 right now. All right. So two or three things before we start, two things actually. One is we are a part of the Linux Foundation. So we need, we need to be aware that we are bound by the antitrust policy of Linux Foundation. Basically it means that we are not going to indulge in any anti-competitive behavior. That's the first thing. Second is our code of conduct, which you can find in the, you know, in detail in, in, if you search for it under the wiki page. But primarily it says that we have to be, even when we disagree with someone, we have to be, you know, we, we shouldn't be disagreeable. That's the first thing. Second is we give people an opportunity to speak and we try to be as inclusive as possible in terms of the differing, you know, the diversity of opinions, the diversity of people, the diversity of expression. These are the only two requirements to participate in this call. Other than that, it's open to everyone. And we will be making available the recording of the call on the site that I just put in the, put in the chat before. And please add your name to that list. There are 11 participants right now. So without waiting any longer, I'm going to ask Stephen Phillips to talk about what he came to talk about, which is the possibility of digital payment systems, especially ones that are backed by Fiat equivalent, which may be un, unpopular these days because of the rise of the Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, but it still is a viable option. So please listen to Stephen Phillips. He's the VP of bit.com. They are currently undertaking a digital currency exercise, DHCD in Eastern ECCB, you know, which is the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank. They have signed a memorandum with DCCB and a project is full underway. And that was in February 2020. So obviously we are almost ready to hit the ground with that project. So Stephen, please tell us more about this wonderful, about this game changer in the Eastern Caribbean. Amazing. Thank you for the introduction. I hope I'm calling your name correct. Is that correct? Yes, it's as it is spelled. The VIP is in. So you are converted to Sikhism. I like how you did that, Rupin. Have you converted to Sikhism? No, I am a Moor. Oh, wonderful. Yes, yes. Fantastic. So are you seeing my share screen as well? Yes, we do. All right. Amazing. So without further ado, I'm happy to move into this. You guys are ready? Please. All right. Fantastic. So I want to begin. First of all, by saying a big thank you to the Linux Foundation and the team here within Hyperledger for inviting me to briefly share my thoughts and experiences with digital currencies. I'm truly grateful for all of you taking your time to join this call and to listen in. I hope we can have a very fun and interesting discussion today. So just a bit on me. I started my journey with digital currencies in 2016. And this was very tough. It was very early on. And at that time, very few central banks or financial institutions knew much about blockchain or distributed ledger technology. So it's been a long road. And today I lead product development at bit.com. So a brief introduction to bit.com. We are a financial technology company, creator of the lead in digital currency management system. And we enable central banks, financial institutions, regulators, payment providers to adopt digital currency infrastructure required for the next evolution of the financial ecosystem. So bit is very much on the technology services provider side of things. Our clients are central banks and financial institutions. And we provide them with technology to deploy these new modern payment system structures and to achieve their strategic objectives. All right. So we begin our conversation on new opportunities for digital money with a look at adoption. Adoption, for me, is a key success metric for any transformative technology. And looking at the USDC stablecoin, we can recognize signs of growing adoption by a significant growth in USDC market capitalization, representing a 900% increase in less than the last year, with yesterday's daily trade and volume exceeding 1.5 billion USD. Now this trend, in my opinion, is set to continue on the heels of the recent Office of the Comptroller of Currency, OCC, announcement clarifying national banks, federal savings associations can participate in independent node verification networks. So that's kind of a weird way of saying blockchain and DLT and use stablecoins to conduct payment activities and other bank permissible functions. So for those of you who haven't heard of the OCC, they are an independent bureau of the US Department of Treasury, and they supervise nearly 1,200 national banks, federal savings associations, and federal branches of foreign banks that conduct approximately 70% of all the banking business in the US. So this is a big regulator coming and smoothing the path for digital currency adoption with key stakeholders within the monetary system, those tier one banks. So moving away now from stablecoins and looking more for success stories for adoption with CBDCs. We have central bank and regulator for the Kingdom of Cambodia. I think this project was the last talk that this group had early this year or late last year. Someone couldn't correct me in the chat. But their CBDC launched in 2019 and currently they have 50,000 users, $20 million worth of assets in their ecosystem and it's growing. So this is all against the backdrop of an increasingly large number of central banks globally