 Well, welcome everyone to the session on open source blockchains emerging role as the platform for digital currencies. I'm Karen Ohtoni. I'm with Hyperledger, which is a sister project to Phenos at the Linux Foundation. I'm here with Makoto Takamiya from Soar Mitsu. We're going to have a discussion today on CBDCs, digital currency, DeFi, and hear about the CBDC project that Makoto has been building for the last couple of years. We are recording the session previously to the live time, but Makoto and I will be available in the chat to answer your questions during this session and also if we have any time at the end before the next session starts. So let's get started then Makoto, please introduce yourself and share a little bit about Soar Mitsu, what you do there. Soar Mitsu is a member of Hyperledger and you're very involved with the Hyperledger technology community with the distributed hyperledger Eroha. So please share a little bit about your involvement in our community. Yeah, sure. So it's great to be with you and thanks a lot for the introduction. So my name is Makoto Takamiya. I'm the CEO of Soar Mitsu and for those who may not know, Soar Mitsu is, I'd like to describe it as a boutique fintech startup. We were originally based in Tokyo, Japan, but now we're actually in a few different countries. We are still a very young company, we were founded in 2016. And actually just a few months after being founded, we joined the Hyperledger project, which was actually a great honor for a small startup like ours. I'm actually a computer scientist by background. I studied and grew up in California, actually, and I got my computer science degree. And then after that I moved to Japan and worked in the research lab studying neuroinformatics actually for more than seven years. So it's been an interesting journey that brought me into blockchain. But I've been in this industry since 2013 and it's been really fascinating. I've had the honor of being part of many different open source blockchain projects. I can talk a little bit more about my company and what our vision is. So we kind of wanted to build our own kind of vision of blockchain. This was back in 2016 and we were focusing on digital identity at that time. And none of the current blockchains at the time were really meeting our needs. And so that's kind of where, through discussion with our engineers, that's how we built this project called Iroha that then we gave to Linux Foundation with other Hyperledger members back in 2016. And that got accepted as one of the open source platforms in the Hyperledger project. So it's been a long journey, but it's been very interesting. Well, thank you for that introduction. So before we dive into talking more about your specific project, we might have some newcomers to the topic of DeFi also known as decentralized finance to peer-to-peer payments and CBDCs, central bank digital currencies. Maybe you could just give a sense for, what are all these terms that people are throwing out there? DeFi now encompasses stable coins and cryptocurrencies and all kinds of different things. And maybe just kind of level set for the audience here about what's going on in the peer-to-peer payment space right now. So when people think of blockchain and peer-to-peer cryptocurrencies, they typically think of Bitcoin which of course is the most famous and kind of archetypal example. But since Bitcoin, there's been quite a lot of innovation over the past 12 years. And so since the Bitcoin white paper came out and it's just so much that it's hard to even figure out where to begin to talk about. But some of the more recent and exciting trends are DeFi or decentralized finance. And this is an idea where you go beyond just having a cryptocurrency and maybe some peer-to-peer payment system that's using the blockchain. And you actually provide more robust financial services on top. And an example would be like a peer-to-peer loan where you could have one token as an asset that's a collateral and you can either mint or provide a new type of token from this collateral. And this is just managed automatically by the rules of the system. So you don't have to worry about things like people defaulting on loans or financial crisis like we had in maybe 2008. On the other hand, if you build the rules of the system in a bad way you can have new types of financial crises. So it's quite an interesting playground that's doing quite a lot. Now in the DeFi sphere there's many different types of applications. And of course things like stable coins for payment are very interesting. And there's different types of stable coins. So stable coin typically is pegged to some type of index like for example, the US dollar and it could either be backed by real dollars like an evolved or something or it could be backed by another type of currency that's actually equal to dollar or even worth more than the dollar. Like something like a synthetic asset that like if you want one dollar but you only have ether then you can actually put in like maybe $1.50 worth of ether into a smart contract and then you can mint a new type of dollar stable coin. And the innovation here is really not so much as in these financial mechanics but rather the concept of composability. So by having this on a blockchain and all these clear inputs and outputs from these different applications you have what IBM I think used to call the API economy. You actually have a way to create a digital economy where everything is just connected by these kind of like API calls or by interfaces and you can build a really, really complex applications that even the designers of maybe a piece of it couldn't have envisioned before. And that's kind of like it going on in the public blockchain space. So there is some work in the