 All right, thank you. Those who are joining in from Asia Pacific, I know it is late in your day, so we really appreciate you joining us. Fantastic. All right. Good day in Brazil. Barcelona. All right. We're gonna go ahead and get started. My name is Daniela Barbosa, for those of you who just joined us. Thank you for joining our webinar. Today's webinar topic is Blockchain in Europe, Advancements and Opportunities and Challenges. We have a fantastic panel of really experts in the field, working in various aspects of European blockchain projects that I'm very excited to announce. For those of you who are new to our Hyperledger webinars, I'm gonna take you through a couple of housekeeping, just to make sure that you understand how we operate our webinars and how to participate. And I do welcome you to join us for chats. There is some questions that you can also answer through. So let's go ahead and just do a couple of housekeeping rules for you. Hyperledger Foundation, for those who might be new in this year first webinar, we are a global community of open source developers and business leaders worldwide, who are really focused on blockchain and blockchain related technologies and how to implement them in our various, both public and private sector use cases. So we welcome everyone to our community. We're really committed to having a safe and welcoming community for all. And this also means the webinar. So please be respectful of one another. We do appreciate questions and hard questions and potentially some arguments, but we want to be respectful for one another. So we do have a Hyperledger Code of Contact that we also follow for these webinars, these virtual webinars, as well as all in-person events. So once again, all are welcome to the Hyperledger community and please be safe to one another. A couple of housekeeping rules, all Hyperledger meetings are held under our antitrust policy. The Linux Foundation meetings involves participation by industry competitors, and it's our intention to conduct all its activities in accordance with applicable antitrust and competition laws. If you ever have any question, please do just read our full policy available there in that short URL and would be happy to answer any questions that you have. Another point today's event is being recorded. It's also being live streamed on YouTube. And Tomas, if you can put the live stream URL into the chat, if you haven't already, feel free to share it with others that might be looking to join. And we will make the slides available for download after the event. Although I don't think we have slides today since we're having a panel discussion, but we will post the video on YouTube straight after the event as well. And if you have any questions, do put them onto the question and answer chat. Stay active, get involved. We will also have some, hopefully some opportunities. Raise your hand. If you're new to Zoom, there's a raise hand feature during the Q&A part we can call on you. Please go ahead and ask questions, queue them up in the Q&A. So there's a button in the middle of your screen, click the Q&A, ask your question and we'll get them through the event as well. And please, as I mentioned before, feel free to talk and comment. Please tell us if you haven't already where you're dialing in from today and we will monitor that chat as well. So I wanna first just give you an overview of what we want to dial into. As I mentioned, the Hyperlegic community is a global community. And today we're gonna delve into the latest trends and opportunities related to digital identity, central bank digital currencies and other important use cases where blockchain is really core to the solution. The participants today are going to learn from some of these leaders. We're gonna break the webinar into two parts. The first section will be a webinar that will have our associate members from the European Blockchain Association, the Digital Pound Foundation and a Digital Euro Association. All three are members of the Hyperlegic Foundation really helping us collaborate in the European market with a lot of the projects that are certainly going on there. So I'm looking forward to digging into it. Our second part of the session will be with Alastria and Ebsi. And it will really be about some of the implementations that we're seeing in the European Union and some of the advances and opportunities that they see as well. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Dingela Barbosa. I'm the executive director of the Hyperlegic Foundation. I've been here with the Hyperlegic Foundation since 2017 and really seen the changes and the adoption rate in Europe over the last few years really accelerate. So I'm very excited about today's panel discussion with the members of our foundation and our community as well. So I'd like to go ahead and Erwin, Claire and Conrad, if you can go ahead and turn on your videos and who's and Maxine, if you can turn off your videos for this part of the session, we'll get you back on. And I want to, I'm gonna go ahead and stop sharing. Let's see if I can do that. Here you go. And you should be able to now see us all. And let's go ahead and introduce ourselves. If the three of you can give a little introduction, introduce yourself, the organization and what your mission's goals are. We have a very global audience who might not be aware of what your associations and foundations are working on. So Erwin, do you wanna go ahead and get started? Sure, thank you. First of all, happy to be here and representing the EBA in this webinar. So my name is Erwin Valder. I'm the head of policy at the European Blockchain Association. I'm a former regulator. I work with the European Commission and European Central Bank. At the EBA, I basically lead research and advocacy between the Web3 community, the private sector and public sector institutions, including obviously EU institutions. The EBA, we're structured as a semi decentralized autonomous organization that our governance decisions are driven by snapshot voting, but then we also have a certain number of working groups that cut across everything from SSI and digital identity to data governance, tokenization entities, staking. And my job or my day-to-day activities really revolve around coordinating those initiatives across our working groups, whenever there are, let's say, relevant policy files that are being developed and discussed at EU level. And then it's my job to basically take that back and then coordinate with our working groups in terms of what can we do when it comes to research, what can we do when it comes to advocacy and then how can we amplify that message obviously through our channels. And I think that it's exceptional that Europe is such a growing blockchain community and that we have some regulatory clarity obviously in place right now and I'll get to that later, but it really does establish a floor underneath the industry. And I think that in this time when, let's say that's not the same everywhere, it does give us some confidence that Europe is progressing in the right direction. Indeed, indeed. Thank you, Erwin. And we're looking forward to digging a little bit deeper into that regulatory landscape, which I know a lot of people are very interested in worldwide as well. So, wonderful. Thank you. Claire, if