 Welcome to the Hyperledger fifth anniversary series of panel conversations about the past, the present, and the future of enterprise blockchain technology and the Hyperledger product and community and all that. We're really happy to be joined by an amazing panel, but before we get started with that, first, if all of you could throw into the chat where you're calling from, which city, which region, whatever you're comfortable with sharing, strength of Hyperledger has always come from its global community and its really diverse community in terms of backgrounds and companies and organizations and the like. So we'd love to get a taste of that here amongst all of you and really help us understand who we're talking with. So as I mentioned, this is the last panel of our five week panel series reflecting on the five years of Hyperledger. We've covered our early history, kind of where the project started and where we came from, the role for Hyperledger and transforming trade and trade finance, especially the focus on the Asia Pacific region, how we're playing a disruptive role in fields like energy and healthcare, and how we're impacting the future of money. All of these are available on the Hyperledger website as links. You can go back and watch the panels and hopefully that is an interesting way to start a morning for some of you. We also have coming up on Thursday a social happy hour meet and greet with the rest of the Hyperledger community. It's a very casual, relaxed thing. Feel free to join. You'll find a link to that on the Hyperledger website. We're also doing one on Friday morning in the Asia Pacific region as well just so that timing works for everybody to be able to connect and get to know each other. We also still have fifth anniversary t-shirts available, which I'm modeling here a little bit. There's better pictures of this online, and it is green and it matches my background, which is why you can see through my chest. Don't worry. That's by design. Those are available. They are free shirts, but you have to pay for shipping. Sorry about that. But the code to access that is Hype Five Year, and we'll put that link in the chat just so that you can see HYPE5YEAR if I have it right. So now we're going to have a panel on looking ahead to the next five years and beyond. What impact lies ahead? What kind of challenges? 2020 is a pivot point year in so many ways for so many of us, and I think particularly in the blockchain community, the enterprise side in particular, this has been quite a year. And to lead this panel, we've asked Michael Casey, who's an esteemed journalist. He's the chief content officer for CoinDesk and co-host of the Money Reimagined podcast to lead the conversation. So Michael, take it away. Great. Thanks, Brian. I'm going to take this as an idea next time we do a panel, like a call out to everybody to see where you're coming from, because it's great to see such a variety of locations. And I'm impressed by, I think it's probably the folks in India, like Sushi, Dindal, and Punjab there, probably out the latest, I would imagine, because I did see nobody from my home country of Australia, but very pleased to see that Mr. Baldina, I hope I pronounced that correctly, from Hamilton in New Zealand is dialing in, which is 7 a.m. there, so up early, but it's great, really fabulous to see such a wide array of books. So good morning, good afternoon, good evening, whatever time it is. It's a great pleasure to be here. Some familiar faces, some new ones for me, work with a bunch of these people over the years, and I tell you this is going to be a really interesting discussion. First of all, let me introduce the panel. You think you all know Brian, so he really doesn't need any introduction, but he's going to wave again. Thanks, Brian. Sandra Rowe, who's the Chief Executive Officer of the Global Business Blockchain, sorry, I'm a member of the GBBC, I should put that right, Sandra. I'm sorry, Global Blockchain Business Counselor, Sandra Rowe. Thanks for being here. We also have Alisa Whirly, who is the Global Marketing Director for Blockchain and Multi-Party Systems at Accenture, and she's also a Chair of the Marketing Committee for Hyperledger. And last, but definitely not least, Emiliano Venini, who is Head of ICT Innovation Strategy at Postia Italiani. So thank you all of you for being here. I think this is going to be a great discussion. I just thought I would just open up a little bit just to give a bit of context here. Let's frame this a bit in terms of where we are. This is a looking forward panel, so let's just put up a milestone in where we are in this particular moment. This is a pivotal year. We don't need to weigh too heavily, I think, on how significant 2020 is as something of a transformative moment for the global economy, clearly the big story being COVID. I think that's really relevant to stories, to the conversation around decentralization, because in many respects it is a decentralization challenge. The pandemic is something that just refuses to abide by borders and structures and organizations. And I think in some of the challenges that as a society we've confronted really point to how do you organize around something as global international as this with these somewhat outdated hierarchical structures of organization that we have around that, whether we're talking about supply chains and the delivery of medical goods, or just simply how we share information, public information and private information with regards to medical records. We've got economic challenges as a result of that. There's debt problems looming. There's been a massive amount of money printing from central banks, which is raising questions about the future of what money looks like. The fourth industrial revolution nonetheless is powering ahead with 5G coming, IoT, AI, some incredible developments in this area. And this is all converging at the same time that we're seeing some real developments within the blockchain space that are quite separate from what we've seen before. China, for example, launching its new digital currency, this new push towards central banks getting involved in this space, and integrating things like the blockchain services network there into the Belt and Road supply chain out of that country. So governments, companies and decentralized communities are all sort of coming together at a moment of real challenge for the global economy. So I think that's kind of the framework for this that I'd like to set. The other thing I think though is this is about a particular model of blockchain application. We're talking about what we tend to describe as the enterprise blockchain applications. And for the five or six years that this is going on, the five years that Hyperlegion's been in place, I think we've really seen some sort of shifts in this process where consortia came along and some of them made real progress, some of them didn't. And some of that's evolved around defining exactly what this is and what the opportunities are. Alisa, I'd like to throw to you, because from your perspective, you