 Hello, everyone. Good afternoon. I know it's been a long day of panels, so hopefully we'll keep this one interesting for you. My name is Dominic Plino. I'm a senior manager at Accenture, part of our Metaverse continuum business group, but focused most of my time on digital currencies and central bank digital currencies. So we'll be talking a little bit today around open source and central bank digital currencies and the implications of those two coming together. Before diving into the panel, Jen, do you want to give us a little introduction on yourself? Yeah, thank you, Don. I'm Jennifer Peavey. I'm the head of strategy and innovation at DTCC, and I have overall responsibility for corporate strategy, our global partner team, strategic investments, and innovation. And the innovation work that we do tends to cover anything around emerging technologies. And, you know, we like to bring use cases to life through pilot, so we'll talk about one of those today that's centered around CBDC. Thank you. So, topic today, open source. Obviously, you guys are a financial services firm. How do you think about open source and financial services? So, for DTCC, I was actually quite surprised. They think the first time I did a technology contract for some development work at DTCC, and the lawyer said, so, you know, we need a list of their open source technology that they use, and I was like, wow, I didn't even think twice to imagine that we use so much open source ourselves and, you know, just making sure that the, we had the same versions as they did. But beyond that, with regards to blockchain and distributed ledger technology, et cetera, DTCC has been an active member of Hyperledger from its founding days. We were a founding member back in 2016. We've also done a lot of, with regards to, again, blockchain, our first ever contribution to open source code was through those projects, and we worked on the Hyperledger Explorer project, which allows you to have some visibility and transparency onto the blockchain. And I think we're pretty excited to hear that other firms and organizations are leveraging that project now. And so, that's one of the projects. I'd say Hyperledger has been kind of the foundation for us for the last five, six years. We've also done some work with regards to BASU and Firefly projects, and we've looked at the Hyperledger DLT stack and leveraged that for some of the internal proof of technology and proof of concepts that we do. I think we've also been really interested recently in Project Hamilton, so if you haven't seen their open source code, I'd recommend go doing it. I'm not the technologist, but I do know that, you know, they have put out code that was slightly different than some of the other CBDC projects that have been done that allow you to actually look at things and get a better understanding around the functional architectural and performance design elements that they chose. So I think that's something that we've also spent some time looking at. And, you know, generally speaking, I think we firmly believe in the open source communities. I think it's certainly taken us time to get to the point where we're actually contributing to them, but now that we are, I think the team, our technologists, are really excited about those opportunities because when you take real-world use cases and you bring an entire globe together of technologists and developers, you're going to get a much better outcome in terms of your product and the assessment of code and the design, et cetera, than any one individual organization could ever get by hiring staff, right? So I think it's been an important part of our going forward position. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think, you know, we've been involved alongside you guys is, you know, Hyperledger, Dave Treet, Metaverse Interim Business Group Lead, is a governing board chair of Hyperledger. And I think the work they're doing is super important. And, you know, although this is, you know, focused on Phinos, you know, both Linux projects, I think there's a lot of value that can be created there. Some of the project you mentioned, you know, do you see as an organization that the DTCC gets general value from participating in open source? I mean, is it an area that you expect to continue to, you know, work in and support going forward? Yeah, 100%. I think, again, I'll go back to, you know, being a financial services company, you know, infrastructure quality, performance, stability, resiliency are all, you know, right at the top of things that we look at. And when you're, when you want to work and you want to evaluate emerging technology, there's really no better place to do that than in an open source community. I think, and I think, again, why we contribute to that technology, those platforms is so that we can then further learn and understand what some, what the best and ultimate design decisions should be around certain applications of technology. And I think once you, once you contribute and you participate in those forums, you just really find the value. And so you want to continue to do that. And I think we're no different. I think, you know, we also, you know, Rob Platnick, who's our, who heads up our technology research and innovation team, has also been on the governing board of Hyperledger. And I think, you know, we've also seen and learned a lot from that experience in terms of how the projects are governed and how they're operated and, you know, thinking about how open source communities really manage the code and the longevity of the code and the community around it, I think are, is all very important to us. So we are particular, I would say, in looking at stuff. I think there are other technologists that have attempted to create an open source community around their code and they've been less successful. So I think it does take a lot of time and effort to really drum up and get the interest in what you're doing in an open source and maintain it in order for it to be successful and usable. