 We'll be keeping an eye on the Q&A as we can. And so please feel free to ask questions as we go. All right, yeah, thanks everyone for attending. Chris and I, we're both professors in the School of Business at Portland State. And we've kind of created, Chris is the founder of this blockchain program that we have and I'm the co-director of it. Started a couple of years ago and we've been developing it since. Kind of it's a rolling development type of thing. But we've developed this certificate program for the School of Business, specifically business students. And so it's focused on enterprise blockchain a lot. So over the last two years, we've really followed a lot of enterprise blockchain projects. And we've noticed that over the years that these use cases, they sound great. But it seems like they've been a little bit slow in terms of the uptake in production systems. And we started to wonder why that was. And looking into it in more detail, we can go to the next slide. We find that it seems that everybody on this call knows that blockchain technology has the capability of solving business problems in ways that we've never seen possible before, as it says here. But why is it that it's taken so long for us to get large blockchain systems into production? And obviously, early on, we knew that things like cost savings, risk reduction, improved stakeholder relations, things like that were possible. In fact, if you look at one of the earlier success stores and trade lines, the IBM and Merisk Consortia, it definitely did do that. It drove a lot more efficiency in that global shipping business. In fact, I think they claimed to be 15% more efficient and drove $1.8 trillion in reduced costs in 2020. And that number is going to be doing nothing but going up. So there's great potential there. There's a tremendous value, of course, that can be unleashed. And I think everybody on this call knows that. Consortia are economic systems. And when you have an economic system, you can drive network effects through that, through Consortia. And what that means is when we have larger networks, anyone that, as we grow the network over time, that network becomes more valuable as we come, we're able to pool data to create new revenue streams and cost savings and those sorts of things. So we want these consortia to get up and running, but they're difficult. Next slide. So early on, we found that technology was an issue. And everybody that's been a part of blockchain for a few years will realize this. We had a lot of POCs, our proof of concepts early on. And those proof of concepts, like with any new technology, exposes issues that the technology hands that need to be addressed. And so we saw issues like, basically, scalability and throughput were issues early on, speeds just not necessary for high speed types of DeFi applications, for example, or interoperability across blockchains. And we're improving those. And they're being improved daily with off-chain things, improving consensus methods, both helping with throughput issues, maybe even exploring things like directed acyclic graphs or DAGs to increase scalability as well. And then interoperability, an issue that we saw early on, is now starting to be addressed with projects like Polkadot, Cognos, and even Cactus here at Hyperledger, which is great to see. Other roadblocks that were out there had to continue to be that we see them being solved and things like staffing. I think many of you probably know that LinkedIn has stated that blockchain is one of the most searched topics on LinkedIn in terms of a skill set. While we were lacking skill sets in certain areas, and mainly in the business area, we had a lot of labs out there in universities like Berkeley and MIT and so technology folks in the CS departments were heavily involved early on. But as we're going to talk about in a minute, it's really a business issue. And Portland State was one of the first universities to come up with an 18 credit or a business certificate where several classes were offered to both undergraduate and graduate students. Rather than simple just labs that were developing blockchains, so now we're getting business students to start to understand the potential in business operations, which is what we need moving forward because as the next slide will state, enterprise blockchain is a business problem. So let's go to the next slide, Kristi. So blockchain is a business problem. You think we would have learned from things like data warehousing, ERP implementations early on. I was part of the data warehousing world for about 10 years. I worked at Teradata. And early on, our sales teams made the mistake of calling on IT. Well, IT, they enable the business solution, but it's business people that own the problem. So at Teradata, until we understood that we needed to call on the business and understand where the problem really lied late, then it was then that we started seeing success because business organizations that have the money to solve the problems, they then go to IT to help enable the solutions to those problems. And so that's what we need to think about it. And in blockchains, not a simple thing to do because as it states here, it's a new paradigm for doing business. It's a team sport. And many times, as these consortia are starting to understand, you need partners in many of these solutions. And in order to get partners to work together, partners that might have even been considered competitors and may still be considered competitors, but we need to figure out a way that we can work together to solve these problems. And it is difficult, again, because of new business processes that need to be put in place, business models. Things as simple as how one company might define a customer in one way and another company defines another company, part of the consortia defines a customer in a different way. What is the unit of analysis? How do we determine what that is? And so we need standards. We're working on standards as well. The Global Blockchain Business Council has an initiative now that they're working on the Global Standards Mapping Initiative 2.0 that I know Hyperlederger has been a part of as well. And Portland State now has three interns working on that project also. So we're moving that needle as well. So the technology problems are starting to be solved. The business problems are starting to be understood at a deeper level and what we need to do to solve it from a business perspective. And then you run into the ultimate problem that we think is kind of the, if you will, the long pole