get to see how different organizations and companies deal with this technology, and you've talked a bit about the mindset that needs to be brought to bear here in terms of the capacity to collaborate and work together across organizations. Where are we in that mindset? Are companies ready now to embrace this structure? So thank you for having me, and that's a great question. I think it would be hard pressed if you've been involved in this technology on any level, if you're involved in technology at all, and you saw what happened this year with COVID unfolding, and it would be hard to press not to have seen what could be different if we had already made the giant leap into cloud. We were all fully digital. Organizations that were had been regularly investing in their infrastructure and innovation did much better than those that were maybe a little bit slower off the start. So when we were looking at how innovation might be impacted by an event like this, we already look at the top 10 percent of organizations that consistently invest and lead in investments and innovation versus the bottom 25 percent, and you see that the return on investment for the differential, there's roughly two times growth trajectory of the top 10 percent versus the bottom 25 percent. And when you think then about how that was being transformed slightly in this current environment, we saw that the leaders in that top 10 percent were not only continuing to invest in innovation, but they were actually looking to partner. So David Treat, our business lead in blockchain, actually uses an African proverb pretty frequently that goes, if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. And I would argue that in this environment, the only way to achieve both is to collaborate. And I think that's what we're starting to see. We're seeing that there's a broad collaboration both in, let's say, for example, with the work that we're doing with Banque de France, that brought together banks from both France and Switzerland as well as the central banks from France and Switzerland to come together and collaborate on how they could actually execute a true cross-border payment where money was actually moving from one country to another country. So I think it will be a really interesting time. And certainly this plays to our sweet spot as we see more and more individuals and individual organizations coming together to collaborate, because that is what will build out the resiliency. That will build out this, the data sharing model that we need to solve problems quickly and efficiently and effectively. Great. Yeah. I mean, I've often sort of thought of, one way to describe blockchain technology is as a we technology, not a me technology. And I think sometimes there's this corporate challenge because everything gets fed up through the P&L and the what's in it for me kind of question is one that can be answered around the collaborative, the payoff of that collaborative benefits. But it takes, it takes some capacity to think outside of that silo mentality. So Sandra, maybe you could also weigh in, because clearly the GBBC has been talking to companies across multiple industries, and you've been evangelizing for some time around this. What do you see? Is there a capacity emerging for companies to step outside the box and collaborate, as Alisa was saying? So completely agree. And first of all, thank you Hyperledger for for having me here. And I agree with everything that Alisa has said around enterprises that are collaborating are the ones that are advancing, particularly blockchain, because it is a team sport. We've heard this again and again. But what I find really interesting here is look at the combinations of consortia that are coming together. A government entity with a central bank with a enterprise you would have never thought would actually belong together. These misfit or seemingly misfit fitting institutions working together. I think this happens more and more. I mean, Miliano, I'm sure we'll be speaking around his work at the post office, but whoever thought the post office would be innovating. And yet they're leading innovator. I'd like actually Miliano, if you would go talk to the US post office, because they need to innovate too. I think these cross collaborations are just going to happen more and more. And let's face it, between Hyperledger and the GBC and other organizations like us, who are bringing lots of folks together and putting them into a virtual room, not a literal one these days. But that's where the magic happens. And we're going to see more of that. We have to. So Miliano, why don't you pick up on this then? Because clearly, you're there at that sweet spot between public institutions and private institutions. What sort of progress is being made there in terms of forming appropriate functioning consortia and private public partnerships? Maybe the European example of one that you can expand upon. Yeah, we are trying. First of all, thank you for for inviting me. Yeah, I totally agree with Alissa and with Sandra. Despite it was a really strange year due to the pandemic, I think that the last year for the blockchain, it was a really good year because there's a lot of stuff that's actually is going on. Even in Italy, we are trying to put together the public sector, public agency with private companies in order to build, let me say, an Italian infrastructure to speed up blockchain adoption. And the model we are working on is something that it's collaboration on the on the infrastructure and competition on a higher layer on the services, on applications. So it's such a model that is called the competition. So collaboration and competition together. And I think that it is a really good model because as Alissa said, in this scenario, in these markets, no one will compete alone. Everyone needs to collaborate, needs to change mindset shift from a silo approach to a network approach. So, Brian, why don't you talk us through what Hyperledger and blockchain DLT technology in particular adds to all of this, right? So you're really interested in working for some time in terms of open source systems, open standards and open source software. How does blockchain fit into all of that? And how does it feed into where trends are going forward for the next five years? Sure. And actually, as a follow-up to Sandra's comment, the US Postal Service did file a patent a few months ago for the use of blockchain to help secure voting by mail. It was a little interesting wrinkle. I was worried it was like a portender of something darker happening, but fortunately, that all happened smoothly. But no, I jumped into this project a little bit less than five years ago. I started after it started, partly because I saw blockchain technology as being the natural next step in progression of these decentralizing forces that really started with the adoption of open standards. And I mean, go back to the railway gauges and that sort of thing, the size of screws, that sort of thing. But really, open standards is what built the internet to the next phase of that