 Hi, everyone, so it's great to be here. Just a quick question to the audience. Who here has heard of Bitcoin? Who's heard of blockchain? Who's bought Bitcoin? Why haven't you retired yet? OK, sorry, it's my favorite questions for everybody. Yeah, just a warning as well. It's actually an Australian accent, so my apologies if you're hoping for a British one. So as always with universities, I must tell you who my partners in crime are. The idea of Datanet was actually originated through something called the GovTech Labs at UCL, and the CEO of that is Zainab, and Professor Philip Treleven is a very well known computer scientist, and he's the sort of architect of these kind of ideas, and we're driving his plan forward. So why care about blockchain? So for me, blockchain is as disrupted to the telecommunications industry as the iPhone was. So a little bit of personal history about me. I worked for over 15 years in telecommunications, and when I was a lot younger than I am today, I spent a lot of time trying to convince my leadership in the company I was working at that the iPhone was actually going to decimate the service layer of the industry. Unfortunately, I was proved right, and unfortunately, they didn't really listen. So I think blockchain actually can also have just as big an impact if we ignore it in the telecommunications industry and don't think take it seriously. It can also actually reduce the cost of core network and infrastructure in quite surprising ways. And so today I'm gonna give two different examples. One is the very long-term perspective of what we're doing in the research institutions, and the second part of the presentation is a little bit more about what we're doing closer to term with a couple of operators. So basically, for me, blockchain is a fundamental transformation of how our customers are going to behave and how we are also going to be able to create new revenue streams. So what is a blockchain? It's an interesting question, and it's one that actually you will get a lot of different answers to, depending on who you ask. But basically, for me, a blockchain allows untrusting parties to co-create a historical transactional record without relying on a central authority. The other thing to note is that blockchain and distributed ledger are often used interchangeably. For me, they're not exactly the same thing, but I'm an academic, so I'm a little bit anal about these kind of things. So blockchain, however, is a lot bigger than Bitcoin. When we talk about blockchain in a variety of different fora, we often seem to have this idea that it's about cryptocurrencies only. And in 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto released this paper on Bitcoin, and what that did was release two things. One was the idea of cryptocurrencies, and the other was the idea of this concept of a blockchain. And if we think about it, a distributed ledger is merely just a platform upon which various applications can be built, and that goes far beyond financial services. So here we have the blockchain as a platform at the bottom. We have a bunch of different types of records, currency assets, contracts, data, and peer-to-peer. And we can see that Bitcoin and cryptocurrency are really only on the far right-hand side here. It touches on supply chains, digital rights management, insurance, financial securities, everything really could be affected by blockchain. However, be very careful, because it might take a lot longer than everyone is telling you. We have a lot of people coming into our offices saying that we're going to redefine the future of, I don't know, transport with our new token. And quite often, you know, at the end of the day, those solutions are really quite small in comparison to the size of the problem of transport. So what do we mean by a central authority? If we think about today's world, we have the bank, we have lawyers, we have real estate agents, and we have the firm. The idea here is our society, for the last sort of hundred odd years, has been defined by intermediaries. It's been defined by a set of social norms, whereby we outsource trust to a third party in order for our system to work. So for example, Bitcoin, the idea was that we would replace the central bank. Every individual is able to create their own, or sorry, use their own currency, store it, and exchange it with each other and appear to peer fashion without needing a bank to create the trust. So if you think about the British Pound or the Euro, if you look on the British Pound, it says the Bank of England, and that is the institution that has provided trust in that currency for however long it has existed. And the idea with Bitcoin is you no longer need that. Other areas, however, are, for example, law. We have a huge number of lawyers or legal firms coming into the center and basically saying, we've got a big problem here because blockchain means that we can have things called smart contracts, so we can move our business model from a per hour basis to a per piece basis, which of course scares a lot of lawyers because it's gonna make them a lot poorer, basically. I'm not so sure I'm worried about that, but if you think about a law firm, the contracts between companies are set up by legal firms, and if you can remove a lot of that work using a blockchain via a shared transactional record, well, actually, that does have a big impact on the way that you would establish contracts. One of my colleagues from Imperial College was extremely interested in trying to put blockchain, sorry, put title deeds of houses onto the blockchain, mainly because he'd ended up in a dispute about who owned his house. So he would like to put all of the title deeds of your house onto the blockchain, and the idea, of course, is there, you remove the intermediary of the real estate agent, you're able to do things like do title deed searches much more quickly, and the final one is the firm itself. So corporations will have the boundaries of