 So very excited here to conclude the Firefly Hyperledger launch event today. It's been actually a great week talking with people and the culmination in a number of months of working with Brian and the Hyperledger team. So I guess I think Brian, myself, Steve, and also Andrew, one of our developers, who will do a demo as part of this session. Just for some quick intros in case someone is not familiar with Brian. Maybe you could say a few words about yourself? Yep. I'm a second year director of Hyperledger based in the Bay Area. I've been working for the Linux Foundation for over five years now and on Hyperledger and a number of new things recently. But just really excited to welcome Firefly to the community and call it out really as well. Thanks, Brian and Steve. Hi, everyone. I'm one of the co-founders of Kaleido along with Sophia. And Kaleido is a technology startup company that's focused on enterprise blockchain solutions, specifically for enterprise. So we've worked across a lot of major industries, helping customers. And our story is Firefly story. And Firefly story is our story. And as we've spent the last six years in this space, and we really are excited about what this new community could do to accelerate the larger space. Great. Well, let's jump in. We wanted to start, I guess, with a couple of thoughts with Brian. Steve was saying we've been living this space for about almost four years now. It's Kaleido, and felt really motivated and passionate to open this up, to grow a real community, although we'd open sourced portions of this before. And it had had some people on our previous panel who had been touching the tech, I guess. So we're really excited about growing the community. I wanted to hear from you, Brian, some initial thoughts. What gets you excited about Firefly and sparks your interest with project? Yeah, well, I think Firefly addresses have been a longstanding challenge, which feels very much like the early days of the Linux operating system when to compile your own kernel, when the user interface was a very, very basic X window stuff that had been ported over from Solaris or whatever. And it very much felt like a hacker-only kind of environment. And over time, obviously, you had GNOME and you had other parts of the stack emerge. And finally, a usable operating system that you could put under Chromebooks, you could put in anything else. And we had a couple of early projects that tried to build the bridge between a low-level plumbing and the developer-friendly kind of environment, things like Composer, which I know you're all familiar with. And Composer really was best as like a design tool, a design thinking tool, but people wanted to use it to build and manage their production systems. So that was always a challenge, and that was one reason I think the Composer team themselves decided to pull back on that project and it wasn't the right approach to a high-level tool to be able to build and manage apps that balance this on-chain, off-chain kind of thing. So the project of now having a tool again that makes it easy to build and one that has the benefit of being able to work across multiple ledgers, which matches very neatly our objective since the beginning at Hyperledger, which was to say, there's fabric and it's really market-leading and has all this power and complexity. It's like a gigantic chainsaw, right? But there's other ledger platforms in Hyperledger, including Beizu, which obviously inherits the Ethereum stack. So the multi-ledger nature of Firefly is super important to us, and I'm really happy to see now this backbone is kind of forming that other things could potentially plug into other projects of Hyperledger. That led into a second question I wanted to ask just about the Hyperledger greenhouse. And you have a collection of co-bases that are really focused on enterprise blockchain communities. You mentioned Beizu and fabric. In having to feel Firefly, there's a multi-protocol aspect of it and more broadly, having to see Firefly relating to other communities in Hyperledger. The other question. Good question. Well, I'm happy to see that there is now fabric supporting those just beginning, right? And it's been very clear that there's a lot of interest from the fabric team, especially those who recently put out the fabric smart clients to figure out how to collaborate early on, maybe even combine efforts in some really interesting way. And make it a first class supported platform and underneath Firefly. And in addition, obviously I'm hoping Beizu in the community around that rallies in a similar way. But some of the other projects might be interesting too. Like it'd be interesting to see if there was a common design pattern or paradigm for doing cross-chain interoperability where being able to adopt the primitives being built inside of cactus might be something interesting to slot into there. Also, it would be interesting to see if there were cryptographic primitives that were recurring in the design of Firefly-based apps that meant pulling in Ursa, which is a library of cryptographic primitives, would be really useful too. So I actually think there's potential to collaborate with probably all of the different projects in Hyperledger and have them fit into this kind of framing. Because I think very few of them were designed primarily with like making life very, very easy for the first-time developers, for the early developers, the people who really focus on the business here. And I think this is a nice path to being able to get there. That's an avenues and collaboration in store in the coming months, just within the Hyperledger community alone. And then more broadly, there's other tech where open-source communities like Node-Red and others that have already communicated with us. So we're excited to see that grow. I guess the last question I was gonna ask you, just as you, with