 All right, well, let's go ahead and get started then. I'm Hart Montgomery. I work for the Linux Foundation, where I serve as the Hyperledger CTO. And we have a really exciting panel today about blockchain in Europe. So I'd like to start by letting our excellent panelists introduce themselves. So if we could just get a few words about all of you briefly and all the impressive stuff you all are doing. Good afternoon. I'm Conrad van der Winter, CTO at Circular. We based in London and primarily focused on creating traceability solutions and tracing raw materials from mine to the, for example, EV batteries. And we make use of Hyperledger fabric as the blockchain. Hi, good afternoon. I'm Vanessa Senj. I work at Fujitsu as head of marketing of our Enterprise Blockchain Solutions Center. And I'm happy to be here to discuss this topic, as I believe that Europe is, in fact, a great space for blockchain innovation. Thank you. Hi, my name is Jesus Rith, and I'm currently with several hats. I am a board member and CTO of Alastria Blockchain Association, Spanish Blockchain Association, building the infrastructure for use cases in the real economy. I have also participated in the technical working groups in the building of the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure Blockchain, probably in the future, more national blockchains, but essentially focusing on infrastructure, more than use cases, infrastructure which enables use cases which cannot be deployed in the current blockchains. Great. Thank you all. So since we are at an open source summit Europe, I'd like to start by asking a question specifically about Europe. So when it comes to blockchain and blockchain markets, the US tends to get most of the attention. And perhaps there's some attention on Asia as well. But there's sort of been considerably less attention on Europe. What would you say distinguishes Europe as a blockchain market compared to the US or Asia? Yeah, and Europe seems to lag behind a bit in the innovation space with blockchain. There seem to be more startups, more smaller companies, and more investments being put into it in the US especially. But in Europe, again, it seems to be more national level or more governmental type of funding for it, looking at solving real problems in the region and how those could be addressed by using blockchain. So from my perspective, Europe is known by a lot of new regulations. And I believe that not only that, but other things. As a marketing professional, I must highlight GDPR has paved the way as blockchain solutions aim to contribute to solve real world problems. And as I was mentioning new regulations, also we'll pave the way for the innovation in blockchain. So I would say that we have a huge opportunity here, not only for, as I was saying, innovation in blockchain, but also to be aligned with those new requirements. And we also have government support. So we have a lot of initiatives here in Europe that support blockchain, not only, as I was saying, innovation, but also blockchain projects related to sustainability, for instance. So yeah, so basically I believe that Europe is in fact a good space, a fascinating area for blockchain. So I believe that the time is now, actually. So a lot of opportunities. Yeah, I agree. I mean, in my opinion, there are many, many aspects, even cultural, but I would say that three are the most important in my opinion. One is the focus of the European governments and the European Commission and the European Union on protecting the general people, not just the savvy people or the people who have a lot of money to invest and so on, but protecting, because we have 500 million people and many of them have problems. So we have to make this a better society. That's the focus. You can see these type of regulations in GDPR, consumer protection directive. You can see right now in Mika. So that focus is protecting. So many people think that the regulation, or some people think that the regulation is in reality a barrier by some institutions to the innovation. My point of view is totally the contrary. The focus is the person. The most important thing in the world is the person, not the business or any other thing. So the quality of citizens is something which has to be enabled. Another factor, of course, is venture capital. So in Europe, we have less than, for example, in the US and other regions. And this is very important. But the third is related to the second is the focus is on the people. So the focus is on building things for the real economy versus the financial economy. You know that the world has real economy, financial economy. Financial economy is banking, assets, digital assets, and so on. So there is a lot of money to be made in financial economy. But in reality, financial economy should be at the service of the real economy. The real economy is health, food, dressing, roads, the real things, the real things that make or break the life of the citizens and make the quality better. And not many things, not many citizens in Europe have a lot of money to invest in risky investment instruments. So the focus of Europe is on things that are not attractive to risk capital or to venture capitalists that they want to invest and then get a benefit. So the focus in Europe is on real economy. And then you need financial mechanisms. And then you have Mika and so on. But most of the things go under the radar. And I can tell you Europe is the most advanced region in the world on blockchain for the real things. Great. Thank you all. I'm sure we will have some follow-ups to those points. I wanted the next question to start with Conrad here. But everyone else can