main net for obvious reasons because we're backing central bank money. And there's two other things that are really important to us or were really important to us. The first one is getting to settlement finality. So there are a set of regulations, settlement finality regulations that we had to meet in order to be able to back central bank money. And actually the consensus algorithm within Basu being the IBFT2 or IBFT kind of algorithm allows us to actually get to the point where we can show that we have a legal settlement finality at a given point within the consensus algorithm. So really important for central banks and for meeting regulation. So that was a key. And it's also interesting or I like to call out, there are different consensus mechanisms for different use cases. So for IBFT2, it's kind of known to be like that, it's stable on that instant finality and that is like what its benefit is, right? So that fits a settlement use case, for example, that you are talking about. And then there are other ones like that are much more performance driven and can fit other use cases, but that like, I like to just call out that they're, this one fits, but there are different kind of options that you could choose if your use case was different. But that would definitely met your needs, which is great. That's why the team built it. That's music to my ears, really. So performance isn't a massive deal for us because we're talking about wholesale banking here. So, the transactions per second that numbers are gonna be relatively low even if finality reaches quite a lot of the market. So actually what we care about much more in terms of consensus is that it is truly peer to peer that it is decentralized and that it's very secure, i.e. it's very difficult to destabilize the network, obviously, and obviously operate from a resilience perspective. If you've got 20 banks, 21 banks or whatever, running the validator nodes on the network, actually penetrating or trying to create problems within a third of those to stop the network or two-thirds of those to compromise the network is significantly more difficult than hacking or attacking a centralized system, hey. Well, yeah, I think this is actually some, so I'll keep chiming in, I apologize. So it's interesting because we get that question a lot also when people are considering using Basu and what makes sense. And they're asking about, or they ask about like the security of it. And you're like, well, like mainnet Ethereum and Hyperloader Basu runs on mainnet Ethereum has never been, you know, has never crashed, you know. So you can at least, that's probably the best use case of kind of the strength of the network but also then security audits. I think not everyone knows that code bases like blockchain DLTs do security audits. And we obviously do testing kind of these use cases and particularly the private and provisioning features because they're not tested every day on mainnet and we've done a couple of those in the last couple of years. So it's, you know, those kinds of security requirements that you're thinking of and testing those network is something that at least we really think about a lot and making sure it's fit for, you know, production not just messing around in a POC because that's very important to us. That makes me feel very happy, yeah. I'll send you the reports of the security audits if you like. I guess and then the final thing that we really care about is disintermediation and that sounds like a big word but basically what I mean by that is effectively because we want this to be a peer-to-peer network. It's participants running the network, moving money between each other and the DLT being the true immutable kind of letter of those transactions. What we want to make sure is that all nodes are equal. So there is no... So we are completely effectively disintermediated. And if we had a single notary, like I said earlier in finality or in a node or anything like that then we're introducing single points of failure but we're also introducing the possibility of the network being compromised. So one of the key things with Bessu and the algorithm that we've got in IBFT is that all nodes are completely equal. So that's a really, really important part to us. So decentralization and disintermediation just move everything out there. And all of that stuff is really interesting because we've tried to build everything in that decentralized way so that we're not just using a DLT as a ledger because it's a database and that's great. It's actually getting it so that we're truly and utterly decentralized and that no one can really compromise the network. And that seems, I think even a couple of years ago I think you're right, it was just being used kind of as a registry, a lot of DLT use cases, particularly with enterprises and I think you all are leaders in the space of kind of thinking beyond that but I think we're gonna be seeing a lot more of that and kind of taking the real benefits of the blockchain not just here's a hash on a ledger that can say a transaction happened but really what's the value of it which is decentralization and having that ownership and that collaboration across competitors. You can't having all of those banks that you listed at the beginning working together is not always an easy feat and then having that trust in the technology as well as the use case itself. Yeah, trust is a key word here. We're building trust in not just the technology but also the participants between themselves as well where the banks didn't necessarily trust each other that much before. It is a very different way. Yes, totally like flipping business on its head. That's crazy, but very, very, very cool. I'd love to hear, oh, go ahead. There's just one final thing which I think is one of the killer reasons for picking Basu. So I just, the one that I really love is the fact that we partner with a company called Adara which is a consensus company as well and they've actually got precedent with using Basu with the banks, with central banks. They've run a project a few years ago called CoCo which is CoCo, which was with the South Africa National Bank and of course that sort of set a