 And we're now coming to the keynote of Brian Beilendorf. Brian, by the way, I always wanted to ask you, do you have like a German roots because it's a German name? Not any more recent than something like six generations back. I have been to the town of Bellendorf. It's just outside of Hamburg. And then there's a little lake there called the Bellendorfersee, which I always laugh at. But yeah, nothing directly there. I'm very much mixed. Okay, nice. So that's, yeah, but like it always feels like connected when somebody has like a name like from, you know, another region or something. So yeah, really nice to have you here. So let me introduce you Brian. Brian Beilendorf is the general manager for Blockchain Healthcare and Identity at the Linux Foundation. In his capacity, Brian leads both the Hyperledger Open Source Enterprise Blockchain Software Initiative, as well as Linux Public Health, which builds software and services that assist public health authorities in the fight against the pandemic. Brian has a long history with open source software going back to co-founding the Apache web server project in 1995. And from that point forward, founding or working for a series of companies like Wired Magazine, Organic, CollabNet. Non-profits like the World Economic Forum and Governments, for example, the Office of Science and Tech Policy 2009 and where he was an advisor. Brian currently also serves on the board of directors of the Mozilla Foundation and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. So that's very strong track record in free and open source. And yeah, we are very interested in your presentation now in your keynote, Hyperledger and the current state of Enterprise Blockchain. Brian, thank you very much for joining us and I hand over to you. Thank you. Thank you, Mario and thank you to everyone watching now. I'm really, really happy to see not only the FOSS Asia event continuing on in a virtual setting here. I regret that I could not make it to Singapore and be there, that we all could be together in person. I can't wait for face-to-face events to start to happen again, hopefully this year. But I'm also really happy that the conference is using open source software itself for the video platform, for the big blue button. I think some other parts of it use JITSI. It's just a testament to the fact that open source software not only can be about operating systems and databases and these low level pieces, but also about the newer software, the stuff that is more say cutting edge but even more urgent in the world that has only gotten way more connected in the last year. I'm gonna talk a bit about Hyperledger and some of you might know about who we are, where we came from. I thought I would actually start for this audience with a bit of a story for why I believe this field of enterprise blockchain technology and kind of the difference between it and the cryptocurrency kind of angle on blockchain is actually the third chapter of what I would say started with open standards even before open source software in like the mid-60s, the mid-70s where you had people realize if we're gonna get more connected, we better agree on the protocols for how we get connected to open source software and its rise in the 90s really as a way to say, if we're gonna get better connected we should be writing software to each other to make it easy to adapt and adopt those technologies and make connecting as low cost as possible and be able to evolve it to really now looking at open networks and the way to try to get away from the same kind of closed thinking that caused all of us as Linux users in the 90s to kind of point a target on Microsoft and say, well, at least we don't wanna be like them. Now Microsoft is one of the biggest open source companies of course, but now there's other companies who've kind of positioned themselves in this very central kind of role and blockchain technology really represents a chance to re-interrogate that. Do we really need to live in a world where all the interesting useful stuff happens in these big central services or can we do something different? And that's what motivates me. So, you know, just to get a start here in 1964, Paul Barron was one of the, you consider one of the kind of ancestors of the internet published a series of papers articulating what a properly decentralized architecture for networking would look like. One that, and he tried to draw the distinction even in this paper from over, what is it almost 60 years ago, between centralized networks with a hub at the center, very much kind of like how I most command and control networks at the time worked to decentralized but still rooted in a couple of key places which is how perhaps the phone networks really worked at the time, allowed for breaks in the network, but depending on how it was broken, you could get cut off from everyone else to something that was much more distributed, something that was really about every node being diversely connected to other nodes and through that being able to withstand quite a bit of network failure and breaks between those nodes, right? And inherently kind of operating at a level where we're peers and we mostly got what we wanted out of that original design for the internet. There still are some places where there is an inevitable amount of centralization that was required. I'd point to the domain name system, point to IANA, which is the organization that assigns IP addresses, I'd point to, you know, a few other organizations that were still voluntary but kind of centralized like the Internet Engineering Task Force, but, you know, those were authorities we could pick. And the interesting thing about all those authorities is they had to earn their right to be authorities in this distributed network. If there was an organization that could do the domain name system better than ICANN, they had every chance to kind of rise up and be an alternative or better than the Internet Engineering Task Force, they absolutely could be. So we mostly got what we want at the level of TCP, IP, DNS, SMTP for email and HTTP. Any one of you can set up your own email server today. There's actually a great thing called Mail in a Box that allows you to do that at your home or on a droplet, a digital ocean or anywhere else that you wanna host that. You could also, of course, run your own mail server. But where we've ended up now, I really, when you talk about the core ways that people use email or social networking or file sharing or frankly, even today, building enterprise applications, there's a very small number of organizations that sit at the heart of most of these. And in some cases, they compete on equal grounds, Google and Amazon and Microsoft and others compete for cloud services. You can move your Kubernetes containers from one to another. But there really is no other alternative to Twitter. Twitter is kind of a closed system. And I love Twitter. I use it every day. I do scroll every night like the rest of you. But Twitter is a very centralized service, even something that Jack Dorsey recognizes and has started to fund explorations of an alternative too. But most of the way that we build these social networks today and you could even look at what's happened to email with Gmail. Gmail is the majority of email traffic on the internet