you can do the same, introduce yourself and give us a little bit of a review of the organization. Yeah, sure. Thank you. Hi there. My name's Claire Comby. I'm the operations and governance lead at the Digital Pound Foundation. I'm also co-founder and chief risk officer for an organization called One Step Financial and we design programmable payment platforms focusing on mass payouts such as refunds incentives, payments to temporary workers and things like that, all using new forms of digital money. So I also bring with me kind of the risk experience and business management experience as well. However, with my Digital Pound Foundation hat on, we're a UK nonprofit organization and we are advocating for the development of a well-designed Digital Pound. Now that might be a CBDC, but also we're looking at privately issued forms of digital money as well, essentially with the goal of making sure that any new forms of digital money are well thought through. So whether that be from a privacy perspective, interoperability, financial inclusion, how the new forms of money align with the existing payments architecture, there's lots and lots of avenues and challenges that do need to be explored and analyzed. Within the Digital Pound Foundation, we run several working groups focusing on topics exactly as I've just described, but equally very, very active in the policy, legal and regulatory space. So we work closely with policymakers seeking to influence regulators, really with a view to making sure that the challenges are well understood and that we can support the UK as they continue to be a leader in innovation relating to kind of FinTechs and new forms of money. Our members consist of a variety of institutional members. We do also have some individual expert members as well, but through a variety of discussions, debates, events like this, webinars, roundtables and things like that, we really want to have a strong voice to be able to influence and educate in all things relating to CBDCs and new forms of digital money. Excellent, great, thank you, Claire. We definitely want to hear more about the payments landscape and what you're seeing there in the UK and worldwide as well, excellent. Conrad, over to you, tell us a little bit about the Digital Euro Association and your role there. Sure, my name is Conrad Croft. I'm Executive Director at the Digital Euro Association and we're the largest independent association in Europe dedicated to fostering understanding around and shaping the discourse around digital currencies, especially central bank digital currencies as well as stable coins denominated in the Euro. We focus on promoting knowledge exchange and education about digital money and fostering collaborations between our multidisciplinary global community of digital money enthusiasts and experts. Interestingly enough, Claire is one of them. And towards the public good, ultimately, we want to ensure that digital money goes towards the public good and that no one is disadvantaged as a result of the implementation of digital money. Of course, like Claire mentioned, this includes topics such as privacy, offline payments, just a well-considered CWDC such that no one is disadvantaged like I mentioned earlier and that the financial system's integrity and robustness and resilience is in harms rather than diminished. We have working groups that consist of various stakeholders as well as experts. And we focus on matters such as machine-to-machine payments for instance, working groups on tokenized commercial bank money and others. We also form part of a very integral part of the digital Euro project, which is stakeholder engagement. And we are regular contributors towards the civil society seminars. We also host events such as the Digital Euro Conference which we just had in March and we are having another one in February next year. It's a pleasure to be here and I'm looking forward to discussions. Excellent. I think what I heard and I think hopefully the audience heard as well is that, here's three groups working uniquely in the market for your mission and goals and your specific use cases, but that there's a lot of overlap, right? There's a lot of overlap in this work and I really, I love hearing the collaboration, right? The collaboration between the two, the different organizations. And maybe at the end we can get by a little bit into, as individuals and as private sector that is interested in learning more, how do they participate in the different working groups and the different organizations effectively, right? Without really being overwhelmed with a lot of work. So hopefully we'll target on that as well. Claire, I'm gonna go over to you and see if you can tell us a little bit about blockchain in the payments landscape and what are the things specific to blockchain and the technology of blockchain that you believe is gonna be part of the success stories of this new form of digital money that we're all working towards? Yeah, sure. I mean, I think it's fascinating and actually all I see is opportunity really and the more time that we spend through the Digital Pound Foundation looking at use cases and what these new forms of digital money can achieve within the payment landscape, the more it becomes more and more difficult to actually think, is there any other way to go other than to be looking at these new forms of digital money? Of course, cryptocurrencies have shown us that there is the demand for new forms of money. And when you look at the existing payment architectures in the UK, for example, what we have here is kind of a legacy infrastructure that isn't necessarily well designed and well suited for the digital world as we know it today. And when you look at cryptocurrencies and kind of their underlying blockchain DLT architecture and the benefits that can be realized from that in terms of efficiencies, financial inclusion and programmability as well. I'll come to that shortly. It really does strike me that now is the time to be looking at a different way of doing things. The technology is there and any efforts that are taken to really explore the differences that these new technologies can make to money and payments as we know them today is in my view, efforts well spent particularly where we're looking at countries that want to be at the forefront of fintech development. This has to be the way to go. And when we think about what blockchain can bring to payments and money as we know them today the ability to align data and money on the same platform eliminates intermediaries, introduce programmability. So all of a sudden you have money that not only is just the transfer of a value from A to B it can do something smarter than that. And the whole concept of a transaction being more than just a payment really becomes quite exciting and compelling. So when I talk about programmability I'm not by the way talking about programmable money where we're talking about kind of controlling what people can spend their money on. What I'm talking about is programmable payments where you can now embed rules and conditions into the release of particular payments. So for example, if you were to have migrant workers looking for immediate payment upon completion of a task you validate that the task has been completed and within the same platform the funds