 So, welcome, Christof. You're a CEO of Hornet, one of the largest LGBT social apps in the world. It currently has about 25 million users worldwide. You're also the president of Recently Launched LGBT Foundation, which has the intention to use blockchain tech to foster equal rights for the LGBT community. I mean, why did you take this action? Why do you think it's in the blockchain, which is the best way to help the LGBT community forward? So first of all, let me say thank you for having me here, Elsa. Of course. Also a big shout out to the entire organization team here, the volunteers, the staff and everyone. I'm very proud to be here and in Helsinki and sharing my humble thoughts with you. Indeed, I do believe blockchain is a technology that allows a community to solve a really, really big problem. The problem we are talking about is the lack of full equality and acceptance for all members of the LGBTQ plus, that means lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and others. And basically, empower that community to solve this on their own. And it's a very large problem if you put it in numbers. There's about 400 million LGBTQ plus members in the world, 400 million. And if you just think about the economic impact of this, if it was measuring GDP that these people would produce, it's 4.6 trillion US dollars. If there was a country, it would be the world's fourth largest economy. So right after US, China and Japan, but ahead of Germany and the UK. What does that mean? You know, we would have our own army and we would have our own aircraft carrier and we would have sailors with much more pretty outfits. So that's on the side. Anyway, it's a big problem in numbers. And we are seeing obviously advancement of equal rights and acceptance for members of the community, especially in Western countries. I'm a gay man. I live in San Francisco. I'm white. I'm socioeconomically well off. But at the other side of the spectrum, there's still 72 countries that criminalize LGBT worldwide, 72 countries where it's illegal in one form or the other to behave among what the community usually does. And also in advanced countries, we obviously don't see the same rights awarded and forwarded to, let's say, people who are of lesser socioeconomic status who don't live in San Francisco, maybe who are HIV positive. Or more recently, we have seen a lot of debate around transgender. Just very acute is the initial achievement of transgender in the US military. There are 15,000 of them. In fact, the US Army is the largest employer of transgender people in the world, who knew. Obama allowed them to come out into the open. There's 15,000 of them. And now this current administration wants to illegalize it again and kick them out of the army and bring them away from their jobs. Just imagine how much of a retreat this is. Long story short, I'm a software entrepreneur. I believe technology can empower people to achieve things that are otherwise less accessible. And for me, the blockchain is a great way to organize and let this community take its destiny into their own hands. So we proposed and initiated the LGBT Foundation. And on our white paper, an LGBT dash token.org, we are laying out three basic tenets of this token design. One is the identity of LGBT members. The second is surfacing the economic impact, the power of the pink dollar, if you will. And the third one is to create a funding source for nonprofit projects that this community seems important for their cause. And that's those of the three tenets. Thank you. I mean, surely there must be some people in the audience who might be rolling their eyes just a little bit when we're talking about another initiative to do with crypto and blockchain. So going back to the first question, why is it block tech exactly what do you think is the right way to do this? Sure. Let's get this right out of the way. I'm not here to pitch an ICO or anything. So let's get this right out of the way. The LGBT token will be built on an existing platform, which has been built by the team of the fabulous Jason Goldberg and the team over at OST, Simple Token. So we're using an existing technology that's already in place to build and distribute the token to the many users that we, for instance, bring from Hornet, 25 million, you mentioned that earlier, and other partner apps from the get go. So we focus on using and building token technology and token products, and we're not talking about investment or even speculation by any measure. So why blockchain? I do believe that blockchain is really, it comes down to one word. That's decentralized. Decentralized. Decentralized as in a decentralized technology that is blockchain. There's no head, there's no authority that controls or owns it. But also the LGBTQ plus community is a decentralized community. There's no one who kind of controls it. In fact, your membership in that community is declared by yourself and owned by yourself. So it's a decentralized technology that helps a decentralized community to organize its own destiny. And let me walk you through the three aspects. Identity. So I mentioned becoming a member of the LGBT community is not some sort of a sign up or a baptism or a citizenship test. In fact, it's yourself. You decide what your sexual orientation or your gender identity is, and you want to be in full control over it, especially as it could change over years. People do change any of the above. So you want to be in full control, but at the same time, you want to be accounted for. So you don't want other people to list or try to target you. So you are in control of your identity and your membership in that community, and the blockchain can account for that. So that's a great way to manage identity. In fact, pseudonymity is the key word. The second is the pink dollar, the purchasing power. I do believe a lot of power in this world comes from economic power. It's what makes the world go around. I mentioned the GDP equivalent. You know, that gives you power. If you have 4.6 trillion dollars, you get a seat at the table, and if you, in a permissive way, allow businesses and brands to work