today. There's a disturbing amount of centralization. Even though the underpinnings have been decentralized and distributed, there's been a re-centralization up above. And I'm talking here about the easy consumer examples that we can point to that everyone can relate. But there's a real risk that these architectures that we've built lead to the same kind of centralization and things like supply chains or financial markets or other systems of the world that are typically regulated, that are typically about different companies kind of trying to compete on a fair and level playing field. So there's a risk that if we don't try to answer this challenge of building up from these layers, how do we make it easy to build decentralized and distributed architectures? We may end up with in every category one dominant company dominating things like equities markets or the supply chains in key products. And if that were to happen, it would be a much different world. We'd end up with companies that were stronger than countries and not sure that's what we were on. So to get back to this kind of decentralized internet and thinking broadly about what the internet is, what we really need are databases and information systems because that's what it gets to the heart of. Those companies that are at the center, they're there because the data is there and they have our relationships that are centralized there. We need to think about ways to make these cooperative systems that are multi-master. What I mean by multi-master is that you can have a whole bunch of different organizations that are all peers to each other at the core of that. They're verifiable. So the data that you store in one, you know that it can't change without your noticing, right? Very much like GitHub. You know, if somebody were to try to silently change the repository on GitHub, you'd know because GitHub operates off of hashes and the pull requests are based and commit IDs are based on hashes that can be verified, right? It would be append only in these databases, right? Because once something is written and published, you can certainly update it. You can certainly, you know, publish something new, but if you were to try to prevent that, you know, you didn't say something or something went unsaid, that would get complicated really quick. You want them to, you want them to be programmable rules for how these updates get made as well. If you want it to make, you want to make sure that if somebody says, you know, I own a thing, I have a possession of a digital asset that that asset can't then be transferred to multiple people at the same time, right? This is called prevention of double spend in Bitcoin and other systems, but the idea that there are these sequences that as a network, we need to enforce the proper behavior around the way that things change on that network. Think of it like the equivalent of stored procedures and databases, right? You can't actually change a thing without going through the process. That's a very important concept to bake into these decentralized systems. Such a network also needs to be resilient to hostile actors. It can't be too easy to corrupt what's going on, you know, as a participant in that network, you can't, you know, for it to actually work, it has to be able to stand up to attacks, even attacks from a large number of determined attackers. It needs to be resilient to network issues if something happens to a cable across an ocean and suddenly whole continents aren't able to talk to each other. There needs to be a way to reconcile and come back to a consensus on what that database says going forward. And finally, just like free and open source software, the thing that keeps power in check, the thing that keeps us from becoming dominated and tyrannized is the right to fork. And this is something all of you know is inherent in every open source license is the right to take that code and go in a different direction than the original developers want you to. Obviously we all want to work together. If you come up with a bug fix, I'd love to have a copy of it. You know, we want to be as good that upstream as we can be, but the right to fork, the ability for software to split is inherent in controlling power and keeping power at bay. And likewise on these decentralized systems, there's always the risk that one party gets too much network power. And the only way to combat accelerating returns from network effect is to make such networks forkable. So we really need a cooperative network between nodes, you know, like on any given kind of business use case, let's just think about that for the second that comprise lots of different kinds of organizations, right? In this kind of humming benzene ring, if anyone remembers chemistry and remembers that a benzene ring is kind of a magical unit that has like one and a half bonds between every carbon atom, right? If I got that right, hopefully I did. And you almost have to treat it as a unified thing rather than as something that can be teased apart. So we need this cooperative network that forged from nodes running free and open source software because that's the way that you know that it's running in the way that it should. If every bit of software running on this was owned by a certain company and it was proprietary software, you'd never quite know if all of these were working together and whether your interests were being defended. And it needs to be based on technical standards and an open governance model. And we talked a little bit in the last session about what human governance looks like in there. I'd still argue that it's pretty important to have in these network systems. So what I'm talking here, it's just like the blockchains underneath cryptocurrencies, right? But maybe not. There's plenty of concerns out there regarding energy consumption derived from the proof-of-work consensus mechanism. Apologies. There's plenty of regulatory issues like those that we dove into in the past regarding how there's a lot of concern about the role that financial speculation plays in driving clashing motivations between the people who wanna see that network deliver utility and the people who wanna be rewarded for mining on those networks and the people who want the token value to increase. Those interests are not always aligned. Sometimes those interests diverge. And that's something that I think I see a lot of folks struggle with when it comes to even using Bitcoin today at the prices they're at, trying to get transactions cleared at a reasonable price and quickly is a big challenge, right? That gets into performance, of course, but really this question of data privacy exists as well. Regulations like the GDPR and the California Privacy Act and others say, even if we use all the perfect cryptography in the world to implement zero-knowledge proofs across networks like this, if a mistake is made, how do we recover? And that's where you need a governance model and that really underpins everything else that can come back and say, okay, we collectively as a community need to have a mechanism to have hard conversations and make decisions and do things beyond what was anticipated originally by the designers of the system and the smart contracts that run on them. So one solution to all of this is distributed ledger technology. I'm not