 All right, all right, we're at 1.10 here, 1.10 p.m. Eastern Time. So we're gonna go ahead and get started. First of all, I just wanna say hello and thanks for taking the time to join today's session. I'm really excited to talk about how the Amazon Managed Blockchain Service can accelerate blockchain experimentation and adoption for AWS customers as they work to transform multi-party business processes with blockchain. But first, by way of introduction, my name is Forrest Collier. I'm a Blockchain specialist solutions architect here at AWS and my main role is to help customers capture business value from blockchain, regardless of where they are in the journey of adoption. And later you're gonna hear from Manish Dutta, the co-founder and CEO of Alpha Ledger as he describes a high impact use case leveraging Amazon Managed Blockchain. But now that that base level is out of the way, let's talk about what you can take away from today's session. So we're gonna talk about the introduction to Amazon Managed Blockchain, what it is, what challenge that it solves and how it's valuable to customers, how AWS customers are using Amazon Managed Blockchain for their proof of concepts and pilots and building their solutions with it and then how Alpha Ledger's bond trading marketplaces put together. And like I said before, Manish is gonna take you through that. And then we're gonna leave some time to go through any Q&A that has come up during the session. And so the first thing I wanna do is sort of a level set on Amazon Managed Blockchain and sort of the challenges that it's seeking to solve as a service available to customers. Now, when you embark on your blockchain journey, the prerequisite step is, regardless of whether you're building a proof of concept, you're doing a multi-organizational pilot or if you're going to production, you've gotta build your initial blockchain network. You've gotta set up the infrastructure at that very base layer. So setting up your Hyper Ledger Fabric Network, connecting to a public network, whatever that may be. And that process can be complex and require quite a lot of effort to do. So the challenge of setting up that base blockchain infrastructure often stands in the way of building out those use case specific components for a given solution that really illustrate the value of blockchain for your business. So whether you're starting with a private blockchain or connecting to a public one, setting up that blockchain network can be challenging. Most open source frameworks require or have quite a lot of configuration options that you've gotta walk through. They require you to stitch together quite a lot of infrastructure to get started and this can include things like networking, configuration, testing and more. Now from there, as you start to grow your network or you're expanding your POC to a pilot, it can be hard to scale that network and apply those same learnings that you did in your proof of concept to an expanding network. Whether that's adding new members, figuring out how to remove old members, managing growing storage requirements or compute instant size requirements for your peers, et cetera. So as you scale it becomes more complicated to manage managing security, governance, data, billing. And because of that multi-party nature of blockchain networks and the solutions that you build, things can get from an infrastructure perspective more complex at a relatively quick rate. And with all of these challenges comes expense and comes cost whether using consultants to build and maintain your blockchain network or you're using internal resources, it can become expensive to build and maintain that blockchain network itself and build the automation that's required to establish a framework for this going forward. And so with these challenges as a backdrop, you might be thinking, it would be valuable to have a service that will take care of these underlying blockchain infrastructure responsibilities for you so you can focus on your use case and Amazon managed blockchain really is focused on doing just that. So what is Amazon managed blockchain? At its very basic level, Amazon managed blockchain is a fully managed service. We'll talk more about that in a second. That makes it super easy to create and manage scalable blockchain networks using popular open source frameworks. That's hyperledger fabric and Ethereum, for example. So on the private side, you have hyperledger fabric and on the public side, you have Ethereum. Now, in terms of what features you can expect from these particular networks, there are a handful of things that I think are really important to talk about. So let's go ahead and dive into those. So the first one of those, right? At the top left corner of the screen here, you can see you have a fully managed network, right? Fully managed basically means that you don't have to worry about the underlying infrastructure. You can set it up in minutes versus hours or days using the Amazon Management Console, the AWS Management Console, excuse me, the CLI or CloudFormation Infrastructure as code, things that you might be familiar with in the market. So this cuts out a lot of that overhead in managing your network and getting it set up. You don't have to worry about all the manual configurations. I already mentioned a couple of frameworks that are supported, but there's also the ability to democratically govern the network, right? So in Hyperledger Fabric, you can add or remove members, right? You can add a new member to the network. You can remove members. This happens via voting on proposals. And in that regard, there's functionality built into the service here to help facilitate that governance process. And across this whole service, right? You have one of the value propositions here is the AWS reliability and scalability that you're used to with the other services that you might have used from AWS. So the service is backed by Amazon's technology. And that technology really