people come out of today, the Firefly Hyperledger day, what do you think they should keep an eye out for, or what sort of activities would you recommend or invite them to? That's a good question. Well, definitely having a responsive core maintainer community involved, participating in chat on the mailing list, helping make sure that the developer experience is smooth. Having that activity will build confidence in the part of other people, and they'll jump in as well. And I think that's a faster way to build community than something that kind of launches and then looks almost like a ghost town, right? So maintaining that momentum is pretty cool. The other thing is, the best projects really don't have advocates out there who are presenting at meetups, virtual meetups as they are now sort of thing, or even at other conferences. The Linux Foundation produces over 100 different conferences a year. And like the upcoming Open Source Summit in September in Seattle, which will be a hybrid virtual real one. But all over the world, and once we reopen again, most of us will go back to being face to face. So presenting at those, getting out there writing, post for medium, or for other sorts of like channels, tweeting about updates, those are all things obviously, we at Hyperledger wanna help the project do and do with a Hyperledger voice and through the channels we've set up. So the more that we can collaborate on that and that kind of advocacy, the more effective we will be at building both the user community and a contributor community. Thanks, Brian. And yeah, we have our eyes on us, Tom. So we're gonna submit some sessions for that. And I've been in talks with Ryan, David and others about that, but that's great advice. Well, thanks again, Brian, for your support. Getting ahead of this week and here with us today to launch sort of an invitation to the community to join. I really appreciate your perspectives and ongoing support. Think with that, we'll transition to, I would like to get a little bit of the business context for Firefly and see if we'll get into walking over, through what it actually is and does. Think from a business context, one thing we've been talking some of the panels and other activities today. If you look at Enterprise Blockchain and sort of the promise of Enterprise Blockchain, people look at solving deep problems around transparency, trust that go all the way back into the core systems of record companies. And until now we didn't have a technology that could really provide that shared view of the data and that shared application logic. And then as we went through COVID over the last year and a half, we saw all the implications to supply chain, the inefficiencies, a lot of issues will be just, as the society things started breaking down. So I think there's a big spotlight on how can we do a better job as people are digitally transforming and moving to the cloud to solve some of these economic inefficiencies and social problems that result through some of the misfunction of these systems. We've seen that during COVID, some industries such as insurance industry has told us in North America, their digital transformation roadmaps have accelerated by decade. Across all industries, various analysts have done research on this and they're saying there's about seven to eight year acceleration of that. So we have the industry drivers and business drivers but behind some of these changes. McKinsey did some recent research and saw that only 8% of companies believe that their current business models will remain viable if they don't digitize. So they're seeing this digital transformation in the back office as a real imperative. And they, and digital ecosystems are estimated to account for 30% of global corporate revenues just in the next four or five years alone. It's interesting to see some of the research as well just as applied to different industry sectors and you see sort of a blending of cross industry sort of value and now the value of the network is the network rather than one company's product. It's the health of the network and who they're associating with and then the type of business outcomes and value they could generate for their end users. So with all of this, we see some of the business drivers and some of the movements in the industry to where the ecosystem economy is arriving and in some sectors is already arrived. But the technology over the last five, six years of enterprise blockchain has really struggled to reach the promise and to deliver that promise. And there's some reasons for that that have become evident to all the parties in the blockchain space. You know, these cross party flows are pretty sophisticated in terms of the needs on privacy and security. Overall, enterprises have requirements around privacy compliance and integration with existing core systems and sources of data for their production ready solutions. But meanwhile, as they're adopting these new emerging technology sets, they're dealing with new cutipier frameworks, new programming languages, new containerization and other constructs that can be new internally. So they really struggle when they pick up and just try to build all the components needed on a blockchain solution, especially when the actual running of the node and the blockchain piece of it from a node perspective might be five to 10% of the solution. And there's many decentralized off-chain tech components as well as the app in the middleware that they need to pull together in order to provide a viable solution. So what basically they think the job initially is writing some smart contracts, starting a blockchain node, building a web app and then just deploying. So a couple of components, a few months, four to six months maybe to do that. What the job really becomes is like looking at sort of the architecture and design and how do you actually use blockchain