gonna say it's the only one. In fact, there are many cases for why it is an inferior one but tends to be, in fact, I would say there is no use case for which distributed ledger and blockchain technology is going to be the fastest, is going to be the cheapest to deploy, is gonna be the most flexible. You're always gonna buy any classical technical measure, be a better way to solve any of these kinds of problems with a centralized database. But there's reasons we don't wanna do that, right? As I just went into, we don't wanna empower an 800 pound gorilla at the center of these networks. So how do we do this in a cooperative way? So DLT technology is a way to get to that network of participating organizations without requiring proof of work, consensus mechanisms, which means you don't have the energy consumption issues that Bitcoin and Ethereum have. Now, some cryptocurrencies do use proof of stake and proof of authority and some other approaches. So it's worth keeping in mind, but the enterprise distributed ledger systems operate without needing to use that. They use what's called a Paxos, Byzantine fault tolerant, other types of algorithms that are actually just much more efficient. They are also able to operate this using, they still are able to have tokens and digital assets on a system, but there isn't a mining and nor is there like an ICO, nor is there necessarily one token at the center of that network. But you are able to support, say, central bank digital currencies or frequent flyer miles or any type of kind of currency that people have and expect out there. These kinds of networks can use the same smart contract technology that the public cryptocurrency networks use. The Ethereum Solidity smart contract language is very well supported under Quorum and Hyperledger Bezu. You can talk some more about that in a bit. And the way that these networks tend to be operated is with all these different nodes run by parties who are permissioned and using certificate authorities. So there is an important question, what is that governance model? What is the, who runs the certificate authorities and issues these certificates to participate on the network? And this is very much like the CA problem we have today. If you have too many of these certificate authorities and the standards that they have are very low, you can end up with security issues and operational issues. So that is an appropriate place to ask what is the right granularity, what's the right size, that sort of thing. And again, it's very much like open source projects where you join an open source project based partly on what it does, but also based partly on the leadership behind that software coming together. These types of networks can always interoperate with public blockchains or other payment networks. They can always say, I'll transfer a title to this car on this permissioned launcher and I'll correlate that to an Ethereum transaction that happened here in which you bought the car, right? And then finally, we should be able to map these technologies to existing consortia and governance systems. This is really important because as much as everyone wants to bring down the banks, to bring down the way that regulations and the systems of the world work today because it's not working for an awful lot of people, finding ways to meet up with the people who designed and run those systems for good reason, right? And say, maybe there's a way to map how these consortia work or how these rules work into the underlying blockchain and distributed ledger platform, that's gonna be a lot more impactful and probably lead through automation and through rootinization of processes that are right now very human-based, hopefully eliminate a lot of corruption and take things that used to take weeks or months and have them take days or hours. I think that's the goal for a lot of this. So this is what we've been building at Hyperledger is a set of distributed ledger platforms that can meet the kinds of needs described in that last slide. That can meet the need for software that can run on a node if you're a bank to set up a banking network where you're conducting settlement of payments, where you're conducting sharing information about account holders where you are, or if you're on a supply chain, if you are a supplier or a distributor or a retailer and you wanna track product as it moves from one place to another or as actually a new approach to digital identity through by using such sharing networks as a way to essentially record public keys for individuals or for issuers, that sort of thing. So as a fresh approach to PKI, these are all ways in which these platforms are being used today. In the interest of time, I won't go into too much depth, but I'll just kind of highlight that. Across the board, we've got six different technologies and people might say that's kind of crazy. Why would you want six different ways to build a blockchain ledger? And it might be a few more than you actually need. I'm not gonna say anything about that. I love all my children, of course, but there are a couple of platforms that are really category leading. And in a way, it's kind of like databases. No one says out there, well, there should only be Postgres, there should only be MySQL, and that they should just merge, right? And users on one should just move to the other. There's always gonna be a bit of rivalry or somebody like MongoDB, who is very much a no-SQL kind of angle on things, right? And likewise, these platforms do differ in meaningful ways. Fabric comes more from a transaction, online LLTP kind of big iron kind of transaction processing background. Whereas Hyperledger Bezu, for example, comes from the Ethereum community. Comes from a company called Consensus, who has been building Ethereum network clients for a long time. And Bezu actually runs both on enterprise permission blockchain networks and on the public cryptocurrency networks. But it's some of the other ones have an interesting backstory as well. Hyperledger Indy is very focused on digital identity and Hyperledger Roja is actually one of my first examples. It's been deployed for very, very focused distributed digital asset environments. And I'll talk about an example very soon. In fact, that's my next slide. So you might be wondering how are these technologies used out there in the real world? And where are they solving some problems? And again, I kind of alluded in the last panel, a lot of this stuff is behind the scenes. A lot of this stuff is hard to track with the granularity of a price on coin market cap, right? But as one example, the National Bank of Cambodia has launched into production now into apps being used by their citizens, something called the Bakong project, which is essentially a central bank digital currency issued by the National Bank of Cambodia and harmonizing accounts across all of the major financial institutions in Cambodia. It was built by a company called Sora Nitsu using Hyperledger Roja, which they are the primary contributor to. And the network actually sits and manifests by nodes running at all these different member banks as well as at the central bank of Cambodia. The end user has one app and the end user from that app can move their balances from one bank to another and know that that is a real-time view of the