 Ladies and gentlemen, we're going to ask you to come in from the hallway. One of the great joys of these types of events is we have lots of amazing people to chat with, but we're going to ask you to hold those conversations for just a minute while we get rolling here. My name is Tamika Tilleman, and it is my great pleasure to welcome you to a little bit of history with this inaugural blockchain summit that is being co-hosted by the World Bank Group and the Blockchain Trust Accelerator here at New America. This event wouldn't be happening without some of the planet's best partners, and I want to take just a moment to acknowledge them and their extraordinary work. We've been fortunate to partner with an incredible team, collaborate with an incredible team at the World Bank. Denny Robotai, the Bank's CIO is here, and Stella Mokin and Susan David Karabek from the Bank's Blockchain Lab have done Yeoman's work helping to pull this event into existence, and we're very grateful that Ed Sue from Jim Kim's office, who is really leading the technological transformation efforts at the World Bank, is here with us and will be speaking to us this morning. We also are incredibly fortunate to have extraordinary partners within the Blockchain Trust Accelerator, and our founding partners, especially, are the foundation on which this whole undertaking is built. Three organizations came together to stand up the Blockchain Trust Accelerator because we saw an incredible opportunity to harness this technology on behalf of social impact, good governance, and development applications, and we have all of those partners represented here today. There are many tech companies that aspire to put changing the world for good as part of their mission, but few that actually make it the core of their business model. And the Bitfury Group, which is one of our founding partners, has done that. The company's CEO, Valerie Vavilov, Vice Chair, George Kikbadze, and Chief Global Communications Officer, and a VTA co-founder, Jamie Smith, are all here today, and we're fortunate to have them with us. We're also incredibly grateful to the National Democratic Institute, which has brought their global network and extraordinary expertise on governance issues to the separate. Chris Doten, the CIO of NDI, and also their board member, Ms. Connor-Han, is here with us, and delighted that Jane can join us. We have, as well, extraordinary support from the Rockefeller Foundation, and we'll have an announcement toward the end of today's summit about their commitment to this work going forward, but we're very grateful that they're supporting this effort, as well. In a moment, I'm going to introduce Ann Marie Slaughter, who has done more than anyone I know to shape thinking about how networks can be used to solve global challenges. But before we do that, I want to say a few words about why we're here and what we hope to accomplish. We have, I think, a remarkable opportunity. Once every generation, if you're lucky, a technology comes along that can shift the way we do business. It can provide new business models for how we solve problems. And a year and a half ago, a group of us came together on Richard Branson's Island for a discussion about that technology. And what we saw at that time was that there was extraordinary investment happening to harness blockchain for financial technology applications. And that's great. We saw that as a very significant indicator of the power and potential of blockchain to be used in applications that required incredible security and incredible integrity. But far more exciting to us, and I expect many of you in this room, was the opportunity to use blockchain to address governance, social impact, and development challenges around the world. And so we formed the Blockchain Trust Accelerator to build out pilot projects and support research that could advance that goal. And that decision has been validated virtually every single day since that that founding moment. We, this week, I have three encounters that serve to demonstrate this for me. 18 months ago, at the State Department, the Deputy Secretary of State asked for a memo on blockchain. And at the time, there was no one in the institution who had the expertise to generate that memo. They searched far and wide throughout the entire State Department. Nobody could write the memo. On Tuesday, the now Deputy Secretary of State came together with 260 technology leaders and said that they believe blockchain was going to be the transformational technology of our time. And they were working aggressively to harness it to address global challenges. So if you care about international cooperation in pursuit of solutions to global challenges, you need a blockchain strategy. The second conversation I had was on Wednesday with one of the world's largest asset owners. This is a pension fund with $135 billion. And they're focused on the challenge of how to deploy that capital in emerging and frontier markets around the world. This is a lot of what we do through our Bretton Woods II program. And what this fund told us is that if we could solve the challenges around accountability and transparency related to the deployment of those assets in frontier markets and emerging economies, they and their partners can bring the capital to the table, the investment to the table, required to finance the UN sustainable development goals and address a whole host of issues that are facing our planet. So again, if you care about financing solutions to global problems and all of you who are here for the World Bank's annual meetings presumably do, you need a blockchain strategy. The final encounter came last night and it was a surprise to me, but I was asked to come in and meet with the leadership of one of the most prominent social media platforms in the world and chat with them about the challenge of bad information in their systems and what they could do to combat the flood of misdirection that was threatening trust and confidence not only in their platform but in institutions around the world. And over the course of that conversation, it became very clear that if you want an informed public with access to reliable verified information, you need a blockchain strategy. Ultimately, this is a technology that builds trust. And trust is really the reservoir that irrigates everything we do across all sectors of society. It is also unfortunately a commodity that is in vanishingly short supply right now. And we need to figure out how to get it back. So if you care about that problem, you need a blockchain problem strategy. All of us, I think, do care about these challenges and that's why we're here today. So what are we going to do and how are we going to get there? Many of you in this room have built networks, built extraordinary networks. We have John Evans with us, a co-founder of C-SPAN, which is a network that's changed the way Americans at least understand their government. This is a new network. We need to figure out how to put it to work. Many of you in this room have harnessed different centers of power and social and financial capital to address global challenges. Gigi Bryson, the founder of Ocean Elders, has done that. And we need to put those skills to work with this new solution. And we only get one shot at this. We only get one chance to get this right. We know a lot more now than we did when the Internet was created, but we need to take that knowledge and be very deliberate in how we put it to work. Because this is a technology that is going to spread regardless of what we do. But we have an opportunity to steer it in the right direction. And that's our challenge today. So we're going to hear a little bit about how this technology is being deployed in the field. We're going to hear from our friends at the World Bank about how they're hoping to harness this tool. We're going to look at concrete use cases. There's a misperception that this is something that's going to happen soon. This is happening right now. And we're going to hear about the pilot projects that are breaking the path that others will follow for the use of blockchain technology. And then finally, at the end of today's session, we're going to make some commitments. We're going to talk about how all of our organizations can help move this effort forward. So start thinking about what you and your organization can do to advance that work. Now that we have our mandate, I want to turn things over to our fearless leader at New America. And again, one of the world's leading champions of using networks for good, Anne-Marie Slaughter. Anne-Marie. So I met Tamika when he worked for Secretary Clinton as a speechwriter in 2009. And I was the director of policy planning and the speechwriters sat in my shop. And Tamika arrived. I just want to say two things. One, he's even better at giving his own speeches, as you just heard. And two, like many speechwriters, his passion was actually for policy. He took the speechwriting job, but very quickly parlayed it into a position as Secretary Clinton's emissary to civil society. And you can see his passion for actually solving public problems. And that's what all of us do, right? We are all the World Bank and DI, New America, and many other organizations that you represent. What binds us is solving public problems. We have traditionally believed that you solve public problems through law. That's what policy is. I ran a public policy school, but even before people went to public policy school, they went to law school because the way you solve public problems was to adopt a regulation or a law, or sometimes to get rid of a regulation or a law. And then policy often is the way you then implement that law. Or sometimes, if you don't have to go all the way to law, it's simply the set of rules that guide you. Nobody in this town would think that policy isn't important, that law isn't important, that politics isn't important. But in the 21st century, digital code is as important as legal code in solving problems. That is really the reason that I came to New America because I saw, we have this extraordinary set of tools to do things that would have been unimaginable even 20 years ago, much less 50. But what we have to do is to marry those tools, those technological tools with policy, law, and politics. So in California, it's all tech. Here, it's often all law. We've got to bring them together. And that is exactly what we're doing around blockchain. Blockchain, as you heard, has amazing potential. But that potential is not all for good, because that's the other thing about technology. Just like any other tool for solving public problems, it can be a tool that is used for evil or for bad purposes just as much as for good. And we have to understand going in that that's the potential. Indeed, right now, you're sort of seeing America fall out of its love affair with tech and suddenly discover, oh, wait a minute, all these technologies we thought were wonderful. Well, they can cause revolutions and they can also disrupt political systems. So thinking about how we use blockchain, we have to think about how do we design the structures within which it's going to be used? How do we design the networks? Tom, I mentioned as a scholar, I started studying networks in 1994, which for most of most of our current employees were not born or just barely, and studied government networks and then networks of civic organization and corporations and government officials and international organizations, and then most recently applying network theory to figure out what should the structure of a particular network look like depending on its purpose. If its purpose is resilience, it should be distributed. If its purpose is to accomplish specific tasks, then sometimes you want like a star network with one hub and lots of spokes and sometimes you want something that looks more like a hub network with multiple hubs. But the point is we need to be very strategic about how we design the uses of blockchain and the governance of blockchain, or we're going to find ourselves five years from now, it's actually going faster, probably two, three years from now, discovering the bad purposes as well as the good. So I want to close just by saying how thrilled I am to have everybody here and why this event is so much about where New America itself is going. So the first reason is exactly that we want to marry policy and technology to meet the challenges of this century. And we want to understand the downsides as well as the upsides. Tech is not always the answer and even when it is the answer, it often needs to be cabined in all sorts of ways. But there are two other reasons. One is that I could not be happier to see all our partners. So often now, and this is a lot of what networks are about, instead of doing, find other people who are doing and collaborate with them. There are so many different organizations out there with different tasks and supporters and missions. We can accomplish more by bringing people together in partnerships. So to see both the Blockchain Trust Accelerator with NDI and then to see this event with the World Bank, this is exactly how public problem solving institutions should be working. And the last reason is we're a think tank, but we're transforming into what you might call a civic platform. Now, a think tank is often closed and technocratic and top down, although I am the last person to give up on thinking and data and reality. All of that is critically important, that part of what we do. But it's not enough. We actually also have to surface and scale and share solutions that are already out there. And so much of what this work is doing and what we're doing in work on technology and property rights, you get out there and you find the people who are actually on the ground testing things, figuring out what works and what doesn't work. And you lift up those solutions and you support them and you share them and then you scale them. So here again, looking at the way the Blockchain Trust Accelerator is designed and the kind of work the World Bank does, we're not just in the business of creating solutions, we're in the business of finding them, improving them, sharing them and scaling them. And with that, I won't be able to spend the whole day, but I've got a good hour and a half and I'm thrilled to be able to sit down and learn from all of you. Thank you. Thank you very much. My name is Edward Tsu and I'm a senior advisor to President Kim at the World Bank Group and I'm delighted to be here. And I'd like to also thank Emery who was also my dean when I was a student at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School. So it was a fascinating experience to sit there, listen to her and again be inspired as I was when I was a student. So thank you for having us here. So I'm going to zoom out a little bit and talk in a big picture about why is the World Bank Group interested in disruptive technology. In general, what is our strategy? How are we thinking about it? And then I'm going to allow Danny who's our CEO to really zoom in on blockchain specifically. So we have two goals at the World Bank Group. One is to end extreme poverty by 2030. We still have one in 10 people who live under $1.90 a day and half of the extreme poor live in Sub-Saharan Africa. And our second goal is to boost shared prosperity which is to boost the incomes of the bottom 40% faster than the top 60%. These are ambitious goals and it's becoming quite clear to us that in order to get there, we must harness the disruptive technologies on behalf of the poor. There's obviously challenges to all of these disruptive technologies but also great opportunities. Not only do they destroy jobs, as we know, they create jobs. They create new opportunities. And that's why we're having this conference today. And to quote President Kim, everyone in the World Bank Group should be asking how disruptive technology can be used on behalf of the poor. So we think we're in a unique place to harness disruptive technology to accelerate sustainable and inclusive economic growth in developing countries. From our own programs, we do about $70 billion of between lending to governments, grants to governments, investments in private sector, mobilizing to private sector. And we work across both public and private sectors. We're also global. So we think this gives us comparative vantage when we look at what is our role in bringing these technologies to the developing world and helping the poor to access them in a way that supports them. What we did recently, we did a stock taking of what are the range of interventions we have that are used to accelerate the use of disruptive technology. And so a few things I just want to share. One is that we support technology enabling infrastructure. So we support direct, we build broadband, we build mobile towers. We know that half of the people in the world today are excluded from the digital economy. And disproportionately, it's the poor, the rural and the women. So a lot of what we're talking about actually cannot even be accessed until we build out that hardware. The other part we do is we support enabling infrastructure around the enabling environment for startups to emerge. And I was just at a conference last week in Singapore that we organized the single world government where we brought together leaders from different innovation agencies that are trying to spur startups within their country by supporting incubators and looking at regulations. And this is another critical part of getting blockchain out there in order to find ways to use it for the poor. Other things we do, a big part of that in the enabling environment is some basic steps. You need to have a digital ID system actually in order for many to access, for many of these applications to be viable. And so we're deeply involved in something called ID4D, which is digital development, a digital ID for development. And we have some studies that show if governments use digital ID, they could save $110 billion per year in leakages. And another part of the enabling environment is around bank accounts and financial access. So 55% of adults in developing worlds still don't have a bank account. And so we're out there working with governments, again, on the regulatory environment and also directly supporting business models. For example, we supported a company in Bangladesh called BeCache that now have 25 million people with bank accounts through their system. And that's more than all of the banks in Bangladesh combined. So very interesting, again, enabling environment for blockchain to rise. The third way that we have is through our direct projects and procurement. And as you know, we finance health projects, energy products, agriculture, transport, and we're looking at how can we use disruptive technology, how can we use these projects to bring disruptive technology to our clients? For example, for example, in energy, we know that solar used to be a disruptive technology. Now we've mainstreamed it. We've brought down the cost of solar in Africa from 20 cents down to 5 cents recently in a recent auction we did in Zambia. In health, in 2002, only five countries had an e-health plan. Now we've helped over 70 countries to have an e-health strategy and to think about how to use these new technologies in their health systems. In agriculture, we use different forms of ICT to help farmers shift to better crops and help with irrigation systems. We're doing very interesting things when we design mobile transport systems. For example, in Haiti, we were looking at how to design their urban transport system, but we didn't know where people were living or where they were going. So we partnered with the mobile phone companies to look at where people live based on their mobile phone usage, where do they work, and how do they get there. And through that, we helped the government of Haiti then design an urban transport system based on that data. And then we're also using geospatial data in fragile conflict situations to try to predict the next crisis. Where are the refugees going to go? Where are the crops going to fail? Where is the flood going to be? Another area is education. I think not only can we deploy sort of new technologies in order to reach, in order to improve educational effectiveness, what are we teaching the children? What do we teach them? How do we prepare them for the next century? We know that many of the jobs that I think the 65 percent of primary school children today will work in jobs or fields that don't exist today. So how do we prepare them for those? And I think we're actively looking down at working with governments. The World Bank, we do a lot in terms of knowledge or research. We just published a couple of big reports these past couple of weeks, the growth of manufacturing, looking at where those jobs are going to go. We published a report on innovation and why do governments systematically under invest in R&D. We also work with global standards, global partnerships. We work with the G20 and the G20 represents 90 percent of the global GDP and we're actively in discussions with them of how can we accelerate the, you know, help those governments accelerate the adoption of these technologies in their countries. So we do a lot and I think what we've seen also is we don't do nearly enough. President Kim strongly feels that we are way behind the curve, that our staff generally are older and not so aware of their new technologies, how they're adopted, how they're used. But on the other hand we have so much potential and we want to get there. So we're conducting a little bit of a strategic review of, better understand, how can we, and I think Annemarie put it very well, how can we partner with others? We're never going to be the Google, we're never going to be Airbnb, but how can we partner with them to bring their technology on behalf of the poor? And just yesterday President Kim and the founder of Airbnb had a great discussion, had a great event, and we decided we would partner with them to figure out how can we bring sustainable tourism to help the poor in developing countries. And so I think these are partnerships we need to think a lot more about and blockchain as well. We need to through conferences like this, partnerships like this, understand how do we build enabling environment so blockchain can exist, then how do we work with all of you here on the policy environment and the startups to get it moving again always on on behalf of the poor. So you know we're so pleased to sponsor this cosponsor's event with you, and if you also have any suggestions for the World Bank Group on what more should we be doing, how can we really use the tools we have, the partnerships we have, the community power we have to accelerate these to help technology to have the poor. We're going through a consultation process right now and we'd love to hear your thoughts. So thanks. Let me turn it over to Good morning to all. I hope you did not watch the Nats games last night. I did. A little bit tired, disappointed again. That's the problem of living in DC. Thank you very much Tommy Cat and Marie and Ed. I hope head despite my gray hair and my age that I will not be excluded for the opportunity to change the world because I think in ITS where we have an internal mandate, the CIO recently nominated CIO for the World Bank, we have an internal mandate, but I think we do understand I think the potential of emerging technology and so we are fully supporting this call for this knowledge exchange and learning all together and how we can meet the World Bank Group goal all together of eliminating extreme poverty and boosting share prosperity. I'd like to start with a personal thing that happened to me long time ago was since I'm old. It was in 2005 I was based in Bangkok at that time for the World Bank looking at the portfolio in East Asia and I remember you will all remember the tsunami that took place. 