conducting research into CBDC. So we can see that the trend is there and we have when we have the early signs that things are taking root and this is going to drive enhancements in the global payments infrastructures. Chat. All right. Okay. Yes. First off for 2021. All right. So next slide we now move into taking a closer look at bits technology. So on screen you have our system architecture at a high level and we've architected a modular containerized software and payments infrastructure that is blockchain agnostic. This allows for easy upgrades and can even support changing DLTs based on client requirements. For instance, if there's a new blockchain that a client is particularly interested that solves problems better or has particular features that they would want, our infrastructure facilitates migrating over to different blockchain or underlying ledger infrastructures. Privacy is very much a key talking point when we're talking about CBDCs and our infrastructure preserves the privacy of transacting parties by storing personally identifiable information off chain. So this makes transactions private but not anonymous under investigation by regulators. And this is a very key deciding decision to keep that information off the chain and to allow regulators to access that information on an as needed basis. Next, we can talk briefly about minting. So we offer a secure offline minting system for asset creation and also destruction. A key component is also the public APIs you see over on the right. So these allow for ecosystem partner access and also really those are there to kind of drive financial innovation and adoption of the CBDC central bank digital currency or synthetic central bank digital currency issued by a licensed entity. Of importance, we also have, you see their wallet app and merchant app. We have custodial and non-custodial wallet types. And our infrastructure also supports other payment types such as payment cards. ISO 2020 standard messaging format facilitates interaction with existing financial and global payments infrastructure. So that's a key piece for interoperability. ISO 2020 is continuing to be adopted globally. And we felt that that was a key component to have for a messaging format to ensure we have interoperability with core banking systems and global payment system infrastructures. Looking at eastern Caribbean central bank digital currency pilot more closely, on screen we kind of have a large laundry list of motivations for central banks and emerging market economies to explore central bank digital currencies. To provide a brief overview of the eastern Caribbean central bank, the ECCB is a monetary authority and sole issuer of currency within the eastern Caribbean currency union. So this currency union is made up of eight sovereign territories and is one of the oldest currency union globally. The EC digital currency which is called DXCD and it's the digital version of XCD which is the ISO currency code for the eastern Caribbean currency. So DXCD is a term I may say I just mean digital EC dollar. So this is configured as a two-tier currency distribution model and it's a retail CBDC. So licensed financial institutions play a critical role in the distribution of the digital EC dollar. So they are the only players that the central bank in this under these regulations can issue currency too. So they play a very key role in ensuring currency makes it to the retail market and consumers can have access to this digital currency. So a bit more on the pilot. It will commence initially with four territories within the eastern Caribbean currency union and will grow to include all territories within say six months. More specifically the eastern Caribbean central bank their motivations to embark on this journey are really around promoting the inclusion of vulnerable populations. So this technology is going to enhance accessibility and ease of doing digital payments. Motivation number two is payments efficiencies and regulator compliance and regulatory compliance. So reducing the cost of payments is huge and reducing the cost of compliance for say financial institutions is also a key motivation. To give a quick story you could be in one you could bank with with one bank say you have a friend or a family member and they're in another country within the eastern Caribbean currency union and you want to send them say a hundred dollars it costs you today almost a hundred dollars to make that wire transfer and it takes about three to five days. So there are huge motivations for the central bank to kind of enhance efficiencies for payments and reduce costs within the economy. The final key motivation I would suggest is economic growth. The governor of the the ECCB is very keen to facilitate and support digital transformation of the region and this technology central bank issued digital currencies can help facilitate that in a currency union by more closely connecting the economies of those eight territories within the eastern Caribbean currency union. So you could imagine right now today you know business owners in one territory are kind of limited to their geographical area however with this technology business owners can target all of the all of the participants within the eastern Caribbean currency union as a potential market because they can be paid and they can provide goods and services and get paid instantly via the central bank digital currency issued by the ECCB. So moving on we are looking now at the payments landscape kind of past present