 Hi, everybody, and thank you for joining us. My name is Robert Hackett, and I'm a senior writer at Fortune Magazine. Today, we're going to talk about blockchain and distributed ledger technology. Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies facilitate reliable transactions between entities without the need for traditional third party intermediaries. One of the most discussed innovations of this technology is the smart contract, a computer protocol that leverages cryptography and the immutability of on-chain data to enable self-executing credible transactions. While blockchain ecosystems can benefit with relative ease from smart contracts, this innovation's potential to drive efficiency and transparency can be truly realized if smart contract systems can communicate with legacy systems and establish the same level of trust. Many national systems that serve citizens, such as insurance, ID systems, real-time payment systems, property and land registries, hold crucial data for a country. Smart contract applications focused on various socioeconomic use cases will require secure and trustworthy communication with existing national systems to deliver transparency and immutability gains. A governance framework and strategic approach to build interoperability between blockchain and legacy systems is needed to unlock the disruptive power of smart contracts in the real economy. Thank you all for joining us for the release of the white paper, Bridging the Governance Gap, Interoperability for Blockchain and Legacy Systems, co-written by the World Economic Forum and Chainlink. We have a panel of experts here to talk about the need for interoperability, how it can be systematically approached by various organizations based on their varying needs, and what can be its impact on legacy systems as well as on the scale and pace of adoption of DLT applications. It's my pleasure to introduce our panelists here today. We have Sheila Warren, who is the head of blockchain digital assets and data policy for the World Economic Forum. She's also a member of the executive committee of the World Economic Forum. And as head of the data policy platform, she guides the forum's approach to data policy, crafting forward-looking interoperable and trustworthy data policies to fuel and accelerate responsible innovation and data use. Also the head of blockchain and digital assets platform, Sheila leads the forum's efforts to accelerate the growth path of this technology through a portfolio of initiatives spanning diverse geographies. She's a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law. Next up, we have Santosh Mishra. Mr. Mishra is a technology and technologist and a part of the Indian administrative services, the bureaucratic backbone of the government of India. He currently serves as the CEO of Tamil Nadu e-governance agency and as commissioner of e-governance for the state of government for Tamil Nadu India. Under his leadership, state of Tamil Nadu achieved a unique distinction of becoming the first state to have developed a blockchain policy as a guide for the path ahead in using the technology in the state. Mr. Mishra studied engineering at IIT Kanpur and University of Minnesota and worked at AT&T Bell Labs before joining the Indian bureaucracy. Last up, we have Sergey Nazarov who's the co-founder of Chainlink, the leading decentralized Oracle network used by global enterprises and projects at the forefront of the blockchain space. Chainlink enables smart contracts on any blockchain to reliably connect to real world data and currently secures billions in value for smart contracts across the DeFi or decentralized finance space plus insurance and gaming industries, among other places. Working with leading banks, insurance companies and large tech firms on the creation of universally connected smart contracts gives Nazarov a unique perspective on what is required to drive mainstream adoption of blockchain technology. Hi everybody, thank you so much for joining me today. So we're gonna have some time, by the way, for any participants on the call for questions at the end. So if anything comes up, please just drop a note in the chat on the side over here and I will get to it. But first off, I'll kick things off to my panelists. My first question is for Sheila. Given your broad view of everything going on in this world at the World Economic Forum, what are you seeing? What are the current areas of distributed ledger technology that are most capturing your interest? Thanks, Robert, for the question. I think what's most capturing my interest, frankly, is just seeing the unique ways in which people are using this technology. I think that we all knew it had tremendous potential. Any of us who work in this space knew it had tremendous potential from the very beginning, even beyond financial services or fintech. What we're seeing in the explosion of different kinds of products that are being created, even using this pretty basic technology layer that currently exists are really exciting. So certainly things like D5, our centralized finance is we're keeping an eye on. We're looking at how companies are using or trying to use or want to use this technology connected into their existing legacy systems and how they kind of see this revolutionizing their own internal operations. That's actually really exciting. But I think what's getting all the attention right now certainly is some of the sort of the money generating stuff, right? Like the D5 and some of the new protocols that are coming out. So the speculation that's happening around here, the price of Bitcoin is an ongoing topic for sure. And we're really tracking that too. We will be foolish not to. So it's the variety that I find most interesting what I think makes this technology so exciting. And yes, especially right now with the price of Bitcoin, I haven't last checked, but I mean, it was approaching 20,000, the last time I was looking at the price. So it is rebounding like it hasn't in years. I'm wondering, this technology has gone through phases and cycles, at one point, Bitcoin was hot and then it was blockchain, then it was Ethereum and ICOs. Now it seems to be a little bit of D5, but Bitcoin kind of rearing its head again. Where are we right now? Like what actually is getting people interested? What is getting attention? What are you seeing? Yeah, well, I certainly think that Bitcoin is always getting attention and that's in part because it's like the grandfather of the space, right? It was the first and therefore it's always gonna have sort of an outsized degree of attention. But I think that a lot of the attention on Bitcoin, if I may be frank, is really on it, on the speculation aspects of it. So as it approaches 20,000, people are, do I buy in, do I not, am I investing? But what's different, I think, about this cycle is that we're really seeing institutional investors come into play and that reflects, I think, how enterprises are thinking about blockchain technology and distributed ledger technology is a general matter. We are seeing, at the beginning of days, it was really kind of individuals who were driving the speculation. And in the 2017 to 2018 bubble, we really had average people calling me, right? Texting with, do I buy Bitcoin or what do I do, all that. Now you're seeing a lot of institutional movement. And so it feels very different to me. It doesn't feel like that earlier to August, three years ago. It doesn't