13 countries were affected. I don't know if you remember how many people died, 230 to 280,000 people died. That was like one of the worst event ever. So even worse was for not even worse the survivors especially the poor not only they lost their family members and their friends they also lost their biggest asset which was their land. So their land title disappeared and unfortunately again the powerful of the world you know grabbed their lands and so we tried to help them. We managed to get a grant from Japan at that time. I remember two million dollars to help the poor fight their rights in court to regain control of their land but this was very little. So blockchain did not exist at that time like the potential of having an internet of value to have digital record that you can find and fight. Of course there's always the issue of like the quality of the entries into the system and also enforcement but at least it's a mean it's a mean to the end to an end. So we did not have that at that time so imagine this today just this today. Land is the biggest asset for the poor people. So being able to use it to get alone and manage to develop their own economy and manage to send their kids to school and get education is very important. So that's why I am so excited. I'm new to this to the CIO business. I was as I said I came in very recently but when Stella where's Stella I want to recognize Stella. Oh she's outside. Anyway Stella came to me in April I was acting at that time and she told me about blockchain and right off the bat I think I recognized the potential and for me the potential was to help empower individual. So it could be used to help them regain control of their rights and their identity. And also the elimination of the middleman when I read a lot about the blockchain. So I saw the huge potential gain for human. So I got super excited to with the potential of this technology. So the first thing we did in I did in July is to reorganize the ITS and created a unit dedicated to looking at emerging technologies. And we created one of the first thing we did with Stella is to create a blockchain lab. And right away I can tell you the excitement is unbelievable. Everybody in the bank wants to partners we have so many partners outside as well. So it's very exciting. I have staff that are not from this unit in ITS organization. They volunteer their time to work on at night and on weekend. It's a small unit. But we're very excited about it. And now we are looking at the legal elements security elements technology elements. So a lot of excitement in the organization. Three weeks ago Jim chaired a big workshop in the organization with all senior management. It was about 1500 staff. And the topic of blockchain came in left and right. So the potential is there. So as I said my mandate internally my mandate is internal. So how can we create efficiencies for the World Bank not to be not to be neglected. It's an important mandate just with Treasury. We're just thinking about the thousand if not like hundreds of thousands of transaction every year. If we can save on this transaction we could maximize our lending capabilities for our clients and improve the impact we can have on the poor. So at the same time all though my mandate is internal I am very excited to help operation and build expertise and help them to maximize this power of technology. So we all fan of blockchain here. I we all know understand the potential transparency efficiency security accountability and trust the trust in governments around the world is down is way way low. So how can we have government also regain the trust of their citizen for a better development program is very important. So few use cases that come to mind that can have like huge impact just think about remittances in the world. So the latest number that I have it's six hundred billion dollar a year that people send back home. So currently the fee is the average is eight percent. So eight percent of this is gone to third parties. So just with blockchain if we can reduce this let's say one percent it's it's a huge amount of money that can be used for development purposes just with this we're good with blockchain just with this one but there's a lot of potential application. Another one is also and this is very important for development organization how can we track the money how can we get the money directly to the people to the poor right. So blockchain can be a very good use case and one this is also very exciting for me is public procurement. I used to do I was three years the procurement manager for the bank in East Asia overseeing the procurement of about five billion dollar a year. And of course as part of our mandate is also helping countries to reform the procurement system. So public procurement is 15 to 15 to 20 percent of GDP of a country public procurement. So you improve this by 10 percent imagine the impact of the country level. So I'm we talked about it just before the meeting you said like some people are exploring would like to partner. Yes I absolutely would like to partner on to see how we can use blockchain to eliminate corruption corruption is one of problem number one of the part development is so many leakages of funds. So how can we use blockchain in public procurement very exciting. So let me just end here with a with a call for action. And and you said it right and Mary I like your reference to say that technology can be used for for bad things as well. And you can see that what happened with this Internet of information over the years. I think the jury is still how out about the impact of it. Not sure that the prosperity was shared equally. I think it's the opposite. We see also misinformation a lot of misinformation that has led to very weird results and in election process right. So so we need to question that and I'm very nervous to see now that a lot of private sector now are investing heavily on blockchain. So that's why I see we have a moral responsibility. We have the duty to take a position on how can we use this very exciting technology. I also believe it that it can be transformative but we have a duty to take a position and use it for good. So it's a call for action. So I have been to many of these meetings recently. So I'm very excited now to apply it to find the case where it's working and all together just to make just to make a better world. So thank you very much. Danny we're going to sign you up for the pilots by the end of the day here today. So we're excited about this long before we knew that the blockchain trust accelerator would be the blockchain trust accelerator. Jamie Smith knew that we needed a blockchain trust accelerator and she has been a co-founder and moving force behind the effort. The other amazing thing about Jamie is she's really good at explaining complicated things. And one of the challenges of this technology is it is a little bit complicated. She spent years at the White House as deputy White House Press Secretary trying to explain Washington to Americans. And if you can do that then you can easily explain blockchain. So Jamie we are thrilled to have you and she's going to make sure that we all have at least a foundation of knowledge before we jump in to some of the concrete use cases that we'll be discussing for the rest of our discussions today. Hi folks thank you for having me. I'm going to try and do this in less than five minutes and I feel like that is quite a skill and an accomplishment already even just the attempt. And even in those five minutes I want to point out something that I think is also really exciting with this technology that often goes under reported and I hope that by saying this you all will mutter it to your friends. But if you look around the room it's half women which you don't always see in tech discussions and there is a lot of momentum in this space and so particularly for this event I want to thank a lot of people for their leadership obviously to Micah my dear friend for co-founding this effort with me but Alison Price for putting this together 24 seven our executive director thank you. Stella McCone where are you. Amazing she's working her tail off Rachel Pippen Mariana Dahan for paving the way to make all of this possible there's always like the person who had to fight it all before even any of this could come to be Kathleen Collins another unsung hero Gigi Brisson who was also mentioned Ocean Elders and so many other hats that you wear. Marcina Tillerman Dick Robyn Carnahan Susan I'm so sorry I'm going to mess this up but David Cardinakis Sheila Nix and of course Ann Marie and Cecilia Munoz my dear friend from the White House so speaking of the White House I just want you to know that I was sitting at home post-White House with my delicious 10 day old baby when a friend of mine who called me and I used to work with him at the White House he was in the Office of Science and Technology Policy Brian Ford who I know wishes he could be here today but he's running for Congress he went to MIT to study this technology and he said to me hey I think you should leave your super super safe post-White House job at a big PR firm and go work for this tech startup on this thing called blockchain. Are you out of your mind? That is criminal money I don't want anything to do with that I'm like a former intelligence officer and White House person I can't do that and he said well that's the problem that's what people think and so I spent about three months in my maternity leave reading and reading and I kept putting my phone away and saying no way no way and I kept sort of coming back to it because I couldn't believe how amazing this was but in order for me to really understand it I had to explain it to myself the same way that I do any other policy or complicated position throughout my career and frankly my career is just a simple career of basically taking complicated things and making them make sense to my family so this is what this is what I want you to know first and foremost what is it so I'm gonna say this really quickly think global notary and most of you are in this room because you know what blockchain is but as you're explaining this hopefully maybe some of these tools will help you so think global notary and that is really important because we have not always had that and so I'm gonna go into sort of the next question which is how does it work what we've had through the creation of the original internet that's what I like to call it was the unbelievable power to transfer information but what we could never do is transfer an asset and do it in a way that prevented it from going from me to you and I'm sending it to you and then I send the same thing to Ann Marie that double spend as people like to call it so now this is helping prevent that so this is how I think about it I think about it like a train track between you and me or you and me or you and me you say to me Michael Casey of MIT who is a dear friend and former Wall Street Journal reporter who also quit his job and went into this space like a lunatic like I am so basically Michael says to me hey I need a thousand dollars and I say okay I'll send you a thousand dollars and I'm gonna attach it to this little car that I'm gonna put on this train track and send it to you and that attachment that little car is that's a cryptocurrency and the most famous one is a bitcoin right so that little car on top of the train track is a bitcoin I'm gonna attach a thousand dollars to that digital to that digital token and I'm gonna send it to you and that little record that I have of that transfer now gets recorded on that train track otherwise known as the blockchain and the reason like so that's amazing right that is awesome the fact that I can do that is awesome I don't have to go through anybody else and it cost me like two cents to do it but the reason that's also amazing is because nobody can change that record that I just sent that to Michael because it got blocked on the blockchain it got recorded and the reason no one can change it and well I guess I would say I'm never looking at it and say totally unhackable but it's pretty darn close it's been around for almost 10 years and no one's been able to hack it and that's I don't know if you can say that a lot of networks out there so the reason that it's that's the case is because it's actually really simple I went through this sort of three month process of learning and then all of a sudden I had this aha moment of oh my gosh this is so easy to understand basically the original internet just had data stored removing all this information and all the information had to be stored somewhere stored in silos right think of it like a house and so all of the information is in one house really hard to break into that house it's like a fortress right and over time we've built all these cyber security measures to protect that house but once you get in if you can get in it's party time so some really really smart people basically said what if we took the house and we broke it into a zillion pieces and we put all those pieces all over the world and so in order to break into the house to this whole data center you'd have to actually break into every single piece of that house all at the same time all with the same key it's nearly impossible and by the way if you did break into even one of those houses the whole network wouldn't break down just one of those houses would be impacted so it's sort of not even worth the effort and so I think of it like you basically have the choice we used to do one house and now we're going into like an entire town and here's the kicker and this is like a whole other lecture but every 10 minutes a new house gets created so that makes it even more secure and that's why the fact that the bitcoin blockchain's been around for so long means so much because the longer something's been around and hasn't been able to be hacked the more secure it gets every minute and so I will leave you with this the last question is why should I care and the reason you should care is because data integrity is kind of a big deal right people are pretty excited about the fact that there may, may, may be a really new way to store data in a secure, decentralized way that protects information at the highest level and I believe that as we explore all of this the money pieces to like I said really matters but the non-financial applications are gigantic because going back to that train track in that car Michael asked me for a thousand dollars that's fine but let's pretend I'm a musician and he says I'm gonna pay you two bucks I would like that song that you just created and I say all right you send me two bucks I'll send you the song it doesn't have to be money can be anything it's really our challenge to dream the impossible the opportunities are truly limitless land title and you'll hear about voting identity fun things like music and movies and art I mean it's truly empowering and given the world we're living in today I think empowering is probably something we're all really looking for so with that it's an honor to be here thank you to all the men and women in this room but particularly I'm excited about the progress we're seeing and thank you again to Tamika and Anne-Marie for your leadership all right it's game time now is when things get serious and we have I think an incredible set of discussions on on deck the first discussion is going to be about property rights we heard a little bit about what happened after the tsunami in Asia and the challenges that citizens they're faced when they lost access to their property rights we had a conversation with the prime minister of Haiti recently where he said that the first building to collapse in that country's earthquake was the registry where they stored all of their property records and that unfortunately has crippled rebuilding in the country ever since what we are able to do with blockchain is completely change those dynamics and hopefully create a system where citizens will have far more security and far more integrity and confidence in their land records going forward to help us do that we have three of the smartest people working on this challenge the first is Valerie Vadolev the founder and CEO of Bitfury and you'll hear more about this but Bitfury is among other things the first company in the world to deploy a solution for land records in the Republic of Georgia and they've seen that system grow and scale and proved to be very successful Anshel Anand who is spearheading work on blockchain and property rights at the World Bank and Mike Greiglia who directs our future of property rights program here at New America Val Anshel and Mike please join us on stage Hi I am Valerie Vadolev the founder and CEO of the Bitfury Group we started this journey in 2011 where nobody knew what is blockchain what is bitcoin but my background is computer science developed my first software when I was eight spent seven years developing different kind of registry systems for Latvian government and when I learned what is bitcoin what is blockchain what is cryptocurrency 2010 late 2010 beginning of 2011 I understood this is the transformation of technology this is the next internet and I put aside all my projects and started to do only this stuff because I understood that this is not just a currency this technology really will transform how we deal with assets because what is happening right now in our world we are living in a digital age already yeah and we are sending information from one to another in a fraction of a second but all our assets and anything of value are still on paper and why it happening because internet didn't allow us to do secure transactions and the blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies is the technology what will allow us to do secure transactions and with the help of this technology we will be able to digitize this enormous part what is still on paper it's your property your car your assets anything what is there related so it's very exciting and I hope you can hear me so thank you Valery for kicking off the session I got sucked into blockchain as most of us do quite by accident I was at an event it was a new technology I am into new technologies and suddenly I heard somebody say blockchain and land rights and my ears went up like that of a meerkat I'm like I want to know more about this that was about three years ago I think so being on this long journey and it's been very exciting and not least because I get to meet fantastic people like you all so let me tell you why land is so such a ripe area for this technology first of all transparency international as some years ago had called that the third most corrupt sector in the world so any technology that can increase transparency increase trust is highly welcome and I think blockchain is an important role to play in this sense secondly I work in a lot of countries around the world and in many cases you'll see that the cost of registering property rights is sometimes two three or even more times the monthly income so how is a poor person going to do that they can't do that so if blockchain can remove third parties and can reduce the cost of transaction that's going to be a huge huge impact on poor people registering their land rights and securing their most important asset the third thing I get excited about is the potential for multi-party transactions and I think this is fantastic because blockchain can add a layer of 10-year security for vulnerable groups for women for indigenous people because their private key is needed to execute a transaction and of course you can still go around this there can still be issues off-chain so in the real world where this is in bulletproof but at least it gives that added layer of security that is currently missing and I think this is a very important topic and something to look out for in this technology the last one I want to talk about is disaster recovery disasters happen you talked about the tsunami there's earthquakes there's wars server rooms get destroyed so if you have a decentralized system where you have these records and property rights somewhere else as well that can really help in terms of re-establishing people's rights or even looking at restitution compensation processes so this has huge impact on how we bring a country that is just being hit by disaster back on track get their market economy rolling again and whatnot of course there are many use cases of land the three that I'm most excited about is obviously registry registration that Valeri already touched upon the other two I want to talk about very briefly and just put them on your radar our supply chain management so we all want to know that our products are actually organic actually fair trade and that the farmers are actually getting a good deal and now this is possible through the use of blockchain and a very exciting one that's just come up is the use of smart contracts to track carbon emissions so you can actually set goals if you want to if any country has Paris Agreement goals and most do you can actually set these goals and you can actually track them so monitoring will take out this this immense resource that is required to monitor and actually track progress can be done with the use of smart contracts and blockchain so I think this is another very interesting application and you know this field is full of these things it's just starting so there's a lot to do a lot to look out for I want to finish by talking to you about the pilot that we did it's a proof of concept that my team the land and geospatial team of the world bank did with the ITS team of the world bank and the blockchain lab it was very exciting because ours was the first operational team that partnered with ITS to actually come up with something like this and we were successful we looked at three cases on an open source platform one was the registration of a a new plot or parcel into the blockchain system we also looked at the registration of a mortgage so we are thinking about how to link registration of property rights with access to finance and the third one was the notary verification of a transaction also using the blockchain this application is being talked about and we successfully tested it of course this is only the technology side of things and this is by no means the full solution we need to look at other aspects including policy legal institutional capacity and whatnot so we continue to explore this topic we're very excited by it we're very excited to partner with you so please do reach out to us I think we all have different angles and appetites that we you know we bring to this room so I think we can do more together and that would be very exciting and over to you Mike so I feel like we did an introduction and then we got a dollop of content maybe I'll do both and then pass it back to you please please don't elaborate my name is Mike Garlay I have the great privilege of working at New America on the program called the future of property rights so what I am obsessed with is property rights and I think as was well said by the president's office from the bank we are we can't