being open source software, which I mean, I'm old enough to remember when it wasn't the presumed kind of way that we would collaborate around common technology. So when it was seen as the outlier, the thing that those freaks, the hobbyists did, the communists, the people who didn't believe in making money from software, that sort of thing, remember when it was called a cancer on the software industry, right? To now it becoming pretty established as the way that you do infrastructure level software and also a way that you explore whole new fields, right? Kind of both of the end state of kind of a software lifecycle maturity and also the beginning state of how you map a landscape and figure out what's valuable there. And I think blockchain technology takes that the next to the in like the third step in that natural progression, because it's a way of actually building open cooperative systems without needing to depend upon a central actor in the same way open source software does not depend and does not need a red hat at the center or need even a Linux foundation at the center. Open source software works because of the licenses and the code and the transparency and the development process. And likewise, that's what to me made blockchain network such a revelatory kind of thing. And so that pivot point, I mean, open source software took years and years before it was even acquired the name open source software before it became accepted before a company like Microsoft would join the Linux foundation. That was about a two decade window, right? We are just, you know, five years in really arguably 10 if you count Satoshi's paper as a as an inflection point, or longer if you talk about older consensus mechanisms that packs those that sort of thing, but really in terms of industrializing this five years in, and and a pivot point from, you know, proofs of concept and trying this out in early success stories to what I think from this point forward is going to be a normalization and acceptance into kind of the standard ways that the world works. I think that was kind of thrown for a loop in 2020. I think the stuff that was in production at the beginning of this year did see growth did see folks doubling down. I think there's a bit less capacity for experimentation and tolerance, but also a greater driver of the need to have to work together to solve problems that are bigger than any one of us can solve alone. So let's get into that because I think it's interesting, you know, it really did throw them for a loop. So there's all this innovation being done work being done and building out systems all of a sudden we had an entirely new problem to solve. Yet as I mentioned at the outset, you know, this trade-off between the need for public information and at the same time the need for protecting the privacy around that seem to me to come to bear. And what it did is also it highlighted, I think, a richer conversation around the issue of identity and self sovereign identity. So maybe Brian back to you again to help us sort of stage this conversation a little bit because how do those things come in together and how is hyperledger and other blockchain applications working into the self-sovereign identity solutions as it pertains to, you know, some of these these, you know, health information challenges that we're facing? Well, pretty early on in hyperledger's history, you know, when we realized we could be a home for fabric and be a home for other types of technology stacks that are appropriate in this space that we were approached by a community that had been building a technology focused on digital identity. And that's what became the hyperledger indie project, which had since has grown to a family of projects, all focused on a radically different approach to digital identity online, generally called self sovereign identity. You could also think of it as user centered identity, instead of logging with Facebook, logging with Twitter and having Facebook and Twitter being the sole authority of, you know, information about you and what's important, instead pivoting that to a more of a wallet based approach, very much like a cryptocurrency wallet, you know, instead of holding tokens, you hold signed documents that attest to your driver's license, your passport, and maybe even now your test results or your vaccination record, right? And so that approach to digital identity has grown inside hyperledger continued. We've seen deployments out there. We've seen, you know, fabric used, indie used, obviously other blockchain communities have picked it up. And the role for a distributed ledger in that is to serve as that underlying kind of root of trust, rather than hanging it all on a domain name registrar or hanging it all on a central TLS certificate issuer. Instead, that is now those roots of trust can be shared amongst a wide community and you can choose as an organization or an individual, which routes that you actually do trust. And this is the degree of flexibility and a degree of kind of distribution that the digital identity community has never had before. And that is now going to be extremely relevant when we talk about the need for certificates and credentials where you really don't want a giant kind of database in the sky of who's healthy and who's not, who's been certified or not, who's been vaccinated, that has to operate globally. You want to be able to federate that out to the countries, to the states, to regions, you know, and even to the individual to be in control of their health information, but still be able to use it to cross a border or, you know, enter a movie theater or restaurant, perhaps, if that's what, enroll your kids in school as historically we've had to do, right? So it's coming into play. There are lots of organizations now asking the right kinds of questions about how to build these kinds of technologies from the WHO and the International ICC Chamber of Commerce. All of these are folks are, and Adam, who run the airline, kind of oversee the airline, global airline community. All of them are asking the right questions. How do we do these kinds of credentials in a way that are privacy preserving, privacy driven, but also effective and trustworthy so we can get back to a healthy globe, really? I mean, we just saw the first vaccines now in the United States just yesterday being administered. I think that the UK were a few days ahead of it. I was so struck, though, by when the UK did so, they were handing out these little cards that you've been vaccinated. And it just seemed like the easiest thing to forge in the world that, like, we, clearly at this time, folks, we need to be thinking outside the box about something that is going to be, you know, that is provable, that is transportable, and it has all these other features to it. But, Alisa, the, you know, one other key element of the COVID experience has been the challenges that supply chains have faced in the efficient delivery of, you know, PPE and medical devices. And clearly, as the vaccines come, that supply chain management piece is going to