really feel quite like that to me. It feels more real. It feels like there's not just air underneath all of that. And so I think that enterprise really is taking off with this technology. It's quieter. So it's not something that's getting the same amount of public attention or public press, but it has been a steady growth of enterprise attention to distributed technologies. And that, I think, was the impetus in part for our work here today, which is to say, rather than requiring any enterprise to convert everything over onto a blockchain back system, which isn't necessarily realistic, how do you think about interoperability among a legacy system and enterprise system? And I think it's the chain of those different systems together that's going to create the most power. So where are we seeing that? There's a lot of exploration in supply chain technology for sure. We issued out of the forums team a supply chain deployment toolkit. Interestingly enough, we didn't talk about whether or not blockchain is useful for a supply chain. We took that as axiomatic, took it for granted. What we said was, okay, how do you deploy a supply chain, a blockchain for supply chain when you realize that there's going to be some value to you, right? So it was almost like a next order kind of kind of piece of work. Similarly, what we're realizing here is to say, don't be, don't feel threatened by this. It's not that you have to kind of, oh gosh, two years ago, you overhauled your entire IT backend systems. And now guess what? And that was odd. That should be obsolete. Everything should switch over onto a blockchain. That's not realistic, nor does it make sense, right? Blockchain has certain uses and it's valuable in certain contexts, more so than in some cases in others. So how do you chain together and connect your different systems to create a more powerful ecosystem? Supply chain is an example that I'll leave you with, but we're seeing this in other places as well. We're seeing it in insurance, we're seeing it in the travel space. We're certainly seeing activity here around digital health certificates and pandemic response. So lots of different applications and a variety of uses, but the fundamental foundational architecture is what I think I'm finding most exciting. And then just very quickly, there was that period where there was a mantra, it was blockchain, not Bitcoin. And I'm wondering now in this kind of period where the hype is building again, if there is a synergy between hype in cryptocurrencies and Bitcoin and in distributed ledger technologies. I know at one point they really sort of had a mutual reinforcing impact. Is that the same today with the elevated hype in Bitcoin particularly? Or are those two concepts kind of divorced from one another? Yeah, that is a great question. You know, they are certainly connected because of course what is, what's being speculated upon or with is of course the same thing as the foundational technology in some cases, right? So if you look at ETH for example, at Ethereum, you know, a lot of people are building on Ethereum. And so if the value is changing, does that reflect that utility or is it more speculative? And it's hard to say, you know, I certainly think anytime the price of any of these things just pumps up the skyrockets, that is usually not because if people are paying attention to the underlying utility of the thing, it's really more about speculation, right? But that's not to say, that's kind of my point was that it's not to say that there has not been a steady growth in this space that is, I do think is reflected in kind of where the value tends to steady, like when it comes down off these big highs, like where it tends to kind of fall and stay as a steady state does reflect, I think that there has been growing use of what's happening underneath. But that being said, you know, Bitcoin is not blockchain, you know, blockchain is not Bitcoin. Like all of that was sort of what everyone was saying over and over including myself, you know, in 2018 to get people to understand the distinction between cryptocurrency and the technology's functional purpose and use. I don't think that's a conversation we're having anymore and people who are paying attention understand exactly which is which and what is what. But I think at that time as this really hit mainstream and it was making like all the news cycles on mainstream news outside of like the crypto bubble, you know, bubble of people, I do think that was an important thing people to understand, you know, I do think that was critical. But yeah, they're always going to be connected because fundamentally, you know, the Bitcoin blockchain is a blockchain, right? Ethereum blockchain is a blockchain, you know? And so, but there are plenty of other opportunities with the technology that really don't have anything to do or really aren't primarily about cryptocurrency or tokens or anything like that. And that's also true. So you had mentioned this kind of interoperability between legacy systems and with blockchains. And Santosh is working on that actually in government which is incredibly interesting. And I want to pass it to him in just a moment but first I want to get to Sergey because Sergey, you're working at Chainlink and you're doing a lot of this work that is going to enable this to happen. I'm wondering if you could provide just a little bit of background on what Chainlink is doing and why this technology is at all valuable. I'm not sure, you might be on mute, Sergey. Sorry, sure. First, I'd like to say thank you to the World Economic Forum and Sheila and Punit who co-authored the report with us because I think it's important to highlight the usefulness of blockchains to the government and the other sector. And then I'm really impressed by Mr. Mishra in his kind of direction in terms of taking everything to a place where this technology gets adopted. In terms of what Sheila just said about the dynamic where you have an existing IT infrastructure and now you have blockchains as an environment to create immutable transparent records between the state and the citizens or the state and providers of services, you really see that all of those IT systems essentially create a digital agreement, right? In their current form, they create a digital agreement that is really what the internet has brought to government, to a lot of people in general. Uber is a digital agreement. Amazon e-commerce is a digital agreement. The content served on websites with the ads. The ads pay for that content and they serve through ad networks which are digital agreements. And what smart contracts and oracles do is they make the next evolution of digital agreements. And that next evolution, just like the internet had an impact on how people relate to each other, peer to peer, just how the internet affected how people relate to government and to information, the next evolution of the internet, the next evolution of digital agreements in the form of smart contracts and oracles will rapidly change that relationship as well. Because I think the thing that people need to really look at is what is the digital agreement being output by the traditional IT infrastructure? And the digital agreement that's being output by traditional IT infrastructure, whether it's run by a third party software provider, whether it's run by a government agency, whether it's run by whoever, there's fundamental issues about trust. So there's fundamental