Hyperledger project that's contributing that but there's also many more public blockchains in this. So for example, of course the work in Ethereum which now it's very closely related to Hyperledger. And then there's Polkadot which is doing some really interesting work there. So our company actually works very closely with Web3 Foundation which is a nonprofit in Switzerland who's working on building this kind of interledger Polkadot and Kusama protocols which is really an exciting ecosystem. And then you've countless other platforms. Now this innovation is being done in the completely open and dare I say, rather unregulated space. So this is kind of like a whole bunch of computer scientists and people going out there and playing around with different things. And this is really exciting because people are testing new things that never existed before. But on the other hand, there are very serious financial institutions that are looking at some of these concepts and figuring out how does this fit into existing financial markets infrastructure. So central banks are one of these and many central banks around the world are studying so-called central bank digital currencies and ways to take some of these concepts of tokenized money and build this into the infrastructure of their national economies, which is quite a new idea. There are assets that have value, like cash or nothing new, but doing this in a digital form is very new for banks to look at. And so it also has new challenges, especially regulatory challenges, but it's also has quite a lot of very potential to this that didn't exist yet. And so the whole the whole DeFi space and the C base I think are very hot buzzwords now. In fact, these, I think this has been, and I would say in the blockchain space. Well, thanks for sharing a little bit about the evolution of what's been happening in digital currencies. As you mentioned, you know, Bitcoin kind of started this. It is an open source technology. It's public, nobody owns it, right? There are controls and everyone can take part in it and contribute to it and add to it. Do you think we could have gotten to the point of central banks really digitizing their currencies without Bitcoin if we didn't have that start in this open source technology that Satoshi developed? Well, yeah, that's a good question. So it was really Bitcoin that started it all. Obviously a lot of the ideas were not completely new to Bitcoin, you know, the idea of, you know, digital money or even like a tokenized form of assets or tokens was nothing 100% new. There were other types of applications, but really what Satoshi was able to do was, you know, make this in a way where there's no central authority to take the responsibility or the blame for building something like that. And that actually is what in many ways enables DeFi or decentralized finance applications because a lot of these experiments and ideas you couldn't actually run, you know, because the legal structure hasn't potentially caught up to that in many areas. So Satoshi created really like a worldwide, you know, new type of supranational currency and, you know, more than 10 years later, you know, Facebook came out to do the same and they still, you know, still haven't been able to succeed in that because of the regulatory hurdles. And so, but Satoshi didn't ask anyone, he just put it out there. But yeah, the fact that it's open source gave a lot of resilience to Bitcoin, obviously. No one would trust closed source payment system like that because, you know, money is all based on it's really a form of trust. Right. And I would say that without Bitcoin, central banks wouldn't really be considering a tokenized version of central bank liabilities either because, you know, as we all know, a digital central bank money already exists, especially for wholesale uses. And the idea of creating something like a kin to a bearer asset that's digital, I think is nothing that would be considered if, you know, Bitcoin has shown potentially the utility of something like this. And, but Bitcoin is just, you know, one small start. I really don't think it can be, you know, overemphasized how important composability is in these spaces. So being able to have some kind of token where the transfer of the token transfers the ownership in real time, you know, the transfer is the transfer not just to the token but ownership itself. That's really a very powerful concept in many types of financial markets infrastructure. And that I think is going to pave a way to a much, you know, huge revolution in global financial markets and hopefully, you know, increase the efficiency of things like payments and settlements and different types of fundraising that corporations do. Yeah. Yeah, you know, before DeFi became sort of the coin term the term that was being used is open finance. And it's a real change that was, you know, Bitcoin is part of the evolution and maybe it really kind of kickstarted things. But, you know, it's that openness that really is what's different about what's being done now and the fact that it's, you know, tokenized or digital, therefore more transparent and more accessible. Why do you think it's important though to use open source technologies versus, you know, something that a government is just building in house or a company is just building in house as their own technology? Why is open source important in digital payments and more specifically in CBDCs? Well, I would argue that not just open source but other types of open technologies are very important for advancing mankind. But just to specifically answer your question. So open source is really exciting for new innovative payment systems like blockchain-based or DLT-based payment systems that haven't existed before because if it's not open, then