 Hi, good morning, everyone. Thanks for being here. So my name is Elizabeth Rainieres. I am Global Policy Counsel at Evernim. Evernim is a startup based in Salt Lake City that is building our vision of what we call self-sovereign identity, which I will get into, obviously. What I want to talk about is at a very high level what blockchain-based or self-sovereign identity enables, which is this idea of a new relationship. So start with the basic premise that we all know we're more connected than ever before. So the large increases in connectivity most of the gains are coming from the developing world, which is really important in the context of this conversation. But of course, it means that if something were to go wrong, the risks are significantly higher. So not only do we have this quantitative increase in growth, but we have this rate of change is also increasing. So this was a timeline basically showing the time span in between innovations shrinking rapidly. And the nature of those innovations also amplifying the effect of this connectivity. So obviously, tremendous opportunity. So we have companies now reaching trillion-dollar market caps and beyond. But of course, a lot of that has been based on monetizing our data. So tremendous risks as well. And so we all know about some of the recent breaches and some of the costs of these very lucrative business models for these companies. And of course, the most recent one is actually not Cambridge Analytica. We thought things got pretty bad there. And then thereafter, they continued to get worse. So in the most recent one, of course, it demonstrates the problem of a newer model of identity known as federated identity or single sign on our social login, which is the fact that if you used Facebook to log into other services and companies and sites, we actually don't know the extent of the breach, because this breach will have impacted all of the other places that you would have been logged in via Facebook. So we can't even measure really what the impact is. But we know that it's probably a lot worse than we think it is right now. So we've moved from the first model of having your credentials to log into a website to the second one of federated or social, and we still have a lot of problems. And the reason for this is because despite all the innovation, we still don't have a good way of proving who we are online or remotely at a distance. So who am I? How do we do this in the real world? Well, I've told you that my name's Elizabeth Rainier, and that I work at Evernom. But how do you know that? How do you trust that? So I might give you my business card, and it might have my name and my details on it. Or you might go to our website and might see that I'm the only woman on the website there. And you might know that these are what we call credentials, right? And in the real world, we have credentials of all kinds, and they usually take the form of paper, or you might reference them online like this. But there are other things about me that you might not know, right? So you might not know that I was a classmate of Zuckerberg, that I participate in a blockchain observatory, or that I'm a yoga instructor, Mike knows that. But these things aren't really relevant in this professional context, right? So we have these context-dependent things that we need to be able to prove through the use of these credentials, and those will depend on the relationship that you're trying to establish. So how do we do it in the real world? So in the real world, we have this universal standard called paper, right? We use paper of different kinds, and we can combine this paper and mix and match it in ways depending on the context where we need to prove something authoritative. And so the passport, of course, is sort of a global standard of, the gold standard of paper for proving identity-related things. And this is how we establish trust in the real world. Right, so the problem, of course, is that we don't have any way of doing this in a remote setting, in a digital or online world. So I don't actually like the word digital because everything will be digitized eventually, right, all our credentials will be digitized, we will be digitized. So it really is over the remote relationship that's the issue here. And the reason for that, we all know, is because here's the design of ARPANET, or the early internet back in the 70s, and it was really designed to move packets around, right? This is just packet switching. And it wasn't designed for things like sharing cat videos or social media or other things that might require some level of identity or knowing who's behind it. And of course, this is what led to the famous cartoon of on the internet, no one knows that you're a dog, right? And multiple spin-offs of that. And the reality is after, you know, more than a quarter century of this, it's still pretty much the situation today, is that we really don't know who we're interacting with on the other end. So the problem, of course, is that you are basically renting your identity from each service or company that you interact with online. So you've got the entity at the center, and you've got these spokes that are basically individuals that are renting these credentials to access services. And the problem is that we have this for each different entity or service, which means that we're basically, it's like they're creating their own internet, right? For each entity, they have their own rules and their own way of establishing your identity, which isn't actually yours, but is basically loan to you. And this, of course, multiplies at scale when you think about all the things that we now do online or at a distance. The average person has over 40 of these actually, the sets of login credentials. So this also means that our data is now proliferating all over the web and that it's living everywhere and replicated everywhere, but without any control over it. And this is also obviously creating massive friction. So the struggle of creating the password and locking yourself out, creating login usernames and passwords is still a tremendous friction and cost to doing business online. It also means that we have all the breaches that I alluded to earlier. And this friction is really, it's not just a business friction, it's not just a personal friction, but it really is impeding the relationship that we want to build with these entities. So we want a better customer relationship. We want a better constituent relationship. We want better constituent engagement. And actually the constituent citizen piece is really important to the panel discussion later. So the friction is the problem. And so if we can fix the online trust problem, we can fix the identity as the foundation of that trust online, then hopefully all that friction will go away, which will be a tremendous breakthrough. So we like to say a new identity is coming. It sounds really scary, but it just means we've gone from the traditional