 Hello, hey good morning guys, thanks for coming over today, so I am Gorang and today I am going to talk about blockchain in education. So, you know when you speak about blockchain, the first thing that comes to mind is the beginning, which was bitcoin and blockchain has primarily been used in financial applications. When you say blockchain, people even include blockchain in the fintech space, but we at Atorus and Indors, you know when we started the company we thought let us use blockchain in a non-financial application and that is what we have been doing from the last 2-2.5 years, we have been using blockchain in education. Today I am going to tell you about my journey through Atorus and Indors. So, I have been, I am the co-organizer of the Ethereum Singapore Meetup. I have seen the blockchain and Ethereum community in Singapore, grow from like 4-5 people which was back in 2015 to hundreds of people, thousands of people right now. Any given meetup in the city, you get at least 100-200 people just in one day and if you have people like Vitalik coming here, it is like fully crowded, like you have to push people out, it is like that crazy nowadays. So, yeah without further ado, let me start with my presentation. So, yeah I am Gauram, I am the CEO and co-founder of Indors. So, let me start this through my, the first blockchain company called Atorus. So, at Atorus, we were working on smart contracts as a service. So, you must have heard about SaaS models right, software as a service. We gave it a little spin and we came up with SCAS which was smart contracts as a service. So, I started this company back in January 2016 and before that I had actually put my prenup on the blockchain as well. So, I am the one of the first few people, I am the first guy in the world to put my prenup on the blockchain. People have put their marriage certificates on the blockchain. So, I thought how can I be different? How can I be innovative? So, I put my prenup. It was not a legal document anyway. It was like a funny document. Like you have to go on a date every 15 days and she will watch, you know, walking dead with me only when I watch Seinfeld with her and I hate Seinfeld. So, we started Atorus. What are we doing at Atorus? To tell you that, I will show you a certificate. So, this is a BA degree, Bachelor of Arts degree of my co-founder David Moskowitz. Very valuable degree in psychology and that helps in blockchain rate. Psychology, blockchain very connected and this is his MBA from the same university. So, now if you look at these two certificates, what do you see? The second one is a fake certificate. And David could do that in 20 minutes in Photoshop. This is a problem not only at Atorus, but it's a worldwide problem. The Prime Minister of Moldova faced a scandal. The CEO of Yahoo had some falsified resume. Even at home in Singapore, IDA has faced this problem several times. So, we have been speaking with universities, employers, companies throughout the last two years and this problem exists in the industry, you know, across the industry, I would say. So, some big companies, some big software companies or even banks, they have a team of people sitting back in India, Bangladesh countries like that, where they just do background checks on the new candidates, on the new employees that they are hiring. And people spend so much money, so much manpower, so much, you know, time on that. So, we thought let's solve this problem. How can we solve this problem? Answer is digital certificates on the blockchain. So, we have worked with Neon Polytechnic in Singapore. We did a pilot with them last year. They issued more than 500 diplomas on the blockchain. They didn't issue all of them. It was a small pilot for a small batch. But yeah, this was in production. We actually issued the diplomas to them. This was done in house in Neon. I can't go into much details about that. But the idea is that the digital certificate, we take the certificate, we hash the certificate and I put that hash into a blockchain transaction which goes to a smart contract. In that way, you can see that this certificate was issued to this person at this point of time. So, you have like a digital signature on the certificate which can be proven trustlessly. People can directly look at the blockchain. They can see who initiated this transaction. They can even match the hash of the certificate with the hash in the transaction. So, now if you look back at David's certificate. So, this was the original certificate, right? So, this hash, the hash of this certificate will go into the transaction on the blockchain. So, next time when David makes a small change in this certificate, he just changed the name of the course and the date. When David does this, the hash of the certificate will change as you all very well know. And this hash won't match the hash in the blockchain. So, that's how we did it in Neon. So, when we were working with Neon Polytechnic over the last year, one of the KPIs was that these certificates, these digital diplomas could be put on LinkedIn. So, when we started the project, it was fine. The students could do it. But as I was developing the product, LinkedIn suddenly changed their APIs. They changed the UX UI and it was not so easy to actually put the certificates on LinkedIn, the links on LinkedIn because now the students had to do two or three other steps, additional steps. And that set me back by at least 15 to 20 days in the project. That made me think that I started thinking, like, why are we giving all our data to these monolithic giants? You might know about it. Yesterday, it happened with Facebook. There was a big movement going on called Delete Facebook, Delete Instagram, Chimery Generalty, all these things are happening in the world. This is just happening right now. But we thought about it last year. We are like, why are we giving all our data? Why are we giving the control over data to these people? Secondly, these people, these