and future. One of the key motivations for the eastern Caribbean central bank is to reduce cash in circulation. Move from analog forms of payment to digital payments. So that will look like a reduction of cash in circulation, a reduction of check payments and these will really drive the growth of the DXCD the digital EC dollar as well as electronic payments. So moving the economies into the digital age reducing cash reducing cash payments which are very frictional and slow and costly to you know faster payments instrument like a central bank digital digital currency or stable coin and more electronic payments. So the vision here is this can help ease doing business and making payments simpler and easier for the economies of the eastern Caribbean currency union. So next up we have the likely future for CBDCs and this is my last slide I'm very sure. Central banks are generally not very well equipped to operate and maintain real-time payments and settlement infrastructure. So looking at the first point predominantly centralized operational and governance frameworks where the future state is going to be enhanced consortia and decentralized operational and governance frameworks. It's my assertion that in the near future say two to five years if not sooner we will have digital currencies issued with enhanced decentralized and distributed governance and operational frameworks. This will provide key financial market stakeholders with a growing role for operating and shaping the payments infrastructure of the future. This is particularly exciting for the future of the LTE's like hyperledger fabric which the DXCD the digital EC dollar is based on because hyperledger fabric as I'm sure you all know it facilitates network nodes that have different permissions and roles. So it provides an easy way for different stakeholders to join the network and to play a meaningful role in adding resilience and buy-in to the actual network itself. Moving on to the second point where the current state is really single currency networks and my idea for the future state is CBDC's multi-currency or really multi-asset networks. We see that early exploratory work is being done by the bank of France and a few other central banks who are looking into CBDC use cases central bank digital currency use cases such as delivery versus payment for securities and other opportunities over existing incumbent payments infrastructures. So leveraging this new central bank digital currency infrastructure it's likely that we will see central banks and monetary authorities issuing different types of collateralized assets like we've been seeing earlier for different use cases. This is particularly important because it potentially unlocks offline payment solutions which is very huge and lots of talk around solving for offline payments and I think that central banks can issue different types of assets that can be used in different ways. For me an offline payment solution would be more of a bearer instrument where the central bank would issue individual cents or the lowest denomination of the currency that they want to issue. That way if it's offline it's just a matter of transferring private keys and there's no need to sell on chain. Looking at the last point we have a digital cash model which is the current state and a future state for true programmable money. There's a lot of hype around programmable money right now as well but the current state is really a digital cash model. CBDC's central bank digital currencies today remain a very nascent technology with little functionality in most documented deployments beyond offering a digital version of physical cash and this is pretty much the same for stable coins as well. Future CBDC's are likely to leverage programmable attributes of digital currencies more heavily enhancing central bankers monetary policy tool kits which is very important you know central banks or many of them are broke approaching the lower zero bound and they are really running out of tools to help stimulate the economy. So I'll leave you guys with a gem. Next generation digital currencies are likely to provide frameworks for dynamic interest rates which we've heard a lot of talk about but there's also kind of timestamped money that is an efficient method of reducing hoarding of currency because the money actually loses value if it if it doesn't get transacted so a form of demure age. So this is particularly exciting and interesting especially when we think about economies wanting to move out of depression so these types of tools can really equip central banks with a lot more than they have accessible today and it's my assertion that we will see more programmable money solutions evolve in the next say two to five years if not sooner. So in summary I just want to wrap things up we had a brief background on bit and what bit does we looked at the evidence of global adoption of CBDCs and stable coins we saw that amazing curve with 900% growth in USDC as one example of a stable coin. We also looked at bits digital currency technology and infrastructure we looked at motivations for the ECCB to pilot a central bank digital currency and we took a brief look at the future outlook for central bank digital currencies and stable coins and how these technologies will need to evolve to meet the future needs of payment systems and also you know general stakeholders within the monetary system. So with that I'm going to conclude and open the floor for questions hand back to you Vipin and you can take