issues where somebody might have to get something to someone else in terms of payment or someone might have a degree of reliance that something will happen, like that something will be payout from a government agency or that a service provider will actually deliver some goods to some farmers somewhere. And there's all these places for basically fraud or non-performance. And it's those places that so many things try to fill, so many holes that are tried to fill, tried to be filled by digital agreements that aren't built to fill those holes. So for example, a digital agreement can only kind of tell you that something should happen, whereas a smart contract makes it happen. It makes sure that something happened and it then makes sure that the appropriate party that made it happen is paid or unpaid or whatever should happen according to the agreement. What smart contracts do is they memorialize those agreements and they are the place where the state machine is properly executed to generate the actual contract. What oracles do and what Chainlink does is it connects those contracts, those smart contracts to two important resources. The first resource is data. And data proves things like was there rain? And if there was rain, then I don't need to pay out an insurance policy. But if there wasn't rain, then I definitely should pay out an insurance policy to compensate farmers that just experienced drought. And those farmers, they need that money in order to sustain their farms and they can't go one or two seasons without having any kind of stop gap or safety net, right? So you need oracles to prove things to smart contracts. And then to Sheila's earlier example, oracles are actually the thing that'll bridge the gap between your existing IT infrastructure and smart contracts. And this is the really, I think, forward-looking insight of the report that you don't need to take your existing IT infrastructure and reinvent it or remove it. You can actually keep your existing infrastructure that you've trained thousands of people on that there's already interfaces that the citizens use and service providers use. All you really need to do is have a secure way of getting your infrastructure to connect to smart contracts. And that secure connection is the other thing an oracle does, which isn't fully understood yet, but is a very, very important property because it allows people to take their existing infrastructure and accelerate its usefulness by basically layering blockchains on top of it. And that's the goal of what the report is really supposed to show people as a path. And that's the path that we've helped a number of people go down and I personally believe is the way a lot of people are gonna adopt blockchains as enterprises and governments. They're not gonna throughout their existing IT infrastructure, they're gonna use it to interact with blockchains in the most secure kind of provable way they can. So to sort of succinctly summarize the value proposition here, smart contracts have this opportunity to trim a lot of fat out of the system through automation, especially when it comes to legal financial other sort of contractual arrangements. And when you're talking about oracles, you're not talking about sort of mystics who can predict the future and guide you to their predictions or whatever you're talking about as sort of connector piece between systems that exist out there in the world and this new world of smart contract systems. Is that right? Yeah, that's right. I mean, the computer science origins of oracles is that it's something that tells the system something you can't possibly know. And so smart contracts can't know things because they're purposefully limited in their connectivity to the external world in order to make them secure and therefore highly reliable. So oracles, yeah, oracles tell smart contracts basically everything they need to know whether that's a command from an existing IT system like that's one that's run by government or whether it's data proving that there was or wasn't rain or that goods were delivered. Yeah, sorry, succinct doesn't really come through in these explanations, I guess. What you said is right. It's not about predicting the future. It's about proving reality to a smart contract or connecting it to an existing system but doing that in a hyper secure way because it's only the security and reliability that gives this unique form of automation, its value. And so you have to maintain that security and reliability. You can't just connect things and hope for the best because then you're back to digital agreements which don't have that unique hyper reliability. So you mentioned the potential opportunity here to use these systems inside of governments which I think is a great segue to turn things over to Santosh who is actually doing just that in the Indian government. Santosh, maybe you could tell us a little bit about your interest in blockchain and distributed ledger technology and how you're actually using these things, why you're interested in them. Thanks, Robert. And first of all, let me congratulate World Economic Forum and Chainlink for bringing out this amazing paper. And I think this is absolutely right when it is needed and where it is needed. And I think she was mentioning, Sheila was mentioning, I mean, the existing IT systems and I think Sergey also referred to it that existing IT systems are not going to be thrown out. And blockchain and its potential can only be realized if it can interact meaningfully and securely with existing systems. And I think this is a beautiful framework and in fact, Sergey, this morning as I was traveling, I was reading an article, one of the states, and I'm coming back to you, Robert, give me a brief second, it's a slight diversion but let me just mention this because I couldn't help and relate this to this entire discussion which was happening. So the state of Himachal Pradesh, which is in the North and it is cold, weather-wise it's always cold and pleasant weather has some of the major horticulture crops which is essentially fruits. So just a large supply of apples come out of there, they have large supply of other fruits and vegetables come out of that. So they have, last year, 2019, they have introduced they have introduced and they have restructured their horticulture insurance program and it's sort of weather-based insurance program. Precisely what Sergey was saying and it has these events, you know, so minimum temperature, maximum temperature, there is a protection against minimum temperature, there's a protection against maximum temperature, there is a protection, there is the fluctuation in temperature with rainfall, excess or shortage deficit of rainfall and there's a payout, 100 rupees per whatever or whatever is the unit of measurement and it's a government decision, it has been implemented and it's already there and I was just thinking as I was reading and coming down to this morning I was traveling and I was thinking that this discussion today evening we are going to have, this is so relevant and so useful for a situation like this where there are government authorized weather stations which record these information and it need not be those alone. I mean, I think they can be as Sergey was mentioning, they can be reputation-based data oracles and I think this is a fantastic use case. I'm sorry, I think I'm a little ahead of what I should be saying, but I think this I couldn't help