precedent really. So the central banks know of Basu and know what it is. So it's a really good client for us to start with. Yeah, it definitely, so that is actually a good point I should say. So there's CoCo with the South African Reserve Bank. There's the Bank of Thailand that also is, their central bank that's used as Basu and there are the Hong Kong Monetary Authority as a part of that. And then there are a few others that I can't remember if they're public or not. So, but it's actually very commonly used. So it's, I think sometimes people think with Basu they're like, it's, or I wonder, I'd love to kind of challenge other people but sometimes the feedback we get is, it's not, do I only use it for public chain or do I only use it for those use cases? And actually not at all. And even the CBDC use case is pretty, it's at least five or six central banks are using it right now, which is very, very cool. And Edd Hara is fantastic and very knowledgeable about the space too. Great, no, but I love the air so I know we only have 10 minutes left which is kind of crazy but I'll ask a couple more questions and then I'll leave more questions at the end. Reminder for everyone, please feel free to drop some questions in the Q&A. Happy to answer them in just a minute. But yeah, what, if there are any lessons learned in your selection process for your DLT of choice, anything like if someone was kind of at the beginning of their process, what would you say to them when they were choosing the DLT of their choice? Would it be run more POCs, go like think, what? Yeah, what are those, what's that kind of lessons learned? Yeah. I think for me, it's really understand your use case, right? So, like I said, for us, either the IBFC consensus algorithm works, disintermediation is important. So all of those reasons mean, and legal settlement finality, we had a good list of things that we needed to make sure we could meet beforehand. So it was actually a relatively easy process for us. It run POCs absolutely. I mean, actually, how do you get started with that? So you just download it and play with it. It's actually surprisingly easy to do. Even I could do it, which my team were quite surprised about, I think. So it's really, just get on with it. But POCs are really good. We, it was an easy choice for us with the president from Adara and the other CDBC projects, as you say. But I think really know your requirements, really understand what the key things you're looking for are. And actually, it'll be a pretty easy process to pick the right DLT from there. Yeah. I think that's actually, that's great feedback. Cause I always think, and sometimes, you know, I'm sure some people have half the requirements and know half of a DLT and they're trying to make it fit. And it's like, no, like you're right. That's like, if you have those requirements and are really, really locked down, that does make it really easy. And I don't see it always in the, at least some of the organizations I talk to, it's not always like that. So that's great feedback for everyone as they're kind of getting started. And then to your point, so we're at the Hyperledger Global Forum. This is Hyperledger Projects. Everything's open source. Here's my shameless plug that please go ahead and get started on Basu. And it is, you can, we actually have a brand new Basu Essentials training course on Linux Foundation's training site. So if you're deciding or thinking about what your DLT of choice is or want to get more familiar with it, there's a whole training course video where you get walk step by step of setting up a private network on it. And that will highly recommend those of you interested to give that a shot, because that's really, you know, very easy. As you said, I could do it. So, you know, definitely an easy way to go there. Or do we have any questions in the Q&A or chat? Looks like we have, if not, I can keep talking, but. Nothing is yet. All right. Then I guess I'd like to hear a little bit more about the privacy that you guys use. So you have, I imagine you use a private transaction manager to run privacy groups or is that correct? Like, let me know what, how do you guys set that up on your network? It's a really interesting point and actually one that's a lot of debate in the recent years with Fnality. Actually, from a DLT perspective and the actual ledger itself, we don't apply any kind of obfuscation at all. It's just a payment system, as I said at the beginning. And the point is, we don't want to apply obfuscation. It makes audit from regulators harder. It makes all sorts of things harder. And actually, because we're not, because we're a payment system and we're just recording payments, there's no third party data. So we don't get involved in AML or KYC or any of those things. And actually, the data on the network, we then protect using a commercial agreement or a legal agreement with the participants. We saw we don't want to implement any particular level of privacy there on the network. But from a private transactions perspective, we absolutely do want to make the participant banks some sort of private transactional, private messaging feature so that they can do deals on the side of the chain without recording it straight to the DLT and allow them to agree FX hops and all sorts of things can be done there so that they're talking to each other peer to peer. And there's no, again, it's all decentralized. So that's probably the next biggest thing for us on our list from a basic perspective. And indeed from the EEA as well. EEA is looking quite a lot of the private transaction stuff at the moment. So that's a key next step for us. I think we want to work on our use cases for private transactions and help drive that into the EEA and then with you guys at best here as well. Yeah, no, no, that's good. That's a great clarification too. Because I think sometimes everyone thinks you need all privacy everywhere in a private network. And really that's not necessarily the biggest value add. And I think that's really interesting. One point to mention to the audience if you guys are, I think I said privacy groups assuming everyone would know what that is. If you're familiar with