feel free to weigh in. So you in circular have built what I would say is one of the most, I'll call it, real enterprise blockchain applications, obviously focused on supply chain and is deployed out there today. Can you comment on some of the challenges and things you've had to overcome to really make enterprise blockchain real? Thanks. Yeah, so when we started about five years ago, there wasn't. So yeah, tech was very new. And there wasn't a lot of other business cases or other examples to look at and see what to learn or what's there already out and just reuse or not. But learn from them, see what mistakes and challenges they've had. So there's a lot of things we have to pick up and adapt. And as the business growing, the amount of transactions are getting through, we keep having to adapt this new technology and seeing what's the limits of it. But one of the non, not technical, but one of the challenges was also education because people think, well, yeah, Bitcoin is blockchain. So there's always that hurdle and all those buzzwords and stuff. Then they want to know, well, what's the point? Why, what's the energy usage of this blockchain you're trying to use? Because you're trying to be sustainable but now actually you're making it worse. So there's a lot of education in there. But recently, it also became more about interoperability because companies don't just wanna buy into one technology, do all that investment, and then find out a few years later actually there's a new or better one until all the blockchain technologies are more matured. So interoperability is one of the new ones that we try to address and get around to. Great, does anyone else want to comment on this? Making blockchain real? I know both of you two have also been involved in real blockchain deployments. So would you like to comment? Well, yeah, we have some exciting projects. One of them is Botanical Water and actually we received an award from Elystria and their Sustainability Award this summer. And we actually have other projects where we are solving real world problems. So, and we co-create with our customers to address their needs. So we are focused on customer needs and not on technology. Technology will solve the problem but we need to address these customer needs and challenges that they have. And it is what we are doing with our customers. So we have a lot of success stories, not only under sustainability but regarding also tokenization, for instance. And yeah, so basically we are addressing those challenges with technology that gives transparency to the supply chain and people can trust on data because it is immutable, right? So we have a huge opportunity, once again, to innovate in this area. If we work with our customers and if we are focused on their challenges. Thank you. Well, as I said, I have been focusing for many years, eight, seven, eight years right now, essentially on the infrastructure because I was before in Marcos and Tander and then in IBM. I've been implementing distributed ledgers for 40 years. So distributed ledgers, DLTs as they are called, is something very boring, which is not really the focus of my job. My intention right now or what I'm doing right now is trying to decentralize log technology. The word decentralize is very important. I know that crypto anarchists and so on, want to call other projects which are not Bitcoin or Ethereum distributed ledgers because they want to say, well, this is just private things. Now, I've been focusing on what is the infrastructure for the future internet, the next generation internet. By the way, right now, okay, there's a huge unit in the European Commission called next generation internet. And then I have been involved first on creating an actual blockchain for those real use cases, non-financial use cases because for financial use cases, okay, you can do things right now, but not for real use cases, for the real society, for 500 million citizens in Europe, you need another infrastructure which is like the internet. You need a public critical infrastructure, public in the sense, in the correct sense, not in the crypto anarchist public sense, which is anonymous, public like public education, like public health, like public services of any kind, and public roads which are permissioned. So you need permission. That's not mean private. Permissioning is a requirement for anything which is decentralized. So decentralization requires permission. This is something that we already know from Bitcoin experiments and so on. So what we are building right now is the actual infrastructure for pan-European use cases. This is European blockchain services infrastructure, which is in pre-production and right now the legal instrument for operate this in a decentralized way without any single operator is being created by European Commission. The Spanish government has already approved a project to create a national blockchain, which is called ISBE, E-I-S-B-E, which is a palindrome of FC, okay, but because they are related, the focus of the pan-European blockchain network is pan-European cross-border use cases, okay, actual blockchain use cases, and as a trust framework, one of the several trust frameworks for the upcoming E-I-S regulation, the E-I-S II, you have heard about the European digital identity wallet and so on, you need a trust framework, okay? That's going to be, one of the trust frameworks is going to be not unique, but one of the trust frameworks is going to be the European blockchain services infrastructure, and then at the national and regional level, you need some infrastructure which implements what I call the proof of democracy consensus