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, the Linux Foundation overall has done a great job of creating that community. I think that's, you know, super important if the code just languishes because no one pays attention to it, it's not, you know, quite the value. So topic today was focus on digital currencies and CBDC. So, you know, let's think a little bit about that, right? So CBDC, central bank digital currencies, money is a public good. It is something that everyone needs to participate in. You know, almost definitionally, right? It's an open source activity. Everyone needs the opportunity to, you know, community to come together. So, you know, how do you see the interplay between CBDCs and open source and opportunities for the open source community to add value to that discussion? Yeah. So again, I'll go back to generally speaking. I think that the same principle applies not just to CBDC, but to everything. When a community comes together and contributes the code, the use of the code, they battle test the code, they harden the code, they, you know, continuously improve it, it just helps you then develop other parts of the ecosystem or the use case that you need. And I think for CBDCs, open source then is just a great way to experiment and do all those things when we're at this very early stage. I think my personal opinion is that it's going to take many years for a CBDC to come out if one does come out in the US in particular. But on a global basis, I think every country is somewhat at a different, it's at its own pace in terms of, you know, bringing something to the table. So in the meantime, we need to bring that community and those stakeholders together, ideally on a global basis, but that of course has its own challenges. But if you can bring that community together around a common use case and bring, you know, and then we've got a really good shot at creating what that right framework will be on a going forward basis. Yeah, I want to build on that because I think, you know, one of the biggest challenges that we're going to see with CBDCs is interoperability, right? You, I mean, you're going to have different jurisdictions, different political jurisdictions with groups that may or may not cooperate on a global scale, work together and, you know, at the end of the day, the end consumer wants to be able to go from the US to Europe and use a Euro, use a dollar, you know, use a British pound, whatever. And I think, I think the interoperability piece, and I'm by far the not the first person to say this is going to be the most critical part of CBDCs. You know, how do you see the ethos of interop, excuse me, of the open source community participating in creating interoperability across the different CBDCs? So a really good question. I think I've been in this in the financial industry for 30 years, and I will tell you that the underlying problem to everything we do is data. And I think it all starts with creating the right standards around data and the protocols for communication around those around that data. Then at that point in time, I think once you once you have some standards there, I think communicating between networks can be a lot simpler. But getting those data, those data, the data elements harmonized across global jurisdictions has just been a challenge that we've just not been able to been able to face. So if there is a way that the open source communities can come together to do that, I think it would be almost miraculous. But but it would be great to see. So I'd say that that would be my hope is that that's where they focus and try to move things forward and create yet that interoperability. Yeah, I think it's, it's I was at Sybos a couple months ago, they were last month, I'm losing track of time. There was a lot of conversations around interoperability. And I think the one thing that everyone universally agreed was there will be no universal system. It will be a series of individual jurisdictions, potentially multi jurisdictions in certain cooperative regions. And I do believe the open source community will have a critical component to play in that and making sure that they really create that functional or technical interoperability. So the end user feels like everything is truly interoperable. This, of course, is not to say that open source is the magic solution to CBDC development. There's a number of challenges. What do you see as some of the challenges that kind of both open source and CBDCs will have as they approach this kind of interoperability cross jurisdictional development? Yeah, I think security and data privacy seem to come up a lot when you're talking, when you start to think about less about the technology, less about the open source community of it, but the nature of a central bank digital currency and what it means for retail use cases, for example, or even wholesale. But protecting that data and privacy of that data seems to be the number one element. I'd say for me, the complexity would be the second. So you just brought up a really good point about how the ethos of open source could potentially come together and while we may have end up with different networks, which is