can be released and payments can be received instantly. You know, real kind of use case benefits here and where we have small micro payments that going through the traditional payments architecture are actually really clunky operationally burdensome potentially even more expensive actually than the amount of money that's being transferred by eliminating intermediaries and using a blockchain based platform. All of a sudden there are efficiencies that can be realized here that can make a difference not only to the user but also to those people wishing to make the payments government grant disbursements for example any kind of small clunky payment there are real opportunities here for efficiencies. And when we look at programmability we're talking now about people having control of their money making sure that it's only released when certain criteria are met a more robust audit trail making sure that the recipient is indeed the correct recipient. There are so many opportunities here but of course we have to make sure that any new forms of digital money are well designed and so that they have the appropriate level of security of trust, privacy, digital identity all these things that really matter to the user have to be well thought through because people are only going to use these new forms of money if they have trust in them. You know, and that's essentially what the Digital Pound Foundation is all about is that balance of innovation and excitement about what could be achieved whilst making sure that this is a safe reliable stable form of money that is suitable for the general public. Indeed. You know, it's great to hear from a technology perspective there's lots of different options and different approaches but the technology is there it's been proven, you know in ourselves in the Hyperledger Foundation we have various projects that are being used in some of these projects worldwide including Hyperledger Fabric and Hyperledger Bezu and Hyperledger Edoha. So the technology is there the community is there and it's really great to see for someone like myself who's been, you know, building these technologies and working with the community over the last seven years not seeing the application discussions and implementations going forward as well. Conrad, maybe you can speak a bit to some of the questions around privacy and confidentiality Claire hit upon, you know in her discussion point there. Yeah, sure, I'd be happy to touch on that and give it a go. Well, of course, we know that privacy around CBDCs has become quite a hot topic even going as far as being a political touch point now especially in the US and other places we've seen how people have perhaps misunderstood what's going on with regards to privacy and CBDCs. I do want to just make this statement and say that CBDCs are a payment option they are a complement to cash and not a payment obligation. I think a lot of people are under the impression that CBDCs will be obligatory in terms of how you pay they will exist in complement to other payment methods such that are like cash for instance and other digital forms of private payments. Obviously, we at DEA are strong advocates for privacy guarantees by default. We understand there's a natural tension between privacy guarantees as well as AML and CFT compliance and this has been a longstanding tension that's existed. Technology is available to perhaps resolve some of these conflicts and if we have a look at what the ECB has basically spoken about with regards to privacy they do acknowledge that privacy based on the first public consultation on the digital euro it was actually noted that privacy was number one or chief among the concerns of respondents and I think the ECB has listened to that as well as the calls of many institutions such as ourselves and they understand that privacy exists on the spectrum that's from fully anonymous payments similar to what we have as cash these days and then fully transparent to the central bank as it were. The baseline application at present for digital payments are that some sort of intermediary has if you're gonna pay from a digital perspective has access to your KYC data or at least the transaction data, these types of things. So the ECB has explored something called the tiered approach to privacy which is one that's currently being investigated. This is basically means that where a low value transactions would attract high levels of privacy while high value transactions will be afforded lower levels of privacy and that's because of the risk associated with the value of payments in that regard. They're also having a look at privacy or very high levels of privacy for peer to peer payments for offline peer to peer payments rather where for instance, you'd be able to pay digitally we have to be in close proximity the payer and pay he both have to be in close proximity and they will also be transaction values that are quite minimal. Again, the risk is quite low here but I mean, this is another value add of CBDCs for instance the ability to have digital offline private payments which is currently not something that is widely available at least to my knowledge and cause a lot of people ask what are the benefits of CBDCs for instance that being one I just wanted to throw that out there and then also our working group recently issued a paper on privacy and CBDCs you can check it out on our website and we do explore technologies such as those using DLT or popularized by DLT such as zero knowledge proofs and then also hardware solutions like trusted encryption environments and then we also make a few policy recommendations with regards to the monitoring of how data is utilized and also enforcing a strong regulatory regime to penalize any privacy violations that do take place because we do know that the promise of CBDC is one that's smoother transaction flows across borders. How does this, what does this mean for data or payments traversing from a high regulatory environment to a low or from a low to a high privacy guaranteeing or respecting environment. So these are some of the ways in which technology such as zero knowledge proofs for instance can really strengthen and enhance the privacy guarantees even within CBDCs. Indeed, indeed. I think education down to the individual level the consumer level is so important here and there's some great work across the three organizations lots of great papers, lots of presentations and stuff that I do think needs to be at a high level across the world here are the basic principles of it. So thank you all for putting that information together and out there as well. Irwin, one of the things obviously and Conrad and Claire hit upon this is kind of the regulatory requirements and how digital currencies are going to be regulated in the world, but it's more also digital assets and a lot of the digitalization of tokens worldwide. Can you tell us a little bit about the landscape that's currently evolving in Europe around blockchain and what you think this will have adoption in Europe and worldwide? How are the rest of the world going to follow through with you? Okay, so I guess to start, be good to give an overview of perhaps the digital finance package and then we can get into things like into my longer regulations and so on. So Europe adopted the digital finance