and the privilege of being in this room right now we all benefit from immense technological innovation and disruptive technologies and how they advance our livelihoods and our well-being and it has incumbent on us I believe to look at all technologies and understand how we can better use them to help the rest of humanity specifically you know those high concentrations of poverty and you know all the stats point you to Africa right so it's great that we're using disruptive technologies to get Ubers faster and whatever else we're doing but how are we using these technologies to increase remittances and reduce the costs and these things that were mentioned so the future of property rights focuses on land rights and property rights and how can we use any technology to to do that better so that's my remit and at the beginning of this year like every year I made a list of what technologies are interesting and blockchain was the one that was getting the most buzz and I understood the least so I started writing about it and it took me about three months to realize okay there's a lot of people who don't really get this I should keep writing about it so so I kept going and and at some time in June it takes about a month of being excited and not having a clue a month of starting to fathom it and right about month six I had an opinion so if you read everything I've written the last two articles are worth your time so with that I had the great privilege of looking while Val is busy working and Anshala is busy flying around the world and if you ever try to get a meeting whether you'll know that's true I get to sit and read and work with the incredibly talented people here John and Chris and Micah and get their advice and say what's going on and I would just make three observations I could I could talk for the rest of the day but to Micah won't let me and the three observations I think sometimes people miss when they're getting excited about blockchain it's really exciting to say blockchain's gonna solve everything code is law don't quote me on that I did not I'm just saying people said that it's not true and oh my god we can just we don't need anything else and I struggle with that I do think blockchain is changing the world as to Micah said potentially quoting one of my articles it's a myth that this is going to happen this is happening and I do think we underestimate the level of disruption that's coming but that said property rights particularly fixed real property rights so land you can't deal with land without dealing with the government I hate to break it to you one app is not going to take away a registrar and a government you need to I think Bitfury was utterly brilliant to start in Georgia where the World Bank had just spent a lot of time and money reform reforming the legal system and simplifying the process that was a very wise choice and I think if you look at consensus and what they're doing in Dubai they're hand in hand with the government and if you think about any country you're going to a careful survey of the law and understanding how your blockchain is going to work there is very useful Chrome away in Sweden is currently on a one year hold while one piece of legislation around digital signatures passes so as you think about blockchain in your given environment understanding how you're going to partner with and bring government along is I think utterly critical because if you go to a very corrupt country and try to implement blockchain on the registry if things just aren't working there you may have a false start see epigraph factum in Honduras right it's easy to forget they were real pioneers and they have now come back to the states where they're working hard on the title industry big money great rule of law but they're also one to watch they're they're in this space so just code is not necessarily law and partnership with government will be a key success factor I think that would be one of the thoughts that's coming for me another thinking broadly about emerging technologies emerging technologies very exciting blockchain can do a lot of cool things what will it be able to do when we marry it with other technologies right so for instance USAID anyone in the land sector will be familiar with masks USAID took cell phones made simple apps on them that allow you to use the basic GPS functionality walk around your pot of land and assert your claims of that land it's been very successful it's happened in three countries we've written a good article about it and that's gonna that's that's actually scaling now two things are happening there dual dual band GPS is coming it's gonna be far more accurate it's gonna work in urban areas but what happens when the person who asserts their claim doesn't have to then work with USAID to work with the government to get it into the registry but instead can just hash that claim right then and there they can so we won't get into the nuts and bolts but they can notarize it with the blockchain what happens when you marry GPS and dual band GPS and blockchain your notaries go away you've asserted your claim and you and you the whole development all those development dollars that were spent making those first mask pilots happen can be spent elsewhere because there is so much work to do everyone in development knows every dollar you spend you're spending at the at the cost of doing 10 other projects so GPS and mobile is one technology I'd love to see married with blockchain earth observation there are hundreds of satellites over our head right now taking our picture every day the resolutions would blow your mind these devices talk to each other that's gonna happen more with blockchain where did this image come from when was it taken was it really taken then hash the image to the chain this is a this is an exploding space that I'm always amazed that people aren't aware and then there's a lot of leaders in the room around identity blockchain I mean what are what is a property registry who has which rights to what land what land we can solve with with cadastral maps and images what rights is a matter of law who people I mean I've said this in writing don't go build a property right system unless you have an identity system because the what are you who are you mapping to what and then the other thing I would say we are just getting started this is 2017 is crazy exciting there's so much happening but I really do think that if you it's hard to keep it's really hard to keep it's my job to keep up and I struggle with it Chrome away just just launched something in AP in India right that's happening proppy.com a little startup most of us haven't heard of but some of us might have taken part in their ICO just did a land transaction paid in ether right which is another cryptocurrency in the Ukraine epigraph act Thomas I mentioned is working on title the equity is doing stuff from Brazil so there's so many little things happening and I've mentioned also consensus is working in Dubai and that's all they'll tell me but you know stay tuned there so there's so much happening and bitfury is also now going into Ukraine so bitfury in Georgia correct me if I'm wrong focused on the land registry started there right and that and now that that's been so successful but it's spreading built I would argue without checking this with you on the good work of years of the World Bank's investment bitfury in Ukraine is talking tackling the whole government system and I think that will be a fascinating case study in what's the right approach so at this point from my perspective with the privilege of being an observer to this space there are a lot of experiments going on there are a lot of new actors and if you think about the internet think about the companies that we thought were huge and aren't here anymore right but there are companies that haven't even started yet that are going to use this technology to change the world and potentially some people in this room might be part of those so it's I'm just super excited and privileged to be here have you talked about this with anyone we started in Georgia and you made the right point but why we choose Georgia because Georgia made a lot of transformational changes in the country during the last several years and from one of the most corrupt countries in the world now the Georgia is the least corrupt country in the world they literally don't have corruption and it was quite easy to launch land title in Georgia because the support from government was on the very high level and their systems are working very very well right now because what are the main issues when you implement in blockchain is first of all is the input of data systems ready for this because if you do garbage in you will get garbage out and on a blockchain once you register something you cannot alter it and you cannot delete the record so this is one one very important point I think second very important point is the legislation legislation should be ready so that we launch this technology very efficiently and in full yeah for example you should have legislative legislation but allow you to use time stamping in courts so that you don't need to go to notary services and so on and so forth and of course third thing is the identity the digital identity digital identity is also very critical to use the full potential of this technology because without digital identity you will not be able to move the registration just to smartphone because you need to identify people so those three very important part in a blockchain and if you think about government at all not only land title registration government is this service provider for the population for the people for the citizens and each government has thousands of difference of services but they are providing to the citizens and right now all of this not all but majority of the services are working very very inefficiently because you have a paper you have a different kind of third party checks it could be notary services or different kind of papers from country to country if we take land title to just do the deal of the land sell or land buy you can spend from days to months and you need to collect in some countries you need to collect so much papers and with the help of the blockchain we can eliminate everything we can use the blockchain connect blockchain with the existing registry systems and do all these checks and balances online so I think blockchain technology has very huge transformational potential for the each governments that's why we put government as one of the working with governments as one of priority for our for our company and also my story when I was I think 12 or something and I'm originally from Latvia and Latvia was a part of Soviet Union and now it's part of European Union yeah but and when Soviet Union collapsed my parents and parents of literally all my friends lost completely everything all the savings all the pensions everything why because systems was not designed to work for people and I I believe that with the blockchain we will be able to return this trust return the trust of the people to the governments because government government systems will be powered with the blockchain and you cannot cheat on a blockchain you cannot corrupt blockchain you cannot change the data and now in our world a lot of people just losing properties just because somebody changing records in a database it's happening every day and especially in Eastern Europe and different countries in U.S. and in Europe it's working plus minus fine but 80 percent of the world population can lose it like this do you want to take questions from the audience see to Micah are there any questions thanks my name's Carl Schoenendram with the software and information industry association we plan to get into this as well we're releasing an issue brief in about a month it's great to see old friends here and colleagues quick question there's a lot of discussion about public and private blockchains wondering what you all think about that and wondering what form of blockchain will be most prevalent in the next five to 10 years it seems to me that at least in the financial sector there's a huge amount of investment in private blockchains thanks yeah this is a very good question and I think there will be combination between public and private blockchains for example how we are working and what is what is the difference between public and private blockchain private blockchain is quite limited but only limited I mean it's not so distributed around the world when we are enabling a land title in Republic of Georgia we're using private blockchain because private blockchain is very easy to develop it's a high load enabled and so on and so forth but each private blockchain is not bulletproof in terms of security because if different departments that own the nodes will communicate between each other they can potentially can change the records that's why we're using bitcoin blockchain as the most secure blockchain in the world to anchor the snapshot of the private blockchain to the bitcoin blockchain so how it's working every 10 minutes so every hour you just do the snapshot of the whole private blockchain transactions in the government to the bitcoin blockchain and you can't negotiate with bitcoin blockchain because it's the public it doesn't belong to anyone you don't have central part not central parties but so you just can't negotiate with bitcoin blockchain and by this you are making very very secure audit system for your private blockchain from one hand you are taking the scalability of the private blockchain you are using the scalability but from other hand you are adding the security from the bitcoin blockchain and the bitcoin blockchain is the most secure blockchain in the world right now if I answer your question I would just say yes hybrids I think are important and then there's it's it's it's it's awfully binary right there's also this idea of a consortium chain where you have six entities that want to to leverage blockchain within themselves and that gets you quickly to consensus mechanisms which is is really sort of the next interesting question but I think it's an important question to focus on public or private or consortium permissioning and then which consensus mechanism are you using and if the goal is public and non-negotiable then yeah you need a public chain with mining maybe the goal is just a shared ledger across institutions so it's it depends on the use case and I think we're gonna I think we're gonna see that language evolve a lot and if I can just add I think this goes back due to Micah's point from earlier today this would depend on the country and their blockchain strategy different features are highlighted differently on public versus private there are different risks for instance on private it's maybe not as secure on the public blockchain you're blowing a lot of electricity so your electricity usage is high and if that's coming from coal you're just pumping a lot of carbon emissions so there's lots of implications to think of but this you know this is why we need to look at say a blockchain readiness assessment for the country what is the best strategy for that country what needs the blockchain can actually fulfill so it's again going back to the bigger picture Hi I'm Fannie Wang from the EXO foundation Valerie you spoke about the importance of digital identity for blockchain land rights management Mike you spoken about the pervasiveness of satellite imagery and the high resolution so for me the the big question in the room is about privacy rights and the context of increasing transparency around blockchain but also the pervasiveness of technology in general so the question is if if the blockchain is so transparent how we deal with privacy and yeah so this is a very good question and there are some extensions what is developing right now for the privacy of information and what is the beauty of the blockchain but you you can store the data in distributed ledger the owners of these nodes will not know what they are storing because it's encrypted and only you as the owner of the data will have the decryption key for example let's take the let's say some kind of healthcare records or medical records yeah how it should work and I think how it will work when it will be enabled on a blockchain so all the records will be stored on the cloud which is very distributed and you when you go to the doctor doctor doesn't have doctor should not have centralized systems doctor should have access to your personal data not personal but this healthcare data only after you grant access let's say you came to the doctor you grant access for one hour he looks at your medical records give you some advice and you close the access in this case you are protecting your data from hacking because if somebody has access to centralized system right now he or she can copy the whole database and publish it or sell it or on the black market or something like this but if you will have if you will be able to split the data into the small pieces and each small piece will be stored on the cloud and you will store each you will store your data on your laptop when it will prevent the the access to private information but also it will allow you to restore all the data all the data in case of some kind of disaster and several years ago there was a huge earthquake in Haity and one of the first building what collapsed was the building where they stored the registry the property records and tax records and it completely it was completely destroyed with all the backups if you would have the records on a blockchain distributed across every person in this country they could recover the data like this okay I'm getting Mike can you hear me I can hear you hi I know we have a lot more questions but I think we're going to wrap up this session do a quick coffee break just to let people stress your legs we're going to come back and we'll have lots more time to do three more use cases Mike's still going to get to wrap it up is that okay yes thank you I just want thank you so much for the privacy question because it's a huge part of this conversation I want to make three really quick points number one there's a difference there's a lot of loose language in this space so we can hash something take the fingerprint of data put it on a public chain we've notarized it and we can cryptographically encode it right but we have to make blockchains are immutable so just because you can't decode something today will we be able to decode it in 50 years probably so this is this comes back to the public private question right where you start hybridizing things and you might keep data on a distributed private ledger but then put the hashes on the public ledger and the other thing I propose to privacy and a blockchain meeting is the European Union's GDPR regulation which if you're not read up on it and seeing you're selling blockchain you need to go read about it because the mandates of the European Union around privacy have a lot of CIOs around the world scratching their heads and saying things I can't say on stage right and but blockchain in many cases in many of identity solutions looking at blockchain help people manage that so it's a very important question and an issue that we we need to not have at the bitter end but probably front and center as we have this conversation so thank you to Val and Anshala and we're here for the coffee break we'll be starting the next session in five minutes all right folks time to go please come in and take your seats we have a rock star panel waiting to take the stage they will astound they will dazzle they will blow your minds but only if you sit down we appreciate all those who are at least making a token gesture to come in and sit down there we go there is a pretty critical protocol in the blockchain process to make sure that all of the different portions of the network agree and now we are achieving consensus that it is time to start the next panel so without further ado this is an amazing group and I'm going to hand it over to Chris who's going to get things started but blockchain and e-governance is about the most exciting combination when it comes to this technology that I can think of and we're excited to hear the discussion Chris thanks to Micah hi folks great to be here today so I'm Chris Doton I'm the Chief Innovation Officer for NDI the National Democratic Institute we work in about 60 countries around the world to support and strengthen political and civic institutions and it's a time where civic and political institutions don't necessarily seem to be doing so hot huge problems lack of trust around the world and you know we need trust and consensus on basic facts to operate in democracies we need institutions for all the transactions of our daily life we've talked about land titling but things like marriages commerce civic life and there's been a huge investment in the financial sector fintech and blockchain are almost synonymous but you know what about the civic and governmental sector so we're lucky to have two great panelists here today to talk to us about these issues so Sheila Nix is the Tusk Montgomery Philanthropies President she's got an amazing career in politics policy in the non-profit sector as Dr. Jill Biden's Chief of Staff an advisor to President Obama work as Executive Director for Bono's One Campaign against poverty in Africa and so on and then we've got Robert DeSoe who's got his start advising Australian tech firms on how they could get break into the American market countering government data as often as he did as a part of that he realized what a mess it was and wanted to try and tackle the dire state of U.S. government information and so has built up the vox.gov platform voxgov.com excuse me platform to help make some of that government information more accessible and available so Sheila if you want to introduce yourself sure thank you as Chris said I'm Sheila Nix I joined Tusk Montgomery Philanthropies in April after leaving the White House and one of the things that was really interesting working with Bradley Tusk who's the CEO was that he expressed an interest in mobile voting but neither one of us knew that much about how it would work and what we needed to do on it so I started doing a little bit of research going to conferences learning a whole new issue area and I quickly came to the conclusion that part of the solution if we were going to do something like this was blockchain blockchain would create a platform that was auditable which is obviously one of the key components in mobile voting or the ability to mobile vote and identity is another piece that people have touched upon here that I think is something that we need to pursue but once I started figuring out that blockchain was the way to go I had to figure out like what is blockchain and how does it work and so I called Jamie Smith who spoke earlier because we had worked together in the White House and we met at Starbucks and she gave me blockchain 101 was extremely helpful and so now we're in a process of bringing different groups together technology firms government officials maybe looking at some ways to do a pilot program around deployed military voters and using blockchain as the technology that can make sure that the results are auditable and also are trustworthy which Chris mentioned is so important right now We set out some years ago to map the US federal government's information publishing and I didn't realize what a ambitious task it was what we found