 Hello everyone, welcome back to Hyperledger Global Forum 2021. We're here at the start of day two for segment one, which is the segment for Asia Pacific and European audiences. We have a terrific set of keynote conversations and presentations and one really cool fireside chat coming on, a couple of them actually, now that I think of it. So let me just get the day started with a little bit of housekeeping and a little bit of framing for some cool things that are happening in the Hyperledger community. First, why don't we jump in? The, of course, Hyperledger Global Forum has been helped and assisted with very generous sponsorship from our sponsors. So I can't help but mention them right now. Accenture and IBM as diamond sponsors, of course, as well as Filecoin Foundation, Hitachi, Siemens, and Zulug Pharma as our platinum sponsors. Their support has really made so much of this possible. So thank you so much for this. Also a key thing, Hyperledger Global Forum, like all Linux Foundation events are governed by a code of conduct that's published on the website for you all to read as a part of Hopin. This is a collaborative community. This is one of the, lots of engagement between us. We trust that everyone has read this and understands if they ever feel uncomfortable, they can always come to us and talk because we really believe very strongly we need to create a culture and an environment where everyone feels welcome. Truly all are welcome here. And so the code of conduct is a key part of that. So I appreciate everyone's attention on that. Just to set the ground a little bit before we jump in, Hyperledger has always been an international effort. I've been until this year on a plane, probably 65% of the last five years traveling around to help talk to the world about Hyperledger. And we've accomplished a lot in those five years. We have an amazing array of projects you heard about. So many of them from Arno yesterday, but really the coolest stats are the ones that really speak to our global footprint out there. We have 175 different meetup communities that are represented in over 75 different countries. And many of them got very active during the pandemic in taking what were previously face-to-face conversations, putting them online. And suddenly I found myself in many of our community members presenting at the Sao Paulo meetup community or to the Tokyo meetup community one hour later, right? I'm not sure I'll ever get on a plane again, actually. It's pretty addictive and pretty fun to be able to do that. So that footprint has grown. And you heard about the technology releases, again, in Arno's presentation yesterday. So I won't go into that, but those communities have been alive and putting out new code. Another real source of this has been the labs. A lot of new labs have come in in the last few months and really this year showing that there's this innovation going on in the ground, lots of ideas, lots of people putting pieces together and some major contributions as well have come in in the last few days. You've heard about much of that here at the event. But let's talk really about this international footprint. These different, in fact, this year alone, there's been 60 different virtual meetups taking place since the beginning of the year, right? And this has been a chance for people to get to know each other face to face and understand what's really at the heart of our community. So we've also been busy launching some regional chapters. In fact, just this year we launched chapters, which are basically collections of meetup communities in Latin America, in Italy, because we've been active in all sorts of cities in Italy. The India community really rallied together the both the schools and the companies who headquartered in India got together and created quite an amazing array of not only meetups and content, but also starting to channel their community into contributions into the projects. And also just recently launched the Hyperledger Africa chapter as well, really giving us this really rich representation in the global South that we're really happy to see happen. We also announced just last week the formation of the Hyperledger Japan chapter, Japan has long been an important market for hyperledger technologies. Many of our core governing board members are headquartered, many of the companies are headquartered in Japan. And we've been really eager to see and happy to see the community grow there. So with this, we think there'll be an even better position for, we'll be in an even better position as society reopens, to be able to help take advantage of the community that's there and the real use cases that we see emerging from that part of the world. We also have long had a very active community in China. Many of you have heard about that community actually last December, they were the first meetup to meet again face to face. These are photos from the Hyperledger Beijing meetup group. And we have a very active WeChat presence. If any of you are calling in from China, welcome and really glad that you can be here. As I mentioned yesterday, six of the sessions, actually seven of them, seven of the sessions here at Hyperledger Global Forum are in Chinese. And we wanna do everything to make sure you feel like a first class member of the community. Because there's so much good engineering work, so much good development work coming out of China and obviously lots and lots of deployments out there as well. This here has also been a really a time when we've really invested in getting internationalization into the heart of the projects, helping them be not strictly just English language. So in addition to the 13 different languages that we've seen meetups hosted in, we drove a contribution campaign in Hyperledger Fabric around the fabric documentation that resulted in eight new languages being supported in the core documentation for fabric and kept up to date with fabric releases. This is really remarkable. And it was only possible through the help of a tremendous number of volunteers who organized their efforts, who chose tools to help synchronize that work and have really gone above and beyond to make that possible. We've also seen translations of the Hyperledger homepage itself that adapt naturally when you've set your language preference in the browser. Again, to make it feel like a welcome place for people who speak all of the world's other major languages. And then we've also seen the Hyperledger Fabric Training course translated into Spanish as well, the online course that we have for that. So some really fun things there. Also, beyond the code, many of you know, we have these special interest groups. These special interest groups have long been a part of Hyperledger. I think the first one we started was the healthcare special interest group. Back in the first year, we were in existence out of a sense of intuition that the healthcare community and the blockchain community had very little overlap between them and we needed to find some way to bridge that gap and talk about the use cases, talk about the