say because this is totally music to my ear. Coming back to your question, Robert, of course blockchain and DLT has been off so far, I think the governments typically tend to be very, very cautious. So not only in India, I'm sure everywhere else and particularly democracies definitely need to be very cautious, they move little somewhat slowly after analyzing the pros and cons of every new intervention they're proposing. So in that sense, the blockchain has been sort of, people are experimenting with the, so everybody is testing the waters. Whereas, so luckily in Tamil Nadu, over the last two, two and a half years or almost, I think I would say three years, I have been working with and trying to build awareness and I think blockchain is a complex technology and particularly the fact that it is deeply, I mean, it kind of came out of cryptocurrencies and it was very hard for us to explain it to the policymakers saying that what it is, how it is useful, so it took some time, but slowly they have kind of gotten onto it and they have understood what all it can bring. There's a huge amount of transparency which is to be discovered, efficiency, you use the term trimming the fat. I think there's all that is there in a DLT-based application and also what it allows is freedom. I think that's something which may not have necessarily come out as a core benefit but I think, so if I have a digital DLT or blockchain-able wallet and I have all my stuff onto it with my consent, anyone can access and get my documents 24 by seven. I mean, otherwise you have to go get it notarized, go to some particular institution, get a copy of it, physical copy of it, certified and transmit, so which is not really the most efficient and most safe method of doing things. So for us, we started from that background where we started with education certificates. We said that, okay, let's take education diplomas and certificates and let's put them on the blockchain so that every time, I mean, I was talking to some of the users of these education certificates. They are government employers, they are embassies. I mean, many of the embassies when they process visas, I mean, so I was talking to one of the embassies and they were saying that it takes about four months to get me to verify whether a certificate is genuine or not. So I mean, all that can be gone and can be done in a flash if we have these DLT technologies. So sorry for the long onset, but the first part was very, very exciting for me so I couldn't hold myself. So you're actually using these oracles to bring in weather data and then basing payouts based on that, based on the information that comes through to people. No, I mean, absolutely. That's the idea, but I'm not using it because I mean, this is to be used is what, I mean, a new use case which fits very well within this white paper framework is what got me excited. This is to be used. And I think again, the space I'm talking about is a different state altogether. I have no jurisdiction over them, but I'm sure that if we implement it and get it right in our state, I'm sure others will also want to use it. And are there other areas that you're also looking at that you think this tech can be applied, other sorts of spaces you think that this is equally going to be transformational? Absolutely. So what happened is in the process of convincing the government about the usefulness of blockchain technology and particularly the DLT nature of it, over the last one year, we have had multiple stakeholder consultations discussions with all 35 odd government departments, right from animal husbandry to agriculture, to education, to higher education, to skill development and whatnot. And forest department, environment. So what we started out is, so we had thought of aiming at low hanging fruits first. So things like, so we classified our approach into three different categories. One is digital assets which are non-transferable to be taken as a first phase. So things like educational diplomas or things like certificates or licenses. Phase two would have been digital assets which can be transferred. So things like negotiable warehouse receipts, discountable bills, trade receivables, et cetera. And third phase is where we actually wanted to take the most complex one, which will be the land actually. And physical assets which can be backed by digital record, so stuff like land and all. So this was our plan of action. So when we started doing these consultations with the stakeholders, we became about, I mean, we discovered a lot of new and interesting use cases. So forest department came and said that, can you use this to trace a movement of sandalwood? I don't know if many of you have heard of it or have had some exposure to sandalwood farming. It's amazing. I mean, every tree of sandalwood is worth $250,000 to $500,000 each tree. And usually it grows in wild and the wilder variety is better, but now because there's a huge demand in medicines and perfumes and all that. So the government has allowed farming of sandalwood. So they have these huge farms where sandalwood is planted and harvested. Once they harvest it, it needs to be tracked because it's such a valuable wood and there's a scope of illegal sandalwood coming into the supply chain. So this was something I had never thought of. So the forest department got into it and they said, oh, can you do this for me? So similarly, they came up with another very interesting proposal saying that, can you track all the elephants which are, so elephants are covered in the Wildlife Protection Act, but some legacy and temples have some, in India, some temples have elephants. Can you track all those elephants for me on the blockchain? So we said, yeah, sure. I mean, of course. So starting with educational diplomas, sandalwood tracking, one interesting case which we thought is very unique and we sort of, again, it was a sedentificious discovery. We found one of our department websites had a dormant script injected into it. Since the website was not defaced, nobody came to know of it. I think, I mean, and the script was probably very harmless but then it got me thinking that, I mean, if it is a harmless script injected, it could be a harmful script as well. So that's something we are experimenting and I think this will be very unique use case from Tamil Nadu, I think, to secure our government websites and databases. Registration department, which is custodian of all land-related transaction records and notarizations and power of attorneys, they have come to us and said that can you actually ensure that all my legacy data, we have scanned it and stored it but can you make sure that it doesn't get tampered with? So that's another very unique use case we are doing. So plenty of exciting stuff. We are just, we did a proof of concept. It worked well. We are in the process of selecting a partner and hopefully rolling out a large scale deployment. So you've got a whole bunch of different areas that you're thinking about and exploring everything from education to wildlife management, sandalwood farming and even cybersecurity. It sounds like this technology applies in so many different places. I'm wondering, I'm gonna toss it over to Sergei and just ask because these legacy systems that a lot of governments and businesses are using, they've been around for a long time and part of the reason they are legacy is because people don't wanna change them because they work, you don't wanna