the firm sort of quite dramatically reduced, but that's a lot more esoteric. So very simply, if we think about it, today's transactions, we have separate ledgers in each institution with no oversight, there's a high risk for human error and fraud, we have paper-driven processes that create delays and errors, and a dependence on intermediaries to ensure trust, which increases transaction costs and time delays. So an example of this that we saw previously released earlier this year was a proof of concept released by PCCW Global and Colt, where they looked at their remittances based on voice traffic, and implemented a blockchain solution in order to remove the heavy burden of paper-driven processes in that. And they proved, well, they didn't prove it, but they estimated that they save over 1600 man-hours a year just by doing their transactions using a blockchain. So the previous generations of digital technology have really been about data and information, so IoT is about getting more data, more information, and basically about how to exchange it faster and more securely in pretty much the same way that we've been doing it before, but with the same sort of boundaries of the firm. The idea has been apply IT to do the same business processes just faster. Tomorrow's transactions, the idea is you would use a shared single ledger between different companies. Records are added, sorry, can't be added without every single party agreeing to those transactions being added, and the records can't be changed. So that's one of the fundamental pieces of the blockchain. You can't change a record without all of the parties agreeing to it. There's a reduction in paper-based systems and a reduced potential for fraud. So the idea is apply the IT to completely redefine business processes. What does that actually mean in practice? If anyone wants to actually build a blockchain or has done so, has anyone actually tried to build some blockchain solutions? Has anyone actually tried that? No, wow, okay. So you've read about blockchain, but you haven't actually tried anything. Fair enough, okay. I'm about to blow your mind in a bit then, okay. So what happens is, so for example, it's completely outside of telecommunications. If you look at the insurance industry, we did a proof of concept for them, looking at how you could use blockchain to reduce fraud and reduce paper-based processes. And what happened there was the first thing you had to do was get every single company in a room and every single company had to bring their lawyer because they were sharing business data between one another in a way that had never been done before. So this is what we mean about the boundaries of the firm are changing. Companies share data that they have never shared with one another before. The other thing that had to happen, which may be interesting, depending on how the telecommunication industry progresses, is that the regulator had to be in the room because obviously insurance is a very sensitive topic and they had to make sure that there was no antitrust issues. So redefining the boundary of the firm, sharing information between different corporations, gives you potentially antitrust problems. So they wanted to make sure what data was being shared, there was no pricing information and then it wasn't detrimental to the end user consumer, just something to think about. So lots of different types of distributed ledger. So that is one thing to really beware of when people are coming in to sell things to you. There's more than one different type of distributed ledger. As an institute, we aren't bound to any particular type, there is just a spectrum of them. We have for example here, blockchain, which is what most people in public refer to as blockchain, which is Bitcoin and Ethereum. So they are public, permissionless and shared systems. So what does that mean? If everybody in this room is a network node for Bitcoin, so pretend you're a computer for a second. Every single one of you records every single transaction. So if I want to give 10 pounds to the person sitting just here, every single one of you records that. Well, 10 Bitcoin, I'm very generous, I'm gonna give you 10 Bitcoin. Every single person in the room would record that transaction. What that also means is anyone can read the transactions and anyone can join the network and there are no boundaries on that. In order to ensure that, you have to have quite a lot of complex mathematics at the bottom, which I haven't gone into today, but if anyone would like to discuss proof of work, come and see me afterwards. But you also have other types, which are permissioned private shared systems and that's a lot more about enterprise types of blockchain. So as was mentioned, we have Hyperledger and that means you have to be whitelisted to get access to the system, whitelisted to read and write and you have to have permission to read the transactions as well. So you, and then there are hybrid systems which allow you to do a bit of both. So in the final few minutes, I was just gonna talk to you about blockchain and networking and this is a very long-term view. We've started to program at UCL called Datanet, which is looking at how we would reform or recreate certain aspects of digital technologies for the data world, if you will. So the idea is that with regards to data, we're really at the same stage of the internet, oh, sorry, we're really at the same stage of development as we were in the early days of the internet. And the idea is that blockchain can address some of these issues. So data, if you think about it, is having a pretty dramatic impact on national and international seats of power. This is a very complex slide, I'm not gonna go into great detail but this is some of the political economy behind what we're doing. Data is transforming government, it's transforming financial institutions, it's transforming industry, it's transforming even research. So, and we have this idea of a double-edged