package in iterative stages, started with the Digital Operational Resilience Act which essentially kind of brings into this ICT third party risk management, sets of requirements for risk manager rule books for financial institutions, credit institutions and also there's a carve out section there for crypto asset service providers, which is more so on the light touch side, however still definitely applicable. And you have the DLT pilot regime which essentially allows multilateral trading facilities and central securities depositories the ability to test DLT market infrastructures, DLT trading and settlement systems and DLT based settlement systems within a six year period without having to worry about tripping up on regulations under markets and financial instruments, the regulation the directive and for example, the CSDR and then the big one obviously for everybody's most excited about is the markets in crypto assets, the regulation which is now making its way actually I think it has already made its way through the Council of the European Union and should be adopted soon and published in the official journal and what Mika does essentially, I mean, it's a man piece of legislation. So it comprises nine titles, six annexes, like it's over 500 pages long and essentially covers six main things. So transparency and disclosure requirements for the issuance, the offering to the public and admission of trading of crypto assets to crypto asset trading platforms, for example, it has authorization, authorization, supervision requirements for crypto asset service providers and for the issuers of stable coins to find this asset reference tokens and also for e-money tokens. It has requirements for the operation and part of the operation organization and governance of issuers, protections on holders of crypto assets that are also connected to the issuance and offering and the public admission of those crypto assets and their trading protections for the clients of crypto assets and then also requirements to prevent insider dealing, market abuse and market manipulation. The big chunk of Mika aside from establishing definitions for crypto assets, let's say requirements for crypto asset service providers is really this asset reference token and e-money token regulation. So that's entitled three, title four, I titled two, title three and title four of Mika. Now, they establish across the board requirements for crypto asset issuers, the appropriating for asset reference token issuers and e-money token issuers and that they have to be established legal persons and produce a white paper. So what that doesn't do, for example, is let's say I'm maker and I want to issue dye, that's exactly covered under Mika because we're talking about asset reference tokens that reference another asset, right? And then also significant arts, for example, like US DC or something like that. And the rationale behind the stable coin regulations in Europe really came as a reflexive move after Facebook published its ideas on Libra, right? And this was kind of the catalyst also for a lot of the global action around central bank digital currencies in that the argument was, well, if you have Facebook with its billions of users and it issues its own currency, it would be the largest currency area in the world, right? So obviously from a government perspective, these regulations, and they're very strict, I have to admit, when it comes to stable coins in Europe, they are robust and they can for a large supervisory authority is in ECB, ESMA and the EVA, but they're done so in a way that obviously has to kind of square with what the ECB does in terms of monetary policy. And then you have DeFi, which is technically out of scope. However, within the anti-money laundering regulations, you know, you have this argument that for example, NFT service providers are obliged entities, even though for example, NFTs also are out of scope, should be out of scope when it comes to Mika or the Union Commission in the series. The argument there, and I find it a little confusing, it's like, okay, for example, if I'm an open sea, and I'm an NFT service provider, and then I have, I'm facilitating the transfer of NFTs, but the actual transfer of those NFTs is done P2P through Wyvern Protocol. So it's not actually done by me as open sea, it's done through the P2P network. And then you get into this abstraction when it comes to DeFi in between, what happens at the protocol layer, where like the economic value changes, and then what happens at the interface and the application layer where the users are aggregated. And this is something that regulators are still kind of squaring their heads over. And you've had a lot of public consultations on this regard, actually one by Francis ACPR, which we are currently preparing a reply to along with some other associations here in Europe. And the entire concept of this essentially is how do we look at developer liability? How do we look at product licensing standards? How do we look at DAOs from legal perspective and legal standing for DAOs? How do we look at algorithmic stable coins? And then what are the benefits or the drawbacks of public permissionals, blockchains versus permission blockchains versus the use for consortium, et cetera. So this is kind of the way that the regulation is slowly developing. Now we have about 18 months after Mika enters into force in which the commission should come with some sort of assessment study or report with regards to decentralized finance. However, that is still currently obviously being discussed internally. And aside from that, I mean Mika establishes, like I said before, a floor on the regulatory environment in Europe. And there's certain areas right now, and I'm not gonna name them, but we all know who they are where digital assets are coming under fire from a regulation by enforcement approach, which I mean is really akin to carpet bombing the industry. It doesn't provide the necessary confidence for the space. And even if rules might air on the side of caution, they still do provide a certain modicum of workability, especially for companies that have product suites that are kind of not exactly aligning what you see in traditional finance in that, for example, a traditional exchange in a triad-5 sense is not exactly how an exchange in itself operates in crypto and in the C5 space. And when you get the DeFi, this problem is compounded at infinity, right? So it becomes necessary then to provide that regulatory architecture as a basic principle. And Europe is honestly the largest advanced economy to do so in the world. So this is a manned piece of work that has gone and Nika has been underway for about five years now. So it's not like it happened overnight. And we've got a lot of ups and downs, but I do also believe that the space would better for it. Time will tell as to whether we have now an 80 flux of applicants for crypto-assessor's flight licenses under jurisdictions and whether you're gonna see an exodus in the brain drain. I know that some major players also in the US have been in UAE recently, for example. So you have the idea that regulatory arbitrage and regulatory shopping is a very real concern when you have companies that operate with economies of scale. And I think that Europe could be well positioned to take