 Okay, so I think we're just gonna get started. Hello everyone, hi to Madrid, hi to Atlanta, and to Portugal, and hello everybody and welcome to our Hyperledger in-depth webinar. This is the last webinar of the year and we're glad to have you here. Today we will have a presentation from Andrew, who's the Chief Technology Officer at Validation Cloud about how performance note infrastructure drives enterprise blockchain adoption and allows for Hyperledger based on deployment. Now, before we start, we do have some housekeeping. So first of all, I would like to emphasize that everybody is welcome in our Hyperledger global community and we are committed to creating a safe and welcoming environment for everybody. So please follow our code of conduct when interacting with each other on this webinar and also in the community more broadly. You can find our code of conduct in our wiki on our website. First, all of the Hyperledger Foundation webinars are held under the Linux Foundation Antitrust Policy. So, and you can find this antitrust policy on our website and on our wiki as well. This webinar is being recorded as well as live streamed on LinkedIn Live and YouTube and you can always find the recording along with the slides in our webinar library. So you can always revisit that if you missed a certain part of it. Now, we encourage you to be as active as possible and get the most out of it because the more active we are, the more the better experience for everybody. So please use your raise the hand button to get unmuted and to speak up and do feel free to ask questions. You can use the Q&A box or also the chat box. So we will get to the questions either at the middle of presentation or at the end. So feel free to just pose your questions over there. Now, without further ado, I would like to introduce again, Andrew McFarley, the CTO of the Validation Cloud. And Andrew, over to you. Awesome. Great to see you, Tomasson. Thank you everybody for joining today. I really appreciate your time and glad that the community came out to support and watch the content today. Let me just open up my slides. Tomasson, can you see that all right? Yes, that looks okay. Thank you. Awesome. So my presentation today is about empowering enterprise blockchain adoption. As Tomasson mentioned, my name is Andrew McFarland and I'm the CTO and one of the co-founders of Validation Cloud. My background, just to start so you know a little bit about me, I noticed in the chat some Toronto's, I'm also based in Toronto, Canada, although our company is quite global, folks in the US, Europe and across the world. My background is in computer engineering by training. I've spent some time in telecom working on content distribution networks for video streaming applications. I spent some time at Deloitte and cybersecurity, mostly working with financial institutions on application and network security. And then made my way into Web 3 about six years ago now, started investing in the space. That led to running infrastructure to participate in different emerging networks and started to see the limitation of certain protocols due to the infrastructure that was effectively acting as a middleware between the users and those networks. And because of that limitation of scalability, there was a lack of particular use cases being able to come to life. Many of the ones that, you know, people who are around Web 3 were particularly excited about faster DeFi applications, financial infrastructure, energy, logistics, and next generation gaming, which I'll get into later in the presentation. And so we decided to found validation cloud in order to solve some of those scalability problems and really address the needs for enterprise grade infrastructure across Web 3. And so we purpose built the company to be Web 3 enterprise infrastructure. And this comes not only from the technical designs of our platform, which I'll get into, but also in the construction of our team. So not only experts from the Web 3 world to have context for interacting with networks and how to build on them from companies like Crypto.com, from Binance, and from other large Web 3 companies, but also you can see along the bottom here a number of large Web 2 traditional enterprise companies that have brought their experience into the company for working directly with institutions, companies like Workday, Uber, Citadel, so a wide range of applications and Web 2 experience. Today I'll walk you through a few things I really wanna introduce you to the company at Validation Cloud. We're a new member of the Hyperledger ecosystem and so really wanna present ourselves, get a chance for everyone to get familiar with our services and how our platform comes together for enterprises. That includes staking, node API, and data that you'll see, but I'll dive deeper into staking and node API and how that really helps power enterprises feeling comfortable interacting with our infrastructure. And then finally end on some enterprise use cases where having more performant node infrastructure is particularly important and some of the applications that we see and get inbound interest for infrastructure. So to start a little bit more about the company here, so we primarily today engage Web 3 ecosystems and their underlying applications. Our partners have market caps in excess of 30 billion in aggregate and work very closely with a number of the top public chains as well as on private infrastructure. And again, we're happy to be a new entrant into the Hyperledger