break anything. How do you make sure that everything is going to stay intact? And specifically when it comes to oracles, how do you ensure that the data you're providing, the information is accurate, reliable, secure, that this stuff is actually gonna work? Sure. I think there's actually two nuances. The first one is that the existing IT systems already have a lot of people trained on them and they often have pretty active cybersecurity departments because cybersecurity has become a serious concern for basically all enterprises and government agencies. So those places where people interact with an interface as a administrator or they interact with something as a user, those interactions with the government system are usually accurate, right? Like they've trained thousands of people on using some backend interface as a back office or middle office participant in administering something. The first problem is really how do you get the commands from the IT infrastructure? How do you get essentially an enterprise event into a blockchain? And then the problem actually becomes that it isn't one blockchain, it's many different chains. So everybody starts having their favorite flavor of chains and then the flavor depends, starts changing based on whether you wanna send a payment, whether you wanna know something about a supply chain event with a piece of sandalwood, whether you wanna know something about something else, you basically have people that use different DLT platforms. So it's basically like the enterprise or the government IT infrastructure is now forced to interact with three, four, five different internets. And then as they grow their implementation, the amount of internets that they need to interact with also grows, right? And if it becomes international, if they start using international systems, then it grows beyond that, right? So the first problem is really a fundamental problem of how do I get an IT infrastructure event into a blockchain? And then how do I observe a blockchain event and inform the IT infrastructure that something happened that it wanted to happen in another system? So it's really a matter of securely triggering and securely proving back that something happened in a blockchain, but importantly, multiple chains. And the point of view here to take in my opinion, the risk adjusted point of view is not to choose your favorite chain or your favorite two chains because I've been building smart contracts and blockchains now for over seven years. And it's extremely difficult for me to tell anybody like this is the chain you should have for your vertical use case or that's the chain you should have, right? What I can tell people and what I'm pretty confidently able to say is that you will need to interface with blockchains generally speaking. You will need to get data from a supply chain system that's blockchain based. You will need to send the payment eventually on a blockchain based system. You will need to execute an insurance smart contract on a blockchain based system. And so what I think people should do on the first nuance is become blockchain enabled. And that's the first thing that an Oracle does is it basically is a gateway. It's kind of another layer on top of their infrastructure. A lot of these infrastructures are just layer upon layer of technology, right? You don't have APIs. You had XML or something and then you put APIs on top of that. And now on top of APIs as an IT infrastructure, as an enterprise or a government, you're just going to put another onion layer which is called oracles. And that's the onion layer that lets you interact with blockchains generally. The second nuance about validating and proving things is the other kind of super power of oracles. And what you can basically do is you can say, the government IT infrastructure system is going to send the command to do a payment but we're going to have a check. That check is going to be an Oracle or a collection of oracles that checks the state of the contract and checks the state of the weather data and checks the state of the good delivery of goods. And only at that point will the smart contract go through and actually pay somebody. Or vice versa, the oracles can trigger a payment request from the IT infrastructure and make sure that it gets approved and make sure that it happens. So the first level is really just getting the IT infrastructure interfacing with many different chains. And then the second level is that validation. And that validation is something that you can layer on to whatever degree you want. You can layer on a lot of it or a little bit of it. But what I personally believe from all the implementations I've worked on and seen is that the usefulness of automation is the degree to which it can be left alone. So if you can leave automation alone and you don't need a person overseeing it and you don't need a person making sure it's operating properly, that's the most valuable automation because it's successfully guaranteed you outcomes. And smart contracts together with oracles that validate things are that most reliable form of automation to kind of ever exist. So you first of all need to connect your systems to blockchains at all. And you wanna have something in between you and blockchains that does that for many, many different chains at the same time. And then the second nuance is that once you're connected you'll find that creating the hyper-reliable automation that one seeks from smart contracts actually requires oracles to prove certain things. And you want the flexibility to be able to prove all these various things in a way that meets the hyper-reliability requirements of a smart contract. I appreciate your point about how the sort of full automation is where the true potential lies. But it also makes me, it conjures up the image in my mind of all these sort of self-driving car tests that are going on right now and how there's for the most part people are keeping humans in the loop. There's gotta be like a backup driver there because people aren't quite ready to let these systems operate by themselves. I'm wondering in the sphere of blockchain and DLT how that conversation is going and how ready people are to sort of let these systems just kind of run on their own. So from my point of view in the history of cars I think initially there were ordinances that before a car came into a town somebody had to go ahead of it and wave red flags informing the local population that a car was entering the town because the car had an internal combustion engine that according to the ordinance of the time was I think considered some kind of explosive device or close to some kind of thing like that. So those were the regulations around cars that the car could only go 10 miles per hour like whatever however fast a person can walk. I don't know how fast people can walk. And then the person had to rave a red flag to announce to the town that this horribly dangerous thing was rolling into the town. I don't ride a horse to work. You don't ride a horse. Well, nobody rides anywhere now but after the pandemic nobody rides horses anywhere usually it still happens. It might be fun but people don't do that. I don't see anybody waving flags about cars. There's an explosive device in a car, right? There's a bunch of gas behind you that can explode and people still drive around in cars everywhere. And it's actually, it is relatively dangerous but it has so much utility that