be really, really important. That really was, for some time, I think, one of the most important driving use cases for an enterprise blockchain, these supply chain solutions. So, but as Brian said, there was kind of a bit of a disruption at the beginning of the year, by the entire economy being being disrupted. So, putting all that in the light, where do you see, you know, supply chain management? I'm sure that Accenture sort of paid some quite a lot of attention to that. At this stage, having just gone through this disruptive year, are we further along the path of introducing and making kind of real primetime uses of this use case? Or are we still some time ago? I actually think that this is when the best innovation happens, in times of crisis, right? So, we have an absolute need for people across the globe, in entities from, you know, government, NGOs, you know, people that have the infrastructure that we're going to need to leverage already in place. So, GAVI, for example, with the initiative that they're doing with COVAX. We need to be able to take the systems that already exist and have already worked really successfully and be able to link them in a way that helps to accelerate what we need to do, need to do quickly. Clearly, there's an urgent need for us to solve this issue. The biggest, you know, human impact story any of us will see in our lifetimes. So, I think that there's been a natural mindset shift, because we've seen some of the historic issues that have been prevalent for a long time, right? There's been a lot of frustration about how these, the siloed elements of an end-to-end supply chain. And let's add the, you know, the trade finance element on top of it. There's been a lot of complexity baked in, a lot of manual processes, a lot of paper, a lot of duplicative processes. I think I've heard something to the effect of we did an analysis that said there was roughly 5,000 data points that we were collecting and that boiled down to roughly 100 data points. So, the need to solve this problem and to do it urgently to solve this human impact problem is bringing together a lot of key players and certainly with Accenture City bringing together their industry expertise or technical expertise, the relationship with all of these entities from the NGOs, you know, to government systems. And then, obviously, our work with Hyperledger, the GBBC and others to solve this problem. So, I think we're going to start to see this shift to get a greater level of transparency and traceability to make sure that we are keeping counterfeit drugs out of this particular supply chain. We won't be seeing supply chains built just for efficiency, but we will be actually seeing supply chains built for resiliency. And in the same vein, the fact that these vaccines have been approved doesn't necessarily stop the data collection that's necessary for the individuals that need to keep learning, right? So, we're going to see, we're going to need to see how these, the longer-term effects of getting an inoculation, actually, what does that mean for long-term immunity? What does that mean for somebody who has had, maybe one, but not both vaccines yet? Or how are different vaccines kind of playing up against each other and that impact? So, being able to use the data that we're collecting as something moves across a supply chain and into somebody's arm, I think having that mass of data in a usable format is going to be just incredibly important for us to whether not only this pandemic, but certainly be prepared for whatever comes down the road going forward. That's, I think, what we're going to get out of this particular environment. We're going to see a resiliency mindset and, again, this mindset shift into what technology and information can do to help us weather this unbelievably unpredictable world that we live in. Great. Thanks, Alisa. So, Sandra, from your, again, from your perspective with these different companies, so looking at supply chains just a little bit deeper if we can, which industries? What sort of use cases are you seeing at this stage the most ready-made solutions coming to bear? Yeah. Thanks for that, Michael. I think I want to take us to a more specific problem that happened in the U.S. in particular. And look, I think we can all agree whether you're sitting in the U.S. or not. The U.S. was not a leading example of how to do this right. There were lots of things that went wrong, but I want to talk about the food supply chain, for example, in agriculture. And I think one of the things that we have to separate is the stuff that can be solved versus the stuff that cannot be solved, right? So, what cannot be solved? What cannot be solved is if a meatpacking plant is shut down, then the meat's going to back up, or sorry, the animals are going to back up and you have an issue. However, where technology could help is helping policymakers, executives, and some of these companies make better decisions because they're seeing this information real-time. And I think that is what blockchain can do and a blockchain system can do. We failed at every level, whether it's food supply chain or PPE, you just see it. There was no visibility around real-time access to information so that we could react in a crisis with data. And what Lisa has emphasized, which is correct, we need better real-time data, whether you are an executive at a major corporation or whether you're a government agency trying to make decisions properly. Without that, you're just flying blind. And let's face it, half of our government agencies were kind of acting like headless chickens. They did their best, but we didn't have the data points for them to actually arm themselves to be able to make decisions in a timely fashion. I think it was a big part of the issue. And let's face it, when I saw those potatoes being dumped by the potato farmers in Idaho, and then you saw right next to that queues of people lining up to food banks, I'm sorry, is this the US? We got to do better. Yeah, that brings it into stock relief. That's right. So Sandra, you mentioned governments and the regulatory framework as well being a factor here. And again, I thought maybe you could pick up on this one because one of the barriers to this more collaborative structure that at least rather than we've been talking about, that for people to participate in these frameworks is that some of the regulations are outdated, that there's corporate requirements, compliance requirements that hold them back. But at the same time, there needs to be some level of framework that is one that across boundaries for one. And that essentially, I think, works as an incentive if it's a carrot or a stick either way for companies to actually work together in these things. So what's happening in Europe in particular, but where do you see the regulatory framework developing for enterprise blockchains? Yeah, thank you. What I think is that, again, we have to start from what happened during the last year. So the rapid growth of the fire application, the bull run of Bitcoin that reaches the all-time highs. But