ecosystem where we can hopefully bring some of our operating experience and technical experience to help unlock certain use cases for participants. Our platform has three core pillars, staking, node API, and data. And really this is meant to be an end-to-end suite for enterprises to on the left side of that spectrum, power and bootstrap, very secure and scalable consensus, node API to unlock interactions with those underlying networks that have been deployed, whether we spoke private deployments or on top of public networks and implementations and then data to index and provide a queryable engine for access to historical data on those networks. Before I dive in more specifically on the products, I just wanna highlight two important facets that we're particularly proud of as a company. One is we've been ranked number one for performance in terms of API response speed by compare nodes. I'll get into more of this later, but it effectively shows that across North America, Europe and Asia, we ranked number one for the fastest average API response speed and I'll get into more why that matters, particularly for scalable use cases. And in line with being enterprise infrastructure, we take security and compliance very seriously and so we're also stuck to compliant as a platform across those product lines that I shared on the last slide. Okay, so first I wanna dive into our staking, enterprise staking platform, which provides secure scale for institutions. And so some of the product features that you can find on our platform are completely self-service non-custodial platforms. So if you come on and you'd like to stake Ethereum or other assets on our platform, you can simply make account and get started, hit stake and you'll be able to provision validators on demand. There's a few key components here on the left side that I mentioned that are particularly important for institutional token holders. The first is the non-custodial nature of the platform making it completely staking as a service or validator as a service if required. And so you can keep your tokens in custody and simply interact with the network directly through our service. And that I'll walk you through in the next couple of slides here, how that's possible and some of the technical innovations that we've made. On demand, so you can go directly on our platform and we'll spin up dedicated environments for the provision validators on our staking platform completely isolated on a per customer basis that interacts. You can do this through the UI as well as API, key provisioning. So if you are an asset manager and you feel more comfortable working through our user interface, you can stake directly in that interface or if you need a more programmatic connectivity if you're a custodian, you can do that through API calls to our platform. Everything's done on chain in terms of commission. So there's no back office accounting for actually settling payment for the service. Everything's done on chain, full reporting. And you also get the benefit of extra features for enterprises like slashing insurance and the SOC2 nature of the platform. Before I dive in a little bit more technically in how it works. So right now our staking and validator platform is trusted by several hundred millions of delegated assets across ecosystems and is currently used by asset managers, foundations and custodians. And so if you're particular interested in bootstrapping a consensus on your network, if you're interested in support and managing assets whether that's through smart contracts or other means on top of a network or simply in how you interact as a custodian on top of different protocols, our platform can support and our team is happy to work with you on your particular use case. So some of the key technical innovations I'd like to go through now on this slide, particularly with respect to staking and how that non-custodial real-time provisioning in dedicated environments and smart contract awards split all works in tandem on our platform. So hopefully you can see my pointer here to walk you through, if not, I'll walk you through verbally as well. So if you're an asset manager or institutional token holder, you can show up on our platform with an existing account. Let's say with a custodian, as an example, Fireblocks. You can interact with our platform, as I mentioned through UI or API, and effectively what that UI or API has been built to do is help facilitate a transaction that's signed from your custodial wallet and pushes that transaction completely based off of your wallet interactions into public network in order to stake those assets. Once that's been accomplished, our platform automatically dedicates environments for that new wallet that was recognized on the platform. So everything is completely isolated. Once that happens, our backend deploys a few components, two of which are highlighted here, so that new dedicated environment, as I mentioned, with validators that interact with consensus on the network in order to generate rewards and validate transactions. The other key component that is deployed is a new smart contract for handling on-chain rewards commission. So everything is completely automated, completely transparent on-chain. So how that works is you've deployed from this custodial wallet, and this rewards contract has been deployed to automatically split rewards between our billing wallet and validation cloud, as well as right back to the wallet from which you stake. Now, to round out this flow, if