 So Igor, I think you already know this, but just go through it. The live stream has a chat. I'm going to put the live stream link here in the Zoom chat, but the live stream also has a chat. So just we'll keep an eye on both places. Yes. So if Conor is here, you're welcome, Igor, to kick off whenever you like. Yeah. Conor is here. Conor, it looks like you're muted, by the way, if you're trying to talk. Oh, no, no, we're waiting for the green lights. So I can get going if people would like me to now. Oh, great. Yeah, Igor, if you want to kick off. Yeah, of course. Hello, everyone. It's a pleasure to meet you and to host you. Hello, Conor. A few words and maybe some small talk about you and your path to the blockchain, to this place. So could you share us what you are doing now? You are a CEO and founder of Web Free Labs, but maybe from the beginning, when did you hear about the blockchain first time and what did you feel? OK, so I've got kind of a background that I'll do in the talk. But in terms of what pulled me into blockchain in the first instance, it was back in 2016. And it was actually when I learned that you could mine Ethereum using commodity, just GPUs. And so I built an Ethereum mining rig and then started scratching beneath the surface of the technology. But what really got me about it was that it was really that I've been very into the proprietary unixes. And when they transitioned to being open source, such as Sun Solaris and seeing how Linux had displaced it because Linux had a very powerful community. And back then, I saw a similar thing happening with really the Ethereum community and it being more than just the Bitcoin network, but just this kind of force for just achieving a lot. But from there, it's kind of just developed my interest more generally in blockchain and technology. And also the opportunities for enterprises as well, because I'd spent many, many years against that backdrop. And really since then, I've just been working originally writing code, but then creating my company in order to really help bridge the transition really for enterprises to work with blockchain technology, but also to see the actual opportunities that it provides. Because we're not at a point where, yes, some people may argue it's a fringe technology, but I think that there's some very clear use cases for what it is very good at. And that's kind of what kind of brought me into the space. But I'll talk specifically about why the Sustainable Development Goals as well once we get going with the talk. But also, Hyperledger as well, I've been actually, I think my first post to the Hyperledger group was in the summer of, I think it might have been in the summer of 2016, where there was some discussions that were happening with Bob Summerwheel and Brian Bellendorf and some others just around integration libraries for blockchains. And that was my first point of contact. And then since then, time's been on the fringes, but other times it's been more actively involved. And right now anyway, I'm trying to contribute what I can to the climate action and accounting special interest group within Hyperledger, which I'm finding there's some really good dialogues happening there. So that's kind of right now where I'm active in Hyperledger. Oh, great. Yeah, yeah, we'll try to invite them. I was at the beginning in this group too. So now we'll speak about the 17 ways blockchain can help us meet the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. This is a topic which you develop in your company. Yeah, I think it's more something that I'm passionate about. And I think I want people to share that passion. And so shall I get going with the presentation now? Kick it off, or is there a few more words to say or a few more questions? Yeah, no, please. Let's start. OK, awesome. Well, thank you, Igor, for hosting me today. And also, thank you, David, as well, for asking the question, would I like to do some talks on this topic as well? Because this wouldn't have happened if there hadn't been that prompt in the first place. So first of all, thank you for that. So the title of the talk is 17 Ways Blockchain Can Help Us Meet the UN Sustainable Development Goals. And before we jump in, I'll just give you a little bit more context about myself as well. Just so you can kind of see the angle for where I'm coming from here. So we just check, first of all, that I'm doing this right. OK, so I'm the founder and CEO of Web3 Labs. We're a blockchain technology company. We work with large companies to help them harness the disruptive potential of blockchain for digital assets or managing their data or simplifying their complex business processes. We also do work with some of the blockchain protocols as well, but those are kind of more niche, very specific technical pieces of work that are less easy to articulate what they involve. Actually, this week launched a new podcast and V-LOG as well called This Week in Blockchain, where I spend, well, under 10 minutes, typically just discussing some of the main events that have happened in the last seven days about blockchain. And that's available as a podcast and a video log as well, or vlog as I think people are calling them. And that's it, a week in blockchain.com. And it's on all of the main kind of podcast and platforms too. And I'll have a link to that at the end. I originally authored a library called Web3J, which is the Java and Android integration library for Ethereum. And that was kind of my first big commitment to the space. It's still a very widely used library, and we very actively maintain it. It's coming up to 1 million downloads and is used by some influential companies like Samsung, JP Morgan, UBS, and Opera Browser in their blockchain offerings. I've been very involved in a number of industry organizations as well during the last few years. With the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, I was their technical specification working group chair, which really was responsible for producing the first Enterprise Ethereum standards documents as in following the sort of technical standards that come out of organizations like W3C and IEEE. I stepped down from that role midway through last year, having held that chair role for three years, and then got involved with the baseline protocol, where I'm on the technical steering committee. I'm also involved with the inter-work alliance