 Good morning. I hope you're all well caffeinated. I think the topic of CBDCs can seem a bit daunting at first, a bit dusty almost, but actually, if you take a look around the world right now, I mean, there's news coming from Russia that they're actually going to roll out a CBDC, the digital ruble, buy next year by the political pressure that is put on them. So I personally don't think that CBDC deserves let's say dusty stereotype that it can sometimes be adhered to. And this is what we're here to discuss today amongst other things. But just because we were already on the topic of the topic being quite international, just by show of hands, how many of you are actually outside or came in from outside of the Eurozone, just for this event right here? Oh, brilliant. Wow, that's very good. I'm glad we did this. Wow, that's impressive. I mean, for many of you, this must be the first time back in Europe as well after covid. So the world certainly has changed. And as we know, central banks have changed their attitudes towards CBDCs as well in the last couple of years. And this is exactly what we're going to be discussing today. And we have financial leaders from financial institutions, from different European countries in this case right here. But we'll make sure to obviously touch on to the developments worldwide as well to get the first hand experience on the research that was being done in France on a CBDC for interbank settlement, but then also touch on the infrastructure that is used in different countries around the world other than the Eurozone itself. So as I've said before, the keynote panel will bring together those those unique perspectives from our leaders that are sitting right here next to me. May Santa Maria, great, great that you are here with us. I wouldn't call myself a leader, but thank you. That's quite, I just happened to have been looking at a blog change for over five years in way of intro. I joined the Department of Finance, as I said, exactly five years ago. I started looking at Bitcoin at the time towards Christmas when it was looking at $20,000. Those are the days and it all felt really strange. I just felt that clearly blogging technology was something that the Ministry of Finance in Ireland had to look at. I thought it was going to be transformative. And as I said, we've been looking at it and trying to support the departments and the development internally here in Ireland, but also at a European level. And I'm also a member of the OCDCMF meeting where we obviously also look at digital finance. And I was very, very fortunate to work with the World Economic Forum during COVID actually, when we spent the guts of 14, 16 months looking at stable coins, in particular for cross-border payments. So that was very, very good. I hear someone nodding. So a very long report, but definitely incredible experience, particularly for a dusty, dust person like me. So, yeah, that's my interest in it and who I'm sitting here with you today. Thank you, May. And we'll touch on the work that you're currently doing and you'll come as well in your position later on, I'm sure. And for now, Nicolas Doulabard, please also present yourself and your work. So I'm coming from the centralized world. So as mentioned before, curiosity and challenge drove me to work on Blockchain. Years ago, when we built the Eurozone, we had to build market infrastructures and payment system, which should be resilient, strong, so centralized. Then comes the Blockchain and we started experimenting Blockchain five years ago. And I'm going to tell about these experiences. Perfect, right before we get started, I'll use the opportunity to also introduce myself. My name is Farah Polarevic and I'm from the Digital Euro Association. I'm an executive director there. And the DEA in short is basically picking up on all the developments that the two next to me are working on on a daily basis. The papers that are coming out and seeing where different countries stand, for example, with the CVDC tracker. So we keep a close eye on those developments as well. Now to get everyone leveled, first of all, let's dive into the attitude of Banque de France and possibly also the Bank of Ireland. If you can comment on that, may that be great. What general attitude does your financial institution have toward a Eurozone wide CVDC, so one issued by the central bank and then attitude towards individual research done by individual countries in the Eurozone? So let's start, so we have basically two use cases, one for the banks and one for the customers. Maybe we can start with the customers. We see that coins and notes are less used, especially by young people. So we know that we have to move to something new. So we've been working on a digital Euro for all the citizens of Europe. We've been doing it with the ECB because we are part of a single entity, which is the Euro system. So we are really keen to provide central bank money under the form of tokens that anyone can use in its wallet. So we think there is a big interest for the Eurozone to do this move so that we can still use central bank money and the stability of central bank money. Let's start with the retail industry, or you want me to touch upon the interbank as well. Let's touch on the retail first. For the digital Euro, that's fine. On the retail, go ahead. I think we're on that path now. No, for the retail, I just, so you know that we started an investigation phase. So it's one year that we are being working daily, as you mentioned, on the digital Euro. We know that, so what we want to bring is tokens so that we can still have central bank money in our pocket. But we know that the payment system is today mainly managed by commercial money. So we want to find