assets that they have and that that represents the system of record for where their assets are across these different banks. It was intended as a way to try to make the currency system for Cambodia much more pervasive. Sometimes the US dollar is used in Cambodia in circumstances where really the Cambodian prefer that you use their currency. And so bringing that down to a mobile app that can run on very low-end hardware was a key focus for them. And they didn't want every bank to have to have its own mobile app. They thought that that would be confusing. So this is a way to bring that together in a still in a decentralized way, still in a way that allows all these different banks to have confidence in the balances and in the assets that they are responsible for rather than simply what say the Bank of Cambodia tells them is in their account. So I'm happy to share more with that. It's on the Hyperledger website as a case study with the Director General of the National Bank of Cambodia herself, Madam Chia Serre actually playing a very front-end role in understanding how the tech works and being an advocate for it out there in the world. It's really amazing. As another example, there's a, there's a, I wanna say a company, but they're really more of a social impact company, kind of almost a nonprofit called Kiva based in the United States, but they've been active in the microfinance and microlending space for years and years, for over a decade, I believe. And they've been key to enabling microloans in all sorts of different countries and front-ending small microfinance institutions in those countries like in the Philippines or in India or in other places. But in certain countries where there is no national credit bureau system, their rates of lending are very high because the rates of default are high because without a credit bureau, knowing what your credit history is, is impossible. And so if I lend to you, and the odds are 30% that you're gonna have a default, I have to charge a 30% interest rate just to break even, right? Modulate certain things. And so Kiva had an opportunity to work with the government of Sierra Leone to implement a digital identity system and a credit bureau system. And they chose to do this in a way that wouldn't create a gigantic centralized repository of this, but instead to push it not only to the perimeter, but push it to the individuals themselves in a way that implemented something called self-sovereign identity or user-centric identity and kept the credit bureau records in a form that was privacy preserving. And that has now been issued. There's something like 7 million citizens now in Sierra Leone with a self-sovereign identity using a mobile wallet given to them by Kiva. They're not spending money that's tracked by the blockchain. This isn't a cryptocurrency or any kind of currency network. This is about identity and about proving when you take out a loan and you pay it back that you've been able to pay it back and you're therefore a good credit risk for the next loan that you'd like to get. This is implemented now on top of a combination of hyperledger technologies and is really just a lot of fun to know that it's out there and know that we're having a positive impact in a country like Sierra Leone. You can read more about it on the hyperledger website. The third example I'll give, again, these might sound like kind of boring back office kinds of things. And this one is perhaps the most in that vein. But I think it's one of the more fascinating ones which is in the United States, in the insurance industry, often there is a need, especially around the kinds of companies that offer insurance in like home insurance and fire insurance, flood insurance, those sorts of things. They have to share information with regulators on a regular basis that talks about where they've had to spend money. There was a flood or an earthquake or a big fire or like the gigantic freeze that happened in Texas a few weeks ago. They need to share information in ways that can be confidential, that can be verified, that can't be taken back and that get processed by certain parties. And one of those is an organization called AIS, the American Association of Insurance Services. They've been using hyperledger fabric to deploy a network where there's peers on that network from the insurance companies as well as the regulators, as well as those who perform analytics on that data. The data gets published there, not in clear text, but simply as hashes that then reference larger data files that are shared off-chain between the different parties. But the record of them there satisfies a regulatory need to make sure that reporting is happening on a regular basis. And then through the analytics as well, they're able to show that there's high integrity in the results of that analytics processing. Basically it's a way for the insurance industry to get smarter about where risk is to be able to respond more quickly and try to keep rates as low as they can. And it was a system that was pretty burdensome until AIS came up with a way to do it in a decentralized way using blockchain technology. And again, you can read more about that on the hyperledger website. There's a ton more examples out there. There's an article that Forbes put out on the blockchain 50 called the Blockchain 50, which talked about 50 different companies, all of them north of a billion in revenue that deploy blockchain technology, the enterprise DLT technology. And 26 of those, I'm sorry, actually 20, 30 of them. Actually this year, technically 30 of them are using hyperledger fabric-based technologies. There are a couple of those where it wasn't mentioned in the article that we know that they're using hyperledger behind the scenes. But a lot of them are, these are in production today across these different organizations. And that's where it's hard to say, what's the, what are the downloads? Where's the activity? It's in this kind of dark matter inside these organizations. But we know, because we see people from these companies joining the developer community, asking questions, engaged, and service providers to those as well. So in those five years since we've launched, we showed you the greenhouse with 16 different projects, shown you the different production releases that have hit. We've also felt it was important to build a supportive community of companies around the different technologies as well as training and certification of those as well. In fact, I'll show you a little bit. What we provide all those different projects at hyperledger, and this is really because of our pedigree at the Linux Foundation, how we run these projects is a set of available tools from obviously GitHub and Wiki and chat, all the ones that developers are used to, but organized in a very familiar way. A common IP framework using something called the developer certificate of origin to make sure that enterprises are comfortable where all the code is coming from and that it's under the Apache license so that they know they can use it, their legal teams don't have to give them grief over that sort of thing. There's also standardized processes for reporting security holes and we do bug scans and all that kind of stuff, but really drives it as the volunteer developer culture at the heart of these projects