absolutely the most likely case here, but you created a way for these networks and protocols for them to communicate. But I'd say anytime you have a mix of technologies, the design choices behind those technologies, you have multi jurisdictional considerations like rules and laws and regulations. That's never an easy path forward. That's almost as easy as doing a consortium build with your clients. So I think that, to me, is going to be the most difficult thing to get around. So again, it doesn't really have anything to do with the open source, necessarily the open source community, except for the privacy and the security side of it, but the complexity of those types of initiatives just generally drag things out for a very long time because of it. And I think when you look at past experiences and other products that have been built in financial services, I'm going to use trade repositories as a good example. Again, I'll go back to data, harmonization of data on a global basis to ease the use of those repositories and create a network, if you will, on a global basis. That's just been elusive because they don't have, you know, harmonizing those data standards while we're making progress on that with regulators. We're still just not quite there. And so I just, you know, I think we're at a good point, we're at a good place now with CBDCs, we're at the starting point, right? So we can, we have the opportunity to get it right from the beginning, but have, you know, escalating and having the right discussions with the right leaders within each jurisdiction is going to be critical. So bringing the central banks into the mix will be important and making sure that technically they're thinking about things in the same way. Yeah, it's super interesting. I mean the BIS Enbridge project that was announced a few weeks ago, the publication was released, they talked a lot about how the legal and jurisdictional challenges were almost bigger than the technology challenge, right? As technologists, we say, well, the technology works, go do it. But at the end of the day, you need lawyers to agree on what settlement is, you know, what different processes are, how do you have recourse and remediation and all of that stuff is on top of the technology and it's really more than just a technology problem. Yeah, I think I would totally agree with that. I mean, if I just thought about every blockchain use case that's been talked about, you know, prototypes, et cetera, since we started really, you know, talking about it back in 2015, I'd say that, you know, my going in position is always that technology works, just hands down technology works, right? It's just a matter of architecting it the right way and then making sure you have your community around the table. And the whole purpose of prototyping and getting in front of clients is to help them see the value in what you've built, not necessarily to opine on the execution of the technology itself. Although there are some use cases where that does become important when you need, you know, you did ensure scalability performance, et cetera. I'm not discounting that, but I'd say that nine times out of 10, it comes down to use, comes down to your community and buy-in versus the technology. Yeah, absolutely. Well, pivoting to the getting the community around the table, you know, recently, the DTCC in partnership with the Digital Dollar Project published a recent white paper exploring US Central Bank digital currency. For those of you who aren't familiar, the Digital Dollar Project is a not an open source technology group, but is a non-for-profit private public partnership focused on exploring the implications of a US digital dollar. And so the DTCC was one of the first, was the first participant to run a pilot. Do you want to talk a little bit about your work with the DDP and kind of what the pilot results were? Yeah, I'd say first I'd like to, I mean, shout out to the Digital Dollar Project because the number one thing that attracted me to that organization was for the public good, right? We were, this was not about, you know, a solution for DTCC. It was absolutely a solution that we were interested in and wanted to explore for the benefit of our clients. We don't actually have a stake in or a preference on whether clients settle our transactions through CBDC or stablecoin or some other form of token or through our traditional Fed systems. But we are absolutely interested in making sure that they can do it. They can settle in the most efficient way and they have optionality. And so thinking about the future of central bank digital currencies and what that might mean for the industry. When the Digital Dollar Project came around, it was a great opportunity for us to take some technology that we had built in-house and work with the Digital Dollar Project team to explore what a central bank digital currency could look like for tokenized, the settlement of tokenized securities against CBDC. And so I'd say for us there were, beyond that there were two goals. The first one was we wanted to understand how we could utilize a U.S. central bank digital currency for cash settlements payments and of securities. And the second was that we wanted to contribute to that public-private partnership that we talked about, share our learnings from the pilot and highlight areas of future exploration. You know, we had nine, I think nine banks around the table or nine clients around the table. And I think that was also really important because sometimes, you know, you can get a comment, well, do commercial banks really want central bank digital