you ever want to undeligate your assets that are associated with validation, you can simply go back to UI or API, again, sign a request directly from your custodial wallet. This will be pushed on-chain for verification, and those initial delegated assets will be returned directly to the custodial wallet from which you stake. And so it's a completely closed system where all the initial stake and rewards go back directly and can be managed from your custodial wallet and keep your assets safe and be in compliance with the mandates of operating from a custodian with your assets. So that's the flow for staking on our platform. There's a, you know, in summary, there's a particular number of innovations around making this non-custodial, making the real-time provisioning work both for the net new validators and dedicated environments, as well as the on-chain reward splitting, and then making sure it's a closed loop environment, bringing all rewards as well as initial stake back to your wallet. To go through the next section of our platform and some of the innovations that we've made, I'd like to highlight our enterprise node API where I'll go through some of the technical work and platform architecture as well as the use cases. And I think to set the stage a great analogy for platformers to think of us in node API as a cloud flare for web three. So cloud flare does a particularly great job in web two of if you have an application or a website and you wanna scale interactions with your web application, that you confront that with cloud flare to add a scalability to your web application. And similarly, if you have needs for high throughput in terms of interacting with applications, sending transactions, our platform is particularly well suited for those applications as a middleware between the end user and consensus and particularly good for global scale ecosystems to get a unified experience across the world for interaction with an underlying protocol. So I'll get into a few metrics here and then dive into the architecture and what interaction looks like for you as the end user. So mentioned at the beginning, the third party metrics from compare nodes in terms of the number one global node API performance, this gets more into the specifics in terms of relative throughput based on the latencies measured by compare nodes as benchmarked on their site to some other commonly used node API providers. And you can see in this depiction that whether you're in North America, whether you're in Europe or whether you're in Asia, you're getting a unified advantage and a similar operating experience in terms of your interaction for your application, no matter where you are on the planet. And that was particularly what our platform on the node API was designed to do. So why is a performant node infrastructure important? I mentioned a few reasons, but just to highlight them here. So quite frequently, web three networks or particularly private implementations deal with different business partners, different worldwide users. And it's important, especially in performance systems not to advantage or disadvantage folks based off of the location from which they're interacting. And so giving that unified experience brings a parody of interaction across the board. Cost efficiencies for your enterprises and for your ecosystem as a whole. So quite often when you factor in not only the actual cost of operation and the technical know-how to implement and maintain node infrastructure, but the human cost of maintenance upgrades and enhancements over time can cost ecosystems an aggregate of over $10 million and on a per enterprise basis, often individually into the several hundreds of thousands of dollars a year alone to manage that infrastructure. So having that be offered as a managed service is particularly well suited to streamline your operations and enhance your time to go to market for your application. And then finally enterprise grade scale. So our platform has the advantages of economies of scale of operating it across different networks. And so a tremendous amount of operating knowledge, but also particularly strong innovations that we've made that support enterprise grade quality across the board. So that includes that high throughput 24 seven uptime and infrastructure compliance like SOC2, but also resilience to the infrastructure. The ability to have redundancy baked in is particularly well suited for a variety of use cases. What I would like to highlight on the right here is as I mentioned at the beginning, we're a new entrant into the Hyperledger ecosystem. So you can see some of the additional networks around the hoop there that we support in terms of public networks, but we're also very excited to play a deeper role in the Hyperledger ecosystem and support our different applications using our middleware and perform an infrastructure in order to make those next gen applications come to life. And so if you're interested in building and you are looking forward to needing more performance in your application, we'd love to dig in with you and see if there's a mechanism for how our platform can make your network or your application scale. To go in more technically here in terms of what does this global architecture look like and how do you interact with it from the standpoint of a user in networks? So our global architecture spans the globe which is in part why it's particularly advantage North America, Europe, Asia, across the world, the ability to interact in about 20 