it away. Yes please ask your burning questions to Stephen and he'll put out the fire. Hi Stephen this is Karen thanks so much for coming on. Thank you for having me again. I was wondering you know if you could provide a little bit more detail and information on how you're using hyperledger fabric you know what were some maybe some challenges and how you overcame them and and using it for this DXCD it's something that I think a lot of people are wondering and thinking about in terms of how to apply which DLT to these sorts of use cases if you can share anything more about that that would be great. Sure so how are we using it so in this use case this client wanted to use hyperledger fabric they felt like it was a good fit so we went along with it. I think that it's a reasonable fit as well. So the hyperledger fabric sits here in what we call the numus so this basically abstracts direct interactions with the distributed ledger or the ledger technology to allow for you know all of all of those particular attributes that meet BITS technology great so this framework allows for easy upgrades swapping out the ledger you know it it creates a buffer that allows us to do lots of things operationally. So we're using version 1.2 I think at the moment and I know you know from interactions with the technical team that you know there were some issues with container containerizing certain components and getting things to work in the way that we wanted to work for our clients you know some clients want infrastructure deployed on premises some don't mind cloud deployment so it was very important for us to be able to provide the software in a manner that the client would actually upset. So that was one of the key key challenges that jumped out to me early on. We did have to write you know all of the chain code for the digital currency itself and because it was nothing native in fabric at the time so that was also you know a big axe and to you know to ensure that everything works perfectly right with that and also some other security layers different types of wallets and what they can do and how they can move money and you know built-in security via the chain code that we wrote and smart contracts. Was that helpful Karen? Yeah definitely. Okay cool well I'm open for any other questions. Don't be shy. Nathan maybe you have one or two. Well I could keep you here for a couple of hours. I know I know you know the reason I don't ask right away is because I want to give people the opportunity to ask what they have to ask and that's why I'm keeping sort of in the background for now. So does anybody else have questions? Yeah Stephen this is Mani from Swap Sub. Can you give a bit more detail about how do you plug and play ledgers? What's your thought process? Let's say if you wanted to read if some other central bank wanted to replace with an Ethereum based ledger and how do you go about building it? Yeah so that's an important point. So like I said we've been kind of working on this technology for a number of years so we recognize very early on that committing to one ledger technology may not be the best strategic play for the company because you know there's new technologies coming out so we need a way to be we need a way to future proof our infrastructure so to speak. The we do very little with with the ledger technology it's kind of just a store of values what it was intended to do you know maintain accurate records and maintain a mutable you know ledger that's fine but a lot of the value that the technology brings is on the layers above you know all of the business logic and you know custody stuff and applications and processes data models and process models built into to actual workflows. You know the ledger for us really just stores the values so as long as a blockchain or distributed ledger technology can support smart contracts it offers settlement finality via the consensus algorithm you know some some pretty standard requirements that we would have when selecting a distributed ledger technology to be the backbone you know truth for for for balances etc within the entire system architecture. Does that help any? Yeah thank you. Okay fantastic thank you for the question appreciate it. If there are any anything else I'm happy. Anyone else? Yeah this is Dave, hi Kazar, hi Stephen. Nice presentation. I maybe discussed and I missed it but so what except that some of the uses of it have you started testing out some use meaning like have used it for testing out a merchant somebody purchasing something with it or transferring have you started testing out some sample applications with it? Yeah for sure so as part of so bit is providing all of the applications and technology for the execution of this pilot so that means providing technology and applications for the central bank financial institutions merchants and then you know retail consumer wallet apps as well so we provide all the technology and we we have gone through some extensive testing we're just about ready to to launch a data program this week so busy time for me but yes we've done extensive testing so you know merchants they download an app from the app store they sign up with their financial institution and they can immediately start receiving payments that are going to sale via you know QR code payments NFC payments immediately at a point of sale and it's very simple and very easy it's kind of what you would expect for you know we're not we're not really innovating on on on that transfer side you know we're just