gives you that peace of mind that you're gonna have a reliable and scalable solution. It's easy to set up in a highly available fashion and that will work with you and enable you to build out your use case. And just like other AWS services, you're only gonna pay for the resources that you use, right? So pay as you go system. Now, it's also valuable to note that this Amazon Managed Blockchain service integrates very tightly with other AWS services that you need. So you have all the services at your disposal in your toolkit to build out use cases on the platform. And so I'm gonna talk a little bit about some of the use cases that you might be able to see in the service next year. So let's go ahead and dive into some of the customer references and how actual customers are using the service here. So these are customer references within Amazon Managed Blockchain using Hyperledger Fabric for a variety of different business cases. And we're focusing on sort of these multi-party business processes that can be made more efficient by using Blockchain. So the first use case that I wanted to mention is a use case by Riverside County. So just for some context, Riverside County in California is the fourth largest county in the state of California and it's the 10th largest in the United States. And they basically embarked on a journey to deliver citizen-centric services that use innovative technology solutions. And that drove the development of a proof of concept slash pilot solution in collaboration with Infosys and that we're gonna describe here. Now the solution uses Amazon Managed Blockchain to digitally manage digital records. So things like birth and death certificates, things that are managed at that sort of local government level. Now the use of physical paper records and the manually intensive processing that goes into those record management systems today presented a significant opportunity to illustrate the value proposition, if you will, of a blockchain-based solution for issuing and verifying digitally certified records to residents. And so on one end, Riverside County officials can issue on the system PDF records or PDF files and the hash of said file is recorded immutably to the blockchain network. And on the other end, recipients, those recipients of the digital records can very easily verify the authenticity of that record and which issuing agency gave them that document through a web interface that essentially compares the hash of the provided document to the hash stored on the blockchain. So this solution was used to illustrate the potential operational cost savings and user experience benefits for the residents of Riverside County associated with implementing a digital record management system using blockchain, moving from what once took maybe weeks to issue a document and verify that to a nearly instant distribution and verification of those documents. Now, there's one more use case I wanna talk about before I pass it over to Manish. And that use case is another one that's using blockchain to solve for a manually intensive multi-party business process. And that's related to AirLink. So AirLink is a Seattle-based startup that's focused on transforming the aircraft, leasing and financing industry. Now, close to half of the world's freight aircraft are leased in a multi-party business process involving less sores, less ease, et cetera. And the business processes involved in that leasing process are very manually intensive and subject to errors that are wrought from the lack of a single system of records shared amongst the parties, right? So everyone's keeping their own records and of course, reconciling those errors can take time, reconciling disputes that is. One such process in this larger aircraft leasing space is the process of maintenance reserve billing or MR billing. We'll call it maintenance reserve billing for the session. Where a lessie operating a leased aircraft must deposit funds into an account held by the lessor. So the person who is lending the aircraft to pay for required scheduled maintenance activities. These are often mandated by regulators and compliance standards in the aircraft industry. Today, this process is manual in nature and there's an agreement, there's payments being facilitated, information being shared and discrepancies between party systems of record must be manually resolved, which takes time. However, using hyperledger fabric on Amazon managed blockchain, Air Link was able to partner with Tech Mahindra to develop a proof of concept blockchain solution that can manage the process of maintenance reserve billing on a unified system of record between multiple parties that are involved in the process. The solution utilizes chain code or smart contracts to more or less automate the manual processes that we once had to provide a unified system of record with role-based access control to make sure data privacy is taken into consideration. And the parties are able to collaborate on lease contracts much more efficiently in this ecosystem. So those are just a couple of examples of how hyperledger fabric on Amazon managed blockchains being used in industry to accelerate proof of concept and pilot solutions and how blockchain like hyperledger fabric is being applied to these business challenges. That being said, I wanna pass it over to Manish Dutta. Like I said before, the CEO and co-founder of Alpha Ledger to talk about bond marketplace that they've built over there at Alpha Ledger. So Manish, take it away. Thanks for the introduction for us and hello from Los Angeles. So let me share my screen. Just give me a quick second. Here we go. Just gonna find the right window. All right, can everybody see my screen? Excellent. Well, excellent. So thank you again for us. So before I talk about Alpha Ledger, the utilization of blockchain by Alpha Ledger, the importance of Amazon managed blockchain service and how we became the first firm in the US to record municipal loans on blockchain