and then getting into looking at the architecture and design of all the different off-chain pieces so that the apps can talk to each other, you're exchanging documents, private documents between parties, solving problems that are needed for the solution, but it's much beyond just running the node or writing a smart contract. And then struggling to code to the blockchain APIs and the different protocols or different levels of sophistication and use abuse around that aspect. So it's a blocker for traditional enterprise developers and we're looking for RESTful APIs. So then they come to the realization that deployment can be pretty far off and it's really more like 40 components and it can be two to four years to get into production with some of these ambitious projects that get announced with the fanfare and then they run into the reality of what it really looks like to build one of these solutions. So what should the job be? We believe it should be modeling the assets and the data, defining the process orchestration, workflows, coding to simple APIs and clicking deploy. So one platform and now something that took years could be done in weeks. Just to transition with the last spot, you know what does this mean in terms of business impact and really helping industries move forward to be able to use these decentralized multi-party solutions? First, there's a huge cost savings from what we see as the gen one way for looking at a blockchain and gen two which some consortia have already moved towards in some industries and we're hoping now by open sourcing Firefly to help the whole blockchain space move towards a more efficient way of working. And what does that look like in terms of a distribution of effort? In the past with the gen one, maybe half of what you were doing was all on the plumbing layer, things like architecture, infrastructure design, reusability were smaller pieces and then the business value or use case ended up being a very thin slice. So people would have a very ambitious goal for their consortium or project and then spend so much time and money on the plumbing that they end up building sort of a simple calculator app when they really needed a very complex financial market exchange was the initial vision. Now with this gen two, a way of working, the plumbing is greatly simplified and you see the demo and you'll see what that looks like in terms of what you get versus lines of code as an example. A lot of the design is sort of baked in so that bringing in the commodity type pieces of architecture and with the opportunity to centralize new components along with the blockchain, you don't need to have a PhD to do all of this. So really democratizing access to building blockchain solutions to all of the enterprise developers out there and then really getting to the business value now being the majority of what you're doing and able to deliver to clients, companies and consumers. So with that, I think I'm gonna hand the baton over to Steve who's gonna talk a bit more about our play. All right, thanks Sophia. And I think, you know, Firefly setting out, it's an ambitious goal for a project to really take a half-stack back and look at that graph and say, okay, something's off here. If you're really spending most of your budget on a project on plumbing, right? Which we've seen over and over again. You know, how can we invert that? You know, plumbing is a great candidate to build an open source community around and just solve it as an ecosystem, as a community and sort of allow that budget to be inverted. And so what we're introducing today is Firefly, a part of the hyperledger community coming in at the lab stage and looking to grow and advance through the community there and be incubated is what we're calling a multi-party system. And I'm gonna come back to that term a few times over, but the idea of sort of a larger system that's a bit broader than a blockchain, but it's really focused on data flows and that cross-party flow of data. But before I get into that detail, I wanna start with an analogy because we've found this is really helpful. If you think about Docker and the first time that you've used it or saw it, maybe you're younger and you just take it for granted, but some of us saw the world before Docker where software was all over the place. And in those days, your budget, your IT budget for a project was dominated by not your business application, but dealing with a lot of plumbing, essentially type of operations. So Docker came along and said, hey, let's put all software into the same box. And if we do that, we can standardize networking, we can standardize security, we can standardize how we do high availability and scalability, very hard problems, that you could solve once in a uniform way. And that was great for a developer running a Docker container on their laptop, but for an enterprise to go into production with a hundred or a thousand Docker containers, it was just not possible or feasible. And so the market sort of became stuck or there was a need for a larger system. And along came Kubernetes really sort of standing in the gap there and giving you that broader control plane upon which to build and orchestrate and manage how many ever hundreds of Dockers. And it was designed to be really pluggable. So there's more than one choice for networking and the cloud providers have come in and plugged in underneath and technology providers have come along and plug in and built tools around this. And you have this larger system, this enterprise system around Docker, which importantly delivered the initial promise of Docker itself, right? The breakthrough of all software fitting in the same box. It's now achievable or consumable. How about blockchain? So if you think about blockchain, wow, when it came along, there's like, it just makes sense if you've been in the enterprise software space, if