milliseconds with infrastructure from wherever you are on the planet and how you interact with it as user is you simply generate an API key on our platform on demand that gives you access to this entire global network of those deployed across the globe. It is first priority is to tap you in and resolve to the closest point of presence in our global network in order to interact. And then each of these regions is linked through private network in order to speed up propagation of those transactions across the globe and come to transactions broadcast and becoming aware across the network as quickly as possible. What that URL in your application automatically does is it also detects if there is any local issues with any of the infrastructure. If at all, if that happens, it automatically reroutes your transaction to the next closest point of presence. And again, trans propagates those transactions across the globe or fast finality across our set of infrastructure. And so based baked into this architecture, it prioritizes speed, but doubles the speed but doubles as a resilience mechanism so that with a single URL and API key, you are tapped in to the full worldwide scope of our operating infrastructure. One more point that I'll make is this also supports high throughput as well because you are getting the advantages of a tremendous amount of parallel processing across the nodes that are deployed. How a user interacts with that network and I'll make the point that network can be bespoke. So if there is a private network and you're launching a new network and you'd like this particular architecture to bootstrap your ecosystem's ability to interact with it, then this opportunity to work directly with us to make that supportable and ease of onboard and streamline your user base into that ecosystem and to drive interactions and to build new applications. How the user experience looks here is you can generate your API key in seconds. So you simply go on our platform, select the node API option in our UI. You'll be prompted to create an endpoint. When you do that, you can name your endpoint, particularly helpful for segmenting environments, whether that's for your test environment and production or different use cases for your application and select network, select whether that's a mainnet or testnet for the ecosystem in which you want to interact. Simply click confirm and then you're off and away and can make calls directly against that global set of infrastructure. Our model is particularly well suited for scale. It was AWS inspired pricing model. So for builders out there and enterprises, a payment model that's particularly familiar and maps well to a wide range of applications. So we have a free tier. So if you're an enterprise and you're looking to trial our platform in the procurement process, it's particularly well suited there. You get 50 million compute units for free per month no credit card required to get started. So very seamless in order to trial the platform. And for those of you that are not familiar, compute units are basically a weight associated with an API request type, basically mapping the resource intensive nature of that request to a value to better standardized requests and bill for them across different types of requests and different networks. And then we also have the scale plan. So this is unlimited compute units. So you can scale completely based off of your needs and you only pay for what you use. So it's a pay as you go model and you also get economies of scale. So similar to AWS with their pricing thresholds as you use more you pay a lower marginal unit cost for what you consume. And so here on our platform it's similar. So you pay a lower cost per compute unit the more requests that you push through the infrastructure. And so you're not penalized for higher throughput and scalability. You're actually rewarded with economies of scale on the platform here. So who are you and who are some of the folks that are interacting with our node API platform today? So we're trusted by enterprises. So whether you're a blue chip enterprise, a web two company looking to get into and leverage a DLT solution particularly well suited for the scale resilience and compliance that you're used to seeing in the web two world that you can do on top of node API platform applications. So if you have a target ecosystem in mind and you'd like to scale your throughput whether that's through higher requests per second or particularly well suited there if you'd like to launch a private network let's say an L1 network that's unique for your use case we can help you bootstrap the network one on the consensus side but also deploy this global scale network so that you have an effective way for builders to connect into that ecosystem in a seamless, efficient and scalable manner. And then more use case specific but traders or financial services use cases if there's particular need to scale interactions with an application let's say example of high frequency trading where global scale advantages and latency it particularly makes a difference. This is where our notes can help you out with those interactions. So that's the overview of our staking and node API platform methods of interacting with it the value that they add to particular use cases and user profiles across web three. Now I'd like to get into a little bit more specifics on industry verticals where we've seen interest of the platform and how the performant node infrastructure is particularly well suited