in the tent or the biggest problem, the one that was maybe most difficult to solve. And that is how to do a consortia and how to get partners to play nice together, so to speak, to understand each other's business issues and problems. And so we've come up with a framework for addressing some of these and Christie's gonna talk about that framework. Okay, and feel free to jump in, Stan, as we go. This is pretty dense, but the framework that we're developing here is the kinds of capabilities that a consortium needs to be able to use blockchain successfully. And so we have this framework divided into two sections. You can see the darker colored blocks and the lighter colored blocks. And so those lighter colored blocks, you can see they all start with the word partner. And so these are aspects that each individual partner will be responsible for and then the rest of them are factors associated with the consortium as a whole. So what this framework does, on the left we have kind of inputs, in the middle we've got the processes and on the right we have the outputs. So that standard model, here we're focusing on the capabilities or the things that these consortia can do that perhaps other groups or other ecosystems cannot do. There are many factors associated with blockchain adoption. So there's other impediments, legal, regulatory, institutional, those kind of things, standards. We're not really talking about that directly. We're talking about the capabilities of the firms individually and as a group in the consortia. So we'll start with the conditions for success. So the first one of course is that the use case needs to be relevant. The use case needs to be appropriate. There's been a lot of testing early on and a lot of proof concepts. You can send pilots for use cases that didn't really require a blockchain solution. And so we're starting to understand all that. And so of course there has to be a clear use case. In most instances that involves shared workflows inter-organizational workflows that are complicated and involve problems, involve frictions, pain points and that kind of thing. And or the shared need for information or data or the potential for shared benefits from information or data. And so those two things might make it so that the use case is of value to be put on the blockchain. And of course those normal sort of test supply about if you've got a trusted third party that everyone can agree to, you may not need a blockchain and all that kind of stuff still applies as it would for individual firms thinking about these decisions. Second, these participants in this consortium need to have a shared vision of what this consortium is going to create for them individually and collectively. So the participants will need to collaborate quite heavily, even when the consortium is driven by a service provider, IBM or whoever or a blockchain provider constellation network. It doesn't matter, they still all the firms that are gonna participate need to be able to collaborate and they need to have a commitment to that collaboration. They also need to have a shared mission for what this blockchain is going to achieve for them and a shared value proposition. So for these businesses comes down to economics, of course. And so they all need to think through, what is this value created by this blockchain and who is that value going to accrue to? And how is it going to accrue at the beginning and over time? All of those questions are really important. And that kind of underpinning, the understanding that this really is gonna create value, we're all on board as a consortium. Everybody knows why they're doing this and how beneficial it's going to be. That's precursor to any kind of blockchain being successful. Then in addition to that, there's a lot of demands on the individual participants in that consortium, particularly sort of, we would think of them as the keystone participants, the ones who are starting out often the larger and more powerful firms. They need a lot of capabilities to be able to make this blockchain a success. So they of course need domain knowledge in whatever area the blockchain is serving. They need technical competencies, each individual firm, because of course this blockchain is gonna interact with their normal ERP systems and it might replace a whole host of EDI relationships that they have and all kinds of things. So it's going to require upgrades in technology and integration and technology, which is not necessarily so straightforward for firms even when they have a service provider that's helping them with all that. They'll also have to have some relational capabilities. So there are firms who've participated in strategic alliances on different R&D projects, standard setting projects, all kinds of things like that. Those firms have capabilities that enable them to form relationships and work productively with other organizations. These inter-organizational relationships are really important. Some history with that, some competence in those areas are really important for each one of the partners to have. Because if they've been working in isolation in a very competitive mode, it's hard to make that paradigm shift as Dan was saying and really think about how to get into a collaborative mindset and really share business processes, share data in ways that hadn't been done before. They'll need economic strengths. So they really need to understand them. They'll need to be able to project the cost and benefits of this system to them. So how are they going to create value using this? For their firms and their stakeholders, customers and everyone else, how are they going to capture that value and when? So really, there's got to be an economic benefit for every single partner on the blockchain. No one's going to join without that economic benefit. And so, but it's really difficult for companies to do this effectively. For one reason is that they don't think enough about the strategic outcomes. And we'll talk about that at the end here, but we think of blockchain often as an operational system that sort of, we use those terms, pain points and frictions. We think it's going to improve operations. It's going to smooth things out. This is a back office play and that's where we're going to get the value. But we don't think about the strategic benefits these systems can provide and they can provide a lot of strategic benefits. So for some firms, it might be just helping them enforce claims that they're organic or conflict-free products, things like that. For others, it might enable them to