the right balance between central bank money and commercial money. And there are some intensive discussions currently today on this, how we can have a system that is co-managed by us and by the commercial banks. This is the key discussion that we have today. And we are still discussing on this, so the updates will come soon on this. Very good. Just on that topic, what's really interesting to see here is obviously the central bank of France stands towards CBDCs. We see very different approaches here. Obviously the central bank of Ukraine, for example, they're very inclined to actually use blockchain as an infrastructure, whereas the Eurozone, they actually just recently announced that Web 3 and anything other than person-to-person transactions are off the table for now, at least very likely to be, it's yet to be decided finally. But we kind of see very different likelihoods of there actually being blockchain as the foundation for the infrastructure. May, if you could give us an update on kind of the worldwide developments here, what different approaches do countries in general have towards CBDC? What's happening worldwide is easy to spot. Anyone can clearly go to the CBDC tracker, go online, and you can check that out for yourselves. I'm sure you're all more intelligent than I am, particularly when it comes to blockchain, so I will certainly not try to be able to add value to that that you can check yourselves. The value maybe that we try to bring in in financial advisory when it comes to developments really is, where's the focus is, where's the risk might be, but where's the value at? There's 90% of the central banks in the world now looking at CBDCs. Most of it, maybe 70% of the people here put their hands up to say you've come from outside the Euro area. The Fed just announced in August that they're definitely issuing a CBDC of sorts, and I'm not talking about a digital dollar foundation, but something doing, I think they're going to call it the Fed now, which effectively is your infrastructure, so there's a lot of developments out there. And yet, from a citizen's perspective, and that's me, the normal person, not my work persona looking at this, I'm wondering why would I want this? What's the CBDC going to change in my life? And how could blockchain actually change my life? And why would I want the central bank change that for me? And I think that's for me when it gets interesting. Sometimes it feels the discussion that we're having, and there is development, and we're all looking at it, is we're applying blockchain and the application of that ability to pay to a paper-based process. But we're not using that technology to consider, what can we do? Not just digitalizing that paper exchange, but what else could we potentially do that right now we're not even considering. And I think that's where the discussion is missed. We can all obviously go in, and eventually the technology will allow us to just digitalize that payment between you and me, or between banks, or between even central banks, which is something I'd love to explore in a wider setting perhaps. But are the other uses we could do with that CBDC that just not just the payment? It just feels we're not giving credit to what the technology can do. And I'm looking at you, because you guys are the experts, particularly knowing what hyperlegia can do. So could we use a retail CBDC for lifting the hardship of having to pay taxes? What if taxes could actually be deducted through programmability at the point of payment? As an example, that to me is where we're missing the point. We have incredible opportunity to reconsider clearly how we digitalize that as I said, this payment, this paper trail that we're doing, but we're just too focused on that. I think it'd be great to do. A bit more sky, blue sky thinking in terms of what the technology and the opportunities will bring to us. There's many of them. I mean, I know you guys coming in from a hyperlegia form perspective, in the CBDC discussions and the pilots that Nicolas had mentioned. For example, in bringing in the work that we do at the WF, the Sustainable Development Goal number 10 is about reducing, effectively reducing the inequality in humankind. And specifically, there is a goal there to decrease transaction costs, like remittance costs to 3% for immigrants and effectively erode all corridors or old remittance corridors that charge more than 5%. During COVID time in European countries, some European countries transaction costs, this is payment like all of these countries, all you guys here here. I don't know how much you're getting charged now to come here and get your your your payments. But in a lot of countries in the world during COVID, remittance costs and transaction costs actually went up as digital payments went up. So could CBDC address that? And at the same time, address the SDG goal number 10 and at the same time, address that inequality. Those are the questions that I think were missing sometimes just looking at retail CBDC. Just one more. I fully agree that we define some priorities, but I fully agree that we might still be open to many many use cases. So we didn't decide yet which would be the first use cases. So there would be surprises. Which will be the first use cases in terms of the goals for CBDC, especially I mean now you've talked about the retail one and then there's also the inter-bank settlement. And could you just briefly take us through the objectives for both of these for the Bank de France? So inter-bank was mainly driven by our customers, meaning that we have customers with other banks which are now paying in central bank money. They see a use case to issue tokens, security tokens. And so they want to have central bank money