also the transition of Ethereum from proof of war to a proof of stake. So I think that all these events are really important also because they in some way have captured the attention of regulators. And so regulators are really important to foster the evolution and the adoption of blockchain for enterprises and for public administration also. It's such, let me say, such a bottom-up revolution and blockchain, Bitcoin, DeFi is something that regulators cannot ignore, can no longer ignore. And so in the last year, in Europe happened two or three very interesting things. The European Central Bank released a paper about the digital euro. And so defining some way a strategy to develop a European Central Bank is our currency. And in the paper, it is clearly explained that they do for one reason because they don't want to lose control over money. There is also a proposal from the European Commission on regulation for digital assets, for crypto assets. It is called MICA. And also the European Commission, the European Community started a project that is named European Blockchain Partnership. And it's an effort of over 25 countries from Europe to build together the governance, the regulation, but also an infrastructure, a common European blockchain infrastructure. I think that these are all very important things because you know, even in a decentralized world, it is important that regulators could in some way define the rules of the game. And it is very important also for enterprise to have a clear understanding of what can be done and what cannot be done. Yeah, the governance question has been one that I think people are starting to pay a lot of attention to with regards to this otherwise decentralized architecture and how it intersects with the real world. So you talk about law, but there's also this sort of other mid-level area of just arbitration that can exist within these systems. Brian, I know you've probably given a lot of thought to this because these systems have to work in the real world and the internet offers something of an experience to draw upon, but it's still a very different world with this insertion of value of things like digital currencies into blockchain. There's money involved and I think there are challenges around law and regulation and governance become bigger. Can you give you a picture for where this governance story is going? Yeah, well, I definitely want to distinguish between government, you know, the elected leaders in any country or otherwise who, you know, kind of define things that are unavoidable and governance, which hopefully in most cases can happen amongst the organizations and individuals who participate on these kinds of networks, right? And that kind of governance, I think blockchain technology gives us a lot of new tools that we didn't really have before to manage ourselves and manage ourselves in very voluntary ways. I've used, for example, pre-blockchain the kinds of self-regulatory structures that we're familiar with are things like ICANN, which manages the domain name system, which certainly benefited from having just enough government touch to kind of bless it by using it, but is actually supranational in that, you know, ICANN themselves, even if they started as a Department of Commerce kind of project, spun out and has become kind of international or separate from any country. And that's a really important thing to figure out. What are the economics of how that works and how do they actually, you know, use a combination of carrots and sticks to accomplish this goal of a globally consistent domain name system, right? And as much as we can do in kind of self-governance or, you know, it used to be that industry self-regulation was kind of a joke as a term. But I believe if you, you know, set the rules upright of these blockchain networks and use smart contract code and chain code and others to kind of enforce those rules, you get this automated compliance that, I mean, look, regulatory processes, whether government imposed or self-imposed, are meaningless if there isn't consistency, right? If the presumption is that if you have enough money, you can get away with it, right? And the more that we can build these fair markets, provably fair markets through code, I think the better the outcomes come for participants in those markets. And the cool thing has been in the last few years, I think, to see regulators recognize that and view blockchain technology not as a threat, but as a form of reg tech, that if they can participate with industry in the definition of those rules and say, here's the public interest that we're fighting for and need to defend, here's the existing regulatory infrastructure we'd like to try to, we're willing to reboot, we're willing to reevaluate. But the more we can automate that and get away from subjective processes to determine compliance and more to objective or even automated processes, the better off everybody is. So I'm incredibly enthused, whether it's in the central bank and money regulatory side or supply chains and food quality and anti-corruption efforts, this is the real opportunity for this technology, I think. So let's jump to some of the questions. A few questions have been coming in from our globally spread audience here. I thought this one's a bit of a news you can use type of question that I think is obviously in the minds of any company looking to get at this. This comes from Mark Hattle, who says, as blockchain-enabled solutions mature, how are providers approaching efforts to commercialize it? And how do your best price delivery of a blockchain solution be for service per user per month subscription model? I mean, these are just like rubber hits the road type questions, Alisa. Can you give us the thoughts on best practices advice on these kinds of things? I don't know that I'm the best person to answer the question, actually, because I think that that's a pricing model and technology question. So I'm going to throw that over to Sandra and perhaps with your membership, you might actually have a better understanding of how that might actually work. Yeah, so hi, Mark. How are you? I know Mark. I have to say this is a very important question. Here's the other problem. I've had enterprise blockchain, sorry, I've had enterprises tell me, not only is it hard for them to price blockchain services, but they don't know how to, they don't have the metrics to measure the performance output, because there's no standards around this kind of stuff right now. So you've got several levels of problems that we need to sort out. And I do think we're going to get there with the help of Hyperledger and other organizations, but we do need a couple different things, which is what are the optimal levels versus public chains versus hybrid versus private chains. And then on top of that, let's face it, what are the metrics for deciding if a blockchain is performing well on certain attributes or requirements than others? We need to build all that out. I don't think we're there yet. Well, that's actually a really good one to key off, I think. And