hours. We need proof of democracy. Proof of richness, like proof of work, proof of stake, and proof of everything, okay, you name it, they are not suitable for those type of use cases. So we need proof of democracy in infrastructure, which is public, decentralized, permission, and proof of democracy. This is the things that we are building. And they are coming very fast. Great, thanks a lot for that. So Conrad mentioned education and the challenges around that on blockchain. And Vanessa, since you're a marketing executive, I wanted to start this question with you, but one of the biggest challenges in blockchain is in fact, talking to potential customers or users who aren't so tax-happy about blockchain, maybe they don't understand the technology, maybe they don't care about the technology, maybe they just want to see the end results, right? And perhaps their exposure to blockchain is through things like Bitcoin or perhaps more recently FTX or some less than savory activities. So from your perspective as a marketing executive, how do you talk about blockchain to these people who are perhaps not as educated? So as I was saying, we need to focus on customer needs and not on technology. But of course, that when we are talking with potential customers, we need to talk about technology and it is blockchain. And I must say that I'm not a technical person as well. And I believe that helps when I'm communicating to the market, to different target personas. And of course, we have some of those people that are not familiar with the technology. And unfortunately, we still need to clarify, to mystify the concept of blockchain because sometimes we are talking with customers and they are saying, oh yeah, it's Bitcoin. And so we need to clarify that blockchain is much more than digital currencies. And actually, it's easier to explain with real use cases, right? And so we have, as I was saying before, some success stories with our customers and we can't talk about that. What was the problem of that customer? How we address the problem and the results. And besides this, I believe that's important to communicate the benefits of blockchain because when we are talking about blockchain, they are saying, oh okay, energy consumption because of Bitcoin. So, and we need to say, well, in fact, our solution is address to solve sustainability challenges. And we are talking about a solution that in fact is going to support you in your sustainability strategy. So I believe that if we can give some concrete examples, it's easier to understand that blockchain is in fact a technology with huge potential. And we have a lot of opportunities to solve real world problems. So, yeah. Would anyone else like to elaborate on this? Yes, some comments. I mean, right now from my explanation, you can see that I'm focusing on infrastructure for the use cases, but I have to be involved in some use cases. Most of the use cases that I'm involved in are very foul credentials, traceability, time stamping, and truthfulness of information. So, some people now have realized that it is not a good idea to store personal information in blockchain. We know this for 50 years, okay? Blockchain or whatever, public databases. But public information is good. So the use cases that I'm focusing right now is not, again, financial use cases because for that you have Ethereum, you have many, many, many possibilities, okay? But for real use cases, we don't have the infrastructure. So I'm focusing on infrastructure. So at the end, my product is not a commercial product, it's a common good, it's an infrastructure, is the next backbone, internet backbone. When I talk about internet, I'm talking about the cables, the fiber cables, okay? And I don't know if you know how this works, okay? But for example, in Europe, most of the providers, Telefonica, Deutsche Telekom and so on, Vodafone and so on, they are connected between all of them to enable the traffic in some points called IXPs, Internet Exchange Points, which are managed in Europe by non-profits, neutral entities. So the network is public because it's available to the general public, anybody can contract access to that network and then you can do whatever you want. It's private, it's, and then privacy. You have privacy and permissioning. So the next blockchain is the next generation internet which is going to be transparent. You don't have to explain for your use case, hey, dear customer, I'm going to do this e-business by the way we need internet. Come on, internet is there. So blockchain is going to be there, it's going to be transparent specifically for the citizens because the citizens are not going to be involved in the real world, okay? Not for financial, for real economy use cases. And then most of the companies are going to be also like, this is another internet with other properties and those the- Why? The ability in an infrastructure which is not owned or controlled or operated by anybody is a collaborative operation, transparent, so you know who is good for the business. But this is very simple. But the problem is, yeah, put your face, face, where do we put this? Yeah, I think that some of us apologize for the questions that you've been watching, is there still a little bit of a problem to solve? But once it becomes more of an infrastructure scandal, and it just becomes a lot of people that focus on what technology is in there. And you'll look at what's the real problem in trying to solve it. The property, the property of the watch and the service just helps to eliminate the incident. And then, they will start getting rid of it. Great, and continuing on that day of infrastructure, so a question