limits of the technology as much about the potential. Since that time, we've broadened out into telecom, into capital markets and trade finance, into all sort of domains, including one that we're gonna talk about next, which is the climate actions and accounting special interest group. So stay tuned for that. We also believe education is a really huge part of growing the community beyond the code. We've had free courses distributed through edX around fabric and sawtooth, as well as Hyperledger Indy and Aries for quite some time and as well as an exam and certification course around fabric and sawtooth. We've updated the courses for fabric and we've also now released new free content for the Hyperledger Bezu Essentials. And that's the first time we've done this for Bezu. We anticipate doing a lot more. We're working on a certification and exam process for Bezu as well to help grow that community and help people who have those skills be able to market themselves and go get some awesome jobs in this domain. Because again, this has got to be about building these layers beyond the core developers so that we get more people using it and get more traction. Sorry, I forgot to advance the slides. So there's the slide on the training materials. We also have a vendor ecosystem that has grown this year to over 24 different Hyperledger certified service providers. These are organizations who employ staff who have passed these different courses and we can attest then to the fact that they kind of know what they're doing. So they range from large companies with familiar names all the way to startups all over the world. If your organization would like to be listed there, please get in touch and we'll talk with you about the criteria for being listed. But this is a very short list to be able to turn to when you need a blockchain network build and you're not sure who to work with to get something like that done. This is an important part of everything we do. Finally, if any of you have been asking how do I get involved in more in the technologies and the software projects themselves, we have a very rich set of project demos that we've been doing on the side of the other breakout sessions. Please come to many of those. Those are being presented by core maintainers on those projects and the ones coming up today and tomorrow include Fabric and Indy and Bezu and Ursa. There's also tomorrow a conversation amongst the Hyperledger Cactus core contributors as well about where that project is heading. Please come to any of these. And if you're interested in the translation efforts, there's a panel particularly on that tomorrow in segment two called the Tower of Babel, a panel for translations in Latin America, Africa and Europe. This is just core to who we are. So hopefully this gives you a flavor of that international footprint. Very quickly, we have an exciting set of keynotes both in this segment happening in the next hour and a half and in the one in about eight hours, I think the timing is happening for Europe and the United States. That includes a panel on discussing the application of distributed ledger technology in climate. I'll make an introduction to those panelists very soon. It includes in a fireside chat I'll be having with Vitalik Buterin, which I think will be really fun. Following that, we'll have a conversation about reopening air travel using verifiable credentials, using some of the technologies we've built here at Hyperledger to make that possible. And that'll be with Marie Massery from IATA and Drummond Reed from Evernim. And then in segment two, we're going to hear from the Hyperledger governing board chair, Rob Palatnik, who has been one of the biggest champions for the use of this technology for core financial infrastructure. And I think he's gonna give his kind of view from the top of where the industry is heading and why this is still such an important thing to get right. Following him will be Karim Yusuf from IBM. Karim is the new head honcho when it comes to all things blockchain at IBM. And he has some exciting announcements planned for his keynote. So be sure and catch that. And finally, I will hear from Mary Lassardy, who's a professor in supply chain at the University of Alabama who'll be talking about her research in what are the ways that this technology has been used to really deliver value. Don't forget, we have a virtual hallway track in Gathertown that we'd love to see many of you there in between sessions, during breaks, even after the sessions end for the day. And during the breaks in between, you can also get to know other people here at Hyperledger Global Forum in our networking tab. I just, it's a randomized way to be able to meet somebody else here and it's really kind of fun. I've met quite a few new people through that already. And then don't forget to visit the Kiva booth. This, it's hard to do attendee gifts for a virtual event because shipping things around the world is not only expensive to do, it's bad for the environment. But what we've partnered with on Kiva is to give you a credit that you can use to make micro loans in Kiva system as a recognition of the role that they're playing in driving the adoption of self sovereign ID and distributed ledger technology worldwide through the Kiva protocol, which is a really awesome thing. So be sure and visit them. It links to everything on that is in Hopin. So with that, I'd like to transition now actually to our first panel. So we have a really exciting panel here for us with, I'm sorry, really exciting panel. I'm so excited I can barely talk. Here to really focus on the application of blockchain technology to the fight against climate change. There could not be a bigger challenge that we face as a society in that, I mean, even the pandemic, hopefully we'll get past that. Hopefully, in many cases, we started to, we have gotten past this. All of these crises are interwoven, of course, but the real systemic crisis that we face as a society is figuring out how to manage our presence on this planet and live in coexistence with the planet that we've inherited. And there are a set of organizations and individuals who have been working tirelessly for years now in thinking about how do we use the benefits of blockchain technology to try to build carbon trading markets, try to ease the process of regulation in monitoring and in fighting carbon emissions and other wasteful uses of energy. How might we encourage micro grids? How might we encourage green finance? And so to help us understand this a little bit deeper, I've asked a few of my friends, people who have come together and have been part of the hyperledger community and in fact are giving presentations on other parts of the agenda to have kind of an open and frank conversation about the potential for the application of this technology to the fight against climate change, the risks of doing that, the limitations of doing that. But let's also, let's think big, let's brainstorm, let's see where we can go. So with that, if I can get them up on the stage, virtually speaking, of course.