currency? And I think it just behooves everybody to really understand, you know, I think it's too early to say or worry about whether it's coming to market. I think it's time for us to be thinking about what it means for us if it does come to market and how it would work and how we would design the networks. And there were a lot of design considerations that went into this. So, for example, you could have a Fed network that tokenizes onto your own blockchain. You could have the Fed runs its own settlement network, a CBDC network, and then you could have a securities network that then interoperate between each other. And so part of the overall project was to work with the clients in that community setting to think about the best design and architecture for that, for this simulated CBDC network. And we ultimately decided on two separate networks, a cash network and a securities network, and then created the bridge between them. Now, that's not the only way you can do it. Others across the globe have experimented and done it in different ways, but it was the way we chose to explore and experiment this time around. I think it raised a lot of good questions, and it definitely warrants further exploration. We certainly took a focus on the design aspects first and foremost of what these networks looked like and then effecting settlement between them and then thinking about the governance of those networks, et cetera, versus focusing on some of the nonfunctional requirements like performance and scalability, et cetera. So there is more work to be done in those areas. I think we also need to think a little bit more about whether or not we want to experiment with a different model, if you will, right? And just test that out to understand the benefits there. And or learn from the next several projects that come out of DDP if they start to think about leveraging the settlement network in a different model. And then I think what the other benefit that comes out of it is just in the same way that we learn from Project Jasper and Project Ubin and others on a global basis who have done similar things. We hope that this pilot and the learnings from it that we shared in our recent White Paper will be leveraged by not only the DDP on a going forward basis, but also by other projects that are out there. And so I think just sharing those learnings and building on those foundations on each of these projects I think on a global basis are foundations for us to build on and just get to what the right end state is going to look like. Yeah. I think one of the things that was most interesting about the paper was the well thought out nature and how you guys decided to set up the two networks. And the reality is we don't have an answer on what it's going to look like. But the set of assumptions and how you landed on that made a lot of sense. And I think, like you said, there will be several different ways to do it. And perhaps if there's ever a CBDC, there will be multiple ways to actually implement it. Maybe the Fed will choose to tokenize onto networks in certain areas and have a totally separate network in other areas. And I think that's one of the interesting flexibility elements of a tokenized currency and it could be applied in different ways. And I think the other interesting things that we talked about were transaction confidentiality. How do you manage the risks while also providing the right transparency to the right people in the process? And I think these are the things that have to be really deeply thought through. Again, they do have technology elements, but they are risk considerations for how you manage a client's business at the end of the day. I think we also thinking about the separate and distinct networks and then also for that bridge that we talk about between the Fed and the settlement network, the securities network, how do you make sure that you are actually getting settlement finality? Yes, they are blockchain networks, but is there, how do you manage that check mark, if you will, to say, yep, everything worked and didn't, nothing failed? Do you put an orchestrator in the middle of that or do you find some other solution? And in the pilot, we chose an orchestrator that may not surprise many people, given that we are DTCC. However, it was just a way to do it. We need to think about longer term. Is that the right way to do it? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think with what for a quadrillion value of stocks moving through here, you have to know a little bit about what settlement takes. So I think that makes a lot of sense. So the panel topic, we're ending 2023, digital currencies have had a bit of a rocky year, right? I think one of the shining spots in tokenized money space has been CBDCs. I mean, we saw the White House come out with a series of requests for reports and some of those reports have been published around CBDCs. There's movement on the hill, different things going on there. I mentioned to Enbridge earlier, which I think was a really meaningful pilot, particularly on how they focused on moving actual value and not just synthetic value, which we had to start somewhere. So what are your predictions for 2023 if we're sitting here a year from now? What interesting things will have happened with CBDCs that we'll be reporting on? I feel like since the beginning of blockchain, I have the same answer. We're going to be, I think over the next year, I actually, okay, I personally, I think I mentioned this earlier, I think that some form of a regulatory compliance stable coin or settlement coin will come around and be more