for you to start with, you know, more and more sort of public biologics are being driven by public commission biologics. And so you've been involved in two of the biggest efforts so far. Black chain and FC, for those of you that are interested, one in Latin America, a bunch of countries there, and the other obviously by Europe. So what are some of the differences working on government watch and projects as compared to the traditional enterprise watch and projects? That's a really good question. Many companies, big companies, they said, hey, I want to build my blockchain. Like, I want to build my artificial intelligence database, my blockchain. How do I do my blockchain? The answer was, sorry, if this is your blockchain, then it's totally business. That's it, that's it. And then the businesses approach any technology, not let's do a common good. Let's make this useful for others or for the society. This has to be a benefit for me, my shareholders, directors, and then I'm going to go to the competition. For the world perspective, it's completely different, for example, in the European Union, I mean, the focus is again on a fair economy, competitive, and so on, so there are some rules. And then the businesses have to come back. There are some values. So the business, from the government, they approach the blockchain just like with any other technology. This technology has to be good for all citizens, not just for one person, especially those citizens who have money to invest in it. There has to be a common good. So again, from the party administrations, they try to focus on these cases, but they understand very well, but they understand very well that we have an infrastructure that complies with the values of the European Union. It's impossible to deploy any of these cases which can lead to the European balance. So we need the world to solve the problem of the problem of the structure. This is kind of very fast. And Europe, again, is the most advanced country in the world. And then who is going to create the blockchain? That was also a problem. Well, in Spain, I was first in Bankers & Thunders, we had the same problem. We have very fantastic use cases and no infrastructure. Let's create this, and then somehow it happened. A collaboration of many entities to create an actual infrastructure. We created an association which is called Alastria, and we have a network which right now we have 200 different companies there from different party administrations. You have all types. Alastria is 500 members, and then this infrastructure is not big. It's only three or four million transactions per month. But again, the type of transactions are traceability. And production use cases, for example, we have some very notorious use cases, not just in Spain, from the Council of Europe, from France, from other countries. It's international, but it's still Spanish. But now, but then the governance model was that Alastria Association has not to operate anything. Who is operating the network? The different entities. Who is the owner of the network? The participants. That's a difficult model. But we have been successful, and then the European Commission called me, because they wanted to create a pan-European blockchain, but the problem is that they didn't want to operate this as a blockchain, as a service. BAS, with IBM or whatever, or any company. They didn't want to put the operator in a single country, like Germany, because then France would say, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, here, because we have the Tuggefell and so on. And then the Swedes, no, no, no, no, you don't agree? Okay, here. And then the Italians, and then the Spanish. No. Right now, for example, in this infrastructure, they copied, well, I participated in the decentralized governance model, and then they even improved the model. And there is a decentralized governance model. So each validator is operated by each country, so it's impossible that one country can dominate the network, or can censor, or can do anything. So the control of the network that one given country, no matter the size, has on the network, is even less that in the European Parliament. Okay? So that's good. It's decentralized in the sense that I am European, I trust on the European authorities, and then I trust on this blockchain network. The Spanish government approved a project to create a blockchain where each node is going to be operated by at least one regional, different regional government, okay? They don't really cooperate a lot. We have 19, and then also the private sector, because we have more experience. So those are the type of infrastructure that I said. Decentralizing the sense that nobody has control, but everybody knows who is going to do, or who is doing what, and they are accountable. So if somebody does something wrong, we have the European legislation and the regulation. So that's not a major problem. So the incentives are proof of democracy, like everything which is working here. Because by the way, just a comment, I have never, ever in my life seen a more centralized infrastructure than Bitcoin and Ethereum. It's incredible. But everybody is saying decentralized. Well, without saying what decentralization means. For me decentralization means the type of infrastructure. So, blockchain. Then, blockchain also approaches Alastair. Alastair is a founding member of the Latin blockchain network, which you can imagine, what is that? It was, I mean, they don't have the European Commission, they have the Bank of Investment, which is a nonprofit and so on. And then under this, they created a blockchain network, which has the intention to be