maybe I can go back to you, Lisa, because we're talking about how do you get to this mindset of collaboration, how do you build a sense that this is everybody's going to benefit from that. Well, coming up with metrics and standards to define what the both collective and individual payout is from this exercise would strike me as a pretty important part of that. Any thoughts on how we achieve along the lines of what Sandra was just talking about? Like, how do we make sure that the opportunity is profitable for the project? Well, how do you define what that is, right? If it's a collective payout where the supply chain is more efficient and all of a sudden potatoes are getting to where they need to go, what does that mean for different players along the line? How do they actually take measurement and apply it, I suppose, as a payout in some form and therefore put a value on it for each participant in the enterprise? It's one of the things that I think is really exciting about this technology. And I'm going to go into an area that is one of my passion projects, which is how this technology creates almost like the great equalizer, right? So when you think about what we know about the technology today and what it can achieve, a lot of this is actually expanding upon what already exists and making it more a shared success for all. So when you think about like, for example, with the vaccine distribution, one of the things that it exposed and certainly the pandemic in general exposed just this incredible inequality that exists not only in the US, but clearly across the globe. And one of the problems that needs to be solved is the last mile distribution of the vaccine, right? So how do we actually get this into communities in its current state? So when you look at the Pfizer vaccine and it's the requirement that it maintains, I think it's minus 81 degrees. I've seen various statistics on this. How do you actually get it into remote areas, maintaining that particular temperature and knowing that the lot sizes is relatively large, et cetera. So there's a whole host of complications that help us understand that there's just not an equal playing field right now across the globe where everybody has the same access to the same infrastructure that allows them to participate at the same level that we take for granted. So it's one of the things that I really do love about the technology that we work in, because right out of the gate, even though I don't think we'll fully see what the potential for new opportunities are until this really starts to take hold, we know things like central bank digital currencies and tokenization will actually bring more people that are currently unbanked into the financial services infrastructure. We know that people, you know, that may, for example, brought up the potatoes being ground into the ground when there were people that are food and secure, you know, or the fact that we had a run on toilet paper at the beginning of the pandemic, but we had an oversupply. So we had commercial toilet paper at a shortage, but we had, you know, we had institutional toilet paper that couldn't be redeployed because the supply chains couldn't interact. So I think we're seeing the exposure of the need for access to things like broadband, access to things like these basic, you know, infrastructures, like I said, that we take for granted that will bring more people into the global economy. And we will challenge organizations then to pay attention to the fact that if you are a tier three supplier versus a tier one supplier that you that you all have a voice in creating a sustainable and equitable supply chain. So you're going to start to see, I think, incredible opportunities unfold and a stabilization of just the socioeconomic, you know, landscape across the globe because we will actually make a an environment, a global environment that is a little bit more fair. And that for companies translates to not only deploying a corporate social responsibility that I think every big organization takes to heart, right, and is part of their plan, but we're bringing more people into the mix. There's a saying that, you know, we kind of go by this ethos that, you know, talent is everywhere, but opportunity isn't. So making sure that we are actually creating a dynamic that brings more people into the mix creates opportunity, I think that that this technology will help to unleash. And I'm really excited about seeing that that actually come to the beam, come to the fore. So Brian, we're seeing a number of questions coming in about private versus public block chains. And I know this is a topic that has been I remember actually a debate you and Joey Eater had at MIT when I was there. And it was it was just fun to hear the way that this this thing's played out. I know you've got sort of lots of opinions about how these things actually can interoperate, you know, how do you see the world now? I mean, this has actually been a year I think we've seen the reemergence of public block chains as an opportunity with the emergence of defying the advance of the theorem in different capacities. And of course, Bitcoin having yet another another bull run. Do these things interoperate? Do they work together? Is it out of, is it even worth making the distinction anymore between permissionless and permission and so forth? What does the world look like of these different environments? Well, when we started five years ago, there were inklings that that, you know, the this permissioned model of saying, hey, who runs the nodes actually matters and having them badge in in some way to participate in consensus is perhaps a different approach than proof of work or proof of stake. That was a novel thing. It was even though it was building upon, you know, in some ways 20 years of PAXOS and other distributed systems thinking, needed a substantial modernization. Again, partly thanks to Satoshi's paper, partly thanks to advances in smart contract work. And so we really did start out life saying, hey, there's this whole region of the landscape over here that's not getting paid attention to and deserves to be paid some attention. And we think that that was really the right strategy. I think that was right strategy, because it turned out to be a pretty fruitful area in a way that allowed for a lot of organizations to get involved in experiment with blockchain technology without taking upon some of the burdens of the public blockchain space, the proof of work side and the way that a financial instrument is at the heart of making everything run on those networks. And that created a safe zone for them to say, can we just use it for that convergence on a single source of truth where we're amongst a set of organizations who are willing to let each other be known, even if that circle expands to tens of thousands of participants, this is still a different set of assumptions going in than the assumptions going into building the public blockchains. But I think everybody in that space acknowledged not just the debt that was owed to the folks working like Satoshi