scanning QR codes and NFC you know to get to to authorize the transactions kind of thing so we are also working on e-commerce an e-commerce solution um in in the eccbs in eastern caravan central bank and eastern caravan currency union access to online payments is you know pretty difficult you have to spend like upwards of ten thousand dollars to get a merchant account with one of these settlement banks so it's quite difficult and that has kind of hindered the economy a lot so with the digital version of the ec dollar you're going to have e-commerce plugins available that you can add to your car these will work very similar to paypal where you just add a few lines of code and you can have a pay with dxcd behind the digital ec dollar and qr code will come up on the screen and us a user can scan that and pay or log in so we're very excited to see how especially with the global COVID-19 pandemic and the need to make more payments remotely this is kind of very timely to have these types of solutions in place that can allow money to move even though people are not physically moving and as you've seen in some of these slide in this slide currently i mean 2019 is a little outdated but cash is you know there's there's a huge amount of analog payments in this economy at the moment and if you could imagine if you have that much analog payments happening and then there's a there's restrictions on movement of people or shops being open you can see how it could have huge implications for the economy so migrating more payments to digital payments allows they still facilitates electronic payments digital payments even though we may be all locked in our houses we can still buy our food and have it delivered we can still pay our bills and do all these things without leaving home so there is a kind of a burning platform within the eastern caravan to to deploy more accessible safe assets for for consumers to adopt and to make their their payments so and so it just as a follow-up so is the organization starting to promote it to like the merchants and people to start using it more or like how did they plan on getting people to start increasing so we um the the strategy has been very consultative you know we've we've we've to give to give you some insight you know we would work with key influential merchants in a territory we would onboard them so we've conducted training with them you know all the sensitization they would need to onboard we've done all of that so it's it's very much a relationship building exercise you have to remember these emerging market economies are not necessarily as familiar with digital payments and qr code payments uh say a more developed economy like brazil or us or mexico that are more kind of familiar with these types of payment methods so there was a lot of education a lot of hand holding um to to kind of build the comfort and the trust there's a lot of trust come in with the with the digital ec dollar because it comes from the central bank but you know anything new there there is still a little bit of friction there you need to hold people's hand and to build that trust with actually making the payment and that comfort so we spend a lot of time and put a lot of effort into understanding who those key merchants are and to make sure they have a very good experience with the digital ec dollar because um you know the retail market is really going to decide the success of this pilot project and the success of this of cbdc um you know we really need to ensure that people are comfortable to use the product and we take that we take any feedback um that we get and we make the necessary adjustments quickly to kind of maintain the trust and and the interest in this in this cbdc i hope that was helpful David yeah very okay good anyone else does that mean that i can uh i can go ahead please do waiting on you okay uh can you go back to the slide with the architecture diagram sure yeah here you have the top layer this is the commerce layer with the private and the public api and everything is obviously off-chain and then you have the bottom layer pneuma that seems to uh pneuma i assume is a lion in swahili i don't know i mean maybe maybe it's something else so this this this pneuma is a kind of preparatory term we came up with because um we needed a way to kind of communicate with clients about what that is so we had to kind of create our own term for it without trying to reuse terms and confusing people so that's the purpose for that okay uh but that was not my question as you see here the the whole thing is floating with no linkages to anything else meaning the pneuma layer does not seem i mean even though it has an api layer we don't see any connections between it and any other parties so that is a little disconcerting to say the least it's like pneuma is just at a distance getting all this information somehow so basically basically commerce commerce system sits on top of the pneuma and um okay and the commerce system will interact with the with the pneuma via its api so this is how we can we can swap out this pneuma swap in a new pneuma that has a different dlt or an upgraded dlt in there so this is how we're able to do that seamlessly remember some of some of the some of the information has been left off for proprietary purposes yes yes yes i can't show everything but this is just really meant to give a high level idea that the the dlt is kind of encapsulated in an api that provides a lot of services that then adds additional um value to the to