as well, which is really a more of a business aligned standards organization for blockchain. I chair the inter-work, the vice chair of the inter-work framework there, and as I mentioned earlier on, I'm regularly attending, contribute where I can to the hyper-legit climate. So, Web3 Labs' clients, they include large corporates like Microsoft, JP Morgan, but also some very blockchain-centric companies like Consensus and R3. And we also were a runner-up in Microsoft's Partner of the Year award in the startup category last year, and we've received funding awards from Innovate UK here in the UK and also the Ethereum Foundation. That's enough about me, and now it's more about the larger topic, which is really what I came to talk to everyone about here today. So, the UN Sustainable Development Goals, it's one of those things that had actually passed me by for a number of years, and it was something that it was, more recently, I became very aware of them. But where they actually came from was that in a few years back, the UN basically decided, we want to set some ambitious targets that if we can make really good headway in these between now and 2030, they will make the world a much better place. And it's a very, very powerful narrative there, but also, when you think about the actual goals here, who wouldn't actually want to make the world a better place? But what's so great about the UN Sustainable Development Goals is that they actually are broken down into a number of key topics. And so, when you're, I'm myself, like most people, we want to find opportunities to do good in this world, and often it can be hard to know where to start. And one of the, I think the powerful things about the Sustainable Development Goals is that they kind of give you a starting point where you can think, okay, well, which of these topics am I very interested in? What do I care about in my head? And what do I care about in my heart? And seeing ways that you can contribute to them. And so, it's a great source of inspiration for, be it wanting to give charity charitably, or donate your time to causes, or just do work in business that has impact here. I think they're a fantastic framework there. And that's why I wanted to talk to more about them. But the other reason why I thought that, it's great to talk about how blockchain can actually contribute to them is simply because I personally believe there's a lot of opportunity for blockchain to help a number of these. And especially with blockchain, there's always been this discussion about, how long is it going to take for the technology to really mature and no longer become a thing, just it's something there that's kind of running behind the scenes, like a part of the regular technology stack. And I think that most people, if they were to say, well, we think it'll be there by 2030, I'd say even the more conservative people would probably agree with that statement as well. And given that the Sustainable Development Goals or SGDs are focused really on the next, well, nine years now, I think there's kind of this nice synergy in that we're thinking about these almost 10 year time horizons and also blockchains well placed to actually kind of align with those. And so that's another reason why I think there's a really nice kind of synergy between the two here. So as I go through these, rather than kind of discussing the complete abstract where I'm talking about this high level topic, I'm going to drill down into some of the specific points that are actually on the Sustainable Development Goals website. And again, I'll provide the link at the end of the presentation for that, which is full of great resources for these. But each of them has got like a number of sub aims so that they can really quantify what they're trying to achieve. And they're a great source of data there as well. And for as you go deeper. So hence, with each of these, I'm framing them from a specific angle that of course, yes, it does align nicely with blockchain, but also it's pulled from an angle that the UN's SGDs have actually discussed. Where possible too, I'm providing examples as well of companies and technologies and organizations that are working towards these Sustainable Development Goals too. And really the point here is not to sort of call out or have favoritism for specific ones. It's more of a general statement about here's an example of a company that's supporting this because yes, there's lots of discussions about people's favorite protocols or products or whatever else in the blockchain ecosystem. But really here, what I'm interested in doing is just highlighting some of the great work that's being done that's conducive to these goals, but there's so many other examples out there. And just because I'm using it here doesn't necessarily mean I specifically, I necessarily endorse the project. It's more about endorsing what they're trying to achieve here. So I think it's just important to point that out as well. Okay, so we will get going now and we'll start by talking about number one, which is no poverty. And so the angle here that we're thinking about is how with poor and vulnerable people, if they have greater access to economic resources, then that can actually help provide them with the assistance they need to live in a less poverty-stricken way. And so of course, everyone's heard about the opportunity for, with Bitcoin, it is a digital store of value, but what's great about blockchain is that it can provide access to finance in a way that traditional institutions, you haven't historically been able to be it because of just the challenges with setting up businesses on the ground down to legislative reasons or whatever else. And so the angle here for blockchain really is by offering financial services using more inclusive systems that work on things like smartphones and so on. And this is how blockchain can really help with no poverty. And the technologies here can provide things like access to payments on a smartphone, digital currencies that could be pegged to US dollars and more stable fiat currencies than they'd actually have on their own. And so this is something that the cello blockchain is a great example of. They're really focused on the unbanked and being able to provide access to more, well, it's more than modern. It's very much a cutting edge type financial technology because even in the more developed