and others, but also that that landscape was on the public blockchain side was continuing to evolve. And that frankly, it's a little bit different than the VPN versus public internet kind of debate. But in truth, every permission blockchain, you want the same thing as liquidity. You want eventually everybody who has an appropriate role to play in that use case in that industry to be able to participate on that blockchain for efficiency, for reach, for economic value. And so we always felt that there was a lot to learn from both sides. And in fact, the first business trip I took was to China to attend the second Ethereum DevCon and meet Vitalik and all those and even send a message back in 2016, let's figure out how at one point to work together and really paint this as a spectrum of options and a lot of different points on that landscape. And that really did come to bear first with Hyperledger Borough, which is the first Ethereum smart contract implementation that came in, designed for permission networks, but still kind of learning more about how that community worked. And then this past year in 2019 actually with Hyperledger Bezu entering as a top-level project as a peer to Hyperledger Fabric. And Bezu is a public Ethereum blockchain stack. It does implement proof of work. It does touch that electric third rail, but it does so also in a way that allows it to be used for permission ledgers and have that full spectrum of offering. And so I think it's going to be a key part of convergence in this picture. We're already seeing projects like the baseline protocol and others that are really playing with that connection between those two. And I think the public blockchains as a checkpoint for the integrity of permissioned blockchains is a really big deal and will help us get to that trust and confidence even on these blockchain networks that have just a handful of participants on that where that degree of trustlessness might be threatened. The permission blockchains will still have an advantage from a transactions cost and a regulatory kind of point of view. And we're not going to see the central bank digital currencies built on top of permissionless blockchain networks just for all sorts of reasons. But I think the world is bringing these sides together and hopefully leading us away from a dichotomy to something more of a spectrum. Okay. We also have a question here from Pam before, which I think is interesting for the fact that it talks to all these other automated technologies emerging. AI being a classic one, machine learning so forth. As I mentioned at the outset, there's a convergence between the development of blockchain technology and the fourth industrial revolution, the IOTs, structures by G, all of this stuff coming together at this moment. I'm just going to open this up to all of you. How important and what role does a blockchain play in that bigger, broader economic future? Because clearly we have data is the commodity, if you like, the fuel of that fourth industrial revolution and rights to that data and control over that data and the management of that data are going to be critical if we don't want just the entire IOT world to be run by, say, Amazon web services. Ultimately, how does this all come together? What's the sequencing look like in terms of blockchain's role in that fourth industrial revolution? I'll just open up to the floor here. I'll give one example, Michael, if that helps at all. I think each industry is probably on a different adoption evolution path. For example, in energy, we're seeing a lot of the big energy players. They have meters everywhere and the meters are being used to actually, sorry, blockchains being used to validate the information coming from different meters from different plants around the world so that the person who's actually in charge of monitoring doesn't actually have to go physically to each plant necessarily on a rote schedule and make sure and inspect that it's all correct or valid because the validations already happened if it's baked in. These experiments are now happening. I think it's a very interesting usage of the fact that there's already an IOT device. Now it's being made more, well, the information is being validated on an automated basis so that within their own network of plants, which are all over the world, for example, they can actually aggregate that data real time and then analyze that data to the point where they're predicting when parts run down or they need to actually order things in advance so that they can preempt things breaking down and they have those parts available. That's more of an internal large corporation example, but that's a big deal for these guys. That seems to speak a little bit to what Pamela was asking about her question about what role for human beings in all this, right? Are we witnessing a process that is going to make traditional jobs less relevant and what are the humans going to be doing in all this? Again, anyone want to take that one? Actually, the web just put out a paper which I thought was really interesting that describes the idea that right now, for example, in blockchain, we couldn't possibly plan for everything and program for every single contingency. We're still going to need, and certainly the philosophy at Accenture is that there's a powerful combination between the human and the machine, that technology and innovation require both, right? This is what technology is really doing is unleashing the innovation that kind of exists up here with all of the faculties that are kind of intangibles and how we actually bring this to the fore. I think the idea that we could actually program into a smart contract, every single variable, every single contingency, every single failure that might take place in the future is probably just out of reach at this point in time and maybe forever. The fact that a human needs to be involved I think is pretty solid. We're going to see a shift and I think this has happened over the course of time with introduction of new efficiencies or technologies. When you think about how this work from home environment really opened up people's eyes to the fact that we could work from home and we could maintain a semblance of business processes if we worked in service industries and certainly Accenture was already working virtually or working on client locations. This wasn't as disruptive as it might have been to another organization but the notion that we won't ever come together again and collaborate I think is pretty farfetched because if there is a role that allows you to solely be virtual and never have to interact with somebody then I think that's when you're looking at is this something that can be automated? Is it something that could be outsourced? Is it something that we could just move to a cheaper location to do the same tasks? So I think we're going to learn as we go but I think that the notion that this disrupts completely versus opens up new opportunities I think is we're not at that point in time. Emiliana maybe the perspective of a postal service would