for paying this security token. So this is the first use case. They think that it would be much easier to issue tokens with DLT to sell it around the world. It would be much quicker than today. So they see a real use cases and we have been issuing some security tokens together with them. And we had central bank money to pay this security token. So this is the first use case. Then we have the second use case which is close to what you mentioned which is the cross-border payments. The industry here is not efficient. The issue is that we need to all build this new system around the world. I don't know whether we will have only one unique cross-border payment versus payment use case or whether we will have a network of regional networks. But we will do something and we are experimenting with Singapore, with other central banks in the world, Switzerland as well. So these are the two use cases which are driven by your customers and we want to provide cash on the ledger to these use cases. I think it's great to hear. I think use cases are there. Technology is there to be used and to be applied. And we obviously want to use that experience and that brain and that innovation to apply to things. Again, from the angle that we look at in terms of looking at possibilities for risks, technology implementation, all technology implementation is going to fail unless there is uptake and acceptance by the you and me. Who remembers mini-discs, right? We just went straight from CDs to even shuffles. Although it did bring up a need for shopping songs and then to a Spotify. But the point is with that acceptance, it's the best, I think, structured, defined, designed, so you can see where it is in the world. It's not going to work. And at the same time, with that trust, it's not going to work. And unfortunately, we didn't have a chance to have a representative here from the central bank of Nigeria. But it would be great to actually hear how that worked. But what's the acceptance of the usage? Because in some of those pilots for central banks, outside of Europe, the citizens have not been that willing to accept it because they don't trust their central bank. This is something that us in Europe just take for granted. We tend to trust our central bank. But what happens in a particular country where that trust is not there? Because at the end of the day, you're just digitalising. It's such a difficult word. But you know what I mean. What we're doing is with the paper, what we're doing is with the digital currency. So without that trust, it's not going to work. And likewise, in terms of that design, it needs to be easy to work. We just take it for granted again. We have smartphones. We don't have even just feature phones or dumb phones. But you need access to the internet. We talked about, do we need a QR code? Do we need to have a digital user that's online? The reality in terms of how citizens would accept that and then use it because it needs to be easy. At the end of the day, it's easier just to take a $100 bill out of your back note than having to go in and log in and blah, blah, blah, whatever it is that you have to do. So there's not a lot of elements out there that I think that are really important to be mindful of. And sometimes, again, we tend to forget because we just see it from our perspective. And I guess this is something I wanted to share with you from a hyperledger perspective because you obviously have a global view. So with that specific country experience and knowing or understanding what the citizens want, what's going to work for them, what the central bank is in relation to that particular country citizenship, if you were to actually offer that hyperledger solution in terms of technology, what's the angle that you need to play? That's probably what I think it would be of interest to you. So to reiterate, you're talking about user experience on the one hand needing to be easy, which is also very much in line with what we think at the Digital Bureau Association. And then secondly, what we're touching on as well is basically the acceptance. There needs to be a clear advantage in using the CBDC as opposed to different types of money. We see it in Sweden with Swish. We see it in Germany with PayPal. I can't speak to other European countries what it's like there. But that needs to be clear. And I think one of the ways in which this can be achieved is blockchain as a foundation, like you were saying, micropayments enabling, or right now we have the money that you get once off for the rising energy prices, which is a political measure to help people that need the money to actually pay for gas becoming more expensive, for example. So this is, for example, something that could come in handy because right now more is spent in bureaucracy around those payments than is being paid out to the citizens to name one real-life example. And this is just one example of kind of what you can learn along the way, I guess, what we will learn along the way. And, Nikolas, what's your stance on this? Is there anything that you've learned in the last couple of years when it comes to your CBDC use cases that you can already derive from? You're saying you're doing things differently. This is how will impact the future research and roadmap rollout? I would like to come back to the challenges you mentioned because one you didn't mention was confidentiality. That was the first goal we had to check whether we could manage confidentiality within this blockchain application. Yeah, because people don't want to know how they are using their money. We already saw it for the COVID. They didn't want to be tracked and so on. But for sure, if we want to manage the system, we need to supervise them in some