parts of the world, blockchain is not the backbone of these technologies, but in these more developing areas, as it was the case with the telephone networks being able to jump straight to sort of originally 3G, 4G and now 5G, there's a similar thing there with the potential for blockchain. And so I think cello's mission really here of providing financial services to anyone with a smartphone is one great example of how the blockchain can help eradicate poverty. The second goal is zero hunger and thinking about the ways in which we can ensure that people ultimately have access to the nutrition that they need to live healthily. And historically, the way in which this is achieved is through cash transfers, but the distribution of that cash is a real problem due to poor financial infrastructure. And you have issues like corruption and so on that can stop the money reaching the intended recipients. And then even if they does reach them, then someone could steal it from them. And so again, there's challenges there with the current infrastructure there, even though of course people been ascending the cash there are trying to do the right thing. So the World Food Program actually did a very interesting pilot program working with Syrian, well, working to aid Syrian refugees where they actually provided these Syrian refugees with an identity on a blockchain but the identity was tied to their retinas because of course, refugees don't often have any sort of documentation or anything else that can prove who they are. And so by linking it to biometric data, they had a way in which people could be identified in a safe and reliable manner. And then they basically had wallets on the ledger that were tied to them. And so then when people wanted to be able to use that money for food in these refugee camps. How quickly are scientists and researchers? Sorry, was that a question? Sounds like maybe it was just background noise. Cool, all right, I'll keep going. No, sorry, is a question from Hilesh. Will you be sharing the slides? Yeah, I'll be, I'm happy to. If there's, I can do it by whatever mechanism really, whether it's, if I send them to the Hyperledger SIG or whether I, if people want to put a specific email address in on the chat, then I can copy that down beforehand. Igor, you can also send it out to everybody who registered for the meetup too. Yeah, that's right. Okay, fine, that sounds like a solution. Cool, and hopefully the video will be available as well after the fact, I presume so. Yeah, it'll be on YouTube at the link that I shared at the beginning, the live stream link. I'll drop the link again so people can see it. Awesome. Yeah, so with the Syrian refugees basically, they had cash associated with their identities on the blockchain, which enabled them to be able to spend to buy food and so on. And the great thing here is that by having the money going in and being distributed by the blockchain, you had, you didn't have those intermediaries that could potentially jump in part the way through the actual transaction to take a little bit off the side, so to speak, which has been one of the problems in the past. Okay, so the next one, number three, good health and wellbeing, and especially right now with this last year, what's happened with COVID and how it's affected so many lives. And now, hopefully with the vaccines emerging, it will help people to start to get back to some degree of normality. But the distribution of these vaccines is incredibly challenging in pharmaceutical supply chains. I'm sure many people have heard with the different variants of the COVID vaccine, some of them have got very strict temperature controls that they need to abide to while in transit in order to, you know, not to go to waste. And so, you know, there's, by utilizing the sort of blockchain supply chain capabilities where you can be certain that goods going in transit have gone through the specific routes that you intend that they have gone through but also as they've gone through those, they haven't been exposed to any temperature variation, say that could spoil the goods being transferred is very important. And so, this is another great opportunity for blockchain to help it. And again, just providing the overall authenticity as well. And that's one of the very powerful things because also often these supply chains rely heavily on paper-based documents to prove their authenticity. And there's, of course, so many ways in which those can actually be falsified. The World Health Organization themselves, actually estimates that on the falsification side that one in 10 medical products is substandard or falsified. So imagine, you know, if you have this information on a shared ledger, just the actual power that it can provide there and confidence that when these things are being given to people that they are actually getting the genuine article there. And when it comes to health, that's so important. On the quality education side, one of the things that the internet has been fantastic for making information available to everyone, the barrier to entry is, of course, an internet connection but people in all the different corners of the world can get world-class educations online from various different sources, from top academics at the best academic institutions. But again, there are some, and this in itself can provide great opportunities for greater socio-economic mobility and as a result of that reduced poverty. However, again, there can be challenges with actually people, especially if they're from a, they haven't gone to sort of a well-respected educational institution or a well-known one. There can be some challenges there with being able to prove that they do have the qualifications that they say they do. And again, it's another example where the authenticity guarantees that blockchain can provide around, say, academic credentials here is another great opportunity for the technology and helping further the reach of this quality education. ODEM is a provider of this sort of online learning where they have a wide variety of courses available and they provide certifications of the people achieving these learnings through a blockchain. There's many other providers doing similar things but this is just one example of it. Gender equality as well, hugely important. And the sad thing is that it's a disproportionate number of women who are actually unbanked globally today. And so having access to better, well, having more readily available access to financial services can certainly help here. And the intent is that it's, want to ensure that the most vulnerable women can actually get access to the resources they need. And so, of course, with initiatives like SELO that we discussed earlier, they're certainly helping here, but then there are companies as well like I've Online which are focusing more on helping females there as well. And so they worked with the charity care and created their Village and Savings Loan Associations. And by partnering with Care here, they who have specific expertise in the areas of women's economic empowerment and are very engaged with the private sector, that they are able to reach a very large number of women across a number of different countries. The stats here are on the slide. 