decentralized. So nobody should be controlling this infrastructure. And then the model, we have the model, internet backbone. So we already know that this more or less works. There are some countries that are going to kill this. They are going to kill anything, which is not controlled by them. But this is the right model, has proven to work, and blockchain has to learn and adapt the model of the governance of the internet. Great. Thanks a lot. We have about 10 minutes left, but we have more questions for the panelists, but I wanted to ask if anyone from the audience wanted to ask any particular panelist or the entire group of panelists collectively a question. So I'm going to repeat the question for online audience. So the question was about the European blockchain infrastructure, and what can it do? Is that a fair assessment? Great. Okay. That's a good question, because when somebody thinks blockchain is Bitcoin or whatever, no, non-financial use cases. What can you do? The main use case is going to be one of the biggest trust frameworks for the upcoming European digital identity wallet, because, for example, and then there are some use cases, for example, diplomas, interoperability of diplomas, traceability of diplomas. But the diploma information is not going to be registering the blockchain. Forget about registering any personal information, just evidence. And then it makes the blockchain incredibly useful. You can say, come on, no, but this is not the initial intention of blockchain. Well, who cares about the initial intention? What weaker is about the usefulness of some technology for the citizens, traceability, so diplomas, but you need identities. So imagine the following. Where is a single database with all the public universities in Europe? All the public universities in Europe. Who is managing this database? Second, when somebody is presented to you a diploma from a given university in Germany, how do you know that this university, which is a medical doctor diploma, is authorized to issue this diploma? So it's not just public infrastructure. So it's going to be a public infrastructure on asteroids, not just who is this guy or who is this public entity, by the way, the entities, the digital identities of the legal persons, businesses and organizations, never persons, never natural persons or public information. It's going to be registering the blockchain together with some additional data, metadata, which is going to say, I am at this university and, by the way, I have the authorization from the Ministry of Education of Germany to issue this type of diplomas on this year, because next year, I don't know. So you will be able to verify a very foul credential in a very efficient way, by the way, not even asking the issuer. You are going to look at your blockchain note. Social security is another project. Payments. I mean, name it. Anything to do with very foul credentials, the main use case is not going to be tokens. Well, tokens are going to be useful, but the real economy, the main requirement is verifiable credentials, so those are statements which can be verifiable very efficiently and then you need a transfer framework. And for many use cases, you need a pan-European transfer framework and in Spain, we need a pan-Spain transfer framework because, for example, health information. How do you know that this information that this citizen is presenting to me is coming from the real thing? And you can see something that nobody saw and then I have an article about this, the COVID, the European implementation of the COVID certificate, was the first one to implement a transfer framework which was pan-European, so many entities in Europe could issue to the citizens the credentials, the very foul credentials, not in W3C, but this is very foul credential, okay, digitally signed by Dishore and then very efficient to verify without contacting to Dishore because something like a blockchain, pan-European blockchain, was created with the public keys. No, no, no. It's the concept. It was a trust framework. Of course not. Why? Because there was no infrastructure for doing this, because otherwise, or maybe because it was not there and my point is that maybe for health it's going to be done. But the concept is certainly the same. So the European countries created something like a trust framework developing a doc, a blockchain because every member state was required to run a server with all the public keys of the rest. So they had to design and implement, I was involved in the project, and synchronization, a replication mechanism between all the servers because the public keys of Dishore in one country was the responsibility of the country. And the problem was how do I make my public keys available in an efficient way and robust and trusted way to all the other countries. By the way, it has been expanded to non-European countries. 