central banks or other types of corporations wouldn't want to trust, you know, a single vendor because the technology is too new. Most of the technologies we're talking about are less than five years old. And so if you're a central bank, you know, you're not gonna trust like a young startup like that unless you have guarantees that, you know, even if this company goes away, the core component is open and we can, you know, either take our own developers and continue it or there's a community around it and we can continue with that. So really it's about, you know, many people creating these building blocks and then allowing it to come together. Again, it's a composability and it helps people to collaborate. I'm just to give an example. I guess this couple of years ago, Hyperledger ERSA was, you know, was approved and it's a cryptographic library. It has many different types of complex cryptographic algorithms that have been vetted by professionals and, you know, writing your own cryptography is a terrible idea in any project. And so every blockchain project typically, you know, uses, you know, different libraries and sometimes even the same implementation or sorry, different implementations of the same spec can have minor differences on some edge cases and this makes it really hard, especially in blockchain because you have to get consensus about some data. It makes it really hard to get the exact same answer in some edge cases. And so Hyperledger ERSA helps a lot with this by standardizing, you know, some of the key algorithms that people use. If you're just using, you know, additional signature algorithm, you have it here in this library and you don't have to worry about, you know, is this who created this library? Is it, you know, can I trust it in my code or should I write my own algorithm that be crazy? But so Hyperledger ERSA has been really powerful and enabling many blockchain projects out there. And I think that's just one of, you know, dozens of examples of how, at least in the blockchain space, open sources helped significantly. Yeah, yeah, I think sometimes, you know, it can be seen as governments might see it as more risky to not have something that they are in control of or that's, you know, they can, you know, put their specific requirements on. So it's definitely something that I think, you know, a lot of we hear that a lot of banks are considering both kinds. And it'll be interesting because each government is taking their own approach to it. You know, the Bank of Information System just came out with a report where the Bank of England, Japan, Sweden, Switzerland, and the US as well talked about, you know, what are the core requirements that need to be there for an effective central bank digital currency, not just for the domestic use, but also to facilitate cross-border payment use. But, you know, it's still kind of up to those different banks to choose whether or not they're going to be doing something in-house, homemade, proprietary with the vendor, or something where they're leveraging open source with, you know, maybe even the help of some service provider to help them build it. I think the debate is still going on about what is more stable, what's more sure, what's more or less risky because there's real conservatism in central banks that, you know, they can't, you know, you can't mess up. You know, it has to be something that they feel very, very, very, very sure is stable and confident in. Yeah, so that's a good point as well. But it's also important to remember that technology is just one part of the larger picture and that technology changes very fast. So, yeah, the report you're referencing from the Bank for International Settlements, I think it was a really key report. It came out in October and had seven central banks including Bank of Japan as members of it. But it's a very interesting research report because it laid out kind of what are the, what are the desideratum or what are the desired features of different CDVCs? Yeah. CDVCs. And, but most of it was really about, you know, things like monetary policies. So none of these, you know, tokenized fiat currencies should, you know, of course change monetary policy or provide systemic risks. As far as technology goes, they were mainly concerned about things like, you know, is it going to run 24 seven or is it going to be able to make some kind of offline transactions that perhaps some limitations and things like this. And of course cost as well because, you know, if you have infinite money, you can do almost anything, but that doesn't mean that, you know, it's that you wouldn't have users if the cost was too high. And so they're really thinking about, you know, how do we create like a simple form of digital cash, which is a big trend. But yeah, I would, I don't think the report emphasized the technology enough. Of course I'm a technologist, but I do think that open technologies help a lot. Some central banks don't like openness that much because they're worried about security. And this is, you know, of course, security by obscurity. So it doesn't make sense to just try to, you know, hide things. You should have like real mathematically proven security in your system instead. But I do think a good argument against focusing on technology too much of these systems is that it, the technology honestly does change a lot. And that's for having different standards for messaging and interoperability between systems. So like inter-ledger protocols, the stuff, the stuff we've been focusing on as well is really key. And that also goes with the international payments as well. Right. Right. Well, let's get, let's get into some of the more specifics of what you've been doing at Soromitsu specifically with the Bank of Cambodia and the project Bakong, which