very early on was data was strewn in all kinds of places even within a single agency there was pretty much disarray and those were the better agencies that we came across Today we may ask there's a slide just to give you some context but today we have information from over 9000 separate publishing sources we've identified in the US federal government and the kind of data we have really focused on is about 25% of our data comes from the legislation and regulatory areas and congressional documents but the majority of our 37 million documents really comes from if you call it the ephemeral data it's contained in all of the communications from news, speeches, transcripts, fact sheets and so on many reports 75% of our data also comes from the executive branch and that's significant because that is where compared to congressional resources there is a lot of chaos could we get Robert's slide up there if we have access to that so there's a just a capture of an interface of a search for blockchain which was done actually two nights ago so it followed on the hills of the State Department mentioned and what you can see we are doing the graph is indicating activity levels between agency and parties we have icon graphs giving you some top level information about who is publishing and so on we get down quite granular amongst the members of Congress you can actually see you can search by any number of eight demographics relating to their their own personal backgrounds and in the results and this is where blockchain does become relevant you can see their summary results but when you click into those summary results we have reproduced or extracted our version of the government documents so it's obviously important for a platform such as ours which does not include any editing of any kind that we faithfully reproduce this information the target markets for what we are doing stem quite broadly from education to industry to media law amongst others one of the things I have to thank to Micah very much for is introducing me to the concept of blockchain he has been mentoring me over quite a period because I'm a slow learner and was quite cynical about it and I'm gradually being moved actually into quite a positive frame of mind about it as you'll be pleased to know but I want to give you my reasons why when it finally dawned on me that we are extremely vulnerable as publishers of data not just us we certainly store capture original copies of all the data so we have that verification process we certainly use probably world-leading infrastructure providers so we know to the extent they are secure we are secure but if anybody asks us as a potential user can we guarantee that the data is intact and I think we can subject to our terms of service and as you know all publishers with their terms of service take make a very broad net of exceptions to that this becomes much more relevant today and I think blockchain becomes sort of into focus for us what would happen if our infrastructure providers are hacked and data is changed but more significantly to me it is very easy for us to be victim of somebody taking a copy of our data and manipulating that and simply republishing it somewhere and although this sounds very much about our self-interest in being protected and it is we are also dealing with organizations that are very protective of their own reputation if we for instance are dealing with a law firm asking them to rely on our documents to advise clients to present in court as I think was referenced the last thing we can afford from a reputational point of view is the same is the last thing they can afford from a reputational point of view so I am very convinced that that self-interest that motivation of self-interest is going to sink through very much sooner than later to publishers or republishers of information I look at blockchain very much as the equivalent of the tamper proof over the counter-medication process it guarantees you that if you have the choice between the two you take the tamper proof one and we are leaning very much in that direction and I will say by way of concluding we were in Austin, Texas for AALL the American Association of Law Librarians a Bantian in July I was very surprised that the these are librarians but these are the leading information offices in the largest law firms and firms such as DLA Piper Oric, Morgan and Lewis they are asking is the data in blockchain and I think in fact that we're starting to hear that means that's something we would have to be ignoring at our own risk that's great thanks very much Robert yeah in this time of fake news and disinformation having trustworthy verified copies of things can be tremendously important just this week there were major elections in Liberia and where one of my colleagues was helping support civil society groups running independent assessment of the quality of the election those reports that they came out with the final PDF versions were logged against a very rudimentary basic blockchain based system that the Bitfury Group has built such that if anybody tried to put forward an altered version in the future they could always demonstrably say like nope this version was the original version put up there by us and anything else you're seeing is in the words of a prominent political figure in the United States fake news so Sheila why did you guys start with voting and where do you see going after this yeah so you know one of the reasons that we got interested in voting and and there's examples of this all over the place now first of all is just the lack of participation in the New York primaries a few weeks ago it was like the lowest participation level ever and you know one in five were voting and you know we're trying to figure out what's the solution to that how do you make it more accessible but it's not only in the United States it's in other countries as well and last week or in the last couple weeks in Spain there was the vote on the independence and the police attacked the voters and Bradley emailed me it's like if there was mobile voting this wouldn't have happened but it's true you know in a lot of places it's dangerous to vote it's difficult for people to get there from the U.S. to other countries and and then the U.S. in particular which is why you know we start working on this was more participation in democracy the way that things are right now a very small percentage of people vote and the politicians respond to those voters because that's what they do and that's who they know is turning out for them and there's a lot you know obviously you know every day there's another issue that's coming up whether it's climate change or gun safety or health care that you know that we believe that there's a majority of people that could achieve consensus on it but there's not enough people participating in the process and so that's in the U.S. and you know the the benefits of a mobile voting system across the world would be tremendous I mean I go on and on about why we we think this is a good idea but the blockchain does make it possible and there's a few people here today that have worked on some technologies that have actually started to you know to use the systems so what we'd like to be able to do is to try to do some pilots in the next couple years and show people how it could work and have their results be available great thanks so voting access to government information core functions of democratic systems core rights for citizens how with the new transformational technology like blockchain can we make sure that we keep in mind as Edward Zeus started with this morning with an emphasis on the poor we very often find as NDI that new technologies tend to empower the empowered and tend to further marginalize those who are sitting on the fringes of society so how do we try and make sure that that doesn't take place I think that's a really good question and one of the things that we've considered around around like the possibility of mobile voting is that everyone would have to have a device to be able to vote on initially we don't anticipate that it would be the only way you could vote you know would build on the current system so some people could continue to go to the polls but we had talked about partnerships with phone providers around making phones available for free to people who would that be able to keep them but sort of on the condition that they use it to vote initially but I do think that that was just one idea but that's something that we are aware of as we go forward that we want to make sure that whatever we came up with to make voting easier and more accessible was actually accessible to everyone not just the people who are already empowered Any thoughts on access to government data? Great well so we want to leave as much time as possible for questions so I'm going to throw it out to the audience here and we'd like to I'm going to take like three questions at a time and then kind of open it up to our panelists here so I'm going to attempt to scribble notes while I'm holding a mic and there's a mic coming around here so there's a hand here Andrew if you could please introduce yourself briefly and remember the questions are short and end with a question mark Hi Andrew I was very curious when you're talking about the voting that given block given that you need secure identity to vote how do you ensure a secret ballot because now I have traceability and look back to say you voted you didn't vote and you've got to be able to tell what the vote was thank you next there's another one over there so I had a question around the voting proposition as well and maybe not directly relevant to your use case but it's something that those of us coming from countries where buying votes is easy is it's it's kind of the logical solution I was like please my government can you do this but have you do you have any thoughts on how would you implement a technology like that against the political system where you might not have the political incentive or will to do it we have one more thanks Carl Schoenender software and information industry association I'm very interested in the comments on the publishing industry so the question is for you do you think do you believe that within five ten years publishers will be using blockchain to verify the veracity of the documents they provide thanks I think it will be sooner and I'll tell you yes I do think they will and I'll tell you why in my formal life as an advisor to insurers what I learned is they like to limit risk at the earliest of opportunity and companies that are ensuring organizations for reputational economic loss are going to look at whether it's a bloomberg a lexus nexus or anybody else and say the last thing we want is to be on the hook for avoidable loss Sheila do you want to take some voting questions sure so the question on authentication and secrecy of the ballot is something that we've been really focused on Namit here in the back of the room is from a company called votes and they're one of the companies along with Vodem who I don't know if is here yet but we'll be here later today that are trying to develop all that you know as going through the process as a you know just learning how it all works it's it's the authentication the secrecy the auditability and then also the security of the system that you're using so those are sort of the four challenges that you know we believe have to be met before this can be totally implemented so and the secrecy part is difficult one of the reasons that we were talking about starting with deployed militaries because first they have IDs that's you know it's a easily you can authenticate the identity a little bit easier in that population than in others and there's a little under the current system some you know that they're right now some provisions have been made that the secrecy may not be the same as every other population under the current system so that is something that we need to build on and Namit probably you should talk to him after this because he's he's demonstrated to us how some of that could work but we know that something that actually needs to be done you know really I should have preface that you know we feel like the technology and the security piece have to be figured out before we can do the political selling and trying to explain the benefits and the pros and cons because you don't really you know given the current environment that we're in right now unless you have those answers you you can't really move forward and in terms of other governments and and using voting and being able to help populations actually vote yeah we do have to think through how it works with their current governments and how what kind of provisions can be put in place to make sure that the trustworthiness is there I mean if people feel like the whole system is corrupt it's hard to just come in with a new system and say this is going to solve everything so we would definitely in those cases work with with groups like NDI and IRI to make sure that we understand the challenges in each unique place and how we might be able to overcome those one specific example on the the vote buying case is that I've heard described perhaps by you is that that you can vote multiple times but only the last one counts there was a a great campaign in Zambia that I was working with independent monitors some years ago where the opposition had a a whole campaign advertising campaign saying don't kubeba which was the local slang for don't talk and so they all all these opposition candidates had kind of a hushing sort of face basically they were saying take the rice take the oil but then go vote for us afterwards so a system like that can in some ways undermine the the core transactions of vote buying potentially other questions see so we've got one far over there one in the middle okay you want to just bellow and if we're talking about if we're talking about the issue of putting public services on the blockchain the issue of the business of governance this is going to reach a lot more people than just those who are already tech savvy and using mobile apps so my question is to what degree are you aware of consideration being given to the user experience and user design human central design in the development and rollout of this technology right thanks if you can maybe get across there get your exercise for the day hi thank you yeah I was wondering you mentioned the role of blockchain the potential for blockchain to strengthen participation in government I was wondering about the potential risks to governments since it's such a decentralized system of you know potential groups organizing counter-elections or any you know subnational movements potentially organizing elections and denouncing the official one so how would you define a legitimacy the legitimacy of a vote on blockchain and avoid this type of situation great okay and maybe we'll take one more question and that'll probably be all we have thank you and Claudio from Italy we are developing a voting platform too one of our concerns is about the social media influencing the behavior of electors and how the mass media are influencing people and fake news is one of the most hot topic about that so taking easy for everyone to vote could be a risk if the people are so easily influenced great okay that's an interesting question right if the information that voters are getting is inaccurate or if they're not able to parse the truthfulness of it and then they vote based on that that would be a problem I don't know that blockchain can solve that I think that the technology exists to make people feel comfortable that their vote is counted and that they can check on it I think you know from my perspective that is you know the pros and cons of more participation that's a con right if people aren't voting based on accurate information but I think that's something that's a little bit of a broader problem than just around which voting system you use I think no matter what you do to make voting easier you're going to have that risk but overall I think worthwhile to increase participation and get more people part of the process great and Robert you must you've kind of encountered easier experience problem that spawned voxgov.com to begin with any thoughts on on that side of things with blockchain based applications in general user experience user interface no I mean I think from an adoption point of view you know our concern would obviously be data security but the ideal from our point of view would be if documents at the time of viewing just had a nice little indicator that they are blockchain authenticated that would be I think a value add and to Mike is giving me a look here I think we are at that magic time thank you all so much for your your attention and your questions all right we have an amazing panel up next and we're going to ask them to make their way forward we have Nakul Saran from the Tata Trusts Gigi Brisson that can't be good you're right we did skip one I we want to move things along but we don't want to move things along quite that quickly so let me go ahead and announce the next two and that way we will not have this problem next up we're going to have Dr. Sean Conway who is the president of the IXO Foundation Dana Goldstein who is with New America and Carla Pont of Georgetown they are going to be talking about a subject that is of keen interest to many of you in this room which is how do you use blockchain in grant making and development how do you ensure that you are pushing out payments in a responsible transparent job? Well thanks to Micah we really appreciate it so as Micah said my name is Cara LaPoint I work at the Beck Center for Social Impact and Innovation at Georgetown University so I'm leading our efforts over there on blockchain for social good especially around digital identity and looking at the privacy and ethics of it so we've heard a lot of great ideas this morning around blockchain for good governance and about securing property rights so we wanted to spend a little bit of time right now looking at the possibility of blockchain to reinvent reinvent development assistance so as Emory had mentioned this morning technology has so many positives but it always has negatives that go with those positives so we want to think about it in a really thoughtful development sort of way and think about kind of what are those unique characteristics of blockchain that have so much potential but also the challenges to overcome so we can realize that full potential so blockchain you know the trust is built into the system you've got this transparency involved in the system and this immutability in the data so we have with us two great experts who combined have decades of experience on the ground in development to talk about that today we have Dr. Sean Conway and Dana Goldstein and what we're going to be talking about today is these challenges and potential so Sean has founded a number of organizations really working to achieve impact at scale in the global health and sustainable development field he's at XO foundation but he also works with a range of international partners such as UNICEF Office of Innovation and Dana is a fellow here at New America but she was also founder of Philantec which really looked at how you use technology to try to streamline philanthropy and increase the flow of capital and social impact so Dana let's start with you would you tell us about your work and the potential for blockchain in increasing transparency and reducing friction and development assistance sure thank you Karen first of all I'm delighted to be here today to talk with you all we are talking a lot today about trust and I think development assistance has a fairly fundamental trust problem institutional donors are very concerned as they should be about where their funds are going and how the funds are actually being spent and there are a lot of structures that have been built up around ensuring that funds are being well allocated and there's good reason for concern as I'm sure many of you in the room are very aware there is a possibility for a lot of corruption there's possibility for fraud a recent report from the UN determined that anywhere up to 30% of foreign assistance actually disappears there's a lot of leakage in the system so there's certainly a lot of concern and good reason for concern there's also a lot of concern about ensuring that funds that are being donated alone for development purposes are actually having a significant impact so some of the structures that have been built up around that involve a lot of reporting and there is a cost to that reporting and I would refer to that as some of the friction and some of the the transaction costs built into the system there was a report by the Center for Effective Philanthropy here in the US that determined that 13% of every foundation grant dollar here in the US is spent on administering grants and if you look at that the numbers may vary in other countries but the amount of money that is being tied up in structures around ensuring trust and around building trust is really really significant so where I think the potential for blockchain and development assistance one of the areas that is really significant is unlocking some of that capital because blockchain is inherently trustworthy and inherently reduces some of the friction around transaction costs so to get a little bit more concrete about that imagine a use case that I'm gonna dramatically oversimplify but an organization decides to award a grant to an organization that's on the ground doing good work depending on how those funds are transferred there may be a transaction cost that is taken by banks or there may be a delay in getting the funds to that organization on the ground once the organization gets the funds they go and do the good work that they're doing and then they report back to the grantor or to the donor on maybe a quarterly basis maybe a semi-annual basis maybe an annual basis the donor is waiting that amount of time to find out what's actually happening on the ground with their funds and the organization is spending a tremendous amount of time putting that reporting together so the tool that we are working on developing and we are actively seeking pilot partners will help provide real-time financial reporting to donors to increase dramatically increased transparency to help address the trust problem to help organizations get funds faster to help donors know that their funds are being well spent and I'll touch really quickly on the potential downsides and then turn it over to Sean any technology or virtually any technology is inherently neutral blockchain is certainly one of those technologies that's inherently neutral but when you're talking about moving large quantities of money that tends to attract bad actors so even though the blockchain itself provides maybe not a complete elimination of the possibility of fraud but certainly a dramatic reduction in the possibility of fraud there are also lots of touch points where any blockchain used in development assistance applications is going to be touching other systems those other systems may or may not be inherently as secure one other potential risk that I'll touch on them and I'll stop talking and turn it over to Sean is in order for the types of systems that we're thinking about to be as effective as they have the potential to be they really need to be ubiquitous they really need to be fairly universally adopted and if they're not there is the