be interesting here because clearly the automation of mail has become something that's critical and traditionally it's an industry that's had a lot of human beings working in it. Where do you see the intersection of say you know IoT and you know blockchain feeding into not just your industry but how it touches other industries in particular? Yeah what I think is that people are still so important in all processes and they just probably in the future will change their role and their work will be more simple because they will be helped by technology but they are still probably the main component at least in my organization I see these things people add let me say the engine that moved the organization not the technology. Regarding the convergence between different technologies what I see is that blockchain enable the concept of common knowledge enable transparency so there are a lot of different projects that as Sandra said before collect information from IoT sensor and make this information available to different stakeholders that are in some way interesting in data so blockchain could be an intake let me say like an integration layer an integration layer and a source of transparency that enable a different way to do business. Okay great thanks really I think we've got five minutes left here I think I'd like to sort of maybe dig a little deeper into something that we began talking about when Elisa was giving us this framework around you know the future of collaboration and that is this concept that like you know and you mentioned before Elisa when human beings do come together and collaborate that's kind of when innovation happens and yet I feel like the organizational structures that have been built that particularly you know the corporate structures have in some respects worked against that and now we have this blockchain technology which potentially gives us the chance to do that so what does the future of innovation look like within the context of this kind of cross organizational structure do we you know and and does the capacity to collaborate itself become you know the defining driver of what you know innovation means Brian you've been in the open source world for a long time where innovation is always thought of as a kind of this this you know hive mind idea talk us through what you see the future of innovation in this context. Yeah and I think that in the early days of open source software it was presumed that it was not going to be an innovative force that it was going to be just more of a consolidating force at the tail end of technology movements because I presumably innovators needed the kinds of rewards available from proprietary IP licensing in order to afford it to be able to to write the code in the first place and without taking anything away from that as a as an approach that simply wasn't the rule right that certainly was one way to monetize your idea but also getting your idea out there and deploy it so that you can achieve another thing on top so that you can disrupt a market so that you can you know take out a competitor perhaps but also so that you can create some new opportunities for yourself is is a way that most of the world has figured out how to monetize open source software the challenge with for blockchain networks is you know it does kind of go against the traditional silicon valley venture capital investment kind of motive i want to find the next air and b and b i want to find the next central platform that everybody needs to go through and and which can charge rent based on the value received rather than a more utilitarian kind of what's the cost of connecting everybody and that just doesn't work with blockchain networks right to fund those to to do the r&d to get those to work you do have to kind of ask companies to envision a world and this is very much like open source where there's a set of things you have to do that are table stakes for your industry and a set of things separate from that that are your actual unique source of unique of of of proprietary value right and that ladder builds upon the former but the former needs investment and work and the more that you can cooperate and and fan out those costs and distribute those across everybody who benefits the cheaper that is for everybody and the more that everybody can spend to get ahead and build and go and tackle new things that's a subtle message that's the one that requires conveners like the linux foundation and others sometimes to pull those conversations together and go what are the pieces that really we don't have to compete on right that we can share globally and and those are delicate conversations but you know 20 years now into this open source as a commercial thing kind of direction i think we've figured out how to do that repeatably now we need to figure out how to do that in regulatory reporting in the insurance industry or tracing of pharmaceuticals in the supply chain or providing digital identities to in all sorts of use cases and there's a lot of minds to change about how to do that and a lot of new ways people need to think about how investment turns into value in those on those fronts but that that's happening and it's really encouraging to see uh look i think we're probably getting pretty close on running at a time right now um i i think maybe it's probably best to to wrap it up i was going to throw a quick last question on that do we want to have a quick final word maybe uh sandry you want to just give us a farewell thought on on this this bigger idea of innovation and collaboration yeah well first of all thank you innovation happens at every level um i'll give you one quick example wef and hyperledger came together to map out the standards of where we are technical legal regulatory eccentric supported us um we need corporates supporting financially we need the stakeholders around the world working together we had academia we are going to see more of this we need more of this at every level whether it's technical legal regulatory governance um and 2021 it keeps going and it actually i think we build back better and for those who don't or aren't sure how to participate reach out to one of the organizations and just get stuck in somewhere you can eventually evolve and you know adopt adapt to other areas but get involved this is a global community effort um and look let's face it this cast alone is pretty awesome people i enjoy the people i work with globally and it's a good crew so you know it's a good group of people to work with and lots of opportunity here yes all right on that very positive note we're going to say goodbye thank you so much everybody and for everybody for listening in from all over the world uh great to have you along for this ride thank you Emiliano thank you Brian thank you Santa thank you Lisa um you know years to five ten fifty however many more years of hyperledger so thanks for having me involved in this everybody and appreciate the great conversation thank you michael thanks michael great job thanks thank salisa sondra and Emiliano thank you hypermedicine bye