just officially launched in October. It's been in operation for a year or so now at least in a semi-official launch, but officially last month is very, very exciting. And so please share a little bit more about how that project, you know, started off and where, what you've been building the last couple of years, leading up to this official launch. Yeah. So project Bakong in Cambodia is a, is a, you know, real-time payment system that anyone in the country can use just with their mobile phone, which is kind of a really interesting use case. Most central banks haven't really ventured too much into this space before. I think probably an easy way to explain this actually to show it, because I do have it on the app on my phone. Here, I'll just share my screen real quick. Yeah, that'd be great. Technology is driving us crazy, but you should be able to see my screen now. So what you see here is just the wallet screen. So it's very simple digital wallet. This is a white label app that the central bank, you know, provides to commercial banks. There's a commercial bank here at the top, Foreign Trade Bank of Cambodia. And then there's some balance like in Camarillo and US dollar. And it's really simple. You can send and receive money using QR codes. Anyone can scan this and send me money. And then you can also send, for example, some money here. I'll send two cents. I'm feeling generous. And then you can just hit send and then you get, you know, you receive the payments, some details here. And then actually it's already done. So it says success here on the screen. So people, this image of like blockchain being a slow thing for payments. A lot of that is because, you know, Bitcoin takes, you know, 10 minutes or cheese. In the worst case, sometimes you're waiting like 40 minutes or an hour for your block to get mined. But because this is using a permissioned blockchain technology, it's, you know, much faster. And so it's just a two to three seconds. And that's from the whole stack. Like from, you know, my phone to the commercial bank, to the central bank, and then back to my phone. So it's really, it's doing quite a lot in that two to three seconds. But anyway, so this is the simple overview of the app. I don't want to spend too much time sharing it off, but the cool thing about this is anyone in the country with a Cambodian phone number can send and receive digital money now. And this digital money is actually, you know, the ledger is being managed by the central bank, which is really, really cool concept. It means that under the right circumstances in the future, this could be, you know, it can enable open banking like you discussed where through API access, you could, you could have digital money in your application in a safe and secure way, which is very, a very, very cool thing. But, but yeah, I don't want to talk forever about my own. And using it doesn't cost anything for just to send this? Well, I mean, that's, that's really up to the banks currently, because it's a new system. There's no transaction fees involved, but you know that like, it's not up to us. It's up to central bank and commercial banks. Now we've worked just to tell the story real quick of this. So the central bank of Cambodia actually, I guess from 2016 they were studying, you know, CBDCs and blockchain and different things like that. And they approached us and then from 2017 we worked on this. So it took, took a couple of years. And then we released the first pilot in July of 2019. And then, and then it's officially launched last month. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to be there in person because of, you know, the current, you know, pandemic and it's very hard times to travel, unfortunately. But yeah, I think NBC central bank of Cambodia should really be, you know, congratulated because they had quite a lot of foresight for looking at this. And our engineers worked with their, their engineers and their team, you know, to realize this system. So it's really very, it's really very technocratic, public private type of partnership. And I think it is very successful. And it was based, you know, around open source technologies like hyperligerated, which is the blockchain that we use. Right. And, and how did the project evolve? So when they, when you started working on this with them in 2016, is it, is it the same thing that is now like did it first start off as, you know, let's just digitize payments and that then it became something else or what was sort of the evolution of the project? Well, it's, it hasn't really changed all that much. They had a very clear vision, I think from the beginning, which was that they wanted to have, you know, a retail accessible payment system, because there is very high unbanked proportion in the country. And, and, you know, things like credit cards are very rare in Cambodia. So it's hard to have a digital economy without robust digital payments. And I think they have the strategic vision and they saw the opportunity and they took it, which is very, you know, very forward thinking. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's from what I understand, the only officially launched CBDC other than the project Sand Dollar out of the Bahamas. These are the two that are live and available to all citizens. Is it exactly a CBDC or is it a little bit different than what the project Sand Dollar is doing or the Bank of England and Bank of France is considering just so that the audience can understand the particularities of what's similar different about what, what else they're hearing out there? Yeah, I think the system is very similar to project Sand Dollar in technical architecture. It's also similar to what people's Bank of China has, which is a, it's a two tier system. And for example, in China where any, and in Cambodia where you have a central bank running the master ledger and then all the consumers are intermediated by, by commercial banks who who manage the customers and onboard customers to KYC, AML, you know, all the traditional things. And then, and then, you know, the mobile apps connect to the central bank through the commercial banks. So it's kind of a two tier architecture that's actually fairly proven and scalable. I think it's a very, you know, reasonable approach. The only other architecture I would say that's viable is to do to do something a little bit more decentralized where you would have, for example, instead of the central bank running the whole ledger, maybe have commercial banks joining joining in on validation of transactions and things like that. So I'm not familiar with any central banks doing that. But I do know that over the years there's been proposals like that and there's been lots of experiments. There's quite a lot of very interesting experiments going on in the world, but to actually pull the trigger and make these things live, you know, it takes, it takes a little bit, it's not just a technological thing. It's also, you know, there's politics. There's, you know, other types of regulatory issues. Yeah. And that was something I wanted to ask is, you know, did the government of Cambodia create new regulations or change the regulations in order to make this project possible? Well, they didn't need to change too much. So this is really just, there's no changes in monetary policy because it's very strictly 100% reserved fiat. So it's kind of like just a stable coin or, you know, kind of it's very similar to traditional payment systems that already exist. And so central bank is allowed to build payment systems and that's their job. And so they did that. One thing that needed to be kind of approved by the regulatory side was this, it's, there's a two tier for onboarding users. So anyone with a phone number can sign up and use the system and you get a daily limit. So you have a very small limit of transactions. You can use it for buying some food or something, but you can't buy a car. But if you wanted to have higher value transactions, you actually have to physically go to a bank and do, you know, to KYC and onboard and then they, the bank will set the limit to, they can actually do, I think, anything they want. So it's a two tier system. So getting the slower tier accepted how to be done by the regulatory, the regulatory in the country. But, but yeah, I mean, it's, it's fairly low risk because low value transactions, you know, are really somewhat hard to use and important crime. And also to get a phone number anyway in Cambodia, you have to provide a passport scan. So there is, it is, you know, it's not an anonymous way to do payments because at the end of the day, if a police agency or something wanted to find out who made the transaction, they could do it. There's ways to find out. But it does have clear separation of data and who controls what. So the central bank doesn't really know the identity of anyone doing anything because, you know, that's done by the commercial banks who manage the customers. And so I think that's, it's always important to have, you know, some segregation between, you know, who can see what in the system. You don't want a single entity that has, you know, God like powers in any system like this. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, you mentioned the financial inclusion aspect. You showed us the app and how it works. You know, could you share a little bit more about what this means for, you know, the average Cambodian day to day, you know, what does it allow them to do that maybe they couldn't do before? Well, I think it makes doing any kind of digital payment a lot easier. It wasn't completely impossible before, but it was pretty hard to do, especially in a real time way. Like you couldn't, you couldn't do something like, you know, similar UI or UX to credit card processing where you go to a website, you log in and then you're done. It's a little bit harder involving some SMSs and things like that. So that opens up a whole new way, a whole new area of digital commerce that didn't really exist before. So I think that's very exciting. Other ways that it helps are, I would say it helps kind of make all the, I don't know, the payments a lot faster and more efficient. So up until now a lot of people have used cash for everything. And in cash, you know, you have to carry it and do all these things and give change. And it takes time to do everything. And especially now with the pandemic, you know, people are worried about cash and then all these, you know, sanitary issues as well. And so just the, just the efficiency increase in the payment space, if, you know, if the whole population use this system, it could easily add, you know, 1% of GDP just by the efficiency in payment. Just, you know, the time wasted in, you know, giving change and going to the back. It's quite, it adds up at the scale of the economy. And so this, you know, can help just give more efficiency. And in a developing country, that's every little bit helps because it gives people, you know, if you can barely afford, you know, food or, you know, house, you know, just having a little bit extra can help quite a lot. Yeah, no, that's so true. And it's really exciting to see, it'll be really exciting to see, you know, what we will begin to hear from Cambodians using this payment service, the impact of, you know, that efficiency of not having to go to the bank, of not having to take out cash or carry so much cash. There's security there too, right? Not having to have so much cash on your person. I wanted to also ask you, you know, oh, and by the way, I wanted to just let our