advantage of that. Right, right, yeah. And it's definitely interesting. I'm sure we can deep dive for hours and hours. What we wanted to do today is make sure that our hyperledger community, which is really a developer, an open source developer community, building the tools that are going to power a lot of these new systems, is aware of where the work is being done and how they can get involved. So before we go off to the next panel, Claire, Conrad, and then Erwin, if you can give us just a little bit where people go to get involved and learn more about the work that you're doing. Claire? Yeah, so from a Digital Pound Foundation perspective, we are member-led. If you're interested in joining us as a member, then just look on our website, digitalpoundfoundation.com, or of course, contact me directly. We do also run a variety of webinars and events. Obviously, you don't need to be a member to join. And we publish a variety of written work as well. So again, if you go to the website, you can subscribe, write a newsletter, and keep up to date that way. Conrad? Great. Similar to Claire and the Digital Pound Foundation, you can find us on the website at Digital Euro Association. Just Google it and you'll find us. We're also member-led. So we would always welcome institutions joining us. You can also join us as a fellow or expert to learn about digital money and the future of digital money. And have a look at, or have a look out for our thesis awards, which is being hosted tonight, and then also the Digital Euro Conference, which will be held early next year. And check out all of our content on YouTube as well. And Erwin? And similar to both Claire and Conrad, you can find us at the European Blockchain Association.org. We also have, as I mentioned before, several working groups that you can get involved in, either as a member or a volunteer organization or as an independent expert. You can also reach out to me personally on LinkedIn or find us on LinkedIn and on Twitter. Shoot us a message. Otherwise, the information is on our website as regards to our current initiatives. And we are always looking to collaborate with industry partners with regards to research. We will have an announcement about some ongoing research in the coming weeks with regards to staking, just to give you an idea where the direction of travel is currently going on that front. But I'm always happy to have this discussion and I look forward to the outreach. Fantastic. Well, thank you all for joining us. There's a lot of great work on all these websites and lots of things to spend very long weekends reading, which I very often do. So thank you all for all the work that you do and support of the community. I'm gonna go ahead and if you can turn off your videos and have Maxine and who's joined the video, please go ahead. If you have questions for any of those panelists, please go ahead and put it in the Q&A box. And Conrad, Erwin and Claire, if you can answer some questions that might come in, that would be great as well. So let's go on to the next part of our discussion. I said, as I said when I introed, we really just wanna do an introduction where these organizations, how these organizations are working. So we hope that you found that valuable and we'll post additional links to after the webinar as well. The next panel is really going to be focusing specifically on two organizations in Europe. One is EPC and the other is Alastria. And you, yeah, I'm gonna go ahead and let you, Maxine, maybe you can go first. Yes, perfect. Well, I mean, perhaps the first little technicality that I have to rectify is that EPC isn't an organization in and of itself. So I work for the European Commission and I work in the Director General of Informatics. So DG Digit. So I'm not involved in digital policymaking. All of the regulatory matters that were discussed by our previous panelists is not something I'm working on. But what I am working on with a group of colleagues and a large team is the implementation of the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure, which is actually a project that is pioneered by the European Commission with, together with an association of member countries of the European Union and a few that are European, but not part of the EU, which we call the European Blockchain Partnership. So with all of that said, EPC is actually, well, it's in the name, European Blockchain Services Infrastructure. And it started out in 2018 as a blockchain innovation project, an attempt of the government to get into the technological innovation landscape. It has since evolved a lot. So obviously a big part of what we do is enable the orchestration of blockchain public permissions networks, not permission less, very important for the discussion. And that's one big part of what we do, providing this infrastructure that is hosted by member states of the European Union and not by the commission itself. But a large part of what we actually do, and this relates into discussion, I believe you want to have, is facilitate the implementation of European-wide use cases and the development of the ecosystems that can actually adopt the use cases using blockchain. So we develop a lot of specifications mostly and we work with business, we work with organizations at governmental level, private level, in order to define how blockchain could be used and what is a credible role for an institution like the commission or the European Union when it comes to regulating or working with innovative technologies. Excellent, great, thank you. Yeah, and the work that you've been doing, you said since 2018, I mean, obviously a lot of the technologists were looking at blockchain even prior to that, I think is one of the earliest around the globe, honestly, in doing these explorations. And hopefully we'll have an opportunity to dig a little bit into your choices as well. Excellent. All right, who's, do you want to go next? Okay, thank you. So, well, in order to explain what I'm doing right now, okay, I would say that in 1985, I started collaborating with many, many other people in building the retail banking infrastructure, which was needed, remember, no internet at that time, and retail banking for all the devices in contact with the customers and then of course, all the payments, the payment infrastructure of the world, because I was in IBM by the way, okay? And then those things needed some things which were critical, one is infrastructure, actually communication networks and how to exchange information between the different entities, and of course, identity. Now I'm doing the same, basically, but now this is the next step of infrastructure. So in Alastria, when we started, we started because we thought blockchain will change the world, but we were missing an infrastructure with some properties, okay? Which is the public permission model, something like the public data networks, then you had Ethereum and another network which are very good for some use cases and very bad for some other use cases. So for the real economy, we needed a different type of infrastructure, so we were focusing on the infrastructure and then of course on the identity. So we started in 1917 before FC was created, but then incredibly, well, and fortunately, the European Commission started this initiative and then, well, FC