for those high level verticals. So first tier I would like to highlight financial infrastructure so where we've seen our middleware solution particularly well suited is first for high throughput DeFi protocols. So if you have the need to offer let's say particularly let's say efficient financial services products, lending protocols, synthetic assets, things of that nature tokenized assets and you are curating an ecosystem to interact with those protocols for settlement that often leads to particularly high throughput of requests that need to be pushed through infrastructure in order to interact with the protocol and have sort of cascading events that are triggered based on those interactions. And so that's a particularly well high throughput case for our node API. Here's second, there are highly high-frequency trading and market makers. So let's say those protocols above have been deployed and then there's a need to basically have interactions to make the lead to depth of markets or lead to arbitrage or opportunities for participation. Also again, there's an opportunity and the need for low latency interactions in order to be able to not only identify let's say arbitrage opportunities and execute against them in a rapid manner to bring stability to the underlying financial services protocol. That speed and interaction on node API allows that to happen in a particularly resilient and efficient manner. And then finally, Web3 Asset Interoperability. And so the ability for let's say new networks or existing networks where you've issued assets, our platform also hooks into a variety of ecosystems. So there's a great opportunity in order to build out your logic using our platform across ecosystem in a very efficient way versus going to multiple providers to connect into those different ecosystems. Secondarily here, we've seen inbound interest for energy and logistics sectors, particularly use cases, let's say around first tracking real-time energy generation. And so particularly in, let's say decentralized distributed areas for generation, there's an opportunity to track that production and create a record. And so those happening particularly quickly in high volume are particularly important to deal with scalable underlying infrastructure. We've seen the need for supporting global energy marketplaces based off of things like energy credits and other concepts. And then enabling traceability in the supply chain is particularly important. So a number of, again, globally distributed, highly frequent repetitive transactions works particularly well on our global scale deployment. And then last but not least, and this is definitely not an exhaustive list, but also we've seen a tremendous amount of interest and utilization with respect to next generation gaming. So for this use case, particularly networks and applications that are associated with gaming, there's a need for reaching, again, a common theme of worldwide gamer audiences. And so if you're launching a network or an application, let's say a Web3 game, and you want that to reach a user base in North America as well as Europe and maybe scale that into Asia over time, the network allows those interactions and having consistent user experiences from each of those geographic locations in terms of latency with the underlying Web3 network and allows gameplay to be augmented in a way that is sort of consistent with the increased speed and user experience. So you can have faster gameplay with these assets based off of faster settlement, greater and quicker recognition of these transactions being propagated across the globe. And the ability to, as I mentioned here, scale those in game transactions with asset ownership, which is very important for unlocking a different type of user experience and gaming experience where you actually have ownership of in-game items where you can unlock that value. So I appreciate your time today. As I mentioned, we're a new entrant in the Hyperledger ecosystem. I hope you got a sense of some of the technical innovations on the staking side, power and consensus, as well as the Node API, high performance, highly scalable, highly compliant, highly resilient, enterprise grade infrastructure for launching net new layer ones or helping scale your Web3 applications in terms of high throughput. We would love to get in touch with you, learn more about what you're trying to build and find ways that our platform can act as a great product suite for unlocking what you'd like to do and helping set the future of Web3 through you as a visionary builder. So you can get in touch with us directly. You can see the email at the top there, bdatvalidationcloud.io. You can follow us on xatvalidationcloud or you can use this giant QR code on the screen here to connect directly at validationcloud.io on our website. So thank you very much for your time. Really appreciate everybody joining today and taking time out of your day to learn more about Validation Cloud and we'd love to hear from you and help build together. Thank you. Yeah, thank you, Andrew. We do have a question from Jeff here in the Q&A box. If you can see it. You said from Jeff. Yes, the Q&A, we have only one question over there. Maybe you can read it to me. I can pop it into the chat if you can see it. There's some reason I don't see the chat. Okay, do you see it in the chat? Which of these priorities for Validation Cloud launches where there are no, am I reading the correct one? Maybe I'll read it. That's right. Everybody's benefit. So