6.5 million members, 81% of whom were women across 46 countries. And so it's a very powerful illustration of a company who's managed to actually be impactful for females in these communities, but also by making use of blockchain technology behind the scenes there as well with their VSLAs. Number six, clean water and sanitation. And so there's, I'm sure people have seen many, many times the problems with the lack of access to good quality water and sanitation being a provide with certain diseases that in the Western world are very much so eradicated, but still create real problems there because of water quality. And so where blockchain can be very good here is with respect to water quality measurements. And so there's kind of two sides to it. One part is that you can have IT sensors that are sending data about water quality measurements to putting it on a blockchain to provide guarantees about the data being accurate in terms of what was recorded at source. But then there can also be kind of a feedback loop from that so that when communities actually engage in actions which will help ensure that they're incentivized to not to pollute their own water supplies, which sadly does happen and often it's due to a lack of education or other options available. But by providing the right incentives but also reliable measurements of the actual water there that can actually feed this information back in a very timely manner. And the timeliness of this is important because if it takes months, which can be the case to measure the quality before you can actually respond to this, then there's, people aren't gonna be as incentivized as if they can get something closer to real time. And so this is where you've kind of got this blockchain for the actual measurements and the providing the guarantees around the data but then also you can use blockchain based payment systems on top of that to actually pay these communities because again, they might be in a place where there is limitations in terms of what financial infrastructure exists to them. And so it's another very powerful opportunity for the technology here. And this is something that early last year, Deloitte and IBM actually produced a very useful report on to provide some context around how you can use IoT with blockchain to control water pollution. Yeah, so number seven, affordable and clean energy. There's more and more, everyone is seeing the importance of this and in most countries, electric power, utility operators and so on starting to recognize that even the consumer demand for being able to see where the energy is coming from and that it's coming from clean sources. And often people would be happy to pay a premium in order to get that. But one of the things with these cleaner energy sources is that they need to be able to, if you have like a grid operator that's maybe there's many, many grids of solar panels and then they're selling that power to a more conventional utility operator who then distributes it to consumers and businesses, they will get reimbursed based on how much power they're producing, but they need to be able to provide authenticity guarantees about the data that's actually being measured in terms of the, the readings like the amount of electricity their solar panels are generating is actually accurate. They're not selling this to like, say multiple utility companies and so on. And so again, it's just another great opportunity for blockchain. And it's something that a Vodafone who have, the telecoms operator, they're doing a great, they're very big on their IoT technology and being able to actually utilize what they see it as a huge growth area for their business. And so they've actually partnered with energy web who have with Vodafone's Simcentric blockchain technology to provide access to these Vodafone IoT devices that are contributing to power grids that then registered on the energy web network. Decent work and economic growth. And I think one of the fascinating things about blockchain technology is that, some of these public blockchains they run on the internet and they're creating whole new business opportunities for individuals and businesses, where you don't need an office, you don't even necessarily need a conventional currency to do, you just need to be able to access the network. And so I think this is a fascinating area where blockchain is not only disrupting the landscape in terms of taking some opportunities away from the incumbents, but it's also in creating entirely new business models in the same way that the internet did historically as well with people having these sort of remote businesses or lifestyle businesses and just not having to work in an office. I think that blockchain because of the fact that a lot of these public blockchain networks have got crypto economics, well, economic systems baked into them via cryptocurrencies, it provides these great new opportunities for businesses to be created. And what's happening in the decentralized finance world is a fantastic example of this. And of course, if we're talking about the platforms here, I think Ethereum is a great one to speak to this simply because Ethereum is considered by many, and this was like the moniker that was used, especially earlier on, was that it's the world computer, which I think really nicely encapsulates the fact that this global computer can provide new opportunities for work and quality work as well for people who come up with the right ideas on top of it. The industry innovation