way, but we need to manage confidentiality. That was one of the key elements we discovered was doable with the Hyperledger Fabric. Previously, we mentioned some challenges on interoperability and as was said, the system will not be independent from all the other systems, so we need to be interoperable for sure. The ecological footprint, of course, is something important for us. We've been working intensively as well on these things. We need to work as well on performance for sure. This is maybe for all the use cases, but for the retail, we will need to work on this. Someone spoke about the US project. This was clearly one of the targets they had, so we need to work on performance. You mentioned briefly the offline, which was clear for Nigeria to be put in place. Here, the work we've been doing shows that it's not fully reliable today. For sure, the digital euro needs to be reliable, so the offline needs to be secure and not double spent and so on. These are the challenges we still need to face. We've learned part of these things, but we still need to achieve. Maybe just on conscience of the red light flashing there as well. Sarah, you mentioned that somehow the digital euro would have to be a benefit to using that. I'm specifically talking about digital euro here. I'm not talking about potentially what would be another city in another country. But I would challenge that and I would say, why do we have to have a preference or why would it have to be above anybody else? The reason I'm saying that is because when we approach payments, the way I'd like to approach it is a little bit like modes of transport, right? For long distances, you use planes. Just to go down the road, you might use a skateboard, now an electric one. You might go to the bicycle, you might use the bus. There are different choices depending on where you can afford, because of the distance and so forth. Why can't we have different ways of payments irrespective? No, irrespective. Why don't we have different payments actually respective as in depending on the transaction, the cost, the medium. And that, I think, weighs the value of a city. It might actually allow for the government to diverse and literally pay out certain things. It doesn't mean that maybe the citizens will want to use that for our day-to-day payments. So that's where I think there's a lot of scope and room for us to be a lot more groundbreaking and innovative and actually really consider how we could use this literacy. Because there's a lot more we can do. We're just limiting ourselves with just the data and data payout. That's what I think. One element you didn't mention is that we have a certain stability in Europe since a long time. Maybe people do not see the risk in using such a mean to pay. We want to bring stability to this world. So you have to take as well into consideration things that are not so clear in some of the means you are using. That's why we're doing this project to keep this stability that we have in Europe. Another one of your goals basically and the approach that you're taking right now. Just in terms of being wary of time, we will just do one round of closing statements here on what you think the ecosystem needs in terms of government, technology providers, policy right now. Let's focus on the Eurozone for this question. I don't know what to start. For policy, we will have a pilot regime in the next years. So we will experiment different policies. So we know that it will evolve. Technology, I mentioned offline because we need to... I mean, you may have to pay without your phone in your hands. In terms of government, I would say all the things we have said about confidentiality and so on to work on this so that the people can really trust the digital Euro. Maybe you have more elements on this, on the policy side. On the policy side, I think it's great that we're even looking at civil disease. We wouldn't be looking at them if it hadn't been, I think, because of Libra in June 2019 and that's the reality of it. And this means you can walk into a room, a policymaker or a minister or even the central bank here in Ireland and we're talking about blockchain, which was impossible three years ago. And that's the reality of it. So I think the more of that, I think it's great. This means we're understanding, not just fearing it, and that takes with a lot of meetings and explanations and presentations and that's the work that unfortunately people like we have to do, but it has to be done because if you don't understand something, you can't possibly bring into it a day-to-day job. I mean, how can you possibly end up with the right policy if you don't understand or at least comprehend what a technology can do and cannot do. So I think that to me it's going to be key. Personally, again, from a policymaker perspective, I think understanding the risks or where the focus is is key because otherwise you have to end up with the wrong regulation or the not fit for purpose regulation or the wrong policy. And again, that comes with understanding and asking questions. So if there's anyone here that wants to meet up after and just give me an update on civil disease and hyperledger, I'm always willing to learn because that's really where I get my understanding from. I think you're speaking for all of us heroes. Just going to mention that as well. Please do keep the conversation going. I'm happy to meet all of those that are interested that have updates that want to learn more about hyperledger as an infrastructure, for example, and then keep the discussion going. As you said, keep educating and holding presentations one-on-one in this case. Hope you have a good rest of the summit of today's day and looking forward to the discussions.