and trying to make those standardized across all the hyperledger projects so that you can move quickly from one project, say fabric to another like Aries and know that the same tooling and the same requirements apply. And then on the Linux Foundation side, we try to do all the things that aren't about writing software that are about helping the developers feel like they're able to be productive. It's about helping explain to the world what they're doing. It's about helping make sure that the stuff is being built in a secure way and then go out and talk to the world about it and build that sustainable commercial ecosystem on top. We also have across all of our projects a number of working groups that focus on things like architecture and identity, on performance and scalability, on how the code gets documented on a very important topic, diversity. That'll make sure that the community is as welcoming and taking really advantage of all the different people out there who are not only using this technology but have an interest in trying to advance it. And that's how we try to weave these technologies together. We also have a series of special interest groups which are all about trying to help explain how this technology works to people in the healthcare industry, in telecom, in trade finance, in climate action. Here's how you'd use these technologies and often it's people from those industries coming in and saying, here's a project that we're doing. Could you give us advice about how to do it better? Here's some results that we're seeing. Here's the way we thought about using the tech. So we felt it was really important to match the developers up with the people trying to use these technologies for some really interesting and different kinds of use cases. I mentioned we have a really global community at Bay. I don't wanna dwell too much on it but we've been using the Meetup platform quite a bit to be able to enable all these different communities. Communities there in Singapore. I spoke at a Singapore Meetup a few years ago. Communities all over India where we've opened a chapter in India connecting our Meetup communities there for like an India wide kind of chapter that's been really great but also all over Latin America and other places. We also make extensive use of YouTube where we've published both recordings from the virtual events that have been happening as well as tons of other kind of presentations and things just to get the word out about what we're doing. As I mentioned, it's also really important we believe to build a commercial ecosystem on top of this code so that people who are using this and improving it are feeding those improvements back into upstream. I mean, our goal is to be the best upstream we can be but we know we also need to see other companies making money using these technologies and getting that loop going. So we have 20 of those. We also have over 10 different organizations who have built what we call low or no code commercial options around the deployment of hyperledger fabric out there and making that and really move quickly as well. I won't go too much because I know we're getting low on time here about some of the differences between the core platforms. I mentioned fabric and it's really, I'd say the most widely used of the different hyperledger platforms today. It's something where there's a really regular cadence of new releases coming out of bugs being fixed and it's really been used in some high demand kinds of environments. So really recommend that that be one of the starting points you consider if you're diving into this. The other starting point I'd go into now, if I were starting now is with hyperledger Bezu. There are so many people out there now familiar with the Ethereum stack of technologies who might not realize you can use this in permission blockchain settings. And then in fact, this is production used in production in quite a few in a couple of banking networks and a couple of supply chain networks. This is real code and it's moving quickly and it's tracking where the Ethereum ecosystem is taking its own evolution as they move to proof of stake and Ethereum too and those sorts of things. So some really exciting things happening there. If I had more time, I'd tell you about all sorts of different other projects we've got going on inside of hyperledger. One of these that is getting really the most attention is hyperledger Aries, which is a collection of wallet libraries for building digital identity wallets on top of the concept of self-sovereign identity and using hyperledger Indy as the underlying ledger for that. Although there's a lot of talk now about adapting and porting Aries to other ledger underpinnings. This is being picked up today in a lot of use cases in government and I mentioned Kiva, but right now there's a lot of interest and focus on this for the deployment of digital vaccination records, digital vaccination passports, if you want to call on that. Basically a way to prove you've been vaccinated when you're crossing a border. Lots of deep and important issues there technically as well as ethically that five more time I would go into but it is a huge part of my focus right now is thinking about as those platforms do get rolled out, how do we make sure they preserve privacy and they deliver agency to the individuals using those kinds of credentials and avoid creating the same kind of privacy or tracking problems that we've had online with cookies, right? Which is certainly where we do not want to head. And then across the libraries and tools, things that we think developers are really gonna be interested in using to manage their hyperledger deployments. And one of the ones that I think is really interesting is hyperledger Avalon, which is focused on using secure enclave technology to implement zero knowledge proofs across any type of ledger environment. So as a standardized way to use whether it's the embedded TE functionality and things like Intel's chips or it's through advanced cryptography to try to get that across general purpose hardware. This is where there's really interesting stuff going on and stuff that lines up with the Confidential Computing Consortium which is another project at the Linux Foundation. Also wanna mention hyperledger labs which is like a foundry for some new ideas for things that might even be special use case focus. One of the ones I really like is the Blockchain Carbon Accounting Project which is focused on if we're going to implement things like the Paris Accords or other carbon marketplaces or emissions marketplaces out there using smart contracts and using things that could span multiple countries, how might we do that? And there's a lot of interest there from folks who are building some of the prototyping for how folks plan to get this implemented for the upcoming Paris commitments and the like. So really fun to see that deployed there. We've also been spending a lot on trying to help internationalize our hyperledger projects in particular, starting with at least hyperledger fabric, we have a really active translations community that has started working on and in many cases made substantial progress on translating hyperledger fabric to English, I'm sorry, to Chinese, to Portuguese, Japanese, Malayam, Malayanam, sorry, pronouncing that