and infrastructure, again, this is blockchain networks more generally, they're open to everyone, and this provides this notion of affordable and equitable access for everyone, which is a really powerful thing. These networks, they span geographical borders, clearly from the last goal, when we're talking about decent jobs and economic growth, innovation and infrastructure kind of underpin that. So there's a lot of crossover between these, but I think as well, when we think about the networks that are driving this, it's not just these business networks, it's also these consortia and you also have like a great number of really, industry groups here, specifically as well, when we look at the different ones that are focused on blockchain and climate or social impact. And so this is things that you have, the Climate Chain Coalition, of course the Hyperledger Climate and Accounting Special Interest Group, the Open Climate Initiative as well, Blockchain for Social Impact, the Climate Ledger Initiative as well, which is a fantastic resource for some background on this stuff. And then the Inter-Work Alliance too, just to name some of them that are here, I'm sure you could fill the slide with logos of other ones, but these are definitely some of the groups that are really investing quite heavily in this as well in terms of trying to produce quality output for people to be it's educate or create standards to support this. Number 10 is reduced inequalities. And so one of the fascinating angles here is the world's remittance corridors. So this is where migrants are actually sending money back to their home countries. And the figures here are crazy. So the largest one is the USA to Mexico, which in 2019 was that there was basically 40 billion US dollars being transferred across the borders. And unfortunately for those people sending those payments, the fees can often be as high as 4%, which has a huge impact on the funds being received at the other end. If you think about, often these migrant workers are kind of really at the bottom of the stack in terms of they could be working on many, many hours on minimum wage or some of them aren't even that fortunate. And then they're having to take their hard-earned cash and then they're having to send it back to their families. And on top of that there, the actual value is being reduced by 4% due to fees, as well as there being just the overall, the FX costs associated with it. It's a huge source of inequality really for these people there. And so the reality is is that processing global payments between banks is a very complex thing. Some actual figures that have been provided here is that five to 20% of payments have to actually manually be assessed by operational staff before they can go through, which ultimately delays payments and adds costs to banks doing this payment processing, which inevitably they pass on to the end customer. And so one example of a company who's really trying to innovate here and yes, there are of course questions around banks generally and their motives around climate and sustainability goals. But the key thing here is that with initiatives like the Link Network by J.P. Morgan, what they're basically doing is they're using blockchain to actually simplify and provide better quality data for payments. And so what they're actually able to do is rather than a payment potentially getting stuck and taking multiple days to go through, they're able to actually verify this stuff in real time, minimizing subsequent rejections and the sorts of errors that this can pick up on are things like bad account numbers, sort codes or addresses being out of whack. And so it's great to see these sorts of innovations because ultimately as they establish themselves and become the backbone for more and more payments, then we're going to actually, these savings, we'll get passed on to those people who need the most. There is of course as well the other side with being able to bypass banks entirely using cryptocurrencies and these sorts of crypto stablecoins such as those pegged to the dollar or innovations offered like Celo. But I think the general message is is that there's multiple ways in which blockchain can actually help reduce the cost for payments and ultimately reduce the actual money being burned so to speak on these remittance corridor payments. Number 11 is on sustainable cities and communities. And so there's so much fascinating work happening in the mobility sector. So the mobility sector really encompasses things like smart cities and this kind of interconnected web where you're using, you've got all these devices talking, 5G, well really it's about this kind of convergence of AI 5G IoT blockchain to create these smart cities where a lot of many more innovations are possible and provided sort of hyper connectivity. Examples of some of the sorts of things here that you want to be able to achieve having maybe idle electric vehicles being able to contribute spare capacity to power grids. Of course they want to be paid a microtransaction for doing that as a service which is something that blockchains are very good at. And then even workers, right now things have changed a little bit in terms of the size of the workforce that are actually remote. But if people are taking sustainable transport to travel to their place of work then it's an area where they could be rewarded for it. So these are areas where you can capture this data on blockchains and something that's a Bosch are actually leading a number of initiatives in where they can actually use smart contracts to allow devices to communicate autonomously with one another. Because I think the challenge historically has always been that you have one device wanting to talk to another device. You can maybe establish a common protocol for them but then when those protocols you want to bake business logic into them and you want that business logic to span more than one organization it becomes very complex to agree on a common standard. And blockchain networks do actually provide a common standard, yes it is dependent on the protocol of the network that's selected but it provides commonality that can be used for these devices to talk to one another. And so I encourage you just to have a look at some of the work that Bosch is doing there to get inspired. Responsible consumption and production. And this one of the angles of this