companies, they monetize your data. Every click you do, every like you do, every share you do on Facebook, Instagram, anything, any network, you are making a lot of dollars for them. But as a user, what do you get out of it? Nada. Unless you are a big influencer on Instagram and you have hundreds of thousands or millions of followers, you do not get anything out of it. You know, these influencers, they actually get paid for every tweet or every Instagram story. But a normal user, nothing. And third thing is about verifications. So you know, working with Neon, working with these universities, these certifications, you know, we started thinking that certificates are definitely important. Your credentials, your degrees are definitely important. But I think what is more important is your skills. Because right now, actually, Rick, our engineering manager is here, we were just discussing last week, Stack Overflow made a survey over the last, I think, one or two months. 100,000 developers participated in that survey. And one of the really interesting findings is that each developer, if we have our developers here as well, each developer, even I am a developer, we learn something or a lot of things outside our school or university. So we are a breed of people who constantly keep learning. We always keep developing, we always keep learning new things. And most of those things don't have a certification actually. So now Coursera sometimes gives you certificates, but most of the things that you learn as a developer don't have a certificate. They cannot be validated. And that's where Indoor comes in. So as a developer, so let's take a story of a developer called Alice. Alice has been a Java developer for seven to eight years. She has been working in a good company. She is doing well in her career. But now she hears about blockchain. And she knows that blockchain developers get paid more than Java developers in most cases. That's a cue that we are looking for developers. So Alice wants to come into blockchain now. So Alice starts learning about blockchain. She goes to all these websites like blog geeks. She reads the Ethereum Bitcoin white paper and she learns about blockchain. But still she can't come to Indoor and say that hey, Gaurang, give me a job as a blockchain developer because I don't know that Alice knows about blockchain. How does she prove herself? So at that time she could come on to Indoor. She could get validated and she could get a job. We will go through the story of Alice as I go through this presentation. So at Indoor, we are building a digital backpack. So with Atorus, we were putting digital certificates on the blockchain. With Indoor, we are going much beyond that. It's not just about one certificate. But it's about the entire journey of your life, your entire skills, which can be put onto the blockchain. Now imagine if we have a system where all your certificates starting right from your old levels, to your bachelors, to your masters, to your PhDs, and everything that you do outside of that, like your Coursera certificates, your Khan Academy certificates, any other MOOCs that you take, any other blockchain things that Alice learns, if all of that could be in a digital backpack like this, it could be put on the blockchain in a verifiable manner, in a manner in which it cannot be tampered with. And employers can look at all of that. That would be so awesome. As a developer, I would be really proud to show off my achievements. And that's what we are building here. That's what we are enabling. So we are doing all of this, all the skills validation, everything in a decentralized manner. The focus of Indoor is about skills validation. The data ownership, data monetization, it actually comes through the blockchain stack. We are not just using Ethereum blockchain. We are using the entire blockchain stack. You know, it's great speaking in a developer conference because you guys actually understand what I'm saying. So we are using the entire stack starting right from the authentication at the top level. We are doing that using decentralized technologies like U-Port, Sevek, AirBeds, which is also called Edge Wallet. Below that, we have the blockchain layer. So Ethereum blockchain, we are using smart contracts for actually validating the skills, keeping a record of all the transactions. It's like a ledger, essentially. Below that, we are also using a decentralized database like BigchainDB. We might be using BlueZell as well when they are ready. And we are doing our data storage, like file storage on IPFS. So now this is really interesting, guys, because this entire thing is called the Web3 stack. And, you know, being afraid of having a hyperbole, what we believe in, what we think is that the Web3 stack is actually replacing the entire Internet stack right now. So you could compare the Ethereum blockchain with your servers, with your logic, because Ethereum is a Turing-complete blockchain. All your logic sits there. It acts kind of like your server. You have decentralized databases, which can actually replace the existing centralized databases. And you have things like IPFS, which can actually replace Amazon S3 in a sense. And that's what we are doing. And that's how users have full control over their data. So on indoors, right now you can go and log in using AirBits, which is a wallet on your mobile. It's a blockchain wallet on your mobile. So now imagine it's so awesome that you can actually authenticate on indoors using your Ethereum public-private key pairs. So right through the stack, starting right at the authentication layer, till the bottom blockchain layer, so database layer, your keys actually control your data. And that's really awesome. The second part, which is about data monetization, that is achieved through a token model. So at indoors, we did an ICO last year, which was in August-September. We raised about 9 million at the time. And we have an IND token. So what we do is