form relationships that they can build on in other areas, build joint projects together, new business models, all kinds of different potential that the blockchain can provide that many firms are not able to envision or effectively value any economic sense. So to the extent that the individual firms have those capabilities, that will be a great precursor for the success of the entire blockchain consortium. Okay. And then at the consortium level, so once we get this thing designed and we're ready to sort of actually embark on the consortium creation and management, we need to have some, a number of capabilities in place. So one of them is just this ongoing situational assessment, the ability to assess how things are going. And this is at the consortium level. Individual firms already do this all the time, but the consortium is its own organization that has to have the same kind of skills that individual businesses have when they compete in marketplaces. So they'll have to understand who the partners are, the beginning partners, sort of the minimum viable ecosystem or minimum viable consortium concept. And then they'll have to think about how that's going to expand over time, who are the next round of potential partners and the next round. And we have to think about the situation as it's evolving, whether the workflows, the inter-organizational workflows amongst all these partners, how is that functioning right now and how will that all change as we get further into the blockchain project? And then just how is the network gonna grow? Not just with the blockchain partners, but who else are the external actors that are going to be affected and how? And just sort of keeping an eye on that. We need to assess all that at the beginning before we get started. And then we need to assess it on an ongoing basis. Just how are these operations going? And then governance, of course, we hear a lot about governance. That is really the key to all of this. This is the most important aspect of successful consortia. And so the governance needs to keep in mind all of the stakeholders and how they're gonna be affected, not just the partners, not just the customers, but also regulators, standard-setting bodies, anyone else who is gonna be affected, any other organizations or individuals who will be affected by what the consortium does. We'll meet governance at the different levels. So through the tech stack architecture part, but also on the business process side, that all needs to be put in place at the beginning and then it needs to be ongoing because it's not really a matter of what decisions are made at the beginning. What the governance really has to do is establish how decisions are going to be made in the future. Because everything's gonna change as we go. Partners are gonna change, the technology is gonna change, the strategic environment's all gonna change. So we're gonna need to change these governance relationships. The economics will change, so we may have tokenomics strategy, things like that. Some partners can afford to help run the network. Some cannot, some may have to be subsidized to be onboarded. All of those things are governance decisions that need to be very carefully determined upfront. And then we need a process for how to change that as the world changes as we go. And then finally, the consortium too needs to have strategic capabilities. So again, we can't think of it as just an operational issue. It's not just a back office sort of play. We need to think about the strategy of this consortium and how it's gonna move effectively to create competitive capabilities for itself and for the firms involved. What we use these terms and strategies, sensing, seizing and transforming. So we will partly with the situational environment but partly with strategic. We need to sense what the opportunities are out there. Are there new competing blockchains that will compete with us? Are there new opportunities for new technology? Are there new opportunities for business models? What can we learn that's going on in the environment? And then we have to have the capability to seize those opportunities once we find them. And then once we do that, this consortium will be transforming as we go. So one example that I can think of is just right of hand is meta ledger. They deal with pharmaceutical, sort of there's gonna be a regulation in place that requires tracking of returned pharmaceuticals so we can keep track of opioid return. This is a U.S. regulation. So meta ledger is put in place and they created this consortium of a bunch of pharmaceutical companies and distributors. But now they've evolved. So they've sensed more opportunities partly with COVID and the need for tracking, the need for being careful of counterfeiting and movement of products. And so they've really seen that opportunity, they're starting to seize it and then they're gonna transform this whole consortium so that it can expand far beyond what it was originally designed for. And then finally on the outcome side. So if the consortium can do all of these things then there can be all of these great outcomes that blockchain promises. So for partners, there are really two categories. So the operations, these are for the individual firms involved. The operations can improve often when a firm is trying to improve its inter-organizational processes, how it's relating to other outside firms. It'll realize it needs to re-engineer its own processes and this is common with new technology. And so those processes can be improved. As we go, some kinds of processes could be outsourced. For example, in a consortium, let's say one partner is really good at know your customer and money laundering activities, they might be able to do that for the whole network and then the other partners can share in that. So there may be a lot of operational benefits, outsourcing things, sharing costs, improving processes, and then of course increased security that blockchain provides for many of the increased cybersecurity and that kind of thing. Then partner outcomes on sort of the more strategic level. Individual partner firms, just like the consortia as a whole, individual partner firms can think about new ways to compete based on the new processes that they have access to, the new data that's available to them. So this would involve building new apps or building new products. I think in this Maersk Trade Lens Consortium that Stan was talking about, or maybe a better example is Daimler. So Daimler has sensors that can sense the way its leased equipment is being used, how much