we're, the global transportation system is largely dependent on cars. So to your analogy, I think we're not at the stage where people are waving their flags. I think people like Mr. Mishra and Sheila from World Economic Forum and Puneet from the World Economic Forum are trying to explain to people like you don't need, you don't need a guy in front of the car waving the red flags. Like this is actually a really good thing where you know how you have to have to wait a week to get the mail? Well, now with a car you can get it in three days. It's the same conversation over and over and over again. So as far as technology adoption is concerned, I think it's obviously scary for people to change and to trust a new system. But I think the longer, it's called the Lindy effect, right? The longer a system properly operates, the more people end up saying, oh, okay, you know, that doesn't, the car doesn't, it keeps driving through the town, you know, and hasn't exploded yet. And I am getting my mail a lot sooner. So maybe a car is okay, right? And, you know, and then it kind of model T interchangeable parts. You know, I think we're getting close to model T and interchangeable parts dynamic in our industry. I don't think we're there yet, but just to further the analogy. I love that. You know, I just, I'm gonna push back on the analogy a little bit because I think the main distinction is that, you know, people are gonna notice the difference when they're being driven around by, you know, a not person versus when they're driving themselves. It's a very visceral experience. It's impossible to kind of miss. I think you're giving a lot of people a lot of credit that they're looking under the hood at their visual infrastructure and paying attention to what's happening back there. I don't think most people think like that. I don't think most people are, I think most people who interact with a blockchain are never gonna interact with a blockchain. And I don't think that they would care if they did know. I think what we're, what the distinction is, of course, is enterprise architect, IT architects, it's companies, it's technologists who are making the decision to build in or connect to blockchain systems and to connect legacy systems to whatever chain, you know, of choice, right? They might choose it. I agree that being chain agnostic is the right way to be. But I don't think most people know. So let me give you an example. When you go out to make a payment to a friend of yours or to your, you know, delivery person, more likely than pandemic, you know, and you're tipping them on your mobile, do you really know what's happening that what that process is, what the technical architecture is? You have no idea. So if I suddenly told anyone, right, that your Venmo or PayPal or Square or whatever, was completely running on a blockchain, it was a blockchain payment app, you'd be like, okay, great, because your user experience really wouldn't change at all. And that's a lot of what we're seeing is that the current list fermentation, so initially it was very much like, oh, this thing is scary. What do we do? We don't know. Oh my God, oh my God, right? Let's invest in it or not invest in it and pay attention to its price and see that as some kind of signal of its validity. Now, then we shift to the phase where everyone's like, well, it can do stuff we already do just more efficiently. That's when you had like supply chain stuff or back and settlement payments or things that needed kind of an extra push to digitize that we're moving towards being digital, right? Some of these records or something I was talking about and others, they were like, okay, now we actually have the ability to serve this point to kind of lock in the validity and the veracity of this data or of this record or of this report or whatever it might be in a way that's useful. So let's kind of do that. We can make some more speed and we can make things more efficient. And so that also happened. Again, who knew that that was happening? And now you're moving into a phase where it's still not super retail oriented what we're talking about here. It's not retail customer oriented. It's still kind of more B to B, right? That we're seeing a lot of the explosion. But again, I don't know that unless you are the kind of person that really is going into source code on every website that you're on to copy in a method that you're gonna actually know or frankly care what is driving, what technology is driving your experience as long as your experience is a good one. And as long as you have trust in the institution that is using that technology. So I think Sandesh's point, it's do the farmers trust the government or the agencies to kind of run a system that's gonna be fair to them and is the output that they see something that seems fair and equitable. That's the attention area. It's not so much on the mechanism technically that's being used to get us there. Which is not to say that that's not extremely important. It is extremely important. And the gains and the value created by some of these systems is going to be tremendous. And my hope is that some of that value will go to every stakeholder in a system like for example a shareholder farmer who right now is kind of at the haste of a lot of big ecosystem that doesn't have a lot of control of her. But I think that we're gonna be really, we're gonna have realized blockchain when no one's really talking about blockchain anymore. I absolutely agree. I don't think everybody's gonna be like it has to be on a blockchain. I think the value is just gonna be unbelievably better and people are just gonna start using it. I think some people in places where there's a lot of fraud I do see them selling smart contract guarantees. So I do see them saying like we can't fail because we don't work like the other 50 things that have failed you in the past. So in the place where people are hypersensitive to fraud like ad networks, some insurance cases, a few other cases I do think it will be a selling point but for the large part you're absolutely right. I don't think that most people will think about it. I think it'll just have so many benefits that the people building systems like even with yield like if you can get two to 8% annual rates of return from decentralized finance whereas you can get less than 0.1% from the existing financial system people won't care where they get the yield. And I think banks will actually go to DeFi protocols and offer yields to their users through those protocols. The user just cares that they're getting 2% yield whereas before they were getting 0.1% yield. And so this is, I think there will be a mix, right? Places where people are very sensitive to fraud you will see the word blockchain and the value proposition to the user and places where people are not sensitive to fraud they just want the thing to work. You're absolutely right, people won't be saying but it'll just be like, just like they don't say we use HTTP, right? They don't say and we use HTTPS to make sure the credit card number you send us is encrypted, right? Like that's not on any, well that is actually on e-commerce at the bottom point, apparently. Yeah, cause certainly people are paying attention to things like is WhatsApp gonna be encrypted? Cause they understand some of the consequences of that that's hit the press. You know, there's a big conversation, right? Excuse me. So I take your point. I do think there are