audience know, if you want to learn even more about this, this case study, actually, we have a report, a case study that we've developed at Hyperledger on our website aboutproject.com. So that's another place that you can learn more before we go into my next question where I was just listening to this podcast, where I was coin desk money reimagined, and I was listening to the premiere of Bermuda talk with the podcast host and saying that, you know, they were actually moving away from building their own CBDC and instead are investing in private sector innovation coming to Bermuda in order to build stable coins and other forms of digital payments, rather than spending resources on building their own government infrastructure, which we talked about earlier, you know, is something that, you know, while working with open technologies can seem risky, it can also be very risky to kind of build your own with a technology that's changing so quickly, like you mentioned. And part of the thing, one of the things that the premier mentioned in that discussion was, you know, having to deal with that changing technology and the vendor lock-in. And so, you know, for anyone who is in government looking to use this, why does it benefit government to use open source technologies for these kinds of projects? Yes, that's a great question. And I think maybe it's overlooked by a lot of governments. Actually, I know the podcast you're talking about with the premier David Burt. And I had the honor of meeting him last year in Davos. I met all three of the participants on the podcast actually at the GBBC, the Global Blockchain Business Council in Davos last year, which was really a great opportunity. And I actually spoke to Premier Burt and one of his technical advisors who's there and quite a lot about their stablecoin regulation and also digital identity regulation that he talked about. But, yeah, they're, well, you know, Bermuda's a fairly small market. And so they do have perennial difficulties in getting like new services to come down there and set up shop just because there's so few consumers that it's hard to justify from a monetary standpoint. And so they're targeting a lot of kind of like super national services so things like stablecoin issuance where, you know, you can issue stablecoin that's backed by US dollars that are sitting in pink vaults or on pink balance sheets in Bermuda and then use these stablecoins all over the world with some clear or regulatory clarity, which is kind of a really cool thing. I think it's a good step in the right direction. I was a little bit disappointed that they don't support synthetic assets. So they actually do want, you know, fully collateralized, you know, stablecoins, which I think maybe is not the most interesting thing to me personally. But, yeah, they wanted to not build their own system or even choose, you know, choose the winner for anything like digital identity or with the stablecoins because they wanted different market participants to come in set up shop there and then compete and then have a clear and equal regulatory playground, which is kind of a cool idea. So their ideas like instead of creating a Bermuda and digital identity, you know, 100 companies can come and set up their own digital identity that's totally cool. We'll treat these as, you know, the ones we approve, you know, we'll treat these as a legal form of some kind of digital identity on the island. And so that's one way to do it. So you don't have any vendor locked in because you don't have any vendors. You just let anyone come in and kind of set up shop with a regulatory framework. That works if you have something that there's a clear market demand for like stablecoins or even digital identity, which, you know, you can use anywhere in the world supposedly. So these types of applications make sense. For something like a domestic payment system, it's a little bit harder to justify. So, like, you'd have to actually have a vendor come in and actually make the sacrifice to actually pay the money and set up a system here in this country, which is not the biggest place in the world. And so, yeah, so having everything open source allows maybe the government of a small nation like that to be able to, maybe they could build their own system even using these composable parts that other companies have, like for example that we made and then made open source because then you don't have to worry about having a license that you have to keep buying or some kind of proprietary system that you're not sure what the quality is. Right, right, it's again, kind of goes back to there's so many different approaches to this and each government is really taking, you know, just not too far away. We have projects and all are out of Bahamas that's taken a very different approach. So it's very interesting to see what's being done or what and what will be coming out more and more. We just heard actually there was news today that the Bank of Australia is developing something with a couple of vendors. So it's not clear yet what technology they're using. Seems like it may be something Ethereum based but will it be public, will it be permissioned? That's for us to continue to follow and find out as central banks explore the many different ways in which you can go about digitizing your currency. So before we wrap up here, I wanted to see, you know, what are some of the, you know, you are part of this project one of the few formally officially launched CBDCs out there. What are some of the lessons learned that you have in building the technology, implementing it, working with governments that might be helpful to anyone else who's exploring that. Yeah, so I think one of the things that really led to the success of the project was being able to work directly