is sustainable investing. And this is something that's had a huge upsurge fortunately during the COVID period because I think certainly the concern for many was that COVID comes along when it came along was that everyone would stop thinking about the sustainability and the climate side of things just because so many businesses were on their knees but one of the fortunate things that we have seen during this last year is that so many businesses really are pushing even further into the climate related targets. And so investors are really waking up to this as well. And so a projection by the FT late last year was that they believe that assets in sustainable investment products in Europe were going to reach 7.6 trillion over the next five years which actually means that the assets in sustainable investment products would actually outnumber conventional funds by 2025. So it's a huge shift in the actual mindset of investors there. But the thing is is that those investing in the funds they need to have assurance of the funds are actually doing the activity that they say they are. And this is something that blockchain can be incredibly powerful for in that if you have the balance sheets showing assets but then you have say some sort of green or climate related assets or it could be maybe climate offsets you want to see how those offsets were where they are ultimately came from then blockchain can provide that provenance there. Organizations can also use blockchain to verify reports. I mean, there's some great use cases actually even when you step out of ESG but just seeing what Microsoft's Xbox division has done for instance with respect to drastically reducing their reporting burden using blockchain there. And the great thing here is that investors ultimately could have greater confidence in the numbers being reported by these companies and the environmental practices off the back of this. So in terms of taking actual climate action one of the ways in which companies take climate action is by interacting with what I call the voluntary carbon markets which is basically where they say we're creating carbon so we want to buy carbon offsets that are produced by a project to reduce our overall footprints. And when that is the case the buyer needs to be genuine that needs to be certain that the claims are genuine. And so these projects when they're actually doing the carbon removal process such as planting trees for instance they can use blockchain to record the information about the activities being taken on which is something known as the MRV process which is discussed a lot within climate circles and providing greater efficiency there. We also see it as well which with what I call nationally determined contributions which are what are done at their national level where different nations basically commit to certain staying within certain levels of emissions and that was something that started with the Kyoto Protocol and now with the Paris agreements as well there's a real push there too to reduce the overall emissions. And so something that the World Bank has been pioneering here is their climate warehouse where they're actually developing a blockchain based meta registry so that they can combine climate data from multiple nations into a searchable registry so you can see where these climate reductions are happening and the different impact that's being had there. And so it's another one of these initiatives that's fascinating to see kind of emerging from the sideline here supporting this. Number 14 is Life Below Water and I'm sure everyone knows about the issues faced around pollution in the water. We touched earlier on about how blockchain can help with actually providing better quality water and just in terms of this similar technologies can be used for Life Below Water as well in terms of seeing how clean the oceans are. But one of the other things is overfishing as well and we're all very aware of how much the oceans have been overfished in this last half century and how much fish stocks have gone down as a result of that. And blockchain again is a very powerful tool here because in the supply chain for these fish when they're going from being caught all the way to the plates of the consumer if you have a way of providing guarantees of how they were actually caught in the first place then you have greater confidence that the fish has come from where you believe it to have but also to those people who are actually illegally fishing or exceeding their quotas they wouldn't be willing to put this information on a blockchain ledger to go to the consumer because it would highlight there was an issue there. So this is something that Provenance is one company very, this is one example that they've provided of how they've used it for tracking yellow fin and skipped it Jack Tuna from Catch the Consumer. But again, it's very much so the supply chain and using blockchain there is very powerful way of helping achieve this. Number 15 is life on land. So one of the areas that has a significant effect on biodiversity is logging and especially illegal logging which in some countries, unfortunately can be as high as 90%. And so if there's if blockchains used to actually provide transparency and traceability of where wood is coming from from where it's actually been chopped down all the way through to who it's been sold to then there's, and the illegal loggers and the consumers won't take wood that doesn't have this Provenance information then you massively reducing the demand for the illegally cut wood basically. And so the wood tracking protocol that's being established to actually help do this to save the Amazon rainforest in Peru currently a lot of the timber tracking is done with paper and so by with the wood tracking protocol they've created a blockchain based system to replace this paper based methods allowing buyers to verify the legitimacy of the actual timber there. And so this transparency is helping reduce illegal logging operations there. Number 16, peace justice and strong institutions. A stat that really stood out to me here was that if only 46% of sub Saharan Africans have had their births registered. And so just imagine that you didn't actually have any record of your birth the sorts of challenges that would create in your everyday life. And so having digital systems here can make a big difference with helping to