wrong, Spanish, Russian, Tenno, and French. All of those are languages that collectively would open up about a billion new users to the platform. And so we're really eager to see that continue to grow. And we think in general translations are a great way to engage and build new contributors to open source projects. And so it's front of mind for us. We do a newsletter focused on developers would really love all of you to join that, that comes out each week that tells you what's going on in the community. Really important for us, as I mentioned before is highlighting civility and diversity at the core of hyperledger. There is a recording. These slides are now posted online, so those links should be clickable. There was a presentation given at our last face-to-face event just about a year ago, talking about the hyperledger approach to diversity and why that's important and how that's important to us. We do have an upcoming virtual event. Just flash it here. Let us know if you're interested in attending. It's taking place in June and it is online. One thing I just wanna end with is how we're running hyperledger as an open source project is very much how the Linux Foundation runs open source projects or facilitates, I really should say, communities around open source code. We don't ourselves fund that work. We do employ Linus Torvalds and Greg Crow Hartman and Shua Khan and a few other people in the core Linux kernel. But of all the hundreds of open source projects we host and at this point it's over 400 different distinct projects and involving membership from 2,000 different organizations and 41 different companies, 41 different countries involving contributions from almost a quarter million developers and different ways of measuring the impact. But one study came up with $54 billion and value created by the open source communities we've hosted. And last year we were adding a new project every week. The real focus has been on how do you make these projects sustainable? How do you really get a circle going between open source products that get used by companies to go out and build things and they generate profits from that that then come back into the projects that build those products, right? Not in any direct revenue kind of way, not in a, hey, IBM can you fund this one small thing for $20,000 kind of way, but instead builds this kind of ecosystem where the stakeholders who are making money from this realize that paying it forward and being engaged and actively funding not only their membership at the Linux Foundation, but also having full-time devs working on code and improving it is a faster way to get where they wanna go than buying proprietary software or trying to write everything themselves and keeping it to themselves. So that's what we really focus on at the Linux Foundation. All sorts of different kinds of projects that range from single code-based kinds of projects to umbrella organizations like Hyperledger that range from things that are way down in the plumbing like the Cloud Native Compute Foundation and obviously the Linux kernel to things that are kind of up at the end user level, things like this software project we do with the film studios called the Academy of Software, the Academy of Sciences Software Foundation which is all about Pixar and ILM and Disney and other animation firms sharing code to do digital filmmaking, right? Just kind of amazing like you can go in that direction to automotive software and all these other things. Linux Foundation has really become a home for this really wide variety of different projects. And with that, I think I'll pause and take a look at the questions that have been answered. But that's the big picture on where things are at and how things are going now with Hyperledger and with Enterprise Blockchain and it still feels like the same point it felt like in 1998 when actually 96 when we were five years into the worldwide web. Remember Tim Berners-Lee's first web browser, first web server was 1991. And by 96 we were still just getting off the ground. I'd say we'd make, we're a lot further along in those five years than the web was in its first five years and there's so much more that we can go in. So with that, let me pause and take a look at the shared notes and see if there have been questions. I think I'm gonna look there rather than in the chat because I know that was the structure that the folks wanted to use. Is that fine or should I look in the chat? Yeah, you can look in the shared notes. Brian, I'm just so impressed because we don't have to engage anything. You just work out everything yourself with such a pleasure to work with somebody who is really into open source and knows how to handle the system. So thank you very much for the flowers here that you also mentioned earlier. And yeah, we have two questions already and the audience please feel free to add more questions or direct them to us through the other channels. So the first question is this and I don't know who was asking this question. If there's additional questions you can also switch on your microphone. We're happy if you would like to have an interaction directly but I'll read it out for you. In the Cambodian example, do the end users participate upstream in the Hyperledger project or are they basically consumers? Yeah, so the company that implemented this for the Cambodian government is called Sora Mitsu and they've been incredibly active as a contributor. In fact, they lead the implementation of Hyperledger Iroha. They're not the only ones who work on Iroha there are plenty of others as well but they've built a business out of serving the needs. I mean, that's just one of their many different customers. Not aware if there's been any developers on the Cambodian side who have also participated or contributed anything upstream. They certainly could have but there have been, as I've mentioned, other contributors to Iroha, the upstream code. And I certainly expect that many of the other kinds of companies who do these blockchain services, those end user organizations will start to get engaged. I mean, one example of this is Walmart. Walmart started very much as a buyer of this kind of concept from companies like IBM and now have a very active internal team owning kind of this picture of, how should they use enterprise blockchain technology to go and do all the things that they wanna do? And I think we'll see many more end user organizations doing that kind of thing. Should I jump into the second question? I'm just like waiting like sometimes people need a moment to add a question. So, okay, so we can go on the second question and I would like to ask Roland to address the question directly. Good day, Brian. Actually, can you hear me? Yes. Yes, excellent. So this was sort of a shooting a bit high on the independence of one existing centralized infrastructure particularly DNS. I would need the technologies you're working with replacing DNS even for specialized use cases. And I'm not aware of the ETH thing. I'm wondering if there's people are working on anything else that has any plausible uses. So I would actually cite the domain name system as an example of minimum viable governance. The organization I can is certainly an organization that is easy to criticize. They've made certain questionable decisions historically. But