we reward the users from the platform for their activity. So the more active you are, the more rewards you get in the form of IND tokens. And those IND tokens come back in the platform as a loop, because our revenue, it comes in the form of IND tokens. And it's not just, it's kind of like Google, right? So Google or Facebook or LinkedIn, they have like credit systems, right? So you have to buy Google credits to actually advertise on Google, or you have to buy LinkedIn credits. So it's kind of similar in indoors, such that you need to buy the indoors tokens to actually advertise or participate in indoors as a company, as a business, all these things. So that's how we are working. But the most interesting part, and that's where I want to spend my time today, is about the skills validation. So we have multiple levels of skills validation. So now let's come back to the example of Alice that we were talking about earlier. So Alice knows Java. Now she is learning blockchain. But how do other people know? How do you guys know that she knows about blockchain? So she comes on indoors. She talks with AI chatbot. So we have AI chatbot. We have a blockchain one-on-one chatbot. You can go on indoors and check out or join our Telegram channel. She chats with a blockchain chatbot, blockchain one-on-one chatbot. This chatbot, it will ask her very simple questions, basic questions about blockchain. Like what is mining? What is proof of work? What is a 51% attack? And frankly, if she can't answer these questions, she doesn't know anything about blockchain. You need to know what is mining. She'll claim that you know blockchain. So Alice takes this question here, blockchain one-on-one chatbot. She gets a badge on her profile, which actually shows that she has passed this test and she knows a little bit about blockchain. But still she can't go and get a job because companies in the ICO space, they want there are three companies right now. They want a really experienced blockchain developer, a blockchain developer with an experience of more than 10 years. So what happens is Alice goes back. Now she knows a little bit about blockchain. She can start studying more. So she can start writing smart contracts. She can start writing, doing some consulting projects. That's our journey. We have all of us have gone through this journey. We are making it easier for you by the way. She starts writing smart contracts. She starts doing some small consulting projects. She starts helping some companies who are doing ICOs to actually write the smart contracts, audit them or help them with the security requirements. Now she has a repository with actual smart contracts. She can come back on indoors and she goes through a crowd-sourced validation. Now this crowd-sourced validation is really interesting. It has a lot of game theoretical aspects to it. So what happens is when Alice comes on the platform and she claims that she knows about smart contracts. So now she already has a badge. Remember? Blockchain one-on-one badge. She comes back and she claims that she knows about blockchain. She can write smart contracts. That's her claim. So this claim will go for endorsements to multiple people on the platform. So our platform, our algorithm, it will find the right people who are relevant to that claim. So it might find people who actually know blockchain or who have written smart contracts. Suppose it goes to 10 people for validation. Now this validation mechanism, it works kind of like a proof-of-stake algorithm in which the consensus threshold is really high. So we are looking at a 70% or 80% threshold right now. We are testing it out in the market right now. We are looking at a 70% to 80% threshold. And we also penalize the malicious actors in this case. So if there is a validator who goes and says yes, yes, yes or no, no, no, no to every validation, he starts getting penalized. Because if you go against the consensus, we assume that you are acting in a malicious manner. Anyway so out of 10, 8 people say that hey Alice can write smart contracts. So that's when she gets one more badge saying she's a smart contract developer. Now she can go out and get a good job. So she goes and applies for three interviews. Out of those she gets selected for two of them. Goes to the second round, third round. But at the end she gets rejected because she still doesn't have the expertise. So she could again come back on indoors and get validated by some expert on the platform. So we'll also have experts from the blockchain space. We already have people like Loilu, Benchan who is from BitGo. They are our advisors as well. So these guys can then go and validate her based on her skills, her expertise, and maybe that will help her get one more job in the future. So that's what we are trying to do at indoors. We have a combination of validation mechanisms starting right from AI to crowd-sourced mechanism, your peer review kind of thing. And also trusted validations like export validations. You know through the story of LS, I was trying to explain why skills validation is important and what are the benefits of that. You could get a job, you can get recognized by the community. Because you know people like Vitalik, they don't have a degree in blockchain, right? But he is the best blockchain developer in the world right now because he created Ethereum blockchain. And that was because the community believed in him, that was because all of us believed in him. And that was through the code that he showed, through the papers that he wrote, and through the talks that he gave. It doesn't have a degree, but still we all believe in him. You can show off your peers, you can get better, and you can also earn for being awesome by joining indoors. So that ends my presentation. We are a great decentralized team working across London, India, and Singapore. We get our job done, but we also have fun at the same time. Thank you. Any questions? Yes. Sir, this is the innovation