useful in the near term versus waiting for a CBDC. Now, I'm not, you know, I do know that there are some firms out there looking at and thinking about how to apply to central banks directly to effectively create a central bank backed settlement coin, but that's one that's managed not by the central bank itself. And I think that could be very interesting for us in the short term. So I do expect to hear more about those types of initiatives. We ourselves are experimenting with those expecting that something like that might exist. And if it does, thinking about how we would leverage it, right, for whether it's for cash settlement or whether it was for another form of collateral, I think there's some really interesting ways that you could potentially leverage that type of an instrument. And if it becomes available sooner than CBDCs, then that's even better for the industry. And so I think for us in particular, we're going to be looking at those types of solutions and use cases for something like a regulatory compliance settlement coin, if you will, stable coin settlement coin, right, depending upon how they emerge. With regards to CBDC, I do expect that we'll just continue to see the experimentation, right? The executive order talks about we want you to do X, Y, and Z. And a lot of work has been done. A lot of thinking has been done. The Fed has done their own CBDC project. We've got the Boston Fed working, you know, around Project Hamilton. And I think that we're just going to continue to see iterations on those projects over time. And I think that's important. I think to introduce an alternative means of exchange, like CBDC, a chronic global basis is a big deal, right? And so you want to make sure that it's done right. And quite frankly, the technology is also in a place where I roughly feel like it's half to just past halfway through its maturity cycle in terms of real adoption in the financial services industry. And I'll just pause for a minute and digress to seven and a half years ago when I started at DTCC. Cloud was all the rage in terms of within the organization and other financial institutions. Everyone was talking about we got to implement cloud. Cloud for strategies, this has got to be the way we go. And then as we started to move down that journey, everybody kind of raised their hands and went, whoa, we need to stop. Because what we needed from a regulatory perspective to meet our obligations was not something that the cloud providers at the time could provide. And so we've now spent the last several years working with those providers to get the assurances and build the confidence in the technology such that we can now start to put applications in the cloud, et cetera. And that's a big deal. I'm pretty excited about that. I know we're here to talk about open source and CBDC, but I'm pretty excited about that. So in all, just over 15 years of our industry talking about using cloud, not to be discouraging, but we're about seven and a half years since the first real big hype cycle of 2015 on blockchain. And so now we're talking about re-architecting our financial payment systems in a technology that, for one, I want to make sure it's really robust and reliant performance, et cetera. So I do think that we're going to see, for the near term, we're definitely going to see a lot more experimentation going forward. Yeah. And you touched a little bit on digital currencies. It sounds like that's a similar opinion for digital currencies. Any different views for what's going to happen in that space? For non-dollar backed things. So, you know, look, I think for where I sit, I think it's going to be interesting to watch and I think about the institutional demand typically. So it's going to be interesting to watch how the institutional clients respond to recent market events and where they start to really draw lines around their interest in those other digital currencies versus not. I don't want to say that they're dead. I don't necessarily know that I believe that. But it is going to take time to recover. And then the retail always seems to come first. And our industry retail comes first. And then you typically see the institutional clients following. I do know there's been a large outcry, effectively, for some of what the traditional financial institution brings to the table with regards to just ensuring that the right compliance and rules and regs and stuff are put in place. But again, those are more around running the company, not necessarily the technology itself. Folks like to decry regulators, but turns out regulators seem to do a really good job for the most part. I read an interesting article that basically said no entity that has been regulated by the New York State DFS has had any of the challenges this year that we saw. And I think that potentially is something to pay attention to. Look, we've relied on regulation for a long time. And as an investor, I think it is quite important because it provides confidence in the financial system. And so I do think it is important. And we should be really diligent about how we move technology and new innovation forward, no matter what it is, to make sure that we are protecting ourselves, protecting investors and innovating in the right responsible way and driving new solutions, compressing the value chain, taking friction out. I'm all for it. I think we need to get to that point. We just need to make sure that we're doing it the right way. Awesome. I think that is a great note to end on. We're hitting time. So thank you very much for the time today. And I hope you guys all enjoyed the conversation.