platform. I wanna share and talk about my industry, the US bond market. The US bond market is valued at $50.9 trillion. Bonds do all the heavy lifting. This market is what enables governments at both federal and local levels to borrow money for infrastructure development like roads, bridges, power plants and much more. For companies, it allows them to invest in the R&D and develop all sorts of cool tech. For such an important market and with its sheer size, you'd be surprised when I tell you that the most recent innovation in the bond origination happened in the 1700s. That was called underwriting. And that's part of the problem. Underwriting is essentially a process where the borrower meets a banker in private to borrow the money for fee and then the banker gets to sell these bonds through their proprietary channels to their private clients in the secondary market. This all made sense in the 1700s when people had to gather in a town square to learn about the current affairs. The bond market is no longer built for purpose. To put things in perspective and to understand why Alpha Leisure utilizes blockchain, especially the Amazon managed blockchain, let me compare the US municipal bond market to the cryptocurrency market, a marketplace unencumbered by four centuries of legacy processes. As you can see, the global crypto market is valued at about $1.6 trillion and fluctuates depending on the Bitcoin. And in the US market, municipal market is valued at $3.9 trillion which is roughly 8% of the total US bond market. The municipal market, in my opinion, is one of the most important markets in the US today. It represents 90% of the non-defense infrastructure managed by states and local governments. This market significantly impacts our daily lives from water, power, street lights, sewers, road, hospitals, housing, you name it. This is all part of the non-defense infrastructure. And according to 2021 report card on America's infrastructure from the American Society of Civil Engineers, the US gets an upgrade, C minus. It used to be D plus, so things are surely looking up. There is an obvious need for us to upgrade our infrastructure and for the US government, they need to spend another $2.9 trillion to bring the infrastructure to par. So everyone in blockchain, the crypto space needs to be aware of the US municipal market which is the fundamental market for sustainability due to the direct impact of infrastructure projects. So on one hand, we have the crypto market which is digital in nature, operates 24-7. I can get on my phone or any device, click a button and I can transact. There is no minimum size and it happens instantly. It is that easy. On the other hand, if I want to buy a bond, well, I have to know a person that I can call. Better, I have to know a person that I can call that has to be a broker. And on top of that, I need to spend at least $5,000 to invest. And then the broker has to find the right bond for me to purchase. This is how the muni market works. This is how fragmented the muni market is and frankly, the entire US bond market trades like this. One might wonder why? And for a very simple reason because bonds originate through the underwriting process. The underwriting process by definition assumes that there has been little or no technological advancement and it is really hard to communicate directly with the investors. Therefore, debt must originate and be distributed through large central institutions. This keeps the bond market exclusive, arcane and opaque. Every time a bond is originated through this ancient paper process, it requires the central agency to record these entries into their system. Notify all the counterparties and custody banks. That means everyone involved with the trade life cycle has to recon their data on a daily basis. For every trade. And there are a lot of trades that happen in the industry. Unlike the crypto market, which operates in near real time is transparent and maintains immutable data. The bond market's legacy paper process has major systemic challenges. Let me share an industry insight. The large buy side firms trade massive volumes yet they actually don't own their own data. They rely on third parties to deliver their data on a daily basis after the close of the market. So they can calculate cash flows and market value. This is known as mark to market. This happens every night as part of core night cycle. Every time a bond is traded, the process repeats itself. To add further complexity, bonds pay interest at least twice a year. So we now rely on a single central party to ensure proper journal entries so that the cash flow can go to the rightful owner. Last year during pandemic, the industry was beginning to crack under its legacy system. As you can see, this is from SIFMA and published by Wall Street Journal. Industry, as in Wall Street, aims to suspend back office tasks. Because of a paper-based process, back offices have to reconcile all the trades, settlement, cash flow activity through the arcane dual key entry systems. And if that doesn't happen, there is no cash movement. Or worse, cash is delivered into the wrong hands. Here's an example. Citibank, one of the largest banks, mistakenly repaid the Revlon's $900 million in debt payment. 