the overall architecture by being able to leverage an api and not talk directly to the kind of dlt apis themselves yeah i mean that is a very core principle of system architecture to have loose you know loose connections between the various components so in that sense how did you come up with the you know the functions and the signage function signatures let's say of the api layer what what were the thought processes that went through in your mind did you look at other other payment systems did you look at other you know how did you come up with that api layer because uh the reason i'm asking is because i am now um let's say the you know i see that you are put in your membership of the dcgi uh yes and i am now leading the interoperability working group working work stream inside dcgi so i'm very interested in whatever public information you can give about the api layer because the api layer would be you know the kind of system that that would allow interoperability not just with switching out ledgers but suppose there were another system let's say the western caribbean uh central central bank uh right and then the eastern caribbean commerce layer would be able to interact with the western caribbean uh uh you know pneumo layer it you know for lack of a better term through the common api because it is uh now you're built in sort of a forward interoperability by having this api layer but i'm also suggesting that that api layer could could enhance interoperability even you know without uh going to a different uh ledger but with going to a different system totally yes i totally see what you mean and we do have some patents pending so i need to be careful with what i'm saying but there are some very amazing opportunities for cross network across infrastructure interoperability leverage in that api layer like you're seeing i'm thinking things like atomic transactions between currencies and different things like that that are very exciting that this api layer can offer in terms of you know provides a little bit of business logic um before gehen to the actual ledger so there are a lot of opportunities there um for enhanced use cases especially around cross border and cross currency um that we are actively investigating and seeking patents on at the moment um but uh so vipin i i contribute on the architecture and use cases working group um yes we we contributed if you remember uh money showed up and i i was there talking about etalar uh i mean maybe uh that was the use case we contributed you contributed the eccb uh dxcd use case i suppose um the the just just to wrap that up i can actually put you in contact with my cto uh to to go through in more detail you know what that api learning looks like and how we see that providing value to the uh entire digital currency ecosystem you know what that layer if everyone has that layer what it could allow and what we use it for today and how we see value from it so i can set that up for you no problem well i mean to tell you the truth uh standards in that api layer will need to be open otherwise it will not be uh useful to connect different uh ecosystems it's good you know if anybody has a proprietary interest it often gets uh lost uh uh as as an alternative because uh you know again it is the gatekeepers of the uh of the api layer who will be controlling who can use it and so on so that's you know that's another topic uh but let's back up a little i mean i i i welcome that is that gabriel or somebody else who's the cto no that's uh that's somebody else that's um jim called jim martin jim martin okay i'll i'll be in touch we have a uh meeting coming up this um friday uh where we will be discussing some of these items um anyway so do you see do you see iso 2022 as um that message and standard um do you see opportunities there for that the new api layer well well my problem with the iso 2022 is that it is not a standard it's a collection of various things that everybody has contributed if you look at the actual uh the you know xml what do you call it definition or the uh or the sort of a data standard and the enumeration yeah yeah you will see that it is uh you know the excess needs and the and the various other parts of the standard you'll see that it's basically a a grab bag of stuff i mean it is huge first of all it is uh uh you know it's a swift it is uh various other parties i mean uh money can tell you more about uh what what the i wouldn't say what the challenges of using such a system are so unless you can uh you can uh so that's one aspect the other aspect is the lack of cryptographic uh surety or integrity which they have tried to uh allay by using a by creating a new header standard for iso 2022 but it's it's optional which means that most people will not use it use that use that cryptographic integrity part which is the most important part because all of those hacks that swift was uh subject to would not have happened if they had a proper you know the swift empty messages are what the m t messages are the ones that you know many of them got transferred into the iso 20 or 22 without much uh uh change uh our view is that that itself needs a very thorough review uh the the problem is many central banks have followed this they are not technical they do not understand the problems with this and uh money in fact has proposed that uh the cdm which is is does uh data standard should be used because it's it's uh it's got cryptographic integrity and it also models lifecycle events not just it's not just a one-time