with you and for you, they will take you as a consumer, and they will cater in a permissive and consensual way, you as a consumer, and will really see you as an economic force, and that gives you influence. And that feeds the third element, which is to try to create a mechanism how the many, many wonderful NGO and initiatives in the LGBT space, which currently are very fragmented and often compete for donors, are actually being brought together and are being financed in many ways from the community's own activity. So these are the visions, and we put this out in this proposal. And in many ways, this is a mirror image of a nation state. The nation state is very specific. You have a passport that's your identity as citizen. You have a GDP that gives you a seat at, let's say, G20 in Buenos Aires, right? That's a G. How big are you are? And you have taxes. Taxes are levied on the members to finance common causes that this community deems important to it. So in many ways, it's a mirror image, except it's supranational. It's orthogonal to nation states, and we believe the blockchain is exactly what makes this organization work. So it's a wonderful way to give people and power people to be their own true self. You're right. And just to mention the word decentralization one more time, of course, you also operate in quite a few different continents. You just came here today from Asia. You're here today. I know it's your first time at Slush, so welcome. And you're heading off to Africa after this, right? Correct. And your first company was founded in Germany, the second one in the U.S. and the third one in both Japan and China. I mean, your founder story is fairly supranational itself. I was wondering if you could tell us a bit more about your founder story as it is. I'm happy to do so. So as you mentioned, my background is I'm a German. I started my first company there. I also met my now husband and partner of 22 years Juan, who's a Latino to make it even a little more interesting. We moved to San Francisco 15 years ago after I started and ultimately sold my first company in Germany. In San Francisco, I started doing my MBA and studying open source business models. At that occasion, I got to become a friend of Finland's very own Martin Mikos, the co-founder and CEO, former CEO of MySQL. There he is. Hi. And obviously, that gave me, you know, lots of insights that I then applied to my second startup in Silicon Valley an embeddable open source database company, which I sold in 2008, to then start my third company, which created Android Middleware with customers in China and ultimately a merger in Japan in 2010. After that, I decided as a serial entrepreneur, you got to do investments. So I started doing that. But very soon after, though some of them are quite successful, I missed building things rather than writing checks. It's kind of, you know, only the second best thing in the world. And so I started Hornets in 2011 as a fun and side project. Hornet, I thought, was needed because as a gay man, existing apps were focused on dating and often hookups. But there's much more to being a gay man and a member of the community. So that was the mission. We started Hornet really as a fun and side project. And two years ago, I started to run it full-time. We're now, as you mentioned, with 25 million users in terms of monthly active, second largest app behind Grindr. And number one in many large countries, including over the border in Russia, France and Turkey, here in Europe, Mexico, Brazil, Thailand, Taiwan, Indonesia, all of the Middle East, and the fast growing in the US. So also very supernatural. There's no boundaries or borders. And this has been a wonderful journey. And so the common, you know, kind of, for me, was always technology would empower me to solve a problem I saw. So when blockchain technology kind of grew on me, initially I was very sceptic. I saw, wait, this is a great fit. So I felt founding the Algebra, starting the Algebra Foundation and suggesting the token generation was a natural next step for me in that career. I see. There's a very common thread in all of your work, which I think has a lot to do with open source technology and community empowerment. So what would you say? What do you think it's such a powerful combination to combine community empowerment with the latest with tech? Yeah, so I think it's really a killer combination. Technology, which creates access in many ways and connectivity, and the large size and scale of communities, which obviously bring many people into the fold. Obviously a lot of that insight goes back to my research on open source and open source business models. Software developers were the first to embrace, obviously, community and open source-driven model, because they were closest to technology and understood first and best. That open source would be one of the best ways or better way to produce and distribute software, to service software. And it also produced better products. They're more diverse in the aspects they're solving. They are more often better tested. And they scale faster. They're distributed more cost-effectively and you build ecosystems. You're usually born global as open source. There's no boundaries. And it's, as I said, a huge accessibility. So obviously that applies to developers in the earlier stage of the internet. But it gets much more exciting if you solve day-to-day problems with the same combination. And obviously with my background specifically in the LGBT community, we solve problems, let's say, around advocacy. I mentioned Russia. In Russia, being a gay man is a very dangerous thing. I mean, there's laws against gay propaganda. In Moscow, you may get away with not being too visible, but obviously the provinces are much more hostile. And if you go all the way to Chechnya, it's outright persecution and incarceration of gay men, if not beating or even death. So we are the leading app and give these people a connectivity and lifeline. I personally have never been in Russia for more than two days. But at the same time, I'm market leader there with Hornet or we are market leader. How