is the framework. This is something that doesn't exist anywhere in the world, is a pioneer, but in Alastria, we are just fans of FC. We are hoping FC is put in production and successful because we need this for implementing all the use cases that we need and also an infrastructure at the national level which complements the infrastructure at the pan European for cross-border services. We need also infrastructure for local services. I mean, in Spain, you have 8,000 local governments, you have, I don't know how many, hundreds of thousands of businesses and then customers. So in order to get capillarity, we need something like the internet. It's a network of networks, okay? And it all started with different networks, especially in Europe in 72, which were not talking to each other. There was not a framework for trust. There was not a common thing or a common way to do this and this fragmentation was horrible, okay? Now, thanks to FC, I think this is not going to happen in Europe with the blockchain space. And I think FC is going to structure the global framework. So then all the local initiatives, the national initiatives, for example, the one in Spain, are going to be interoperable with FC and then just adding value to FC and then being able to have the capillarity which is needed for all the society and the use cases. Basically, by the way, we are focused, well, Alastria is a big organization, is 500 members and so on. So there are many different ways of thinking. My idea, I am focused right now because I've been 37 years in banking, in payments and so on. But in order to pay, payments are very good only if people have money to pay and only if there are some goods to pay, okay? So payments is not, for me, the most important thing in the society. The most important thing is the people, okay? So they have money. You have an inclusive society. There is things to eat, health, everything and then you can pay. So payment is an instrument, it's not the objective, okay? And I am focused on what I think is important for me right now. So who's, and I think so, the interoperability story is an important one, right? And we agree FC's leadership in that is gonna be quite helpful for the rest of the local infrastructure. Tell me a little bit about the use cases that you're seeing currently being implemented or being discussed for Elastria. I just spent a day recently with some government officials talking about blockchain, the not crypto blockchain use cases. And a lot of these use cases, they're just not aware, right? They're like, oh, I didn't know blockchain did that, right? Or we would be able to run credentialing would be able to run these kinds of use cases. So tell us a little bit about in Spain, what Elastria is seeing, what kind of companies and organizations are coming to the table to use Elastria for. Okay, good. So first the networks are not operated or owned by the Elastria Association. Elastria Association as a legal entity is just a coordination entity. The network doesn't belong to anybody. So it's operated collaboratively by everybody that wants to participate. It is open, whatever is collaboration. So it's like Ethereum, but with identities, okay? Because by the way, you cannot and this is the first use case because if you want something which is a common good, it's inclusive and should be decentralized and it's scarce, it's not infinite, then you need identities. Anonymous things don't work for this, okay? And then you have a, you need a governance model which is, in order to be inclusive, is kind of based just on economic incentives. So if you want financial use cases, okay, that's fantastic. But what we are seeing in the networks of Elastria are what I call notarization or traceability. So you have two types of use cases in blockchain. Let's say assets, digital assets in the blockchain like cryptocurrencies or tokenization or whatever. And then you have traceability. So you have notarization. You have to prove the existence of something which exists outside. In the real economy, the most important use cases are just the traceability and identity for example. Identity cannot be tokenized. Identity cannot be put in an NFT because you don't sell your identity, okay? You don't have a secondary market for those things. So diplomas, diplomas cannot be tokenized. They have to be truthful. So you need very file credentials. So very file credentials are the things that we see in many use cases because they prove or they state something about something that exists outside. So the main use cases we are seeing is traceability of food. For example, there is a big company tracing HAM, okay? HAM is a very good product from Spain at this time in the Elastria network. Those use cases are especially in the sense that you don't have tokens, you don't have digital assets. Interoperability is easier because you can say the same thing about the car. You can say this in many different places, okay? Because you only have to prove that this is the owner of this guy and whatever. You don't need tokenization. So for the refile credentials, for truss frameworks, okay? Truss frameworks are a critical foundation of the economy. So truss frameworks need a lot of change just for the hyper-replication, the robustness, the transparency and so on, but you don't transact. So what we are seeing are use cases that do not require transacting. It's just the proof of the existence of something in the past. Could I perhaps jump in here and zoom out because what you're saying also is gonna touch upon a point that I really wanted to make. But to zoom out a little bit, because I'm not sure how familiar all our participants are with the architecture of EPC as it stands currently and what you've described, which is the verifiable credentials, information sharing pattern. So if you were to think about what EPC is today, obviously we are developing a number of use cases that Jesus was mentioning, but those don't have mature specifications that we have published. We always, everything that we feel is mature enough to be shared with the world. We publish, it's open on our website, everything can be accessed. All of our specifications are there that we are happy to share because we believe that they work and they've been tested with users. So what we have currently, what we consider to be mature in terms of use cases is, first of all, we have the infrastructure. So we have a blockchain network that is public permissioned, permissioned in the sense that the privilege to write is only granted. So our smart contracts are not open. You can't just build a decentralized app on EPC. The privilege to write is only granted to certain authorized entities and I will get into that in a moment. Also permissioned in the sense that not just anyone can operate a node, we developed a software package that is open source that is based on hyperledger Bezu. So it's a kind of, you know, it's a kind of Ethereum, but we have our own blockchain network, our interpretation, our own protocols and we distribute that software package. People are free to use it, set up any network that they want on their own, but to peer with the other nodes in the EPC network, we do KYC and typically it's only government or proto-governmental entities that are able to host them because of our security requirements. So