message passing system there is none of the message you know there are other message passing systems like xc m which is polka dots messaging system other messaging paradigms come out of supply chains and if you go to world economic forum you can see a new uh message standard being proposed there uh which which involves uh cryptographic integrity and it's for trade finance and supply chain documents and uh it contains things like hashes of documents and various other things so it's not just for uh payment systems anyway i don't you know that could be an entirely uh uh you know full hour or hour and a half of work we have started something in our uh hypolysis labs under capital markets it's called xcci sorry cross chain settlement instruction which is similar in uh spirit in the sense that it has cryptographic integrity and references uh inlaid into it that means like for example if i say dxcd how do i know that it is the eastern caribbean central bank digital currency because the iso standard currently 40 to 17 only looks at regular uh currencies then how do you know how do we refer to the new class of cryptocurrencies various people have come up with that uh standard and we are incorporating those kind of thought processes into our xcci because you can have payments in various forms it is a very uh sort of just in the thought process formation stage of xcci i was just going to ask if there's something publicly available that i could really it is it is publicly available the stat you know the proposal it's in high hypolygia labs okay so not much detail is there uh but again let's back up a little bit on this particular thing about privacy i have a couple of questions one is sure um you say that the pii is kept locally i mean off-chain yes uh in a database uh we know we know that this sort of databases are very vulnerable uh in fact even the u.s government didn't seem to be able to secure their internal databases so there you know it's the honeypot problem right i mean you have a honeypot everybody it's not centralized it's not centralized i didn't go into granular detail but it's not a centralized database hosting all of the information so it's uh the information is distributed by financial institutions so if if i bank with first national first national's infrastructure their node on in the commerce they're they're assigned segregated database in the commerce engine is going to have my data if you see what i mean so every financial every participating network player they have you know siloed data that only they control okay beautiful it's better than everything in one place but maybe everything in five places answer i mean because i'm sure that the uh the scale uh of organizations are huge meaning you know maybe 80 percent of the people bank with four or five organizations rather i mean in the u.s it's true you know like if you take jp morgan city uh wells fogo and bank of america you probably cover like you know an 85 percent it's still kind of a honeypot isn't it yes there you know the problem it's a very difficult problem to solve and uh people are working on it you know the whole as i recognize that because we we didn't you know you can use your shard in and channels and all of these different things but we remember this model of um we remember this model of having client information stored by the by the financial institution because it's what they already do so it's not really a paradigm shift if you see what i mean it's easy for them to digest it at this early stage but looking forward you know if there's a clear um scalable very fast solution that is built into this dlt ledger then we have the infrastructure that could allow us to agree to that if you see what i mean yes i do uh i mean we are uh i also run the identity working group and we are you know we have the whole ssi crowd over there with uh you know distributed key management systems uh verifiable credentials and self sovereign identity and all that and we are you know they are still figuring out the last mile problem and how to integrate with legacy systems in such a way that it becomes useful and it is not hackable easily i mean usually that means moving stuff uh to the edges uh more to the edges and how can you secure that data how can you back it up how can you recover it all of this becomes problem anyway going to the wallet app you said that you had two different kinds of wallets one was a custodial wallet and a non-custodial wallet so in terms of the custodial uh and non-custodial wallets do you have limits on how much those wallets can hold uh yes uh so the the the non-custodial wallet is targeted towards financial inclusion so this is really allowing um citizens within the eastern caribbean currency union to on board to digital currency without needing a relationship with a financial institution so this basically provides a a early step for the central bank to make this legal tender that way you know no one really has an excuse for not having it if i show up at your shop and they want to pay you in dxcd you know you're kind of bound to to upset the payment and i think that that's going to be a very you know reaching that critical mass to where that's happening in practice is going to be an important milestone for overall adoption of these types of uh digital currencies i mean it's one thing for the central bank to proclaim it as um legal tender but um you know in practice it needs to be accepted um so set all of that to get back to the point that yes we have this we have a