do this. And the other thing though, that by using blockchain you can provide some uniqueness guarantees as well. And as well as when you couple that with the biometric data you can provide like some great authenticity and transparency for the identities of people. And this can also aid what is called self sovereign identity, which is where basically individuals can create and control the information about them without having to actually share personal information. And this is something that decentralized identities facilitate here, where you basically, you have like a verifier and so you have like a verifier for these actual, these identities that are created. But the point is as I said that the holder of them, they don't actually need to provide all of the information. So then you don't have the same issues and so on with fraudulence there. One of the areas though, and this is obviously something that the hyperledger, there's a working group around and some of the members are very involved in there. Just really trying to build reference implementations to support this, the hyperledger indie projects is one great example of it. But there's also kind of, what's emerging here is ways in which you can actually remove the reliance and some sort of intermediary to back up your claims, so to speak. And so there's a project called DidCon, which is emerged more recently, aligned with the digital identities and the digital identity foundation, which pushes a lot of this work to help innovate here, to help reduce the longer term issues with people not having any way of being able, not having an identity at birth. And finally, we have number 17, which is the partnership for the goals. And so, I think this is something that just is really great when you're talking about blockchain generally, because given the shared nature of blockchain, for it to kind of work as a technology, you have to have companies partnering and people partnering, working together, whether it's at the industry level, government or non-profits or individuals, it's very much so an inherent part of all of this. So I think that it's really important for this. And then just finally, just, and this is kind of reflective of my own beliefs as well, is that we want to continue to educate and build greater awareness of how blockchain can bring a lot of benefits here. And that ultimately, much as, yes, at one side, you have everything that's happening with the financial markets and cryptocurrency, but there's, we also have an inherent belief that it's a force for good and that there's so much opportunity for it to help be a driving force with these sustainable, helping meet these sustainable development goals. Yes, there are, of course, other challenges that need to be faced, such as, of course, the political and legislative challenges are always the biggest ones, but at the same time, at least I think that there's some key components here that can really help move people and innovate in ways that haven't been done before. So that's everything I wanted to say about the sustainable development goals. If you want to learn more about them or just read more about them, I encourage you to go to globalgoals.org. It's a fantastic resource. There's lots of really, really, really lovely graphics and so on to support all of them as well. And a lot of companies are starting to now talk about which global goals specifically they report, they actually support with their charitable work too. You have initiatives like 1% for the planet as well, where companies are basically committing either 1% of their profits or revenue or time to actually work on causes aligned with the sustainable development goal. So yeah, I encourage you just to learn more about it because it's a wonderful framework. And I think that the more people are aware of it, the more you're just gonna have the better place we are to achieve what we can over the next 10 years for this. If you want to reach out to me, you can find me on Twitter at ConnorS10. And as I mentioned earlier on, just launched this week in blockchain as well, which is this podcast and V-LOG. So if you want to check it out, it'd be great to hear what you think. And finally, you can find Web3Labs by Googling us, but it is just web3labs.com. Yeah, thank you. And I'll open up the floor for any questions that anyone had. Yeah, thank you so much, Connor. It was amazing. Please just share some question. Okay, I know she's just taking a look at the chat as well, because often some... Yeah, yeah. This is some that are there. Yeah, so, okay, yeah. I think Paul Dowling said that he's interested in tackling the various goals, but across several emerging technologies, AI, quantum, as well as distributed ledger. And yeah, I think this is the great thing about technology. There's not one technology, which is the key one to facilitate this. It's identifying how they work best together to support these technologies. I mean, AI is certainly one that pops up a lot here, because of course, when you're dealing with data sets, you want to ensure that those people who have the power to input those data sets aren't trying to gain the system. So there's a massive AI angle to a lot of this stuff as well. Right, so a question. Are you tracking the application of DLTs in public financial management as a sub-goal under 17? So personally, I'd say I'm not, but there's definitely a lot that people are doing with respect to just using blockchain to provide greater accountability for finances. But of course, when it's public finances, the way in which they govern and manage is slightly different to how business does in that regard. So this is Adam who's from the Red Cross asking, can you talk more about governance and specifically what might be needed in a humanitarian context? Yeah, the governance discussion around blockchains is huge because when you have these platforms that potentially span multiple geographical locations, there's different legal implications associated with that. I think in the European Union, for instance, GDPR is one such example where you've got to be very careful that you don't have personal information stored on a tamper-proof ledger, for instance. And so there are challenges. And this is where really the legislative side is so important to ensure that you can actually get the right buy-in from the regulators to actually support it. But then