sword. So my personal data is quite often being used in ways that I probably wouldn't agree with or wouldn't like by very large companies. And financial institutions are being fundamentally challenged and governments are struggling with potential manipulation of information sources. That's the political context of what we're looking at. This is the digital of the architecture of what we're looking at. And the idea is how do we give people access to the data, their own data, in the same way that we give them access to the internet but give them control over it rather than solely relying on corporate entities to take care of it for them. So we have a couple of different layers here. Firstly, the idea of a data vault or data banking. This is quite a common idea actually in the blockchain space whereby I would have my data, all of my personal data is owned by me and I give people permission to use it. So you can pay me for access to my personal data. We then have this idea of an infrastructure layer, a blockchain-enabled infrastructure layer where we're looking at identity management, personal data for companies and clients as well. So it's the access layer that we're very much looking at building. And the idea is that on top of that we have this idea of a universal services layer. Obviously, security is an unavoidable issue that we will deal with but I'm leaving that to the side for the moment. The universal services layer allows us to build a new form of new industries on top. Some of these are the data banking sector. So this idea of buying and selling personal data. The other one is e-services. Law, for example, would be able to completely be redefined how they deliver legal services. Government sector and research sector, the idea is you could think of this as akin to a sovereign wealth fund, but it's a data wealth fund. So we're completely redefining how our society and our economy would function based around data. So like I said, this is a very forward-thinking piece of work. So how are we going to do this? We have the idea of a data net which basically gives us ID, identity, privacy, trust using a form of a universal data locator which provides extensible addressing to all private data. And as I said, the idea is we're going to create new industry sectors. We then are going to build universal data infrastructures and the idea obviously we build on top of the existing internet but we're going to have addressing security and permission to access and then some dynamic trust rating systems. And this is the technology stack so far and the protocols. So we're working with a number of other universities and if anyone else would like more information, you know, you're very welcome to call me afterwards or talk to me afterwards. But let's look at a near-term view now. And this is some work that I've been doing with Colt. We're the wholesale telecommunications provider and they've done quite a bit of work around looking at blockchain for remittances. We've also been looking at using blockchain together with SDNC and this is actually going to be released, I believe, at MEF in November. The idea is, you know, how do you, in a world, well, in a world where the internet or the telecommunications providers have moved to SDN, we have an issue associated with the SDN controllers, mainly that there's going to be a lot more of them than we previously had and negotiating the contracts associated with the SDNs or SDN interconnects are going to be a lot more complicated and they'll have to be done dynamically because we just can't, as an industry, afford to have everybody go out and negotiate and sign contracts as we do today. So, very much today, this is all done manually. It's a great job, by the way. You basically start in Hawaii and you move around all the really nice locations across the world negotiating contracts. So I guess there's going to be a little bit of pushback on that, but it will save the companies a lot of money. The other one that we've been looking at is blockchain as an orchestrator. I know that's quite a dangerous thing to say in a room full of people who are looking at ONAP and very similar things, but we've been looking at this as, you know, how do you use a private permissioned ledger in order to potentially monitor networks and automate that connectivity and automate some of the signaling and reduce some of the network complexity? And that's pretty much what we see here. Effectively, we have a smart contract-enabled DLT with policy, fulfillment, control, and usage. And we're using the event triggers on Hyperledger, for example, to see if we can actually use that instead of going with a large-scale orchestrator. Results are mixed, I'll be honest, right now, so. And this is very much a piece of research that we've been looking at. The other one that seems to be getting a lot more interest as well is this idea of blockchain and some of the mobile-edge cloud applications. So you can think of a situation where you may want to do a transaction on the edge and it will take too much time, potentially, to record that transaction and the financial aspects of that transaction back to the centralized cloud. So the idea is we use some of the offline aspects of blockchain. We record it locally on the edge as it happens and then we basically, at another point, sync back to the centralized servers and the centralized OSS-BSS systems, basically in order to provide a record that prevents, you know, contention over billing. That was really that simple. So the idea there is that it reduces complexity and delivers quite a bit more flexibility across the network. And that one seems to be working relatively well. The final one that I will talk about is data supply chains. So as we move to a data world, we are looking very much at something we refer to in the academic world as data supply chains. So you know what a physical supply chain looks like. We have coffee beans, they become a cup of coffee, but through that