certain spaces where it's gonna be a selling point but I think that's gonna be because it's just a better product. It's a better product that's fit for purpose and the purpose is gonna vary. And if the purpose is fraud prevention then yes, absolutely. This is gonna be a selling point because that's exactly to some extent one's designed to support. Totally agree. Yeah, I absolutely like that statement that blockchain has arrived when people stop talking about blockchain. So I think that's absolutely true. And I think it's all at the end of the day a utilitarian perspective. If it adds value, people will use it. And if it's demonstrable value then it's all the more reason people will use it. And I think otherwise irrespective of how exciting a technology is, it will not get adopted. So I think absolutely. Lovely discussion. Yeah, it's funny that I appreciate this conversation about like whether the technology matters or it's the product that just comes out of it. I mean, especially right now as Bitcoin is becoming once again, it's rebounding and getting more popular. People aren't really talking about the underlying technology so much. They're just kind of talking about it as this digital gold equivalent, this kind of new hedge against inflation. And that seems to be the thing that's catching on in people's minds. They're not talking so much, even though it is totally based on the scarcity that is defined by the software and the code. So it is this interesting relationship between the technology and the product it enables. I've gotten a question actually from the audience. So I'd love to turn the tables over. To Poroshotam Kaushik, he has a question for Mr. Mishra. And I believe we're gonna invite. Thank you, Robert. Yeah, I'm glad. There we go. All right, thank you. And such amazing discussion, really, very exciting. Question was to Mr. Mishra and thanks to Mr. Mishra for participating in the discussion. And also sharing all the examples around various states in India, especially around insurance and also wildlife, like it's really exciting. One thing which we wanted to kind of check and also understand, while all these use cases are emerging in various states, especially some like we've seen in Thelangana as well, and few of the states adding significant value, how do you see, like what are the real bottlenecks which possibly you see from a government perspective on adopting smart contracts in a scalable way and how we can address them as well if you can just talk about it. Thank you, Purshottam. I think very, very important question to be answered, I think, from the government's perspective for sure. What I have seen and I've been following what Thelangana has done and I've been kind of interacting with them as well. Same with Karnataka. So what has happened is, I think what is, and hopefully it will change very soon, the states have taken kind of a siloed approach, you will, if you will, towards adoption of blockchain. So as I was saying in the beginning also, it was more like testing the waters. Oh yeah, it looks good, looks promising. Okay, what, where is the least, least, what should I, what's the word I'm looking for? Safest way of testing it in which area shall I implement? So Thelangana used it for Chit funds, which is not really the core, but I mean, good, I think it's worthwhile. Same thing and I think Karnataka did it for some bit of attestation, which is incidentally, if I remember correctly, it is still functioning well and it is at scale. But the real power will come when we have the use cases I have talked about, when they come into actually play and when people start seeing a much more significant impact of blockchain in their lives. And what is lacking, I mean, that's again, my understanding of the whole thing, I mean, people may have something to add to it, but my understanding is that what they lack is a comprehensive plan for blockchain adoption. So you cannot have, again, I mean, just like any new technology, these technologies thrive on network effect. So if you have one isolated use case, it's not going to add or bring in a huge amount of value for that state. So for example, that's what we have done differently in Tamil Nadu. We are creating a statewide blockchain infrastructure backbone, which is something very, very, in fact, we, EBSI, I mean, European Blockchain Service Infrastructure. So this is similar to that. And this is, we are keeping it open to private participation as well. So it's not something which is where probably, if we sort of connect to this conversation, government will be one of those trusted oracles, if you will. And there'll be large number of private players, of course, apart from government, I mean, so initial thrust, initial boost or initial usage will be driven by government and government-related agencies. But this is a big, big playing arena for a lot of private entrepreneurs, startups, ecosystem builders, people who can unlock value in this whole ecosystem. So I think that's where we have been, I see a bottleneck forming. Hopefully, as I said, every state has done the testing of waters. So they are kind of, they are also looking at what to do next. So version 2.0. So by that time, hopefully our system will be in place and I'm sure we are very quick and agile in adopting and learning good practices from others. So I'm sure we will see significant adoption going forward. Thank you. Great, okay. And by the way, just to let everybody know, if you click on the gallery view button above, you'll be able to see all of us rather than it just being the speaker view since we're now sort of in this participatory phase of the conversation. We've actually got a few more questions come in. So I'm gonna turn the tables over to Arushi Ghol. Arushi, are you on the call? If you are, you can unmute yourself and chime in. Yeah, thank you so much, Robert. In fact, thank you to the whole panel has been a very interesting discussion. My question is essentially relating to a very regulatory aspect of the system. So when you talk about interoperability or I assume you're talking about transfer of data or some kind of an asset from one system to the other. So when this transfer takes place and especially when this transfer takes place by way of oracles or even decentralized oracles, who is going to be responsible for collection, processing or transmission of this data? In light of the data protection regulatory regime that's been evolving. So yeah, I just want to understand, I understand liability frameworks are anyways an issue when it comes to decentralized applications but with oracles specifically because they deal with transfer of data, I think it's of interest. Yeah, sure. So there's two kinds of that and I'll just jump in if that's okay. So there's two kinds of important dynamics here. The first one is that it's highly configurable. So if you're the enterprise that's responsible for servicing a certain smart contract, like you made the contract around insurance and you're responsible for doing something in relation to that smart contract, you would run the Oracle software, right? You would run it or one of your designated service providers would run it or integration service partners or whoever, right? So people that you're already comfortable having a certain relationship with or even within your own systems. So the Oracle in this case acts as a piece of software that enables you to take the cybersecurity burden away from your team