potential that the organizations that are the early adopters benefit from the unlocking of capital that comes along with the system in ways that those that are laggers in adoption don't so I think that has the potential to potentially undermine some of the benefits in terms of trying to make access to capital more efficient for some of the on the ground organizations that are doing great work that's great and I really like to key on that one point that you talked about blockchain itself needs to interact with lots of other systems so as we talk about kind of these unique characteristics of blockchain it is really important to understand how it's interacting with other technologies and with people and all the existing institutions so Sean let's turn it over to you now the quality and availability and accessibility of data has always been so critical to your work can you talk about some use cases where blockchain may actually increase that availability and quality of data yeah I'll jump directly into the use cases and these are taken from the South African context in which we've been working for the past few years with blockchain and related technology applications so the use cases are in the context of early childhood development and I'll give you three examples because I think they each illustrate a very exciting potential of blockchain so the first is in the delivery of household level support services to families to poor families and here we have a project which is implementing an impact bond mechanism so the impact bond is issued by the government and the services are delivered by decentralized networks of service providers and these are for this is for young children and their families and so we have here both the collection of data about children at the sort of very start of their lives which I think is a very exciting possibility and for children to have their entry into the digital world and into social and digital inclusion happening through this rather than through getting their first Facebook account and the data begins to aggregate to those to those children's identifiers and so fundamentally this system of of high definition data collection is really about the data resolving to unique identifiers for the recipients the beneficiaries as well as for the service providers and so we move on to a second use case which is a national franchise initiative which is again implementing early childhood development services so community level play groups through networks of service agents and that is through voluntary contributions so here we have the ability to identify the agents we have the ability to identify the beneficiaries and to flow data through the system in the form of data that is collected as as proof of impact and that proof of impact becomes exchangeable and tradable and the data contained within that becomes valuable information that is used as assets within the system the third example is a national government subsidy scheme for preschool which is pre-cafe kind of education where around 800,000 children receive a daily attendant subsidy currently that whole system is paper-based administratively extremely expensive to administer and also has lacks trust and lacks the use of the data that's collected and so we're working to replace that system using the blockchain technologies so really our mission is to optimize how how impacts are achieved by collecting data in trustworthy valuable and exchangeable ways and so we we have been working on a protocol for how to structure the data and collect it in ways that it can be tokenized and can be exchanged and traded and once you have the data in this format you can then develop derivative funding innovative funding mechanisms and so on so this is it's a very exciting area of the blockchain use of the blockchain type technologies which is not only financial but also also really about information flows and so so that's all the positive on the I think on the potential danger side we know that informational asymmetries are some of the some of the biggest causes of of inequality and of and power imbalances and so whilst these technologies offer huge potential to democratize access to information and the the flip side of that is that it could end up concentrating the power of information into the hands of a few and I think we've seen this in the in the blockchain space in terms of bitcoin and how bitcoin is really concentrating wealth into the hands of of few so that's that's the one and then the governance around the data so there's huge potential for the blockchain technologies to to enable good governance of data and use of the data but if it's not well governed that can that can also lead to problems thank you I think those are all great examples of both kind of the potential and the challenges we only have 10 minutes so we will jump straight into audience questions we'll do the same thing where we'll take three questions and then definitely there's any questions so I'll start off with a question really kind of digging into this this governance of data back to kind of those key characteristics of blockchain right you know that the trust is built into the system it's transparent and it's immutable right so obviously Sean especially in your work the privacy around the data can you talk to kind of your concerns as something who's worked in the global health sector for so long about kind of how blockchain in particular might affect privacy issues yeah so I think the key thing here and I think this is possibly a useful insight in general is that when we talk about blockchain we're really talking about a collection of new technologies that could fit under this this web 3.0 kind of idea and so blockchains as distributed ledgers are only one part of that infrastructure they are also new mechanisms forced for modeling data there's a lot of cryptography based technologies and the collection of these these technologies into the new web 3.0 standards is going to enable privacy and it's a really exciting new cryptographic technologies that are being built in such as zero knowledge proofs and a whole range of solutions to the privacy issue there's a huge economic force but behind keeping things private not necessarily always for good and so the technologies are going to they enable this we just need to be wary of poor uses of technology of the technology that could compromise people's privacy great and I'll jump to to Dana back to kind of looking at the capital flows for social impact one of the things that people have talked a lot about where blockchain is really appropriate is where you necessarily have kind of existing institutions or kind of clean data places like that so do you fear in terms of when you're doing capital flows that you're going to just by using blockchain kind of exacerbate existing kind of winners and losers in the system or do you think it has potential to kind of create disruption in that balance I think that's definitely a risk and I think anybody who's designing and implementing in the space needs to keep that in mind I think part of where there is potential for blockchain to actually disrupt that is that some of the current losers I had to use that term but some of the current NGOs and other entities that aren't getting access to capital or aren't getting sufficient access to capital aren't getting sufficient access to capital because they have a hard time proving that they're trustworthy and that's where I think the blockchain if implemented correctly does really have the potential to increase the trust in those organizations make it a lot of the lot of development assistance a lot of grant making a lot of the structures that are built in are really about risk mitigation and risk production and there is a lot of potential in good uses of blockchain and good applications of blockchain to have that risk mitigation happen on the blockchain in a way that increases confidence in organizations even if there are thus far unproven organizations so at least at the theoretical level I think it has the potential if applied in the right way to increase the flow of capital to some of those organizations that are currently dramatically under capitalized because they're in a low infrastructure environment or because they're doing work in a less organized fashion or other organizations that really would benefit from a greater influx of capital and one quick question and we'll go back to the audience in terms of this idea of unique identifies right identification is really the key to access services or access capital right so I'm interested with blockchain is it important to really have that foundational identity to know kind of who somebody is or can you build identity just through a transaction history which is kind of what you're more talking about Dana. Yeah and I think there is tremendous potential in that I think there are a lot of people who are looking at applications of building identity for individuals that are not using traditional mechanisms for building identity but I think there is significant potential for building identity for organizations loosely structured so in countries where organizations have a hard time forming for example where it may not be safe to aggregate may not be safe to gather they may not be formally recognized by their government there are opportunities to come up with other ways to identify people who are associated with that entity to be able to create enough trust and do that risk mitigation to be able to increase the flow capital. Great and Sean any thoughts on that? Yeah so there's a really big movement through the web 3 standard setting process to establish a universal set of identifiers and a mechanism to manage an identifier infrastructure and this really applies to everything that we any entity that interacts in the digital world so it's machines and people and organizations and so on and what's important is that this is an open standard it's being developed through the web 3 consortium and it's going to enable a whole new paradigm of identity linked to these universal identifiers and the ability to authenticate against those identifiers so we're doing the some of the technical work on this through an initiative called rebooting the web of trust and I like that idea of a web of trust particularly when we think about new ways of scaling up you know so scale really needs to happen through networks and so all of the examples I mentioned in the early childhood development context involves networks of service providers whether that's networks of organizations small community organizations or agents and I think we're going to see more of these kinds of models where networks of people organize to fund and to deliver impacts so it's not only on the delivery side but it's also on the funding side and of course then you have a lot of questions around you know what is the source of funds and how can you trust where the funds are coming from and what are they being used for and so on so the identifier layer of this is really fundamental and something we're working hard on great are there any questions from the audience Hi I have a question regarding the identifiers so in countries like the U.S. and South Africa a lot of problems come from discrimination based on identifying data so how would you sort of protect people from that and allow for an opt-in option because if starting from childhood they're attracting certain information that may lead to kind of more serious consequences as adults for example and we'll take one more and then have them answer up here on the phone Hi I'm Nomini Rubin with Tetra Tech I had a question for Kara on when you were talking about how we could save money from corruption and from reporting costs by using blockchain and how is it different to use it blockchain versus other digital means that we might already have through the normal internet great Sean do you want to start with the identifier issue? Yeah so there's a there's a there's a really cool new concept which is of self-sovereign identity and self-sovereign identity allows for any person to to create their identifiers and accept claims against their identifier rather than against their their person and manage access to those claims with the claims being rooted or anchored in the blockchain as being a a trust anchor but not not a record that exposes their privacy so I'd be happy to speak with you afterwards and explain more about this exciting new technology and the identity infrastructure that that a large number of organizations are working towards implementing and then I do want to tackle the financial costs yeah so on the reporting side of things the the tool that we're working on and there are others out there facilitate essentially radical trans radical transparency into financial transactions so imagine a grant is awarded to an NGO any time that NGO spends funds that are associated with that particular grant that transaction is recorded on a black on a blockchain both the grantor and the grantee have access to that information so the grantor is able to see in real time how their dollars are being spent what that does in terms of reducing reporting burdens is there's much less of a need on a quarterly semiannual annual basis for somebody at the agency at the organization delivering the services to pull together all of their financial transactions to create new financial documentation to send back to the funder so it certainly doesn't eliminate reporting and a lot of the reporting that happens as it should be is on things like outcomes and doesn't eliminate the financial reporting at the organizational level but in terms of being able to provide the donor with a very very concrete sense of how funds are being spent the blockchain facilitates those transactions could that happen without blockchain absolutely and there is technology that's being built that's not on the blockchain what the blockchain layer of it does is make that transparency a more confident thing to do it makes it a more trustworthy thing to do well great well I think with that we are out of time thanks so much Dana and Sean appreciate the thoughts thank you is this on now it's on thank you I'm going to invite up the next three speakers to talk about such a big title but can blockchain save the world I think we'll see so ethical supply chains carbon markets and conservation I'd like to invite Nicole Saran with Tata Trust Gigi Bresson with Ocean Elders and Will Turner with Conservation International we got all three great thank you so this this session I think is going to be really exciting because I'm a digital native and I may be in the oldest generation of digital natives I was born in the 70s and I was also writing my first code in the 70s so I'm fascinated by the technology and the a lot of things about blockchain but I think what we're really excited about all of us here isn't so much the technology itself but the use cases how we're at this horizon of what we thought was possible in the past and what we think could be possible in the future so I want to start with is talking about what are the use cases that that we're looking at in our various domains and why so maybe starting with you Gigi and please introduce yourself and get into it Hi there I'm Gigi Brisson I'm with Ocean Elders although my background is in investing in software tech so blockchain incredibly exciting for the conservation space and I'm going to start with just a little backgrounder some and I like to leave you with some data points that maybe you didn't know and what you probably don't know is you're getting robbed every day and I'll tell you why but I'll give you some data points it is estimated 100 million sharks are pulled out of the water every year mostly for shark fins but also for cosmetics Tuna Bluefin tuna is down to 2.7% of what it should be if it were not fished and a lot of that comes from an area that's called the high seas and the high seas you know it's the tragedy of the global commons we have an arbitrary 200 mile mark countries control the area up to 200 miles and then it's open seas and what goes on on the open seas is sort of like what's called the wild west there's slavery there's and there are very few there are a few companies and a few countries that are actually taking all the wildlife out of what everybody in this room actually owns so that's sort of the little backgrounder so blockchain what can it do so in the same way you think of farm to table supply chain you can think of ocean to table supply chain and what it can do for ocean wildlife so there's um it's known as IUU illegal unreported and unregulated fishing if we are able to I think Mike mentioned satellites we have a fishing vessel that turns off its transponder starts fishing in marine protected areas satellites can be taking pictures sending it to the blockchain collecting information there the technology of of taking all the fish that come out and whatever wildlife is extracted and recording it through every step and there's a lot of steps in seafood through fisheries management which tend to be regional and we have international problems with it through middleman markets and you as a consumer have no way to know that the tuna you're buying is actually caught legally tuna big problem and actually I think this is probably where we'll first see the blockchain applied as it's very much needed tuna are pelagic they swim everywhere they go through not only the high seas but economic zones by putting the tuna through its whole supply chain onto the blockchain will enable better you know to reward better actors those who don't use destructive fishing practices it'll you know cause adherence to the agreements that are out there and it will actually enable those small let's say Pacific Islands who actually sell the rights to fish in their ease to actually get a bigger piece of the of the funds that are generated from tuna fishing so that's one of the cases and in the ocean space so my name is Nicole Sarna with the Tata Trust based in Mumbai and actually similarly our first pilot is actually in the seafood space as well I'm an ocean engineer an oceanographer by training and when but I have to actually thank to Micah and Stella who you know four months ago I had a superficial knowledge of blockchains and after participating in a couple of sessions that they had organized at the bank when I joined the Tata Trust said you know we've got to do something with blockchains and given that I was an engineer the only way I learned is actually by doing so we just decided let's just do so we kicked off a pilot looking at a few different value chains so we actually started with tuna looked at shrimp aquaculture and a few other things and interestingly what happened in that time period is that the EU actually announced that they were considering a complete ban on shrimp imports from India not because of sustainability but because of the use of antibiotics and when you actually tried to then so we said okay I'm I'm also a former consultant so I said well what's the root cause issues here that we want to solve so before we run into blockchains as the answer we've sort of have been studying for the last few months you know what what's really causing this this problem why are farmers using antibiotics when they know that if it's called that entire shipment to destroy it right and what you start to realize is one there's lots of misinformation so you know most shrimp farmers are getting advice from people who have no expertise and are just being told no no no put the antibiotics in there and it'll help the help your shrimp production which is not not the case and then you started to discover that there was this and there's an entire system of certifications and testing that runs through this value chain we in our value chain analysis there are 31 stakeholders right certifiers verifiers license providers that sit entire in this entire value chain and so building trust in the system it's you know it's a blockchain but it's a trust chain right every one of these actors has to agree to play along with the system and that's where the complexity of the system started to in a sense overwhelm us but it's also been incredibly exciting so the blockchain plays this sort of underlying foundational data set that any one of these providers can access and use but what you actually need to do then is build an entire ecosystem of verification systems that you also trust because to the point Mike was making garbage and garbage out right and so if the if you don't trust the data that's going in the blockchain in the first place why are we doing this so we actually then had to go back and say okay we actually need to completely transform the way testing of of the shrimp takes place so you need new sampling protocols you need new testing methods so what started out with as a we're just going to do a little bit of a blockchain thing to increase traceability has become we actually need to transform the entire ecosystem of actors and systems that you use to be able to transform the way the sector works and then link to that is this idea that once you start to do that you actually won't change the system overnight either so I think a new addition to our model is sort of building a reputational model as well so kind of like how you rate an Uber driver and Uber driver rates you you want to build in a system where you can actually start to rate the different stakeholders who are in the system so you actually start to get a choice in who you work with so if one certifier actually tends to be corrupt and you can't trust them because they have a track record of certifying fish that ultimately gets tested to be to be destroyed you can then say hey I'm not going to use them anymore I can move some so you actually start to give people freedom of that information and access so you work with other partners and then hopefully the other piece that we're trying to do is reduce the friction within the system so today testing takes place at every single step of the value chain so imagine the same test is done almost eight different times in the value chain and that cost is borne by the farmer ultimately because by either but through depressed prices or through higher costs so if you can start to say one test that I can verify and trust that carries itself all the way to the point of the consumer I've completely changed the overall cost of that system and the friction within that system and you can then and more importantly because you have this disaggregated system where I can now trace every shipment to that farm the EU doesn't have to go out and say we're going to ban all shipments where they can actually start to disaggregate and say we're going to ban that supply chain or that particular supply chain because now you can actually build trust in the system to separate people out so the potential is enormous but I wanted to also caveat with through the conversation that it's actually also quite overwhelming when you start this to think about all the other you know technology solutions that you need or interfaces that you need to also address before the blockchain works right and arguably the blockchain in some ways is the easiest part of the solution so let's start with that one yeah those are both really great examples from from my side my name is Wilterner I'm I work for an organization called Conservation International and a little while back we took a look across the organization to identify places where there was great potential for