the question is, hi, can you describe your order or nodes? How are transactions prioritized for Validation consensus on blockchains where there are no mining or staking rewards? So for us, historically we've worked primarily in ecosystems where there are rewards. That has been in our company's evolution a way of sort of unlocking our particular business model in providing the infrastructure. In terms of the prioritization and how this would work, where that doesn't exist, I'll say we can dig in and if there's a bespoke deployment needed, we can discuss, you know, this would probably matter specific to use cases. So I imagine for, let's say, financial services, transactions, there's a particular need to order in a specific way versus other industries where maybe the ordering of transactions is less critical to the functioning of the use case. So sort of we're happy to dig in with folks if they need this explored and map the logic here to the specific use case so things function correctly. So I don't have more specific answer, but I think it matters more specific to use case on this front. Okay, thank you, Andrew. Do we have any other questions? Oh, I see something's coming up. Oh, Jeff says, okay, thanks. Okay, great. Would anybody else like to ask a question? I can unmute you. No, okay, I think we are good for now. Andrew, maybe just one last question from my side before we wrap it up. I'm wondering, could you maybe talk a little bit about the use cases? You know, you told us how it can be used, but are you available to speak a little bit about the use cases that you are running now on the validation cloud? Yeah, so I highlighted those generically, but there are use cases in line. So you can think of our platform, I mentioned at the beginning, more of from a node API side, a middleware for a variety of use cases. So how that looks like in reality for us is the users on our platform are coming. I gave sort of a high level overview, but for each of those verticals, there are users in those verticals using our platform for that scalability across different networks. So those were real specific examples, specific names of clients I can't get into today. Of course. But that is how our platform is being used. So really it's for us, we like to work with folks where they need extra bespoke help for specific verticals, but with that said, our platform is made to be sort of a building block for visionaries across the spectrum that can use us to enhance their performance or to unlock the advantages that they need for their use case. Okay, great. Thanks a lot, Andrew. Do we have any other questions? Please feel free to raise your hand. Oh, thank you Alfonso. Alfonso says thank you. Okay. In that case, let us wrap this up. Would you like to add anything else, Andrew? Otherwise, we will just conclude and thank everybody for being here. For me, I just want to say thank you again. Thank you, you, Tomas, for hosting me today and appreciate everybody joining live or watching this asynchronously later. You know, very glad that I had a chance to introduce you to Validation Cloud. We're very happy to be a part of the Hyperledger ecosystem. It's early days, but we really would love to hear from you, hear your visions for what you'd like to build in the future, and hopefully there's a way that our platform can help you on that journey. So thank you very much, everybody. All right, thank you very much, Andrew, and thank you everybody for joining to this last webinar, and thank you, you know, for joining us through the whole year. It was pleasure having you here, and you're always welcome to reach out to us, to join our Discord, to join our special interest group, and we look forward to seeing you at the other events as well. And thank you to Andrew and we're free to reach out to Validation Cloud as well. Now, just before we conclude, I would like to also invite you to visit our event page. So great heavy thank you with us on the webinars this year, and we are happy to have you on our upcoming webinars later in 2024, and visit our events page for both webinars, as well as the in-person events. Don't also forget to visit our Meetup page. We do have some of the upcoming Meetups also this year, still, as well as the next year, and you can just follow this link to join the Meetups and learn more there. I would also like to invite you to view the research that we are doing here at Hyperledger, and over the last years, we published quite a couple of different papers, white papers, e-books. Some of the most recent ones includes the Supply Chain and Trade Finance e-book, which was created by the Supply Chain and Trade Finance Special Interest Group. It's a part of our community, as well as the updated CBDC e-book, and you can download both of them here by following this QR code or just following this link on the research. Do not forget to join our Discord. There's a lot of real-time interaction there. You can find out more about our projects, about our special interest groups, our working groups, original chapters, and much, much more. And you can also join it by following this link or through scanning this QR code. And for those of you interested in your organization's membership in Hyperledger Foundation, feel free to reach out to our membership, such as our valued member validation cloud here as well. Now for the last time, thank you for watching and happy holidays to everybody, and we hope to see you again next year as well. And all the best. Thank you, and goodbye.