that's the permission part. It's public because read access is open to everyone, but read access again is via APIs. So it's not just that you and I could, I mean, you could, it would not be extremely pleasant. You and I could just look at the ledger and look on a block explorer and just read information on there. So that is one part of what we do, orchestrating that network. Currently we don't have a production network. We have a pilot network that pretty much is production grade and that pilot network is used to deploy test versions of the major use case that we have, which is called verifiable credentials. And verifiable credentials is, well, if you refer just to the name, it's actually just a data model and we built a profile on top of it. But fundamentally it's a data sharing pattern. You have a lot of information sharing patterns. Some of them are machine to machine, it's like a four corner model. The verifiable credentials exchange pattern is also what some people think about when they think about self sovereign information exchange where the holder of information that keeps all the claims, which you've described very well, the claims can be pertaining to your identity, to your achievements, with some people also call attestations in some fields. You know, when we discuss sold out tokens, you can also be expressed as attestations. So people hold their credentials and they hold them off chain. But then that invites a couple of questions. Who issues the credentials? And when the credentials are presented to someone, how can the verifier be certain of the origin of the credentials? And this is what we use the blockchain for at this time. And the reason we do this is because we realize that actually blockchain for all its hype and how exciting the technology was, immutability is really bad for a lot of things. It's simply just bad for a lot of human interactions and for a lot of information sharing patterns. But having a chronological append only record of information is good for that cannot be amended is in the case of verifiable credentials, keeping a registry of accredited organizations that are mandated to issue something. And I will illustrate this with an example and then maybe, Jesus, you want to jump in. So it's really simple. The example is, for example, use finished studying at a university. You want to collect your master's diploma instead of a signed PDF, an electronically signed PDF or a piece of paper with a stamp. You will request that diploma in a new format for verifiable credentials, store it on a digital wallet. The storage is local and only you can access it. It is not on chain. And when you receive that verifiable credential from the issuer, you're then free to present it to a verifier like an employer who can then check its authenticity. And the check of the authenticity happens by contacting the blockchain ledger. And by checking if the issuer that issued this credential had is indeed accredited and if that's accreditation is present on chain and if at the time of signature, the key that was used to sign was valid. Simplifying greatly. And so I actually saw a very interesting question in the Q and A which is, and ultimately the blockchain becomes just another intermediary. And in this particular pattern, it does but not in the sense that we understand, like, you know, so what you have here is a pattern where issuers and verifiers don't talk to each other anymore. The holder of the data presents his or her or their data and any part of it that they judge necessary to make the claim that they want. They don't need to show all of their information at once. They have absolute discretion on what they choose to show to whom but there still needs to be a system that allows for whoever has shown information to verify a claim. The old way to do it is to call home. So you phone home, you call the issuer and you check. Did this person study at your university? That is privacy breaking, you know, in theory that creates correlation. The other way is to put something in between the issuer and the verifier. And there you can choose to put a centralized solution or you can choose to put a decentralized solution. And for a bunch of reason, we think that blockchain is good for this kind of decentralized verification infrastructure. It's more resilient, it's privacy preserving, it doesn't have a lot of the possible problems that a centralized gateway would have. So that is an essence where EPC is at right now. We believe that the role of government in this instance is to anticipate on some of the future problems when it comes to information, to avoid more centralization, whether it be by the market or, and again, this is not a policy statement, but we believe in EPC the decentralization is better, both in the private sector and the public sector. And to like have some level of standardization because it isn't actually easy and simple for new technologies to take off. So you need a lot of parts of the marketing. Issures, verifiers, need wallet providers, all of these have to build new capabilities. So what we do is we try to bring them together in our pilot program. I hope that that was clear and adds to the conversation. Yeah, that's actually a fantastic and a very important distinction that I think a lot of people on both sides of the public and permission blockchain theory world don't understand that how these infrastructures like EPC are being in the last year are being built as well. Hey, who's do you wanna add? No, I wanted to say that again, people trying to be extremely. So if you are saying that this is not good for something then you are against something. No, those are complementary, okay? So this type of network, the public permission have a role in the economy, okay? And other networks have another role. So there's nothing which serves or can solve all the problems in the world, okay? Nothing, not even Bitcoin, okay? So we need for some problems with half a specific problems right now with traditional technology, blockchain is something that I never saw in my 40 years in banking. So building this type of things with a blockchain is an incredible and powerful tool and then the pan-European, by the way, we are also in Europe, okay? So FC, for example, and this is my opinion, okay? FC is much more decentralized than Ethereum or Bitcoin, okay? In my definition of decentralization. So I need, because we are in a democracy, okay? So it may not be perfect, but this is much better than just trusting on some Chinese guys running funny things there, okay? For me, so the decentralization level of FC right now is not at the maximum peak. I hope it evolves with more participation but right now it's starting. So I accept this, for example, in Alaska because we are not the commission and we are private sector, our level of risk that we assume can be higher in Alaska. Anybody can participate. I mean, if you are a legal business or a legal entity in Europe, you can enter into the network and you can operate a validator if you comply with some operational policies. This cannot be done in FC for very good reasons. But in Alaska we are assuming the risk and the network that we are going to build in Spain, okay, is going to be based also on this model. So it's something like the internet. I mean, if you are a provider of