process, you have approximately 144,000 people across the world who touch your coffee, actually, before you receive it. Fascinating physical supply chain, but what we're seeing now is the evolution towards data supply chains. So that touches again on the private data. The data that I produce gets processed and transformed into a new product that is sold by somebody else. Currently, other people are making the money. I might like to make some money off that myself. The issue, however, is that data supply chains give us quite a few problems. We have issues here around data quality, data heterogeneity, and data privacy and security. A big issue could be, for example, in some networks, how do I prove that this data is from the person that it says it is from? How do I prove it's from the system that it said it's from? How do I prove that that sensor that has sent that piece of data has not been tampered with really very complex, difficult problems to solve? And one of these was actually related to data integrity in energy networks. This actually came out of a friend of mine who I studied sustainable development with, calling me, and saying, my windmill's been hacked, my wind turbine's been hacked. And I was like, that's great, but why have you called me? And they said, basically, what happened was that they had noticed one of their wind turbines in the ocean was malfunctioning. They sent their boat out, sent it, and the person, when they got there, realized that their firmware was in another language. They didn't know when it had happened. They didn't know what that software was doing, and they didn't know what impact it had on their network. And obviously that could be quite problematic in different types of networks and energy in particular. So we worked together with a company, it's an Estonian company called Guard Time, and we looked at how you would create a blockchain-enabled data integrity solution. So the idea was that we used hashes of the firmware, we registered those onto the blockchain, and every so often you poll, basically, to make sure that that firmware has remained the same. If the hashes changed, something has changed on the firmware, right? So therefore, you then put into operation your other normal security procedures. What I should say here is it doesn't provide security, it provides an early warning system. So it tells you something's gone wrong, but it doesn't fix the problem for you. So a lot of people say blockchain is more secure, or is a secure solution, I fundamentally disagree with that. Blockchain is as secure as any other solution, and you need to apply all of your security around it as you would in any other situation. And so, yeah, thank you. And if anyone... Sorry. That was very fascinating. I have a couple of questions, though. So I'm assuming you have a lot of Bitcoins and you are going to pay for the next conference. Well, no, actually, I'm one of the very few academics who has not invested, because I think I would have a conflict of interest. I'm just kidding. So the point here is this is all enterprise-blockchain. But there are a couple of people here who obviously can fund your next conference. I've got the names of the people with their hands up, that's all right. Oh, cool. No, so my point being this is enterprise-blockchain. Nothing to do with cryptocurrency. From a timing perspective for the telecom market, we've started seeing the usual hype cycle of, hey, blockchain is critical and things like that. As we deploy SDN and NFV and VNFs and CNFs, and I mean, there's a journey here, right? What is your expectation that the operators should, operators and vendors, right? What's the timing expectations roughly in terms of when you see this, I wouldn't say becoming mainstream, but at least getting to a point where pox can happen in an isolated instance. Yeah, I think we've already seen two or three pox happen in the telecommunication space. My question will be when do those scale up, right? So we've seen the one between PCCW Global and Colt, and actually that's been expanded now to four other operators. And I think that could be a very interesting initiative to watch. As for, so enterprise blockchain, I think, is starting to stabilize. I think once now we're moving into newer versions of Hyperledger with Sawtooth and Fabric, they're becoming a lot more stable. And the one key thing that I think is important for blockchain is this idea of interoperability between blockchains. So everyone here will understand the importance of interoperability in standards. And we're seeing a lot more now that there is ability, for example, to build on Hyperledger, but integrate towards Ethereum sort of situations. As for cryptocurrencies, I always caution people and warn people that the biggest problem is not necessarily the technology. The biggest problem is understand the economic incentives behind how you would build a cryptocurrency. So I'm both a computer scientist and an economist. So I work with both areas. And quite often, you will see people of design solutions where the market tends to zero. Something that I would caution the telecommunications market quite strongly about because of the way that you're structured and regulated. So on the economic part, if you were to say the number one reason why someone would do blockchain, I mean, we can do everything without blockchain, technically. But the number one or two reason why we would do it is it lower cost? Is it better accuracy? Is it simplified? Apex? Is it like, what is the real driver beyond the fact that it's pretty cool? Yeah, beyond the fact that it's cool. I would suggest that it is reduced complexity, giving cost savings. And then probably in the next five to 10 years, increased revenue. But I see that as a longer term perspective. OK, so it does simplify the operations. And you do because you don't want to. OK, very good. That's what we're saying. Yep, I think that's very insightful, very good. Thank you very much. Thank you.