25 countries have these servers. So at the end, there was no other because it was created in months. So it was impossible to do this. So how did it work? Well, it was, we say, a hacking. Because in Luxembourg, the European Commission was running a server. Every member state had to send the public keys and the updates and the deletes to Luxembourg. And then every member state had to take back all the keys of all the other things. It's a replication mechanism where every member state, there was no single operator. And then in order to verify the certificate, the mobile application had to check where, in a central database of Germany, no, in home, for example. Well, actually, for example, we implemented the verifier and the wallet and the issuer for one regional government and then we were in Spain but we used the trusted list from Sweden because Sweden was the first country to publicize this. But the critical thing is that the concept, the idea was that and this problem can be solved much more efficiently with a proper blockchain. That's the point. But of course, there was no blockchain. There was not. Blockchain? A poor man, blockchain. Awesome. We only have a couple minutes left so I'd like to close with the following question for the panelists. I know Vanessa, you said earlier, the time is now and Jesus, you said this is coming. So what blockchain use cases do you think will have the most traction in Europe in the next few years and why? I think as Jesus was saying, the key to the success of some of these projects is this infrastructure being available and verifiable credentials being there for organizations. For example, interestability in CO2 tracking if you want to see in a supply chain network who are the worst contributors to CO2 or somebody claimed to be green the real evidence that's there and anybody else being able to look up that's true and not just accept a certificate by a consultant company. Like those type of things. I don't think it's going to be just one use case of only traceability but it's going to be how these layers of data can add to each other. Once you have traceability you can start to add energy uses on top of that. You can start to add compliance information on top of that that create a much richer picture of what's going on in a specific region and for specific organizations. I believe that you already know my answer so it is sustainability. I believe that we are going to have we already have some regulations and we are expecting more and it's going to be mandatory for some companies financial or non-financial institutions to deliver street reporting about their sustainability practices and I believe that blockchain technology can be a huge partner here to guarantee that information, that ESG data, it is actually correct as you were saying. So with blockchain we know that company is sustainable because we have proof of that and I would like to share to that Fujitsu we are developing actually ESG reporting platform and of course that we are going we are using blockchain technology because of that because we cannot say that I'm green I need to prove that I am in fact green and also other stakeholders are demanding that for instance employees or even consumers that are giving some pressure to their brands for instance to have sustainable practices and I believe that is going to be a huge opportunity here and to let blockchain shine I would say and to remove the restriction and to give that traceability that trust on data that it is going to be essential for a lot of companies here in Europe. So again you know my answer but once you have an infrastructure which doesn't have to be as complete as 100 and then you have an interoperable digital identity like the European digital identity then you can deploy your cases on that infrastructure and then you are not going to create silos because for example for traceability you most probably have to know who is writing what who is saying what because essentially you say something and then you cannot retract because it's there and you cannot delete it okay then because you are lacking a common infrastructure as a common good available to anybody then you create clubs and you create logistic chains which are silos the only way to solve this is to have an infrastructure like the internet which is public accessible to anyone who conserves access and that's it with fair prices and then digital identity and then the use cases are going to be based on traceability and then I expect on very foul credentials and then on the very foul credentials side I expect that once this is available the infrastructure and the identity the public administrations are going to issue anything that public administrations local governments and so on okay in my city you can ask for your certificate of residency to a bank for a certificate or whatever but the public administrations anything any document is going to be very foul credentials with traceability in the case of business for example so anything which is a document is going to be transformed into a very foul credential by the way not an NFT in most of the cases because you cannot create a secondary market for example for a diploma well maybe if you are in a secondary market for diplomas then yes then is because you have things that have to be killed so most of the important things and my certificate of residency can you imagine a secondary market for this well there is also okay so we have to avoid this so most of the critical things in this life are not NFTs or tokens because there are not secondary for that you are not going to sell things more than once okay so very foul credentials for many things more than once yeah well no the initial which may be free okay so once you do it that's it to you this is you okay and this is the very easy to do right now especially in Europe because digital certificates couple with very foul credentials very foul credentials will have to be digitally signed with digital certificates using advanced or qualified signatures in Europe then the very foul credential is going to be a document which is fully legal in front of the court is like a PDF but much more efficient because instead of having one person reading the text to verify that this is the document is much readable so you are going to avoid a lot of back offices and that's it very easy in Europe not anywhere else all right well that's it let's thank our panelists