with the government and really have the central bank being one of the core stakeholders. So having that kind of buy-in from the team that actually has to run the system is very important. And I don't think we would just have been wasting our time without having that very special support and actually having them work on it. So I think being able to find the right stakeholders, being able to find people with the passion and then a clear use case that also is easily just viable, makes sense. So in Cambodia, financial inclusion is a big problem. And this is a clear solution. It's not just about using technology for the sake of the technology. You want to use it to solve a real need that people have. And if you do that, then it's not really, you know, the rest will kind of come into place, I think in many ways. But I think it's really important for small companies too not to be afraid to try to do big challenges because you know, technology is not evenly distributed. And a lot of small companies have really stayed the technology that sometimes no one else has. And that should be appraised and, you know, understood by the market and different participants as well. And never be afraid to make things open. You know, a lot of people said, you know, why did we spend so much money and time on open source? And for us, really, well, part of it's just my own philosophy. And I really like, for example, what Tesla did with making their patents open and things like that. And really, life is really short and you don't want to waste time. So it's really important to be able to have others reuse some of the effort that you've done and even contribute back to it. And it's that collaboration I think that really makes life worth living and without that collaboration, you're just fighting the whole world always and that's not a very fun thing to do. Right. And, you know, we are here at a Linux Foundation event and our the DLTs that we work with are part of the Linux Foundation I think that's been part of the history of open source technology is that it fosters and really builds innovation and allows that progress to happen in a way that's much more accelerated, I think, that's been stated over and over that the innovation accelerates when people have more access to how things are done and can kind of look under the hood and then see okay this is what I could now take this and improve upon it and it just really accelerates from there in a way that probably or really can't, I think in a way where you've only got a few eyes looking at it rather than the world's view on it. It increases security quite a lot too and that's something I didn't touch on but I don't think that could be overstated either that having for systemically important infrastructure you want the core part to be open source is my personal opinion. Right. Well, you know trust, transparency and security is the promise of digital currencies. You know, there's different concerns that different people have for that security and that transparency. Some people don't want governments being able to see who they are and how they're spending their money. Startups and financial institutions have had major issues with security breaches and transparency as well. So just to wrap up our discussion here, what is the outlook what's next for Project Bakong and also what do you sort of see or are you excited about in the DeFi CBDC peer-to-peer payments space? Okay. Project Bakong, just to further expand increased users there's some usability increases that can be done by making specific applications for businesses and payment terminals and even integration with card networks. These are all things that I'm very excited on over the next year. So that should be fun. In the DeFi space we talked too much about it but we're doing some really cool stuff. We're working on we got a grant for DEX decentralized exchange in the Polka.Ecosystem that's called FocusBot. So that's actually in the future we're hoping to use Hyperledger Eroha version 2 as part of that ecosystem. So that's really exciting project that we're doing other than that, we're also doing some I would say pretty cool experiments with decentralized economics system called SORA and a few different things. So we make a quite a lot of open source applications as well. So besides just Hyperledger project we also contribute to other types of open source. So we're working with Web3 foundation and also protocol labs on Filecoin. So we're doing some cool things. It's my dream that many of these pieces and ideas can kind of come together and as part of this we're working on Hyperledger Eroha 2 which is kind of taking some of the things that we've learned and improving on them creating new ideas and I think Eroha 2 is going to be very the philosophy is very different. It's going to be really hard to compare it to other systems when we're done. It's going to be a fun year over the hopefully. Hopefully next year it's going to be better than 2020. It's hard to be worse but I mean I think we all I think we all hope for that. Yeah so yeah I think I'm really excited about being in the space and the technologies in a good place I think. There's nothing short to read about on this topic and I'll be sure to post some of the things that we've referenced in the chat here during the event the case study on Project Bakong some information about Hyperledger Eroha the podcast I mentioned so if anyone wants to learn more and continue their reading or listening I'll share the links there. Thank you so much Makoto for sharing what you've done and your insights on launching one of the first CBDCs out there and thank you so much. Yeah thanks, it's a pleasure to be on and enjoy your Thursday everyone. And thank you to Open Source Strategy Forum for having us as well.