platform life and where is the development at this time? Yeah, so we have developers, we have three developers sitting right here. We have developers across London, India, and Singapore. Most of the blockchain developers were in London. We just got our first blockchain developer right now in Singapore. We are on the mainnet already. So we are going in two directions. One is the skills validation and other which I didn't talk about was the B2B direction company pages. So that is already on mainnet. The skills validation mechanism will take a little more time because we need to figure out some things in that. Like what is the threshold for the consensus? Like how many people we should have in every validation all those things. So it will take some time. Yeah. So what problems that I have seen with the endorsement system is that it is usually the people who are met at public relations who are who get endorsed more than people who are better skilled. So how can endorse some of the songs? Exactly. That's a great question. See, that's what we're trying to address. You know, because right now I think that the endorsement system on LinkedIn is completely broken because I can go and tell my friends, I can go and tell my mother, father, sister to actually endorse me on LinkedIn. It's actually even happening right now that salespeople sometimes they just add me on LinkedIn. When I add them, I don't know that guy I have never seen him. He just starts endorsing me for all my skills and HTML, SQL, C-Charge. I've done this like four years ago. I haven't touched SQL because I've been working on MongoDB. So yeah, that's what we're trying to address. On endorse, the validators are chosen at random and every claim needs to have validations through this random set of people. So you can read more about it in my white paper. It's on endorse.io. Yeah, we are considering a lot of things. There are a lot of game theoretical aspects to this. That's what we are trying to figure out right now. So yeah. Duration of what? Yeah, that's the beauty of a smart contract, right? Like a certificate can be a lifelong certificate. It could even have an expiry date. And all of this is completely transparent on the blockchain. And I think that's why blockchain adds a lot of value in this case. Yes. You are making a parallel between LinkedIn and Facebook and decentralizing it. Have you looked into the intro of diaspora and see if there's lessons to learn from there? Sorry, can you repeat that last part? Did you look into the intro of diaspora, which was a decentralized social network? Which one? Oh, sorry, I am not aware of that. Yeah, I'll take a look at that. Thanks for that. Sure, sure. Cool. Any other questions? Yes. What? Yes, but it's only in the neons. This thing, private chain. So private chain isn't it's only in their campus, so it cannot be accessed outside the firewalls. Yes, they are talking about it and we are designing the system right now. I don't know when or how it will happen. Yeah. Any last question? Yes. Yeah, that's a great point. Thanks for bringing it up. So first of all, yeah, I've been writing smart contracts since the last two and half years. I have seen the language grow solidity. I've seen it grow from a very rudimentary system to a much more sophisticated system. But definitely it's nowhere close to Python or Java or JavaScript because it takes time. It is going to take time and it's really complicated. So you're trying to put like a complete Turing machine on a P2P network, which is not easy. About the gas limits, so we have a repo. So my advisor, he has a contract for skills validation. It's called Open Voting Protocol. It uses some on-chain cryptographic mechanisms called ZK Snarks or Zero Knowledge Proofs. And in that case, it was running out of gas. So last year, it was actually hitting the block gas limit in October, I think September, October. But now with the new launch of Ethereum, which is Byzantine fork or Byzantine update, ZK Snarks are on-chain directly and that is actually helping us a lot. About the second thing, which is the development environments, it's really choppy right now that's completely true. And you know, writing a smart contract takes a lot of time. So the first contract that we put on the main net, it took us two months, two complete months. It was really writing a smart contract is okay. It's not very difficult. It takes around three to four days, maybe one week or two weeks. But after that, the testing phase takes a lot of time. Because when you put the contract on the blockchain, you cannot change it. Once you deploy it, you cannot change it. And actually, Rekha is working on an upgradeable smart contract system right now. Let's see how it works out. But most of the times it cannot be updated. So the testing takes a lot of time. You have to also do a smart contract security audit on that and pay a lot of money for that. Yeah, the testing is the thing that takes most of the time. And then you have to put it on the test net, then test it again with real people, then put it on the main net. So it's a long process. As opposed to other blockchain implementations that are more loose in terms of restrictions here. See, I would say that having the restriction is actually good. And there's a reason for that, to avoid spam and infinite loops on the blockchain. That's why we have the gas limit in Ethereum. And frankly, when I started learning about blockchain and writing smart contracts, Ethereum was the only and the best option. It was back in January 2016. I stuck with it. I love it. And I think the community support that Ethereum has is the most important thing. There are several blockchain implementations right now. Just yesterday, I was having a talk with a guy. He's like, yeah, I want to go to this blockchain. I'm like, dude, you go there, but community support is just not there for other projects as much as Ethereum, I would say. Cool. Thank you guys. Thanks for coming today.