blockchain to really enhance what we do and we came up with a really shocking range of things you've got sort of supply chains and chain of custody issues and fisheries or palm oil or any of a number of commodities related to that you've got tenure issues so without secure land tenure or property rights in a place like Indonesia it's you can't have development investment you can't have effective regulatory frameworks for landholders without catch shares or fishing rights established clearly in the open ocean or in trans boundary areas such as the tuna fishery or the South Pacific you can't have effective ocean management so there's clear potential applications of a tool like blockchain all of these but the one I want to focus on is to get to it I want to take a step back and ask really what what are some of the fundamental issues in conservation so conservation international we protect the nature that people around the world rely on and that is it's some that's what I've studied as a scientist for two decades now it is a staggering range of ways that people sometimes really don't appreciate so just to give a couple coastal mangroves and coral reefs protects coastal communities from storm surges fisheries supply a large part of the world's protein the forests this planet store more carbon still than the entire atmosphere so clearly the protection and restoration of forests is a major tool in the fight against climate change without it we could end all other emissions right now and not get to the Paris target you know a couple years ago my dad was in the hospital with a multiple drug-resistant infection the one antibiotic that saved him I looked over at the IV bag and it was vancomycin saved his life was found in a handful of soil was derived from a bacteria and found in a handful of soil in Borneo 60 years ago so literally the other side of the planet 60 years later there's a connection between that forest and saving a life here in who's Austin Texas so this points to one of the fundamental challenges of conservation those who benefit from ecosystems from nature from the conservation of those places are rarely in the same place or the same individuals and sometimes not even the same time as those who pay the cost of conservation or incur the opportunity costs of protecting those places and that is both a daunting challenge and a really fertile ground for the application of a tool like blockchain so here's an example we've got a conservation stewardship program that is based on we've applied it in some 14 countries over the last decade or so and it's based on building a negotiated package of or agreements that communities receive payment in exchange for conservation stewardship actions and there's negotiation of a contract there is verification of results there's a payments made and in all three of those steps we're actively doing this but there are inefficiencies so there's there's bad news and there's good news there the bad news is we're already doing all of these things and we're making incremental progress but it's not what we can do to actually scale it to the level where this is really meaningfully delivering results at scale the good news is that we're already doing all of these things so it's a place where the application of blockchain to reduce the friction in the system so that those making the payments are don't have to drive the boat nine hours down river risk missing the sorry nine days down river in some cases in eastern colombia for example where we're doing this risk missing the person that they were going to give the payment to run into a problem with the report not being there on time from the payee side or the recipient side of these payments communities sometimes may miss the payment which understandably has implications for them they don't have a grievance mechanism there's room for corruption in the system so all of these cases are places where blockchain can enhance the speed and efficiency of payments the reporting potentially results based payments and a grievance mechanism so that there's a verified contract as the basis for that transaction so we are actively doing a feasibility study right now with a goal of piloting this on one of our conservation agreements in Guyana and colombia as two test cases in the very near future so with that I think we're gonna open it up to questions but one question is already upon us which is our session title has a question in it so just really quick responses can blockchain save the world I think they can certainly play a role in helping towards saving the world so you know building on your point around from the conservation where we started was very much from a conservation lens and originally it was aquaculture is one of the major reasons for mangrove deforestation and destruction in India and so an unbridled sort of expansion of aquaculture was going to become a problem what we just saw was that there was a crisis and crisis creates action and so we decided to piggyback on this particular issue but once the system is in place it will actually allow us to track for sustainability as well so once you actually know where all your aquaculture farms are just very simple spatial imagery and machine learning you can now actually track that same blockchain to a specific site and you can tell was that from a farm that was licensed or not or has it come from a new farm that has come because as you track changes in spatial imagery that has come from because of mangrove deforestation so now you can start to add all these other uses to that same platform once it's been built and so property rights and just that starts to become a big part of that enabler we know from conservation a lot of the work we've done in conservation local communities tend to be the best managers and protectors over their natural resource but in often cases when it's an open access or a system you have a tragedy of the commons and you start to see a massive decline in these resources so it's a race to exploit so the more quickly you can bring property rights into it that are strong and will lead to I think greater protection and help in those steps towards protecting the planet right so I think the more we can try to introduce those kinds of systems more quickly we can start to think about solving these problems not just in one site but really at scale and that's I think what we're concerned about from a conservation perspective Gigi you have thoughts on? Yeah I do of course I do you know nature supports us this world does not work without nature and blockchain can be the underlying technology that empowers consumers provides the trusted transparency which is what we don't have today and really it's political will to make the brave decisions to protect you know these areas that we talk about and I think political will comes with the pressure from end users from constituents and so I think it's that trusted transparency that we're all looking for I'll answer the question as well but it's similar it's I don't know that blockchain itself can save the planet but we're at a moment right now where I feel like we're moving from despair to a sense that we actually can act it's going to take coordinated action but the ability to connect networks and actually drive change at a global scale is something that blockchain is going to be a great enabler of so we have time I'm going to add one go ahead actually will doesn't know it yet but we're probably going to be working together on something that came up yesterday I happen to have a meeting it's a small world with his wife and yes I was with I was with your wife yesterday and the CEO of conservation international and we were talking about mangroves and and I don't know if you know but mangroves but they are incredible for carbon management and we all know about you know carbon credits and we started talking about carbon credits and blue carbon and we call mangroves basically blue carbon and and there's a big alliance being created by some of the large conservation groups and as as Sanjian was talking I'm thinking about I'm going oh my gosh we need to put blue carbon on the blockchain and start a trading community and and create the credit exchange for blue carbon and so I think actually you and I are going to be working on this but you don't know this yet all right looking forward to that so we have a couple minutes for questions let's just do grab a couple of questions and then we'll respond I saw a hand in the back my name is Catherine Foster I've just moved here from Europe two months ago and I've been working on natural capital and blockchain so I haven't heard the term natural capital because to me this is one of the most exciting things being able to use non tangible assets in the blockchain and be able to trade on those so I'm just wondering basically how how that can serve as a framework for you in terms of everything from the carbon to the mangrove to trees to other ecosystem services and even down to human rights and SDGs I haven't heard that framework being used here and I'm just wondering if that's within your scope great question you had another question up here within the blockchain traceability function one of the things I'm very curious about is when you're looking for instance with agriculture with shrimp or the fit yes when it's a 700 pound tuna it's very easy to put it our fit in and track the whole tuna but once it becomes tuna stakes it's not necessarily economically viable to to put a tracking device on each individual stake what you guys see as possible solutions to ensure to prevent adulteration or to prevent garbage entering after your certification testing as it moves down the chain great that's a is there another hand over here in the I saw one more in the back great Sridhar hi Shaili Adnalfi with thank you we are actually doing supply chain transparency for Kakao in Indonesia and Colombia and for us the most important using Ethereum permission system so would love to talk to you about that afterwards because we we discovered the same thing it's like when you drill down on these use cases for us we start with the farmer right and then we build up from there so one question I have is at some point we're going to have to have some sharing of data across competitors within industries while still protecting other data right so that we can tackle these industry-wide challenges of conservation could you talk a bit about what your approach is going to be for that using blockchain thanks very much but you want to start take your pick of questions sure so I can start with you know your question as it's easy once you have a big fish but once you sort of chop it up into little pieces but I mean one of the great things with blockchain is you can actually now sort of track the component pieces of it as well right so as it gets chopped up it sort of it gets followed along in the blockchain which is part of the value of having a database like that but I think that from a technology piece that there's a physical element of this is how do I believe that what's in there is still the right is the original piece and I think we're solving that I think in three different ways right so one is you're doing mass balance calculations as checks within the system so that once the certification has been given for x amount of shrimp and it gets processed we have pretty good rules of thumb of sort of the boundaries of processing shrimp will lead to this much shrimp and you know shrimp product and so on and so forth so you can do some mass balancing at each step so that when you set up a smart contract and it's arriving there you can actually verify whether you know it meets that first check the second is you know thinking about sort of the the packaging itself so it still needs to be packaged and you want to make sure that aggregators are all sourcing from places that have been certified so can you put you know NFC sort of tags on them sort of temper proof tags on the packaging so that there's that kind of trust that still exists and then the third piece that I was mentioning is the reputational piece right so you actually build a reputational model into the system as well so you can start to choose who you buy from based on their reputation and their track record of actually delivering you know sort of in this case clean shrimp so I don't think any one piece will will will suffice you actually need to think of two or three different checks and balances in the in the system so that's kind of how we we've been we've been tackling it I think in answer to the issue I assume what your the concern is competitive or IP you don't want to share that information and I think you know we've seen that in numerous areas and what ends up happening is I think you can separate that information so that what we're really interested in is more of the aggregate data and so that gets shared to the benefit of the whole community who who gives information into that community and then the the the stuff they want to protect the IP actually can be you know kept separately and and not for shared information Can I just add to that one I what I've also seen at least in fisheries for example a lot of what is assumed to be sort of business intelligence is not actually business intelligence right Frishers are all convinced that they don't want to track her because they don't want somebody else to know where they're fishing guess what everybody knows you just go to one guy I said do you know where that guy went and fished oh yeah yeah he went to that ground over there yeah they're all on the radio yeah they all know right and so so often it's an excuse and you have to try to overcome a behavioral and mindset barrier as much as it's a technological barrier so you know sort of sifting through that to say okay this is actually business intelligence is a big part of the challenge on the natural capital question which is also an excellent question we're thinking about natural capital in a similar way nature and natural capital in a similar way nature is a it's an asset that our stock that provides a useful benefit to people flows of ecosystem services and and other things what we haven't hit on yet that it sounds like your question is getting at is how do you think of nature itself as an as the asset for the asset class and implement blockchain in a way that that recognizes that and I confess to not having the answer to that I suspect that some people in this room have thought about that and I would love to including yourself I would love to talk about that same here I had someone last week tell me hey let's do an ICO on on nature itself and I was like we could make a quarter billion dollars overnight and I was like all right but what happens on day two so if you've got the answer to that turn it to cash well and then yeah let's talk about that I'm the well I'll leave it there let's we have time for one or two more questions okay let's get yeah we could break for one let's get one more question okay thank you very much thank you and is this oh it is on hi okay so we're a little bit behind schedule but that's because everybody's had so many interesting to say we're gonna do lunch very quickly there's two lines they're gonna start right under the stairs it's buffet but it's delicious get excited if you can get your lunch and bring it back in this room that would be great and we'll start the next panel we're gonna reconvene in about five minutes I don't think anyone out there can hear me but you guys all can so five more minutes all right ladies and gentlemen we've given you an unusually luxurious lunch break so we hope that everyone has had time to get some good food we thank our friends at the World Bank for feeding us we will hurt everyone quickly back in from the dessert table a couple of points before we get started formally the first is can we get a round of applause for Allison, Olivia, Priyanka and all of the others who have made this event happen none of this would have been possible without them and we are certainly in their debt to anybody who has learned anything from today's discussions owes them a lot the next piece I'd like to say is this is the hardest working panel of the entire thing because they have the after lunch crowd and the after lunch panel is a really really tough spot so we have warned them they are coming ready for bear excited to engage with you on a fascinating question which is now how we know how this works at a granular level how do we zoom back and prepare our organizations our institutions for the really extraordinary changes that could be on the horizon and as we get into this and before I introduce the panelists I just want to make one quick point at the outset there's a great historian named Yvonne Hariri who asked a pretty fundamental question which is why do humans run the world why are we in charge he said you know if you look at it it could be jellyfish it could be orangutans there's no natural reason why human beings are in charge and run the world and what he answered when he studied this question is that we do two things that other species don't do we can cooperate flexibly and we can cooperate at scale you find some species that can cooperate flexibly so wolves or dolphins can cooperate flexibly but only in small groups and you find some species that can cooperate at scale like bees or ants but we're the only ones who can do both of those things and because we can do that it unlocks a lot of possibilities in order to do that we need to agree on basic facts we need to have a base layer of reality that everyone is comfortable with and once we have that base layer of reality we're able to say okay I don't know every detail of how the airplane works I don't understand every part of the inspection process that ensured that it was safe to fly but I have confidence in the inspectors that carried out that work I have confidence in the machinists that designed the engines and built the engines and I'm going to get on that plane and fly halfway around the world and know that I'm going to be okay doing that and that's what enables many of us to come together in events like this but that ability to form consensus around a common set of facts is absolutely essential blockchain is going to supercharge that consensus and when it does it is going to pull friction out of all of our systems sometimes this is going to be a good thing sometimes this is going to be a bad thing but however you look at it it's going to be transformational it's going to change the way our systems and institutions operate to help us get ahead of that process we have pulled together some of the smartest people we know so we're going to start with Dante Despartes Dante is the CEO of Risk Cooperative which is an insanely innovative firm that works to manage complex risk solutions around the world and Dante I want to ask you to get us rolling here how do we think about deploying capital and resources in a world where we can manage risks in ways we've never been able to manage them before wow well thank you to Micah and thank you to the New America blockchain trust accelerator and of course the World Bank Group for hosting this important conversation to your point about nature and organization and naturally collaborative the only other species I've found that is as collaborative our blockchain enthusiast so I've had the pleasure to be roped into this community and in a very short order I've become enthusiastic about it so I wanted to answer your question with two philosophical points first and then I'll try to give you a couple of examples in context the first philosophical point is if blockchain could not exist without that other foundational technology the internet what cannot exist without blockchain philosophical question number one the second one being is that if the internet augured a world of low friction communication blockchain augers a world of low friction value transfer and that certainly has borne out in the entire conversation today and the most promising use cases we're seeing with bitcoin being the killer app at the moment are really holding that point true so I work in probably the most friction laden aspect of the capital markets and finance there is which is the insurance industry we're a 5.5 trillion dollar industry we're only essential when bad things happen otherwise it's like the CIA you never sadly you're essential a lot these days yes and if I just to put a fine point on how essential we are the summer of misfortune that we have had with three 500 year flooding events in Texas in three consecutive years with hurricane Irma the most persistent and powerful Atlantic hurricane system ever recorded with Maria destroying the island of Puerto Rico where I'm from all of these types of complex events start to reach the half trillion mark in the span of a few months not not even counting the apocalyptic fires we're seeing in California the earthquake in Mexico and on and on and on and so if you want to build a resilient society the balance sheet that sits on the sidelines to Mike and I work with the initiative here Bretton Woods too you've got to not only take these long-term asset holders of which the insurers are often the the the most efficient at hoarding it you've got to you're not only too big to fail you're too big to hide and what stands between reconstruction and households and building resilience is friction right so just to drive home a fine point in Houston the fourth largest city in the United States after Hurricane Harvey dropped the most rain we have ever recorded in this country on one location the claims process for even well insured households is friction laden you need to number one be able to file a claim number two then a loss adjuster shows up number three then you debate with that loss adjuster multiple times and often you'll have to do that several times before you see the first dollar of a claim and so in the complex world that we live in where we're socializing losses and privatizing gains which is kind of the current operating model we see Equifax drives home that point in that complex world friction frankly is the enemy of all kinds of things and the first and foremost one being trust lack of trust in every institution on the planet is showing up in our ballot boxes with some profoundly consequential changes with Brexit being the European answer and of course the retrenchment of economic nationalism in the United States being incredibly complex so a foundational technology like blockchain effectively removes many of these barriers and there are fewer places that could gain as much from it than the insurance industry but we're also amongst the slowest to move on the planet so I'm trying to rattle the cage from the inside so we're going to have a competition now for arcane bureaucracies so from the insurance industry to the world bank and I say that with great affection for the world bank of course but Susan you get the lucky task of figuring out how you take one of the most dispersed organizations on the planet and I think you guys are way up there at the top there may be a handful that beat you but not many and figuring out how you can use distributed ledger technology and blockchain to pull friction out of the task of doing great work around the world it's not easy but how are you doing it? Thank you Tamika it's a great introduction for the world bank group Susan is not inviting me back So before I start I want to thank Allison Price I coordinated this with her and she's the most impeccable person when it comes to handling