one thing that can't be criticized is for being too big. They rightfully so have pushed all of the hard work and all the value capture of registering and serving domain names out to the domain name registrars. And there's a very healthy and active competitive ecosystem out there between over 200 of these domain name registrars. And the registrars are required to make it so that if you register a domain name with one, you can take it to a different registrar and have a consistent process for doing that. They also require have a uniform way to resolve disputes around, if I register Roland Turner sucks.com, you have a way to appeal that domain name and say that's not a good thing. I mean, more like McDonald's sucks or something like that, right? Some brand name sucks. And that's an important thing to have in any such system. So ICANN can always be improved, but think of how they push everything to the edge or as much to the edge as they can. What I haven't yet seen is a way in which what they do could be improved using blockchain technology necessarily. I do see several projects that have emerged out there on the cryptocurrency side to be a blockchain DNS alternative. And they typically land on things like first come, first serve to your domain name where it's like an asset, very much like an NFT, very much like a non-fungible token that then gets locked into the system. And I disagree with that because I think there are reasonable governance reasons why that shouldn't just be first come, first serve, right? It also doesn't seem to me, it seems like you wanna be able to have a price point for registering a domain names that it doesn't matter how big or small your website is or your domain is or how much in demand that name is. I've seen some sites implement auction systems or some proposals be, well, you should compete in an auction for the value of the domain name. Well, that would be very regressive, you know. It means somebody's name could be subject to somebody else trying to just bid it up and then steal their traffic or something like that. So I don't think that's a system that would be improved at this point by moving to a blockchain system. But that's only because ICANN has done a very good job doing something incredibly hard which is keeping the global domain name system consistent and relevant. I'd sooner look for the digital identity landscape to go that way because I don't think we're ever gonna see an ICANN style organization emerge when it comes to distributed digital identity. I think what we'll see is a collection of organizations like Sovereign, the Sovereign network that you've probably heard about, other types of layer one utility networks that are defined by something called the Trust Over IP Foundation, actually has a nice stack that defines what these different kinds of layers of governance can be. But optionality I think is gonna be really important there. But when it comes to routing packets on the internet like IANA and where do domain names resolve, I think there's an unavoidable degree of centralization required to provide that consistency. Let's just make sure ICANN is as accountable as they can be to the network. And if someday they do need to be replaced, I'd imagine a DLT driven replacement would be preferable to what they have now. I don't know what we're at on timing in terms of when you want to... Thank you. Sure. Okay. Thank you very much, Roland for this question. And I have another question here. As open source is playing such a big role, I guess in blockchain technology, does this also change the views and approach to FOSS in the industry? So FOSS for free and open source software, what is your observation? I hadn't thought about whether it actually changes the approach to free and open source software. I think today in the open source community, we do have an unfortunate degree of centralization. We all think without batting on the eyelash about having repos on GitHub. Now some people go ahead and host their own and there's GitLab for instance that makes hosting your own repositories very nice, but we don't have a nice way of getting the same social network effects that you have by being able to point to like your GitHub history, for example, right? Or stars on GitHub as a measure of how relevant your projects are and that sort of thing, right? And so it'd be really nice to see if we can get to better decentralizing tools for the software development process itself. Not just can you move a repo and host it at a GitHub hosted instance, but what would it actually mean to have a GitHub repo hosted virtually? Or for somebody's developer history and developer identity to transcend all these different sites without it just being about login with your GitHub ID, right? I should be able to log in with an identity attached to bryanetbellendorf.com or something like that, right? So that's where I think we might be too centralized in the FOS community. And one reason I'm so happy to see you all using Big Blue Button and Jitsi and things like that is we need more of that culture of the principle of we should use these technologies not because they're cheaper or faster to use or even technically better, but because there's an inherent freedom to how they're using that sets a principle that sets us in the right direction. So decentralization has been a topic like, for many years and I remember like how we deployed mesh networks here in Berlin I even went to Afghanistan and deployed like the old PC and mesh networks there, right? So these decentralization topics like they have been there long ago and like we have this search project here we cooperate with the Yasi community, right? The distributed search and so on. The challenge was always how to make this commercially viable. The challenge was like how to make it like, for example, as fast as Google search, right? Like how to make the connections as stable. If you, for example, had a lot of hops in a mesh network, it was a challenge. But today we see that these mesh technologies for example are used by companies more and more. So we see a blockchain, it's decentralized, yeah? But like we also see more decentralized projects and like work in other domains like Wi-Fi, yeah? And so on. So was it that it was all too early maybe like because I think like this decentralized view is like in the heart of many people that we want that, right? And what are your thoughts? Are we going like generally more into the direction of decentralization? And will that be just an extension of centralized framework? So for example, you have the mesh network but it's at the end, it's still the, you know, the internet companies, they still are centralized but you are just an extension and mesh. What are your thoughts? I think you are in a perfect position at the Unix Foundation to think about these things. Yeah. So I think one thing that's important for us at the Linux Foundation is to not get too far ahead of where the communities are. Hyperledger wasn't started because, you know, I or my boss felt that it was urgent to do it. It started because there were a set of companies who had already started talking before they called us who said maybe we should figure out how to use the technology underneath Bitcoin in a way that avoids some of the issues that we all have with Bitcoin, right? And