internet connection, you can access, but then it's decentralized. And the only way to have a real infrastructure which is for the real economy is like FC is building. And we are going to adopt anything coming from FC. We are going to adopt in all the other networks for interoperability. But this is something that the people on the other side don't understand. They think that we are just building this for any other use case in the world and that Ethereum or the public anonymous networks are useless. No, I'm sorry, but for some use cases we need what FC is doing, especially when we need an inclusive society, okay? We have to service all the 500 million citizens in the European Union, not just a given a small percentage and we need the real economy use cases. Transability, food, energy, everything. I mean, we need to make efficient the provision of services from the public administrations, okay? And this is FC focusing on the cross border. Cross border things are the most difficult thing. In Spain, we have 19 regional communities which have a lot of power, okay? And this is good because the closer, the more power you have, if you are closer to the citizens, the better for the citizens. But then the coordination is a problem. So we want the best of two worlds. Autonomous entities operating as efficiently as if it were just a single centralized entity which in Europe is impossible and Spain is also impossible and it's not good, okay? So we want the best of both worlds, the centralization and close proximity and then control. That's FC and the other networks. And then of course for financial markets or financial applications or other type of applications, you need different infrastructure. Well, that's the world is like that. Excellent. I know we're at the top of the hour now and thank you for those who've been asking questions and answers. I think we could probably go on for another hour on this topic alone around why blockchain and how blockchain specific for these use cases. Because I do think, as I mentioned before that a lot of people just don't understand the kind of use cases and why blockchain and even just the recent removal of section 11 from the ADS around removing electronic ledgers as a requirement as a trust service. And there's the optionality that people should have and implementations should have about what's right for their citizens and for the use cases that they want to address as well. So any closing remarks, Maxine and then over to you who's and then we'll go ahead and close out for the day. Just a little, I'm sorry, Maxine. Oh, no, no, no, please go ahead. No, I was going to say that that's again my opinion. I mean, when I saw this in the regulation that it was included, I mean, the fact that electronic ledgers, I said, okay, I don't know why, but it is there, it's good. When it was removed, I said, okay, I don't care because at the end, okay, imagine that you have a very foul credential, which is a diploma, very silly example, but this is everywhere, a diploma. And you receive, you are an employer and you want to check the digital signature and you want to check that it was issued by a public university in Europe, which is authorized to issue medical doctor diplomas. How do you do this today? Impossible, there is not a single database. Well, I give you the answer. You put all the public universities in the FC blockchain and by the way, who is adding and removing universities? Well, each government. I mean, there is no one single entity in the European Commission managing all the universities. So when you have a decentralized public administration, like we have in Europe, okay, and in the countries, you need the blockchain to manage the trust frameworks. So the verifiers of very foul credentials, which are coming, okay, with the European digital identity, I mean, we need one place to look for because otherwise you will have to go to the repository for Spain, for Spanish universities. The repository in Germany, the repository in France, that's a nightmare and all the maintenance. So just having one trust framework for these things is an incredible value. And we are going to see this when the regulation is going to be implemented, but the regulation doesn't require the ledger. I don't care. They are going there because for efficiency, okay? Excellent. Maxine? I'll just say that, you know, our first hand experience in FC is that when it comes to working with a innovative technology, it's really easy to get stars in your eyes and to almost get overwhelmed by the potential. The real hard work is in working with people who have a real business problem that they really need to solve. And we think that we found something where we can bring real value. I invite everyone who is involved in these kinds of technologies to always think about what is, where is it that I can bring value and to not try to be almost totalitarian in the way that they try to approach it? Because that's the biggest lesson that we've got from our project, the most valuable one, which is listen to people, make them participate in the design of the system and try to understand what it is that they really need. That's fantastic advice. And, you know, it's great to be able to talk about it from experience, right? Because you've been at it for a while. So thank you, Maxine. Thank you. Daniela, sorry. Did we mention that we are using hyperledger technologies? I quickly mentioned it. Yes, I went, I dropped it in. I dropped it in. Okay, that's good. Which platforms are you using? Go ahead. No, no, no. Bezu in FC, right? And then other things. It's not everything, okay? Yeah, yeah. So, and I think we need to deep dive on those use cases a little bit more. So we'll be reaching out and scheduling additional webinars and meetups on the topic as well. So I want to thank everybody who joined us today. If you have any questions, you can feel free to just forward to us afterwards. Please do get involved. There's some great organizations doing very important and hard work to get these infrastructures and these systems and these payments ready for use. So please do get involved. We have a couple of more webinars. Our webinar series continues on May 31st with hyperledger member Rendate talking about UDPN launch to support a regulated digital currency payment. So that's Wednesday, May 31st at 1 p.m. Central European time. And then we have a presentation on June 7th with Kaleido around tokenized assets at institutional scale with Kaleido and hyperledger, Firefly and others as well. So please do join us. I want to encourage everybody to also join us in the Discord channels. This is where our community with by projects, by special interests and others can participate in. So please do scan that and join us in the hyperledger foundation Discord. And it's a very lively and very active community for those who want to join us. So thanks again for watching the hyperledger member webinar. Thank you to Irwin, Claire and Conrad with the European Blockchain Association, the Digital Pound Foundation and the Digital Euro Foundation for the first part of the webinar and Maxine Lem at EPC and who's we use at Alastria for joining us today. So once again, thank you. If you have any questions, please do send it to membership at hyperledger.org and we'll see you again at the next webinar.