custodial and a non-custodial wallet um and that's really around ensuring that we are not building in um the same frictions that we have in the existing payment system infrastructure where you know uh you know merchant online they have online portal for payments but you need a swift or you need a visa or a mastercard to make the payment so this kind of bridges the gap everyone within the ecu can access the dxcd app and you know it follows that then you know anyone can make payments um an important part there to talk about for the um the non-custodial wallet is is that it leverages the merchant network to cash in and cash out of the digital ec dollar so you can visit a merchant you can hand over cash and the merchant will send you the equivalent of digital dollars to your non-custodial wallet it's a little different with the custodial wallet because you're leveraging your financial institution to just make instant moves from your deposit account to your digital wallet but both wallets can visit merchants and cash in and cash out the custodial wallet financial institutions due to regulations you know they can only really service their existing clients so um a non-custodial wallet wouldn't be able to walk into a bank and get a service because they're not known to the bank so there are limits on all of the wallets the custodial wallets the limits are controlled by the individual financial institution where the wallet is kind of housed or created with the non-custodial wallet the limits are much lower the eccb has implemented entity that they're calling or or multiple entities per territory that they call agencies and these agencies are responsible for verifying the identity of individuals who want to sign up for that non-custodial wallet so while we know that technology exists for ID verification and it can all be done in the back end via you know machine learning and you know looking for different known issues with IDs and lightly mischeck on the selfie and matching that etc they still opted to have an actual compliance team review the applications and approve them before allowing these value-based these non-custodial wallet users to participate in the decash network so there's there's low limits there's that ID verification that's automated by the software and then there's a human that actually eyeballs the ID and the selfie image and verifies so lots of safety and security built into the infrastructure to provide the access but to do it in a very responsible manner you know these technologies are very new and there's a lot of eyes looking in on them so I guess they wanted to go the extra mile to make sure that the infrastructure the framework for a good compliance controls was in place. Great, I have a quick question. Can I jump in here just before we finish? I just wanted to hear a little more detail on your pilot so is this the first stage of your pilot that you say is starting or where are you at in your pilot in the four territories and what activities are part of that pilot? Sure so we are in the kind of closed beta stage where we are currently from the 20th onboarding financial institutions to the infrastructure so they take control of their their infrastructure they start to build out their branches build out their wallets and their users and that stuff so that's kind of where we are we move quickly to onboarding merchants and agencies and getting them transaction ready via teams on the ground visiting them holding their hands making sure they understand how to use the technology and they're ready and then we move to onboarding you know a select group of consumers to start transacting. Beyond that the ECCB will make a final decision after some monitoring and evaluation to see what adjustments need to be made before going public and it's likely that we will go public within two months we'll do this closed beta period and we'll do some monitoring and evaluation and have an assessment and then we'll move into the public launch and that's planned for sometime in March so you can see by the end of first quarter we should be we should be public with this technology. Okay great thanks for thanks for a wonderful presentation and I think we are sort of we have reached the end of the hour a delightful hour and thank you for showing up and presenting on this important topic and we want to make sure that if you can share this slide deck that it would be available to our members and I hope you know I hope we can revisit this topic when you go live in two months yeah yeah that would be great it's just the same all right sure you know thank you for having me and I'm and I'm very to talk with you guys again no problem it's you know it's important that we keep those relationships and we share information and experiences so I look forward to these types of conversations where I can learn and share my experience and my knowledge as well so mutually beneficial from from my side so I'm happy to return and to meet with you guys again and to talk some more in the near future. Well apologies for you know going on at length about messaging systems but I think it's okay I learned I learned something that's fine so anyway we we hope to have you back here with with with your glowing smile back again and I would love that and it is my first opportunity to talk to Amor and I'm very happy to have made your acquaintance thank you same here same here thank you so much for having me and and continue to enjoy your days thank you thank you very much Stephen thank you all right bye