silo data model where you've got myriad usernames and passwords to the very high-risk federated model of the recent Facebook breach where you've now basically breached access to all your other services to what we call self-sovereign identity. So Gartner recently featured Evernim as a cool vendor in this space, and they basically agree with us that just like you start life with a birth certificate of that paper credential that lives in the real world, we should basically start our digital lives with self-sovereign identity. So what does that mean? So some people refer to it as blockchain-based identity, decentralized identity. I'm about to fall off the stage here. We call it self-sovereign identity, and the term is a little bit controversial, but basically what we're talking about is this lifetime portable identity fully controlled by a person, organization, or thing that cannot be taken away. Now there's a lot of nuance packed into that, which we can get into later on, but just at a high level that's what we're talking about. So it actually works like the way that it works today in the real world, the offline analog world, but actually enhanced and a bit better, so more secure and cross-border. So it works today in the sense that if I use my passport now somewhere to prove my identity, the State Department isn't getting notified, right, that I've used my passport, or at least not that we know of. But we want the same thing in the digital world where you don't have to have every interaction mediated by the issuer of the credential, and they don't need to be part of that. They don't need to sit in between the relationship or the service that you're trying to access. So this is what we mean by the new relationship. So we think this paradigm shift of this peer-to-peer connection is the opportunity to enable new relationships, ones that are unique, that are peer-to-peer, and so they're unique to that relationship. They're more secure. They're private by default, and we're very focused on privacy and data protection by design default, and they're verifiable because they have this technical element of verification. And again, no middleman that can turn them off or that can snoop and know what's going on. So Brad mentioned this earlier, but ownership, we view of your data as a fundamental human right now. It's really important in this context, and Mike knows I'm very passionate about this. Ownership does not mean that it's governed by property law or contract law. It means it's a fundamental civil or human right that cannot be taken away from you. And again, we can get into that in the panel. But what we think makes this possible in our new economy is really the decentralized technologies that we can leverage like blockchain. So Evernim has created a custom-built ledger called the Sovereign Ledger, which is now controlled by a foundation called the Sovereign Foundation, so that it remains open. And the way you can think about it is if Bitcoin is decentralized money, Ethereum is effectively decentralized applications or DApps, Sovereign is what we think of as decentralized identity. So it's uniquely built for that purpose. So what are the core features of it, and we also get into this in the panel, but open source is really fundamental to everything that we're doing. We want everything to be built on open standards. There's a lot of community work going into it, and everything is basically under an Apache 2 license and fully auditable. We also have a very robust working group of global contributors who have been designing and crafting all the standards, policies, procedures, and agreements, and also operating the nodes in our network. And those operators of the nodes are called stewards. So we have this hybrid model where the nodes are operated by stewards who've been part of a qualification procedure, and that we currently have about 50 stewards all over the world from various industries and geographies and sizes. If you're interested, we can talk about becoming a steward, contributing code, running pilots, various different things. And also everything, as I mentioned, is fully public and auditable. So our trust framework, which is our governance document, which you can also consider a governance framework, is fully public and auditable. Everything is published in a GitHub repository that's publicly accessible. And so there's absolutely, it's full transparency around how everything's operated in the network. And these are just, some of the people, this is actually an outdated slide now, but as I said, a wide array of stewards from all different industries and geographies. And recently, the World Economic Forum, basically this is their slide and their big red arrow pointing at us as an example of kind of where you want to be in the self-sovereign spectrum. So there is this external recognition that's happening now about the ability of our designer ledger to really enable this kind of privacy enhancing self-sovereign identity. So I love this slide because I do think that we talk about a lot of crypto voodoo sometimes. And really, there's a lot of advanced tech here and sometimes it is indistinguishable from magic, but there is something very magical about it, which is that we've gone through these connection brokers because we've had to, but who actually wants to be sharing their updates via Facebook or their photos via Instagram or their messages via WhatsApp, we don't care about that. We want to be connecting with the people on the other end, but we've been forced to go through these connection brokers who stand in the middle of those relationships. But imagine if we could do them, if we could reconstruct them and just go peer to peer to all the people that we're trying to reach with those messages and those photos and those updates. And imagine if we could do that with everything from entities to individuals to even our cars, right, our smart cars or our smart tech. And that's really what self-sovereign identity is about. It's about enabling these secure peer to peer channels with the things that we're trying to access directly. And again, core to this is that when you can build out that trust and you know who you're dealing with at a distance or remotely, all the friction goes away and this is what enables what I referred to earlier as the new relationship. And the new relationship is significantly more meaningful. So you might have not just more connections, but you might actually want to utilize them more because there's more trust in those relationships. And there's more of an intimacy actually between the service that you're connecting with. So from our view, there are myriad benefits here with the new relationship. And these are just some of the obvious ones. And there are a lot more nuanced ones that we can get into as well on the panel. If anyone has any questions, please feel free to reach out and also follow me on Twitter at Hacky Lawyer. And that's what I've got for you this morning.