private channels on fabric, for example, it's the same concept essentially of kind of on a permission network, you can assign a number of nodes that you want within a privacy group. And instead of having, and within that private network that group can agree, as Adam said, on FX credits, for example, or whatever it is. And then it will hash on the broader chain, but they won't know what the agreement was or what the information was that was agreed upon. So you kind of get that security and privacy. It looks like Arun, it looks like we have our first question, which is great. We have about four minutes left just saying that out loud to keep me on track, because I can talk all day. What are your thoughts on throughput in Beisu? Do you want to take that in or want me to take it first? I'll give you my perspective really quickly and then you can take it. I mean, so for us actually, throughput isn't a major issue because wholesale banking volumes are not that high. And because we're not going to have one big global network, we're going to have many closed private permission networks that interoperate one for each currency around the world. Actually, the transactions stay very low. So Grace, as you were saying earlier, effectively the IBFT, the kind of proof of authority algorithms, they're not necessarily particularly in high throughput, but if high throughput is what you need, then absolutely there are other algorithms, consensus algorithms that will push, I think, best of pretty hard, but then go to you to say what a pretty hard is. Yeah, I can put my finger in the air. No, so I think it's worth saying, public chain obviously for the proof of work, consensus mechanism when Beisu's running on Ethereum mainnet, it has the same exact throughput as any other Ethereum client. It's like what 12 to 14, I think, ish TPS on the Ethereum mainnet. But then within privacy, we have an article actually on the performance on Hyperledger from last year, but we can get to probably a few hundred TPS, but there's so many different ways to optimize it. And I'm sure people at the conference are already talking about layer two scalability and all the ways you can use rollups or other scaling options to really optimize for that. So I really don't think it's the drawback that it might have been a couple of years ago, for example. I think there's just so many ways to optimize for a use case, but that's a great question Arun. And then we got a question around comparing Beisu versus Go Quorum. Adam, I don't know if you wanna take that or you could start again and I'll finish. Pretty quick on that for me. I think the key there is that they are converging. Clients on the EEA course back, which is great. And hopefully we'll see networks where Quorum and Beisu can interoperate on the same network at some time in the future. I mean, they're based on effectively different technologies and they're based on very different licensing rules as well. So the key thing is to look at the licensing, I would say. Yeah, no, that's a great point. So maybe just kind of the quick facts. I think you're totally right, Adam. So currently my team actually works both on Go Quorum and Beisu and a big focus for both of them is interoperability, as he said, and thinking about hybrid networks and how we're working on those together. But there are some different features. So for example, Beisu is written in Java and Apache 2 licensed. And then, which is more of a permissive licensing, Go Quorum is written in Go and LGPLs licensed, which is a little different as well. So those are kind of the two different ones, but as you're right, a lot of the features and even today, so the different private transaction managers you can use are compatible with both. There is a BFT, I think like it's called QBFT, that is a consensus-begatism that we're working on, that work with both of them. So it is a very, a lot of the features are very interoperable and trying, but, and then I guess the one big difference that I am a little embarrassed I forgot, of course, is that Go Quorum doesn't run on Mainnet, Beisu runs on Mainnet and that's, if you're thinking of a Mainnet use case, Beisu would be the only choice of the two. And then yeah, so Mohan, you just asked this question and then if there's one more question, we'll take it, but then we'll wrap up here. So can Beisu work in private and public mode simultaneously? So no, or it depends what you're trying to do. There are ways like, and the team has been thinking about how you connect private privacy groups with public chain Ethereum. It doesn't, it's still in development is what I'd say. So there's something we think about at this point, but it's not, at this point, I wouldn't say it's ready for production, but there's definitely ways to kind of configure your network if that's a big requirement, but that's a good question. Any other questions? We'll give them just five seconds. Cool, okay, well with that, Adam, I wanna thank you very much for your time. Where could, if your audience is curious to reach out to you, where could they find you, would love to hear kind of, if they wanna hear more about your use case or your experiences or what's a good spot to find you? Yeah, thank you very much for the invite. It's been fun to chat, so thank you for that. If you're interested in more about finality or all the best use case for us, probably a good starting point is our website, finality.org. There's a lot of white papers and views from us on there, quite a lot on the use case, but also around the use of DLT and why we think decentralization is the right way to go. Otherwise, find me on LinkedIn. My LinkedIn profile is, I believe, on my profile for the forum, so feel free to reach out. Great, and everyone can do the same for me, as he said, but you can find me on, I'll put my email just in the chat, just in case, but as he said, in the forum, we're all here and we'll be around the next couple of days. We really appreciate you all tuning in and joining us and hearing a little bit about Beisu and CVDCs and finality, and I think it was a great session. So, Adam, thank you very much for your time. Thank you, guys, thanks very much. Have a good one.