900 million. Because someone in the back office didn't click the right button in the right application. This is how the current market operates. This highlights the challenges of simply automating an existing process that was started in the 1700s. So here we are in 2021. We need to think and operate differently. The markets need to evolve and leverage what the blockchain and crypto community has already proved. You don't need centralized systems. With 20 years of experience in the capital markets, my partners and I saw there was a better way. So in 2019, we started Alpha Ledger, where we think and operate from the first principles. We leveraged blockchain technology at the first step of debt creation. That's called origination, thereby creating a trail of immutable digital records resulting in origination of digital asset bonds. When you originate debt as a digital asset bond, it unlocks economic benefits by lowering the cost to borrow, fosters inclusivity, that means no longer relying on a private banker, everyone gets to participate on a digital platform, and the elimination of numerous operational challenges faced by the market today. That means no longer having to wait two days or more for trade settlement, expensive custody, and poorly automated recon that goes on a daily basis. The key to architecting the bond origination and trading process from a technical standpoint is to ensure that we start afresh and build on capabilities. At Alpha Ledger, we have effectively broken down each step and map this journey from origination to distribution, settlement and custody, and in the long run, incorporation of the crypto market. I'll share our three key findings. If you develop the infrastructure from the first principles, you no longer need to underwrite bonds. We no longer need to clear and custody them in the traditional sense. And finally, there is no need to facilitate a Rube Goldberg's data reconciliation process. This deconstruction of the existing process and development of new fixed income infrastructure from ground up will allow regulated institutions to easily adopt blockchain infrastructure so that they can participate in the evolving landscape and allow community banks, regional banks to become node validators. In turn, these regulated entities can spawn their own marketplaces and or simply act as liquidity providers in the general bond marketplace. The ability to readily extend our nodes without having to build or manage the physical infrastructure and for the node holders to extend their capabilities is what makes Amazon manage blockchain a critical component of our offering. The combination of process change and the adoption of purpose-built technology is what allows issuers to interface directly with the investors to originate digital asset bonds on our blockchain platform. Utilizing this approach is how and why Alpha Ledger has become the first firm in the US to record municipal loans on blockchain which again is hosted on AMB. So kudos to AMB for building an infrastructure that's impressive. Thank you. Excellent, thank you Manish. Yeah, so at this point in time at about five to the end of the session I've noticed there are a couple of questions that have come in here in the chat and on the Q&A side. So we'll go ahead and address those here. The first one looks like from the beginning of the session, how can I get help using Amazon manage blockchain for my proof of concept? Are there resources available to assist me? So yes, there are resources available to assist with Amazon manage blockchain related requests. One of my main roles is to interact with customers or prospective customers to help you design your architecture or learn more about the service and its features. And so you can head over to the product main page. I can, what I'll do is I'll put that into the slide deck when I post it as a PDF and you can download. There'll be a link to that in the chat from James Berry, the moderator of the session today. That way you can get a link directly to reach out to our team on the AWS side. And then there's another question here from Claudio Ceballos Paz. I hope I pronounced your name correctly. My apologies if not. Do you know when AWS is going to support Fabric 2.0 Plus so that the 2.x releases? And so what I can tell you on that front from the Amazon manage blockchain side is that we're tracking the releases in the hyper ledger fabric world. I know it's a priority and then it's important for customers. So it's something that we're actively working on. I don't have a specific date to share with you but I would be happy to meet with you and your team to talk more about your requirements for hyper ledger fabric and to give you some more detail there as needed. So feel free to reach out to either myself directly or to us through the public product page on the AWS website. And folks, if we have four minutes left so if there are any questions either for myself on the Amazon manage blockchain or AWS side or Manish from the alpha ledger side about the bond, a usable bond solution, feel free to ask those in the Q and A section or in the chat. We'd be happy to hang out here. Until then, make sure that you get your questions answered but thanks so much for joining us today if there are no other questions. Of course, I think it's a quite crude today. The virtual ones are always tough to ask for raise hands and ask questions. But I mean, the one thing I would share with the group that's still listening is as we have built alpha ledger and as we have sort of utilized the Amazon Manage Blockchain we start with effectively building our own infrastructure and where the first ones to really adopt it's really taken a different life. It's allowed us to sort of have very straightforward conversations with banks, regulated institutions about the scaling elements of blockchain, physically managing the infrastructure because a lot of these banks can't really manage their core infrastructures. The ability to do that by looking at a dashboard and not having to sort of have dedicated staff is certainly an important element that we have found very helpful and sort of continue to sort of really leverage that Amazon sort of provides for us. Amazing. Yeah, I know it's been great to watch customers and collaborators such as Alpha Ledger building solutions that really move the needle on some of these processes that definitely need a modern innovation to help improve. So it's been amazing to watch that unfold in the space. Great. Well, I take it no more questions. So on that note, thank you everyone. Thanks for us. Absolutely. Thank you. Have a great one everyone and please enjoy the rest of the global forum. We'll be in touch.