more specifically as well, you need to ensure that if we're in an area, say, with where humanitarian aid is required, and you need to have the infrastructure available there too to be able to support these platforms. And if someone's just, they're trying to record data, but you don't have reliable mobile networks there, then you need to ensure that there's ways to actually get it there too. And you also need to ensure that the people running the network are incentivized to actually ensure that it runs and really remains intact and doesn't get taken down as such. Does that kind of answer your question there, Adam? Certainly one report that I would recommend you take a look at is the Climate Ledger Initiative's 2020 report that they released in December last year. They have a whole section there on blockchain governance, and they've got this wonderful model, which I think came from the UN actually, which is of the four different types of interoperability, because the interoperability is kind of a key part of the governance, because in order to govern something, you need to agree on how this system should be governed. And so they have this wonderful model that kind of lays it out. You have kind of the technical details, which is literally like the bytes can talk to one another, but then you actually have the next level up there is that like the business terms agree to one another, and then you have the next level up, which is that I think the sort of actors agree, and it's a very powerful framework for that. Let's see if I can find the link there as well, because I could just post that in the chat, because it's a really good article. Anyone else have any other questions that you want to? A question for Paul. Yeah, so is blockchain heavy on power in the same way as Bitcoin, and if so, is that an issue? Yes, it's a very important question to ask that, because there's a lot of... When you talk about blockchain, it doesn't mean heavy power consumption. Yes, the Bitcoin network uses a lot of power. Yes, the Ethereum network, which is the second largest public blockchain network uses a lot of power, although it is transitioning off that over the next year or two. But the point is that it's down to the actual network itself, and so there are... There's a number of blockchains now that are actually using what is called a proof-of-stake-based model, where someone actually has... In a public context, they have cryptocurrency reserves that they basically put down on the line in the network to say, you know, I'm committing to validating transactions on the network. I will remain... I will be an honest actor with these if I am not an honest actor, I will be... I will have some of my, you know, cryptocurrency that I've put down taken away from me as a result of this. So it's a great incentive mechanism, and that actually removes the need for these power-hungry approaches. But when you actually look at enterprise blockchains, these are typically done in a private permission network, and when you have control over who the actual actors are on the network, you don't need to have a barrier to entry such as very high power costs to contribute to it. So there's a lot of flexibility there, and really the only place that it has... That it is happening a lot now is in the Bitcoin and Ethereum networks and some of these public ones. In private networks, it's not an issue at all. And you can run these networks privately as well if you're using other, what are called consensus mechanisms there. Thank you. I would check our YouTube. It's one question from Aramand. I really like your presentation. And in the future, I would like my information to be helping educate about the system and the goals that you discussed today and advice on that. I would say to start by just going to the... the Sustainable Development Goals website, just the globalgoals.org. There's lots of really great content there. But also too, if you go onto the social media accounts as well, like Twitter, LinkedIn, and just search for Sustainable Development Goals, you'll find it pops up so much. There's just so many... There's so many different companies and people who are really getting behind these that it's just a... Yeah, there's just... I'm sure looking out, doing a little bit of research, you'll find, now that you're aware of them, you'll find some great opportunities to follow what people are doing here. So, yeah. But I think the website is a great place to start. So, another question for her now. There's one more. Okay, so... Do you see that distributed ledger solutions are always justified over a secure database? They're certainly not always justified. And one of the things... Even where you do think you've got a great opportunity for blockchain, there's always an argument to say you could just have a trusted intermediary in the middle who has their own private proprietary system and they define these APIs that you will need to talk to one another. But what's really powerful about blockchain is that, yes, you can still use intermediaries to help certain members on the network to work with it, but you actually... You have a common interface that you can all... Companies and people can talk to one another via. These blockchains have got their own languages for the code that they run on them that supports their core business logic. And so, if you've got multiple organizations and there's, say, a complex process that involves inputs or spans these multiple organizations, if you have a blockchain, you have a common interface. So you can say, here's a smart contract or code that exists on the blockchain and can we agree that this is the logic that needs to happen? It's gonna be a lot easier for everyone to understand that versus saying, let's come up with our own proprietary one or use this intermediary and then we're all going to kind of interface with this one intermediary there. So, again, there's always other choices available, but I think what blockchain does is it kind of standardizes the choice there and the approach, which is one of the very powerful things. So, I think we can finish. So, thank you so much. Thank you so much again, it was amazing. Yeah, and please send me a presentation. So I will share through our meetup list. Thank you a lot and please follow us and follow Connor and see you again. Thanks Connor, thanks Igor, thanks everyone. Thanks everyone.