an event and I can't thank her enough under the topic blockchain in the world bank group yes we are a huge organization with many different players and we're decentralized all over if you think of everything that people have been talking about this morning from supply chain to security de-risking every one of these use cases impacts us if we're looking at our organizational structures and what this technology might mean procurement the way we hire people the way that we handle our trust funds where our money goes being able to show that we're being responsible this technology could potentially be a game changer for us a lot of what we do is ensuring that our funding is going to the right places and ensuring transparency and that we're serving our donor countries and our clients adding this layer of transparency makes that job a lot easier the tricky part that somebody brought up this morning is the behavior part I liked what I heard in the last session of blockchain is actually the easy part and I think that's very true we formed our blockchain lab in June and the excitement has spread throughout the bank we've talked with a variety of groups in the global practices but also for internal use cases and I think what we need to do to prepare for this technology is learn about it learn what its implications are knowing that it's not in its final form yet but to prepare for how it's going to change the way that we work the way that we communicate with each other and where our concentrations should be so we talk about end of friction in a huge bureaucracy and how much time people spend just trying to get something done bringing the right people in the room to push something a little bit further the exchange of information building on the partnerships hopefully a technology like this combined with others can help make that go a little bit easier and as our CIO, Denny Robattel also said this morning this type of technology also encourages partnerships to solve a lot of the problems that we have and all of these are World Bank use cases as well we need to partner with organizations and I think that's the new operating model is that we need to be more open we need to partner with other organizations and build on top of what we're doing because we do have a responsibility to ensure that this technology is utilized in a way that serves everyone so one of the organizations that is attempting and succeeding in many instances to deploy blockchain successfully is Consensus and Consensus was founded by a guy named Joe Lubin who invented an iteration of blockchain called Ethereum along with a couple of other folks but Consensus has been very forward leaning in building out system level solutions around the world and I was chatting with Joe a couple of days ago he was demoing the technology that you were using to take law and smart contracts and move contracting entirely onto blockchain you think about the amount of energy that is expended generating the same document over and over and over again in contracting and how lives would be different and how commerce would be different if all of that were streamlined if we could just do that with a couple of clicks of a mouse and be done with it where does this take us and what are the projects that you guys are working on that you think could have the biggest impact when it comes to eliminating friction? Wow these are big topics thank you again to my friend and also another shout out to Allison because yeah I probably wouldn't figure out how to get my shoes tied this morning if it weren't for you so first of all Consensus is a portfolio company we build businesses on the Internet of Transactions and we also are kind of the forefront of helping to make that a real thing and organizations like the World Bank but what we've been getting to know are really out in front of this I had a front row seat I'll quick aside to Uber and the like overrunning the the ground transit industry and how that disruption played out and I can say that the banking industry is you know has those few sharper tax than the the the taxi industry did and they're kind of getting in front of this is is really cool to watch because okay sometimes we see POC projects that are just sort of well we're afraid of blockchain we're going to figure it out by doing any old project but a lot of these projects especially the leadership of the World Bank have noticed this they really are thinking thoughtfully about well let's do projects where if it worked out it'll transform the organization right so we do a small thing but it could become a big thing as opposed to oh trade finance let's do that right yeah and that's so that's a I think that's a good lesson for for any organization is to say when you get in front of this and when you're trying to learn learn by doing and learn but when you're doing think big but do small so give us one specifically that you're working on that you think may be a game changer we've you know heard land titling earlier we've heard some amazing use cases around conservation and good governance and grant making what's one that you guys are working on that could redesign an organization you mentioned I think my two favorite the three projects that really have to succeed at consensus are our project our Pegasus project where we're working on taking the Ethereum protocol and transforming that use you know learning from all the stuff that's out there right now hyperledger fabric and sawtooth and and other other protocols and saying look let's get to pass that let's get to a post protocol period where we're talking about public or private transactions not public or private networks when we talk about friction free we're going to have a lot of friction if you're in a supply chain network in out of Detroit and you're in a tire rubber provenance network trying to keep conflict rubber out of your tires and you're also part of the supply chain for the automotive industry but you've been building these networks separately and now you've got the same problem we've always had right when they come smashing together so we need to be able to have an internet of transactions not a bunch of internet of transactions and we need to to get there so that project needs to happen you port which I described at the state department thing the other day but then yeah open law a lot of people think of blockchain as immutable data what it really is is immutable rules and the most the between legally separate entities where those parties are afraid of each other becoming the hegemon of the system right that's really it solves one problem blockchain doesn't solve a technical problem solves a social problem that says you can't have control of the system and I can't have control of the system through which we're doing business we can't change the rules on each other so so open law allows us any company to do a bilateral or multilateral contract with each other or do a regulation like government could just start writing regulations on the blockchain and say hey would you like a colonoscopy every month or would you like to do run your transactions through this rails right if that's the only choice then we may need to start with a slightly more appealing set of options but but you know Mike you you spend a lot of time perched at the very pinnacle of the ivory tower at MIT and and you've literally written the book on this you know you you see off into the distance and you see where this is headed where are we going here and and what are the implications for society when you know as John was saying a moment ago systems run systems because this is uncharted territory we haven't tried this before thanks to Marco yeah and just seeing the distance doesn't mean that I've got very clear vision of what that is by the way it could be you know some tidal way but I think is an angel so and also thanks again to the New America Foundation to the World Bank it's great to come down here the reason why you might notice that one of my socks is not matching the other one is because I was up at five and couldn't see what I was doing this morning to get on the flight to get down here in time to be here so I'm thrilled to be here the panel is always a place to expose your wardrobe malfunctions in any case with that aside there's no blockchain for that yet there's not yet yeah but going from that sort of very small focus to the bigger one you want me to look at I think it's worth sort of taking the word friction and trying to sort of break that down right in reality technology has always been breaking friction we've always we're always in this ongoing process that the wheel was literally the invention of something to resolve the problem of friction right so we're always in this in this process so I don't think we're ever going to end it that's one thing but I think we are accelerating the process by which we innovate and how are we doing that well you talked about you well Harari stuff and I've I've heard you say this before and I told you this I've stolen that lot that that little speech of yours and put it in the forthcoming trade market because I think it's actually brilliant and that is collaboration is is exactly what this is all about and the beauty of the blockchain is that it allows us to resolve this mission that is really the defining feature of humanity that is we collaborate we form we form tribes and we form settlements and we form villages and we form you know states nations and then the world through the act of economic exchange through the act of collaboration through the act of cooperation that's what happens but we've always had this one fundamental source of friction in that exercise which is trust so trust is the core problem and we resolved it historically through these centralized institutions but we've all come to realize and this is anybody who's sitting at this in this group here will understand that this is what we're all about these institutions centralize that trust and they become the source of friction they also become wealthy and powerful and they are also the biggest challenge we face right so this is a political exercise we are and people say blockchain is the easy bit the hard bit is the governance and that governance comes down to who is going to get disrupted who's going to get disintermediated I actually think that the World Bank and other multilateral institutions are very well placed to do this and so it's kind of funny because the Bitcoin community go oh my god you could never imagine a worse institution because it's you know it's government it's centralized control and everything else the reality is you exist above the all of these centralized institutions and have the capacity if you get it right to be able to set a standard that you know basically herds all the cats together and get some to come together and collaborate which is what we have to do or you could get it wrong because there are very close relationships between you know the shareholders of the World Bank who have often very close ties to the centralized institutions be they banks or public utilities or whoever and all these places who may well get in the way of what we're trying to do so clear focus on what do we mean by friction where does it happen how do we get rid of it and who are the disintermediated parties and how do we make the case that those that disintermediation is worthwhile for society is a key point here but if we do that the the possibilities are incredible I like the fact that Dante talked about you know what what sort of models could we imagine that that couldn't exist without the blockchain and I think that's actually one of the most exciting places to go with this because then we start to say I think what people talk about supply chains they say I want my supply chain with my 10 member companies to get more efficiency around provenance and so forth the bigger question is like what about if we just create this incredibly fluid open situation which suppliers from anywhere can plug in because they've all been pre-certified and we've and we've got you know trusted knowledge about their background and now we have this this capacity to onboard people everywhere rapidly we've got you know internet of things environments where devices can now they weren't we we imagine this IOT world as being in this wonderful data rich environment but how are we going to trust our automated cars to sort of share and transact with each other and build this this vision that we have if we can't figure out how they can trust each other because you can't put a bank in the middle of you know two two cars from anywhere you can't put GM or Ford to your point about nobody wants the hegemon to to run the world in these environments and so the capacity to actually empower the node itself the be it the car the individual the farmer and have them interact with their assets is sort of mind blowing you know this is the collaborative exercise is is broad and diverse if that's the case and I think the question that that I have and I don't know the answer on this one yet but you know hopefully you guys do because you're you're smarter than I am is does this lead to the devolution of power or the dissolution of power because if you devolve power if we're just sending power down a level that's pretty straightforward and and we've done that many times before in the course of human history if we're dissolving power if we're actually taking power and transferring it over to entities that are really beyond anybody's ability to to control them or shape them that's that's even more disruptive than what we have seen to date and I don't know if anybody has thoughts on that yet but I think it's a compelling question that we will have to wrestle with Susan so I can start with that one I think we instead of talking about disillusion of power or dissemination how about we just talk about empowerment so this is a branding on that is much better so this is a technology we're actually the most compelling use cases and implementations at this point are in places that need it most they're they're in our third world countries developing countries where there are services that are missing so you find the most innovation where there's a vacuum and where people need things and that's is where you see the most compelling stories come from this is a technology that can empower people and new business models will form if we just phrase it of looking at power structures disintegrating I think it makes it a lot more difficult to put in place things that we'd like if we look at it from the approach of we're giving people tools to create a life for themselves and to start a business to transact then we're going to get a lot more support if I could add to that nothing has made a better case for digital identity than the Equifax breach right that when you're when you live in a digital world and yet you rely on analog models and you have something occur of this scale where 143 million personally identifiable records what we call in the cybersecurity arena the crown jewels that is nearly the entire size of the US workforce and and so the the analog model of a social security number and a piece of paper and a centralized database and a registry if you just envision a world in which something like blockchain were in place you could still in theory have the existence of an Equifax but it's not creating an Achilles heel by putting all of that information in a centralized location and so in the context of failures do you realize where the opportunities are in the advanced economies but I completely agree that the biggest upside of this and the markets that will leap frog into this future are the emerging and developing markets there in so many ways not encumbered by legacy systems the same way that we are here John help us out on this because I think that you know what we are what we are seeing is a range of different options and you know I would be thrilled as I'm sure most folks in this room would if we did not have to rely on credit monitoring bureaus to safeguard our data in the way that we have in the past but technically what are the intermediate steps that are going to be required to get us to that world and is this something that happens in three years is this something that happens in 10 years is this something that happens when my grandchildren are you know coming out of college yes you know Gibson's right right the future is here it's unevenly distributed and I love what you said because I think that's right that this is one of those technology what did I say the other day it was you know it's not a hammer it's a telescope right it was a way for us to think differently and see differently rather than just go around hammering nails but where there are nails the big nails are in the developing world the nice thing about this how just like the internet is that the the same technique you know that it's a global wave where the thing that's going to solve for child's child's identity in an African state where we don't trust or they don't trust the their government to keep records reliably to give that child identity and for there to be provenance on their education that's a great use use case and it's happening today and so you know say today that's happening today right now there are a variety of projects we do some there's others I won't speak for the other companies I know about that that are doing that and that's happening right now and then cities like Switzerland they're putting their identity their registrars on the blockchain using Uport one of our companies and that's happening this month and then you know slightly farther in the future is into the into the 2018 time frame you're going to have identity vaults starting to show up where I can go and say I'm a young person and I'm going into a or I'm trying to buy alcohol the person who I'm buying the alcohol from what am I doing right now I'm they're seeing my driver's license well maybe they can show up in my house later on right not so good but if I'm shipping that FedEx needs to know my address they don't need to know I'm over 21 the person I'm buying the alcohol from needs to know I'm over 21 they need attestation of that but they don't need to know my address right so what's cool about this is that these public networks and I'm going to make a prediction that large organizations banks governments will insist on public networks being part of their even highly private solutions because it's the only way to actually secure them that's you got to this is this panel I can't you got to wrap your head around that but let me predict that that we will do very very private things and the public network will be part of how that works even though right now I think a lot of us think of the public network as this thing where we're all running around naked and it's the nudist colony and in truth that's called Equifax that's different right once you get to the barbed wire fence you're in that yeah exactly so so I'll stop I think that's that's an important change so let's ask quickly because we do want to get to questions if there is one thing that each of you could suggest that the organizations in the room and we have an amazing cross-section of organizations in the room do to start getting ahead of this wave what is that what is the change that they should be making today in order to prepare for the changes that we're talking about in 2018 and 2025 well the the first is just educate build and re-educate like it's constantly try to to distill information as broadly as possible so that you have these networks I think one of the concerns we face that there's a concentration of talent in the blockchain space and that is great they're all the typically passionate driven people John knows a lot of them but that in itself is a yet an insufficiently decentralized model there is there is the risk the algorithm itself embeds the values of this core group of developers and the rest of us are beholden to that it can be it doesn't have to be nefarious but that in itself is not sufficiently decentralized as a concept so the more people get involved the more education the more investment there is in actually developing talent the better we're all going to be that's the that's the first point the other one I just want to say is that when we're approaching pilots and things like that think about what the business model is where is the money to be made right because these are inherent this concept is inherently a privately driven thing on the other hand it is the public everyone's naked you know architecture that has all of this collaborative stuff going on somebody's going to try to figure out how to make money but otherwise it won't happen right you're not going to have resources deployed unless there is some way to extract rents from it I like to think that we're going to have this cycle of you know new capitalist models new monopolies emerging and then we're just going to destroy them then I come back and come back but if we don't think about which Uber is going to come along and try to capitalize on this structure then we're just going to build a system that looks a little bit like a collectivist farm that doesn't make anything right so it's got to be the private sector mentality the entrepreneurial mentality needs to be there and it has to be what are we going to build that actually makes money and who's the player that's actually going to act like they want to be the king titan in this even if they'll be cut down at some point in the future yeah if I may say that's that's the big the big question mark that nobody has an answer to is how do we incent innovation in new ways in this new system if it is true that rent seeking behaviors become more difficult because now you know I can't I can't do a centralized system like an Uber and charge super rents for that thing because it's you know blockchain there's just going to be so many other alternatives instantly but that did happen with the internet as well we did kind of figure that out so I have faith that it'll we'll figure out where the the incentives come but they will be different my bumper sticker one quick left the token model is very interesting in this right so the idea that now you know we've had this discussion around what Ethereum achieved which is to say you incentivized developers to build something that was inherently open source it was in that that now you're rewarding institutions to build an open platform rather than a closed one that they can extract rents from that's a profoundly different idea because now we can actually and the rents come through a different mechanism they come through effectively creating the sec don't wouldn't like me to say this or at least ICOs wouldn't but it is a form of equity it's an equity of some sort in the system and you are going to be sharing in the value of the rise of that network so you incentivize to build networks not closed systems that's a that's a money-waking exercise but it's a very different way of approaching where you where you get your money from I hear regulators coming off the elevator right now as Michael is saying this conceptual concept of it I think the the bumper sticker that I have often thought of getting printed up on this is that if you thrive on efficiency and transparency and accountability blockchain is going to be the best thing that ever happened to your organization if you thrive on friction and there are a lot of great organizations that do that's where we make a lot of our money in society then you need to be