again, lots of respect to Bitcoin but it doesn't have to be the only answer to how you converge on, you know, a distributed ledger. And so they approached the Linux Foundation because they knew that the LF had run other projects like this and then my boss got excited. Again, this happened before I got involved. Then my boss got excited and said, okay, this could be a big thing. Here's a whole bunch of other companies to call. Let's go ahead and do this. But likewise on the Linux Foundation public health initiative, you know, when the pandemic hit in March, you know, there are a bunch of us who said, well, is there some way that we could use technology in the fight against this pandemic? And I didn't talk much about that during my this talk here, but the first domain in a exposure notification, right? The contact tracing apps that tell you you've been close to somebody who's tested positive. You know, what became clear for some of us who were looking at that domain was that there was a need. People were calling out for an organization that could serve as a home for figuring out how to do this in a privacy preserving way. And that wasn't Apple or Google, right? That wasn't even Microsoft, right? That was somebody who could be neutral. Somebody who could be, you know, focused on the community, the people who show up, right? But also ethical enough to not push something that was inappropriate or would make the world worse off. And so when I think about other opportunities to go into other segments and what the Linux Foundation does, it goes and builds these projects, we always have to be kind of delicate because even if I think that there really ought to be an open source project that solves this problem, if I can't find a critical mass of people already thinking along the same lines, it's not gonna work very well. I can't sell that to people if they don't want it. So, you know, it's been frustrating sitting there and watching certain things like Facebook go from a college message board in 2006 to becoming something that brings down democracies. Maybe not, I should roll back on that. And yet there still isn't like this massive outcry for figuring out how to do decentralized social networking. There's a little bit more now than before though. And at a certain time, maybe there'll be enough incentive for companies to say, okay, this is the right thing to organize on. So it's just, it's so hard to break to where the market timing is on these things. My sense though is that this need to figure out cooperative models for implementing all the kinds of things that if they got centralized would be really bad. It's felt pretty strongly right now. It's just hard to put in the form of like a venture, a pitch to venture capitalists or for, you know, to raise money on or as a single company to find a sustainability model around. But if you can tie this to some sort of regulatory process, like people who want to make sure they're not buying the products of slave labor when they're buying, you know, a diamond or a tennis shoe, right? Wherever that conversation is happening around, how that industry can get to better traceability, you'll find a set of startup companies, small companies that have said, we can help with this industry through that transition. We've got ideas, we can use this open source software, we can marry that to our technical skills and get something like that done. And so I don't know that we'll see the next big Amazon or the next big Google come out of blockchain technology, but I think it'll help make the world a better place if we all use it to the extent that we can. Thank you very much. It sounds like another session should be done on this topic, but we're coming to the end and there's still like one question here. You are now also the GM for healthcare and identity. How is that connected to Hyperledger? I think you already addressed this a little bit, but maybe you want to mention? Yeah, just a little bit on the identity front, the Linux Foundation, well, within Hyperledger, one of the big use cases early on was been around digital identity. And especially Hyperledger Indy and Hyperledger Aries have now become kind of foundational technologies for implementing self-sovereign identity platforms, user-centric kind of identity. The Linux Foundation's recently added two new projects and they called Trust Over IP and the Decentralized Identity Foundation. They kind of started life kind of on the periphery and then came into the core. And they're both more like standards efforts, but a little bit of software. And then harmonizing that effort with Hyperledger is becoming important to do. And then thirdly, this Linux Foundation Public Health Project, it started in exposure identification, but right now it's very squarely in this vaccination credential space. And it's expected that that would use self-sovereign identity as part of the underpinning for how those platforms would work. So trying to harmonize all these efforts and show that blockchain had relevancy, particularly in these two domains, it'll have relevancy in a lot of others. But I felt like it was important to bring those efforts together at the Linux Foundation so that we were all working in the same direction. And my boss agreed. Jim Zemlin. So who's your boss? Jim Zemlin, sorry, Jim Zemlin, who's the overall executive director for the Linux Foundation. Of course. Yeah, Jim Zemlin, of course. Yeah, it's great. So I was just wondering. And Brian, we're at the end of this session, but I quickly want to also share with you because actually the chat system is kind of decentralized in a way that there are a lot of different chats here and there. I wish it was somehow on a technology where you can, for example, take a telegram chat into Signal and a Signal chat into Rocket Chat and so on, right? I think whoever can solve this problem, maybe that will be the big Amazon because I'm on tons of different channels. Now what I want to share what I'm getting here. So a feedback to your session is, I like Brian, okay? So people like what you do. Brian, he mentioned open source, yay. Yeah, so they really liked this industry and like then mentioned open source and he's a first person. So people really appreciate your background and that you're connecting these different worlds and really bringing this openness like everywhere, right? Like, so that's really nice. Brian, it's great to work at the Linux Foundation where I work with over 200 other people who are also very passionate and mission oriented about what they're doing and we're very active in Asia as you all know as well. So we're really, I really appreciate the opportunity to speak at this event and really hope that the audience was able to take a few things away that might be new for them and hopefully we can all meet face to face next year. Cool, so thank you very much for joining us. It has been an absolute pleasure. We appreciate your joining and I saw it like already very late, right? You like got up and we tried to find a suitable time so somehow it worked out and yeah, I really appreciate and a lot of people appreciate your work and that you connect with us here online. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mario. Thank you, everybody involved for making this happen. Have a good night and thank you.