you've seen the back office of companies in the sprawling estate of hundreds of systems, if you've seen the size of business networks, hundreds, thousands of participants in a supply chain or in a financial network or in a value chain in the insurance space or whatever it is, right? And just the lack, the total amount of inefficiency, the lack of coordination, it just makes sense. However, I think it's pretty clear to say that enterprises just can't get into production. It's really hard technology to manage. And we see Firefly as coming along and providing an enterprise system. So similar to how Kubernetes was sort of a larger, pluggable, extensible control plane and system around Docker, we see Firefly as a multi-party system being a larger system where there's a blockchain still there, right? But we're also looking at all the other layers of the stack and all the plumbing that we were just talking about a minute ago that can dominate the budget for an enterprise blockchain solution, right? All these layers in the middleware space, connecting the back office systems and securely, privately connecting across the business network and managing member onboarding and the DevOps around shared IT assets. And on top of all of that, a workflow, right? So those sorts of things. And I think if you apply an open source lens to this, it's really interesting to observe just how much innovation has happened in the past years towards the bottom of that stack. But to date, no comprehensive open source project that's trying to really drive that simplification all the way up to the application layer and encapsulate multiple layers into a pluggable framework. And it's really just a quick review on what data flows look like inside of a decentralized business network where each member in these dotted line circles has a full stack of its own technology, right? That stack we were just talking about, it doesn't exist once, it exists in every organization's IT realm. And that stack needs to connect privately back office. But it also needs to connect across the business network, right? And we see multiple kinds of operations here. They're happening, of course, there's the ledger of the blockchain itself, but almost always, almost always in an enterprise project, there's private data exchange, usually the more private the better, that's quite commonly is coupled with some form of broadcast as well. So it's not just one of the other, we often see both. And then having that shared ledger building digital assets and using tokens and so on, is a really powerful programming construct. So it's all of those things together that this is the shape of the problem that you need to solve just to build and deploy one blockchain use case across the business network. This is all that, all these lines are plumbing, right? All these rectangles in the stack are plumbing in different parts of the solution. So with that, I'd like to introduce Firefly, a multi-party system built and designed for cross-organization data flows. That's what it's about at the end of the day. Understanding decentralized architecture and the fact that all organizations are gonna be running a stack. And because there are so many lines of collaboration and places for data to flow, having a very event-driven system and framework to really tie together and coordinate all the disparate systems that exist within a business network and also the legacy and core back-office systems that exist around the business network as well. So all of that coordination is really a business process feat of engineering. And so trying to make that part of the problem orders a magnitude simpler for a poor old developer who's just trying to get a piece of data from point A to point B often, right? And really importantly, just like Kubernetes, a flexible technology framework, because A, there's lots of different technologies, B, there's different implementations of how to do messaging or data exchange. But most importantly, C, there's also emerging technologies, confidential computings, your knowledge proofs and so on that really ought to fit into this larger multi-party system. So as you put the system in place, it can evolve with technologies, different blockchains, as well as off-chain technologies. Just a quick word on the seed of the contribution. This is coming from primarily from Kaleido, the initial 80,000 lines of code that are Firefly within Hyperledger now. This is our six years of learnings as well as three years of active development. So we've had this, these capabilities in-house as Kaleido products, but we're convinced and we have very large customers, some of them spoke throughout the day today that are running on the Kaleido proprietary version of the code. It became clear to us that the right thing for a big, ambitious sort of platform like this to really put it in the open, to invite others to contribute, to help, to let the community help shape how the investments go into this code going forward and to really build a stronger product. We were just talking with Brian a few minutes ago about the synergies across different Hyperledger communities and we wanna explore those going forward as sort of like an umbrella project we sometimes refer to Hyperledger, excuse me, to Firefly to date and plugging in some of those other cross-pollinations as well going forward. So just zooming in for a second on the Firefly node itself. There will be recordings up soon if you wanna really dig into the technical workshop. There also are pointers available in the booth if you need help being routed into the community through the larger Hyperledger website. But just really quickly on the node itself, the core is essentially the brain that's there, that's the thing that you interact with as a developer building your application. It's there to give you really simple APIs and web hooks to say, hey, I wanna send