pretty concerned because this is going to change things Susan, what do you think? Well I agree education is a huge part understanding the capabilities and the limitations of the technology at this point to ready your organization for changes to your business models I think experimentation is important and I think as people get more used to the idea of it and understand what's coming because it is you can avoid it but it's going to hit you then you're better off preparing but if I think if people think of it try to look at it as what sort of mundane tasks could this potentially take away and what opportunities can it open up so there's gonna be a lot of scared people and a lot of excited people and I think the excited people need to help those that are scared through education and talking about opportunities it could open and we don't even know what all of those are so it's a lot easier to talk about all the jobs that are gonna leave and all of the disruption and the negative parts but nobody's nobody's thought of these business models that you've talked about that that's a little bit more difficult to see how things are gonna change in the future and what sort of possibilities those are opening not until you get to be our final oracle of risk and opportunity here what should we worry about turns out that's what I do by day I sit around and prognosticate about all kinds of terrible things one quick prediction is that we're gonna solve for Michael Sox and blockchain may be involved one way or another second quick prediction is that you're not likely to print that bumper sticker it's a little too long so ask a box retailer pre-internet and pre-e-commerce how comfortable they were and then fast forward to today ask Jamie Dimon ask JP Morgan ask centralized financial institutions how comfortable they are and then fast forward a decade from today the end of friction is coming it doesn't necessarily have to be painful but the people who thrive in darkness have frankly the most to lose right both from a political point of view an institutional point of view and I'm willing to predict that we should go long on where this technology takes the world because fundamentally it harnesses something we all want at an individual level which is trust we're at the lowest point in history and trust in lack of trust in institutions and here we have a technology that could not just disrupt but augment and replace the current standards of opacity and entrenched and friction that drives everything we do in our lives and has not only left millions and billions of people marginalized on the sidelines all of that uncertainty is coming home to roost you can't build fortress america in an interconnected global economy like the one we have today and so the only way we can get back to resolving for this trust is to begin pre-investing in stability so with that as our amazing on ramp to your questions let's take three questions and then we will see how many more we have time for right here if we can get a microphone or if any hopefully we have microphones yes no go ahead and stand up and yell loud while we're doing that I've got a question for Dante here come our microphones I got a real quick question for Dante oh please is you know talking about Puerto Rico I mean is this not an opportunity would an audacious play to be set to say let's rebuild the Puerto Rican autonomy let's let's do the Puerto Rican ICO you see the grin on Dante's face and by the way that was not planted born raised in Puerto Rico my family are on the island you've seen nothing short of the complete collapse of of the infrastructure the electricity grid the banking system the hospital system last week I had an event at the American Security Project calling for this narrative of build back better and out of this wreckage you could genuinely build the Singapore of the Caribbean so there's an enormous opportunity I'm willing to play the ambassadorial role to anybody anywhere in the world we have a blockchain technology company Power Ledger out of Australia that we're partnering with to build certain pilots in the Caribbean so enormous enormous opportunity to build back better and get it right that does fit on a bumper sticker I will note Fanny please I'm going to apologize for being a bit of a rabble rouser here I want to interrogate some of the exuberance that I've heard from the panel with two thoughts for two questions the first question is aren't we creating new forms of friction so if we take this smart contract example legal institutions are much bigger than just a contract much less a contract that can be encoded in a smart contract format primarily the operative clauses of a contract but not necessarily the totality of that contractual relationship so you create a new friction now between what we call wet code which is the legal real world legal syntax versus code and or dry code so that's one friction that I see so one thought and the second point I want to make is about what Tamika referred to as dissolution of power it's a fact that we have created new oligarchs in the blockchain space consensus has a lot of power in this space it does not as much as we want them but it has a lot of power that could be part of the problem I mean bitfury don't tell joe I said that please but you know bitfury has a lot of power the institutions represented in this room have a lot of power you can have a distributed technology but there is still structural concentration of power in this industry so two thoughts out there love to hear your thoughts great questions great questions please will thanks so the the future of blockchain is one of the greatest opportunities for the application of creativity perhaps ever but I'm pretty sure that there's one thing that's going to exceed that and that is the need for creative thinking about the unanticipated impacts like if you are you know if you have land tenure great if you're capable of swiping left and giving it to somebody else that's an opportunity for new impacts and that's just something I can think of right now and that didn't take a lot of creativity but how do we stay ahead of all the unanticipated pieces as well both in terms of creative thinking as well as as as the governance or safeguards that lets us deal with them very quickly rather than waiting till the the worst impacts come these are such easy questions all right we've got time for one more down over here please Hi, Philip Bielewski with World Bank so this morning we heard a lot about the potential and all the different where blockchain can be applied from fisheries to voting to government budgets now naturally there are some costs associated with being from processing power memory electricity costs how do you see some way of incentivizing people to contribute to these and given that this cost exists you would see some emergence of a price which would make some some of these ideas feasible and some not so which ones do you think would be the ones that would emerge and succeed from blockchain my oh my panel you have your work cut out for you so I'll just I'll take a swing at the last one first but the kudos those were great questions all three of the three of you the the energy thing Satoshi Nakamoto was the beginning of history not the end of history don't associate blockchain too tightly with the notion of proof of work and that sort of thing we're moving beyond that today proof of stake but beyond proof of stake so these aren't going to be things where we're going to worry about in the future and shall we worry about arm wrestling with bitfury about this afterwards so I mean you could also say that that proof of work may even become less you know consumptive of energy if we move to acic resistant type models and so forth which was also upset bitfury so I need to be careful but I want to pick up on those two questions because they're actually I think somewhat related I mean the second question of your Fannie and Will's as well and that is I think a very real concern is this concentration of power and it is an inherent as it was getting out before it's an inherent process of the economic reality in which we live institutions seek power that's how you make money what you want is an architecture that is consistently pushing back against that right so we need to be very focused on open source open access again education all this these broad concepts of diversity open access network it also comes down to proof of work not concentrated mining but diverse mining all of that works against the capacity to become the next Google or Amazon right and and I think that we need to be and then institutions like the World Bank anyone that has a connection to the policy layer and it doesn't mean that there's necessary regulation but it means making powerful decisions about which which networks you work with who you procure from what your policy standard is all of that is needs to be towards open access open networks open open open open that helps us resolve that it's not to say it won't happen but if you can if you can create that network you get this cycle and in a way that's answering your question well I think that if we're to we want to sort of worry about what the threats are it comes down to who's going to exploit this model and what will they be so it could be again the unforeseen biases that get embedded into algorithms and this happens in all forms of technology we know that AI has this racial bias there's it doesn't you know there's there's facial recognition technology that doesn't recognize black faces and not because somebody intentionally built one that was you know white person friendly but because these the mistakes that people make when they build technologies the same would go for a bunch of you know crypto guys are a very narrow subset of humanity and they have a certain mindset that doesn't necessarily reflect everything so so you need a lot of credit for the humanity I don't want to be ruled by by Peter Todd Don Tan then we'll give Susan the last word so um I guess my first inclination was to query how how lax is security at new America that a rabble rouser got in but I think you both raise a really critical points the the if the carbon hungry robber barons of the industrial age inadvertently created climate change and if the tech titans of the tech age have inadvertently created systemic cyber risk the blockchain billionaires will of course inherently create some other big externality that it's hard to contemplate today so I mean you know I try to take this you know not overly optimistic utopic view of this technology but just to be realistic about it that it is here to stay it's not going away you're not going to wish it away and of course there will be a concentration of power around it it's how do the incumbent established players adjust to its its arrival is the risk that I'm trying to highlight right so I take my 330 year old industry and I'm trying to rattle the cage from within and I'll tell you everybody I talk to is slow to understand it is slow to appreciate the business model implications and I treat it more like an augmenting technology than a disrupting one but it's not going away Susan take us home and then mic drop so you're right there might be unintended consequences it might create additional friction one way to mediate some of it might be just to take a look at the opportunities and the problems we're trying to resolve and the technology from a multi-disciplinary approach so technology industry tries to resolve one process or a development expert might be looking at it from their one point of view we need to intermix the point of views together and get as many people focused on what this is going to do in the future as we can so that we can try to identify some of the big risks that could happen and see how we can steer the technology and its usage in ways that hopefully will bring the benefit to most it's been said that innovation occurs at the intersection and really the collision point of ideas and if we think in those terms then this was like maybe the most spectacular car crash ever because just an amazing amazing density of new ideas and new insights thanks to all of you that was marvelous please joining me join me in giving our panelists a round of applause and we are almost thank you we are almost done this is the part of the day where you get to make commitments and we all get to make commitments and what we're going to ask is we know that a number of organizations have been thinking hard about how we can work together how we can help shape the evolution of this technology in ways that will solve some of the problems that we're talking about today and Stella and Jamie if you can come on up and help kick this off and get us started we're going to issue like big parkas for everyone up on stage because it is a little bit chilly so Stella we're going to put you on the spot first what are we going to do to get ahead of this how are we going to move forward on this thank you Tamika first of all thank you very much for this opportunity to partner and the host the summit today as Denny mentioned earlier and Susan we are in this journey of learning of experimentation to what are the opportunities of blockchain and not just blockchain and fast is also important to learn fast and by joining forces we can we can achieve this goal one of the priority that we've been asked to address it's about what do you need to have in place to be blockchain ready so this is a question lots of our client countries have been asking especially in the last several months technology is here but you have institutions you have policies you have regulations but you have to change you'll have to rearchitect in order for us to fully benefit not just from blockchain but from any technology that might come on our way from now on and in this respect we need to work closely with partners including New America and the industry to look at the at the underlying factors that might speed up the adoption of disruptive technologies adoption of blockchain so we would like to partner with you with New America in conducting this research in better understanding what is important to have in a developing country in place or even in the US why not to be able to not just run proof of concepts or pilots but also to become an adopter of blockchain and other disruptive technologies so for us some of the key areas where we would like to look in terms of research all these areas have been mentioned here today it's land administration it's supply chain we get more and more interest from our colleagues in the World Bank from different global practices health agriculture carbon market so the demand the interest is huge and the best we can do is to work together join our efforts in addressing these demands so that we don't lose time so very much looking forward to closely work with you on these opportunities the feeling is exceedingly mutual so the blockchain trust accelerate is thrilled about this and we are excited to launch a research partnership with the World Bank so thank you and we will take a round of applause on that actually since we can Jamie okay great thank you very exciting I have to say when I when I first started in this space only two years ago it would never have seen this many people in the room or I mean I dreamed of the World Bank saying that but I definitely didn't think that it would happen in such a short period of time so it's really such a an honor and really a privilege to watch the level of progress and how fast things are moving it's hard to even keep up sometimes and that's what makes it so exciting I have one small I don't know if I would call it commitment but thing that I wanted to kind of flag with thanks to again some of the people that I mentioned earlier Gigi, Mariana I got a lot of folks in this room we thought we started talking about how powerful it would be to just pull together a collective of people who care about blockchain and have that be like a running listserv of people who want to hear about what's going on I think that we sometimes take decentralization to the next level and so every one of the values of an event like this is just to hear people say oh my gosh yeah we're doing the other thing we should talk and get it together and so it's very collaborative but having everybody kind of in one place and you can kind of log in or log out however you want but we are in partnership with the Global Blockchain Business Council which is another organization you'll hear a lot about that I'm actually the CEO of and a lot of people here on the board of we would like to launch that soon in partnership with the BTA and others and just sort of get everybody in one place and who knows what the power could of that list could be but it would be nice to see how many people are in that space I was just added to a women in blockchain list on WeChat or whatever one of those chat rooms is and there's like hundreds on that list so it would just be very cool to try and pull something like that together and see what the power is we're still working through the details of what it is but I think it would be it would be really exciting and I think it'll bridge a lot of the sort of different blockchain alliances out there together so we'll see the mother of all lists serves I love it I'll clap for that that's fantastic we have one more big announcement but before we get to that I want to ask if there are others in the audience who have commitments or announcements that they would like to bring to the fore in the few minutes we have remaining sock chain Michael will be the founder and CEO of sock chain that's excellent don't know if it quite rises to the level of a world bank deliverable but you know it could I could I mention one one more thing those are some people who are joining later or already in this room but it should this is one of the things that we would let people know on the collective there are just a crew of people who care a lot about voting and who knows if that is possible how soon that's possible and what countries it's possible but we thanks to our leaders at the National Democratic Institute and you know Robin Carnahan back there and others Chris I don't know if you're here but we're pulling together a meeting that actually starts after this to just talk about that and we hope that that leads to even more meetings most importantly Sheila Nix back there obviously this is a great passion of hers and we're just I think it's sort of time to stop saying what if and just try to put stuff together so if you want to be more involved in that too or you know people who do just let us know absolutely please but I mean there's a few of us here really focused on what's happened in the Caribbean and how it is obviously a desperately a desperate need on a humanitarian basis to get infrastructure back up and running but to Dante's wonderful hashtag build back better there's also a huge opportunity to actually think about how the particularly the energy infrastructure of various places that have been worked out can be reconstructed around a decentralized distributed structure which those of us who are in this space believe is not possible without some sort of decentralized trust architecture at the blockchain within it so there's a lot of work a lot of us thinking about how we can run pilots how we can develop a blueprint that would involve some of these technologies to enable what we're calling it MIT energy democracy the idea of empowering right down to the local level IOT devices smart local grids giving people the capacity to trade their own power back and forth and how that might bring fabulous efficiency but most importantly resiliency and and redundancy to places that are highly vulnerable such as the Caribbean islands where power is ridiculously expensive even before these problems arose so that's front and center for us and I know a few other people in this room as well thinking hard about this absolutely the only other thing I would add if you're somebody who wants to take action obviously talk to Michael because he is in touch with and soon to be even more in touch with the people at Virgin so Richard Branson obviously has an island in this area but he also sees this as a tragic moment but also an opportunity to rebuild and a lot of people on his team are in like full mode about trying to think about these things both also in the rapid response but in the long term and I'm sure though she is not nodding but I'm guessing that Gigi is very involved in that as well and there's just a lot of really bright minds who are really excited to get involved and if you're one of those people I think that's one of the most exciting things about this space is that it's one of those moments in life where if you're looking for who's going to make the change like don't look left or right pull out a mirror it's you and that's really cool right and then that's exciting fantastic one more back here let's get there we go Xiaojun from FinTech for Good and we have a few initiatives which will be launched pretty soon and next week that's I'll be in Malaysia and launching this agricultural blocking lab with the national innovation agency and this is in collaboration with several universities from UK from China and now from the US part that we have not identified an academic partner yet and then in November that we clap with other organizations to launch this hack for climate and during COP 23rd and after that we'll bring this 100 hackers potentially back to China and then to just continue to work after that and during the COP 23rd that will also launch our global council blockchain economy but I heard that you know you have maybe we can just discuss that how to just merge or just join initiative and the third one is that we are also we have in China three members and in several countries each country maybe one member is called distributed hub a global distributed hub the idea is that you know for FinTech and blockchain incubator accelerator that's when you just go to you know new countries and any members that can access to other ecosystems immediately meaning that the coach ecosystem and the space and everything so then now we have around 10 incubators and the accelerator around the world who are part of this and be happy to see that whoever from this room are interested thank you fantastic that's great well in the two minutes we have left I'm going to announce our final deliverable which is courtesy of the Rockefeller Foundation and they are fortunately today announcing a major grant that they're going to be supporting research on blockchain for social impact development and good governance and partnership with the blockchain trust accelerator we are thrilled to be working with them this will be an ongoing collaboration that hopefully all of us will be hearing a lot more about but again I think it's a big indicator of the rapid maturation of this technology that from a couple of years ago where we were really on the fringes to today having the World Bank and the Rockefeller Foundation to the most respected institutions in the world that address these challenges signaling a strong commitment to get this right it's exciting and inspiring but it's not going to happen without all of you and so I think we've got our work cut out for us but it's going to be an exciting ride and we look forward to traveling that path together thank you oh sorry go ahead I want everybody to put their hands together and say one more time thank you Allison for putting all this together