torque is on the engine and how these things are used. And so because that's written to the blockchain, it's reliable and it's all shared, then they can build new products, they can build new ways to lease their trucks. So it's not based on time and distance, it's based on how you're actually using the vehicle. Those kinds of outcomes can be very beneficial to the partners involved if they're able to see those opportunities and take advantage of them. And then environmental and social as well, that's at the partner level and that's also at the consortium level. So here is an example of the trade lens if they can smooth the transit across the ocean and make sure that the ships arrive at the port at the right time, then if ships can identify when that slot's gonna be available, then they can manage their fuel consumption instead of hurrying down bit of rushing to the port and then waiting three days till the slips open, they can manage the fuel consumption in a much better way. So there's all kinds of social, environmental potential advantages as well as economic. Yeah, and then for the consortium as a whole, so the consortium itself can drive costs out of the entire process. It can increase benefits, new products, new customer marketplaces. By having this expanded network, the individual firms can have access to more potential partners and the consortium itself can continue to grow and throw off economic benefits. So that's a lot to say. We just, we've got a little time left for our questions here. While we're waiting for questions, I can show you just a little bit about our program at Portland State and how it looks. Portland State is a university, a public university in Oregon. We started this program a couple of years ago and it begins with a boot camp that everyone takes. All the students take that boot camp and then we are on a quarter system. So we have three different quarters. We've got two different colors. These are six courses that we offer right now. We've both got a DeFi class. They're split up between the green ones or more of the sort of hands-on tech courses and then the blue ones are the more conceptual courses. We've got those going on in each term. The program's fully online and involves a lot of hands-on labs. We're not trying to create coders and they're not, they do some, they practice, they do some smart contracts and things like that develops in depth. But the idea is to get them conversant. They're not going to be the coders but they want to be able to talk to the coders and really understand both the business side and the tech side. And then we focus a lot on strategy, improving operations and improving strategy. We look at business theories and then the students are involved in consulting projects throughout. So they work with companies too. So they've explained what blockchains are and can do in that industry but also to identify very specific use cases, map them out, create prototype contracts and things like that. So they really have a full sense of how, you know, how blockchain can work and how business can be involved. Yeah, so it's really an applied program and we built it that way and we've improved it. This is, we're finishing up the second year and we've also started to think about how blockchain and other exponential technologies like AI and virtual and augmented reality and drones and robots and 3D printing and those sorts of things start to play together. And so we do approach those subjects as well. And as we're starting to kind of build out a little bit wider range of technologies that all work with blockchain. So that's an interesting concept the convergence of all of these exponential technologies. And I think the business students are really finding that entertaining as well as very insightful in terms of most of them are getting ready to graduate or they're master students. So they can directly impact or see things coming in their businesses or industries that maybe others haven't quite thought through how all of these things are beginning to play together. Yeah, thanks for having us. We're calling it blockchain plus informally at the moment because we really are branching out into that exponential tech and we piloted a course this term which turned out great. And then we'll continue more of that in the future. We're also having formally announced this yet but we're gonna be running note on a particular network and doing a lot more in terms of watching what's happening with the network that we're operating on. We've got a strong student organization. They are working on a project with our support on creating Viking coins and using those coins to sort of support student activities and also to provide social benefits. So with homelessness that sort of thing. And so that's all on track to start next year all of those things. We're getting those all in place in the summer. So I see a question here about pros and cons different models of consortia governance. So the ecosystem led, foundation led, vendor led. Yeah, these are all very different. Sometimes they morph over time. We often have sort of either a vendor or a vendor along with maybe one or two keystone partners. And sometimes that works great and other times it causes problems. And then so things tend to morph over into sort of a more ecosystem led business. It's very hard depending on the use case, I guess is the answer. It depends a lot on the use case and how competitive the firms are. So with this pharmaceutical blockchain, for example, it's definitely fully vendor led. I mean, it's very hard to get the ecosystem to build this itself because there are many strong competitors that all have a lot of power. And so in that case, the vendor was able to coordinate everything. Yeah, it really just depends a lot. And each industry is different in terms of or each ecosystem really is different in terms of the barriers to adoption and the benefits to adoption. So for example, like this, with ports, there's not even the codes that airlines use. There aren't even those codes to refer to ports. Standardization isn't there. And so that creates a big problem. We have to standardize first before we can do some of the goals that we have. So yeah, great question, Ken. Thank you. I think we're just pushing up at the end of our time here. And we would be more than happy to talk to any of you about this further, send you a copy of our paper. I don't know if this video would be one of the ones that's posted, but the slides will be posted and we're happy to talk to anyone further. Thanks everybody for attending.