this piece of data. Hey, give me a callback when you've received it. You know, provide, give me the proof with the blockchain. I don't wanna go into the low level, you know, you know, RPC, you know, transaction pool, you know, checking and management of trying to, all the ping pong of the different pieces of that. Can you just make that simple for me please and abstract that away from me? And that's what the core is doing. Sitting underneath the core are a layer of connectors that are doing the heavy lifting that are interacting with the different runtimes. These connectors have a standard unified, you know, interface that they conform to to make it really pluggable. So that the blockchain interface, which is definitely doing a lot of heavy lifting, you know, there's one there for Ethereum, you'll see in the Firefly, there's also, you know, ETH Connect, but there's also Core to Connect sitting alongside of it. There are discussions today about Fabric Connect and getting that launched and built. And there may be even another community out there that wants to help merge some code in to make that possible. But alongside the blockchain, really importantly, bringing Sophia said five to 10%, well, what about the other 90% all these other forms of plumbing that until today you've had to do to build a blockchain use case. Off-chain, you know, data exchange, whether it's structured or whether there's a gigabyte file, you know, large blobs being passed around, you know, whether there's broadcast going on of events or data that's being synchronized and then how's that all connect together? So if I send something to you privately, let's pin that to the blockchain, let's get global ordering and finality and keep that into the puzzle. I already mentioned multi protocol that's really important to us to give that flexibility and choice, but also to tap into the strength of unique attributes of some of these underlying protocols. So they're still there. That power is still available while there are easy interfaces into them, that the existing interfaces are still there. You still write, you know, arbitrarily complex smart contracts or chain codes if that's what you desire to do. And that's there for that 5% of the time. But for the rest of the time when you're using, you know, what we now recognize are pretty common patterns. Firefly is there to give you simple APIs to accomplish that. Almost like a database. Crud operations are great most of the time. Occasionally you need to write that, you know, stored procedure with a bunch of data wrangling inside of it. And so that we see that similarity there. Firefly is ready for enterprise. It is an active code base, but it is designed for enterprise use. You know that and you understand that with the hyperledger community and the licensing that it applies as well as the open governance that it brings. You know, the Firefly brings with it, you know, back office, core cloud engineering, chops. And so it's cloud ready. It's scalable and resilient. And I've already mentioned why being highly pluggable is important for this project as well. So fire, your blockchain runs better with Firefly. You're still getting global ordering, finality, you know, the immutability of data. Awesome things like tokens and NFTs triggering, but we take that a level up. So it's not just triggering, it's event streaming. It's not just getting transaction in, it's automatic batching. There are simple API, restful APIs so that it's not low level RPC calls and so on. And then unifying the identity. So everything has an identity construct built into it. Your choice for off-chain messaging may not be the same as identity sort of system as the blockchain itself. And so having an identity registry with organizations and simple member management and onboarding, putting all of that in one place almost like an address book is another really important piece of how Firefly works. So finally, just real quickly on the road ahead. Today as a launch, it's a beginning. Fortunately, we're not starting from standing still. We have a running start, as I mentioned, the three years of active development and six years in the blockchain space. Seating this contribution has already been a jolt of energy from different parts of the hyper ledger space and even beyond about wanting to get involved. We encourage everyone to get involved. The community building process is now officially underway. So there will be all the things you would expect happening, maintainer selections, open meetings happening on a regular basis. There's a rocket chat channel set up on the hyper ledger chat tool. So you can get plugged in there. You can certainly download the code today. But looking forward at the roadmap, there are definitely some high priority items that are already feedback in from the community fabric I talked about as well as looking at some specific token use cases, which are quite common again, almost like the CRUD versus stored procedure example I was using a minute ago. There's some common things that happen with tokens. We want to extend Firefly to make those a whole lot easier than they are today. One simple example of delivery versus payment. I send you data or a thing, an asset. I want tokens back, value tokens back in exchange. So how do you make that happen atomically? There are common ways to do that. So those sorts of things are that the Firefly community is already active on. And if you're interested in those things, do plug in. And then finally, all this trending towards a 1.0 release, we envision and we hope that that's later this year, maybe towards the end of the year, something hardened, scale tested, ready, security audited, and so on. And so stay tuned for how that evolves and get involved. And so with that, what I'm going to do is actually transition over and stop my share here and invite Andrew from the team to come in.