and allows you to still interact with blockchain. So at that point, it's a piece of software that allows you to interface. And there's no kind of, I don't think any real complexity there from a legal point of view because you're just, you're running another piece of software yourself or through one of your third party ISVs or whoever. So that's the first nuance. And I think that'll be the simplest variant. The more advanced variant where you have these consortium chains and the consortium chains will be composed of a few hundred enterprise participants. I think what you're going to have is you're going to have a subset of essentially service providers that do things like provide data or payments infrastructure or whatever other additional value added services that are needed for the contracts and that consortium to function. And I think, this will be consultancies, this will be payment networks, data providers. It could be any of the participants in the consortium but the burden of servicing smart con you should think about it as who is going to service smart contracts? Who is going to provide them data? Who is going to provide them payment network capabilities? Who is going to provide them AML KYC capabilities? And I think it'll be the same service providers you're used to. They'll just be a node on one of these consortium chains and they'll be using an Oracle to provide that value to the other consortium chain members. But once again, they'll be the one and I think there will actually already be a number of service providers that already have an Oracle that are very cognizant of what data they put where, how they approach AML KYC responses to smart contracts that need proof about that. The transition of data from servers in a certain jurisdiction to servers in another jurisdiction. I think all of the answer is that all of that is initially very, very configurable. And in the long term, the people that are servicing the smart contracts, they're going to be responsible for figuring that out. And the important part is that they have a piece of software that gives them that flexibility. So it's all on the people that are servicing the contract, whether that's the creator or whether it's the people that are sending it data or doing whatever they need to do to make it function, if that answers your question. Oh, thank you so much. Thank you. I just want to add one thing in there, Arushi, which is that it's complicated where the legal liability will fall. It's not entirely clear. And so finally enough, we're issuing a paper tomorrow actually on dispute resolution mechanisms. So we thought that two big governance gaps were this interoperability question, how do blockchains intersect with legacy systems and what are the considerations there? And the other was really this question of dispute resolution. And so how do you think about the legal liability and set up a construct that will help you guide in the event that there isn't dispute in the event that where do you sign fault? Where do you sign blame? And most importantly, how do you account for that in your system? So that's, there are complexities, I think when you look at the legal system and how the legal system interacts with blockchains and particularly with systems like the one we're talking about, where there's a lot of connection and you're basically chaining together legacy and blockchain-backed systems. So stay tuned for that. Thanks for asking the question. Thank you, Sheila. Thanks for your question, Arushi. It kind of reminds me of the self-driving car analogy we brought up earlier. It's sort of like, who's at fault if a self-driving car hits somebody? But we actually, we're at the top of the hour right now, but if everybody is okay going a couple minutes over, I'd love to get to the last question, but if you do have to go, please dip out. So we have one last question from Jayaravadan Sambaito. Are you here? Yeah, I'm there. Excellent. Please go ahead. Okay, so I wanted to understand from Chainlink what are the various smart contract use cases they have seen where they've leveraged the articles that they have built and what were some of the good practices that Sagya would recommend that people need to keep in mind when deploying these at large? That's great. Sure. So I think the use cases we've seen right now are in the financial products industry sectors and insurance basically. In financial products, you need market data and you need market data to prove certain things to the smart contract, such as the change in price or any number of other things that basically financial products need to know in order to function. So that's what decentralized finance is. That's a very, very popular use case. In line with this discussion, we have seen multiple people using weather data to make crop insurance and to make crop insurance that successfully guarantees farmers that they will be paid out if there is no rain. And very importantly, not based on a logo and not based on a random guarantee of a brand but based on smart contracts guaranteeing things using cryptography. So farmers generally speaking don't need to necessarily rely on an insurance brand if they can rely on cryptography and guarantees from smart contracts that definitively prove and definitively guarantee that they will be paid if there is no rain. So the two big initial categories are really financial products which use crypto assets and generate yield on those assets and those need market data and price data. That's the more advanced variant right now. The important things to learn from that I think is decentralization. So there we have anywhere from seven to over 20 nodes pulling data from over 10 different data providers. And what that does is it makes the system immune to manipulation and systems that don't have the same amount of distribution of nodes or the same decentralization and the different data sources that they rely on we've been seeing some of those get gained. We've been seeing somebody go and manipulate a single data source that the system uses and be able to change the prices in the system and essentially steal funds from users as a result. So I think on the evolution of these decentralized hyper-reliable systems you start out with a certain level of decentralization a kind of minimal level to guarantee certain reliability and certain security and resistance to manipulation. And then they eventually evolve into increasingly more decentralized systems as the value secured by them grows. So I think once you go past 100 million, 200 million, you really start to think about how do I know that this network of nodes won't get compromised that this data source won't get compromised. In the case of insurance I think what that looks like is once again more nodes proving things and more data sources proving things about weather. And then as the value of the insurance contracts continues to grow I think you continue to see a large gain in the value provided to users through security and hyper-reliability. Excellent, Sergey. So I know we went over a little bit. It's 10.05 right now where I am in New York but thank you all for joining us. This was a great lively discussion. We heard a little bit about how this technology is actually being employed in government right now and everything from its various use cases in insurance to potentially in cybersecurity and supply chain. So this has been a great conversation. Thank you everybody for joining.