does that work? Well, because the community went with the technology we gave them access. They went and ran with it and organized themselves. So I think that makes me really happy. The same applies to others like LGBT rights in Southeast Asia, Taiwan, Thailand, Hong Kong, on the cusp of achieving marriage equality. But also, for instance, work with the community around election. Like Macron versus Le Pen in France, where we're market leading or the recent elections in Brazil to educate them about this. So this is the advocacy side and you can take that to the next level or other topics like health. There's many gay men, especially in the Middle East, they don't know about HIV. They don't know about the availability of PrEP. This can be life-threatening. Again, we give them a tool, we give them a platform and we empower them and we can go on and on and on. How technology becomes such a force multiplier. And obviously blockchain takes this to the next level. And I believe that this combination of community and paired with technology is a force that is really unstoppable when it's unleashed. And I'm very happy to be a facilitator for that, rather the source of that. Thank you. Before we go to the audience questions, I had one more question for you. I bet you've asked for this many times. But I'm sure a lot of people wonder that if you create an LGBT token, why shouldn't every single minority have their own token? Why should LGBT be the only one to have that? It's a very good question and you could argue it separates. But the reality is if you don't have achieved those equal rights and acceptance, I think it's an obligation for those who are a little ahead of the curve, let's say myself as I mentioned a gay white man in San Francisco, I'm not so much subject of discrimination obviously versus others. But as long as every single member has the same privilege and access, I think we have a task to stand together and help each other. So I believe there is an obligation and an opportunity for the community to take its destiny into their own hand. And that's why I believe it can work for other minorities or groups. But I think the LGBT community is particularly suited and obviously something that I can speak to. Yeah. So there is an audience question asking you that why are you using blockchain and not open source? It's a very good question. Again, thank you for that question. I mentioned a little bit earlier the aspect of decentralization, empowerment of community. Obviously, that's very similar to open source and I actually don't see them as much different. To me, blockchain is best defined as open source data. Open source data. Open source traditionally means open source software code. So this is machine instructions on how to compute something, but the data is often proprietary. Data is living on company servers and is held away from the public in most cases. There are open data initiatives and in fact they go very close to what blockchain is doing. Blockchain takes the ownership of data away from powerful gatekeepers and puts them into the hands of the people who own the data, which is the people themselves. So in that sense, I see it actually just as a terminology difference. I see blockchain as open source data versus open source code and it's something that is decentralized that neither me or anyone else or Facebook or a government can use or app use its own by each individual and they come together in one big group. Thank you. I think we've got time for one more question here, which would be about how LGBT token claims to generate resources to provide financial support for the vulnerable LGBT communities. Is this something that has been done already? Do you have any examples you could give? Yes, so in the past all these initiatives have been more like around corporate social responsibility at Hornet. We have always tried to give back to the community, not only through enablement and giving them resources, but also actually outright money and support where we can or fostering support. With the blockchain proposal we believe this can get a completely different scale and here the caveat is obviously the token hasn't launched into public yet so the plan or the idea that is being proposed is that we basically generate a fuel, a gas, like a tax on the transactions that funds these initiatives that are suggested by any member of the community. They can be voted upon by members of the community and they can also be monitored by the community because these funds if they're in less well-regulated countries, they can quickly go by the wayside. I'll give you one example. There's a company that distributes HIV medication to gay men in Uganda. In Uganda a gay man is at least criminal, it may result in death. If you're being supplied with HIV medication, it can be a death sentence in another way. What should save you actually can disclose your sexual orientation and put your life in danger. How do you ensure that this medication arrives at the right person and doesn't get embezzled on the way and basically create a accountability without actually disclosing the person behind it. These are things that I think a blockchain can solve and I'm very excited because that is something where the government of Uganda cannot go after and say I take your server or I hack into them or anyone. This is like something that can be managed on the grassroots level and cannot be stopped by any decapitation of a centralized owner, for instance. Thank you, Christoph. Just one more short question, yes or no, is Hornet already using blockchain or will it use it in a near future? We will launch in Q1 2019. We have a proof of concept, check out the video showing how it will work, but the actual blockchain has not gone on the main net yet. Once we start in 2019, we'll roll it out to our 25 million users. People can claim their wallet and we're probably going to see an uptick of millions of wallets, only second, maybe two or three point days within a year. So I'm very excited of what could be one of the largest blockchain projects in the planet. So thank you very much. Thank you very much.