 We're going to kick off today. We're talking D web, real world innovation. This event and series is supported by an award from the Filecoin Foundation for the decentralized web. And so we thank them for their support. I'm going to, uh, my name is Billy Bicket and I will be your event host. Uh, before we get into today's content, I just want to give you a little context about who we are. We're TechSoup. We're building a dynamic bridge that connects and innovative connections that sort of enables connections and innovative solutions for a more equitable planet. We have an office in San Francisco. We started in 1987. We also have offices in London and Warsaw and partners in about 50 countries around the world. And we're all about serving civil society stakeholders. That's nonprofits, foundations, community groups, networks, et cetera. Okay. That's enough about us. And now it's time to talk about what we're here to talk about with Shannon. So let me introduce Shannon and then I'm going to pass the mic. Um, so Shannon's on the board of stewards at East Denver. And after spending a decade in the field implementing humanitarian aid projects, Shannon entered the blockchain space seeking ways that technology can be employed to create resources in developing countries. Very relevant to our interests here. She's worked at USAID and Doctors Without Borders and now helps big projects and blockchain to build cohesion and catalyze this decentralized movement. She's dedicated to leveraging peer to peer decentralized systems to awaken capital, unlock capital and help pull our global neighbors out of poverty. And so with that, I'm going to turn it over to Shannon and Ann Connolly, our subject matter expert will facilitate questions and answers at the end of Shannon's talk. Thanks, Billy. I appreciate it and I'm excited to be here today. It seems like we've got a lot of kindred spirits in the audience, which is awesome nonprofit workers. People are already working on decentralized voting and other fun systems. Yeah, you've got good resources here. My sidekick Ann, who is helping to coordinate all of this also worked with Doctors Without Borders and has done amazing nonprofit work across the blockchain space. So hopefully she'll kick in some knowledge as we go here today. We're going to keep this super casual. Please ask questions as we go. This is going to be really informal. I much rather chat with you as we go through the topics and hear if you have questions along the way. So please don't hesitate and don't wait till the end. So just to kick us off a little quick, who am I and why are we here? Again, I spent a decade in the field. So I was working for small grassroots organizations trying to bring different kinds of technology into emerging markets to try to awaken different resources. So I worked on projects like working in Sri Lanka with kids to get them on computers. I was working across the Balkans trying to bring in like remote workforces and ways that people are to earn money online before Upwork was a thing. I worked in West Africa getting students micro stipends by working online and then I did humanitarian projects like Haiti after the earthquake. I worked there for the cholera epidemic and I also did a COVID-19 relief work. Yeah, I'm super excited jumped into crypto and work in a lot of impact space, but do want to just caveat this conversation today as much as we're super passionate about blockchain for impact. We've got some work to do. We're still really early. There's still a lot of experimenting going on a lot of spaghetti being thrown against the wall and we don't totally know where some of these experiences are going to lead. One of the things that we've seen is it's really hard to work with some of these populations because they're not they're not as resilient. A lot of refugee populations are already vulnerable and that creates all sorts of different caveats and different stags along the way. So we'll address some of those in the in the presentation. I will say I'm very optimistic. I am a positive thinking person about where the space is going and I want to be realistic with you guys that it's not all roses. So today we are going to cover a couple of different topics. There's a bunch of things that we could talk about in terms of what what blockchain and different technologies are creating in terms of impact around the world. But the four areas that we're going to get into today are fundraising, governance and government, humanitarian aid and traceability and out of those there is one that is far and away the biggest in the industry in terms of traction and attention and that's fundraising. Crypto currencies themselves being very much a financial vehicle and a way that we can decrease the barriers to move the movement of money and value around the world. It's not totally surprising that fundraising is going to be a big leader here. There's a lot of reasons for that. There's a lot of benefits to it, but most of what's happening in the impact space has to do with how people are bringing money in how that's being overseen and how it's being deployed. One of the biggest examples that we have in terms of the crypto community itself for fundraising was called the pineapple fund. This is an anonymous individual who came out in the early days of crypto. It's still at 2017 and said that he was going to donate a very massive amount of personal Bitcoin. We think it's a he he named it the pineapple fund because he was completely obsessed with pineapple and really wanted to do well in the world based on how well he had done himself. So according to this anonymous donor, he donated almost all of his holdings and held a really big open call for applications. There were hundreds, if not thousands of different organizations that applied, including me. I had a nonprofit at the time and put my name in the hat and he ended up awarding 60 different organizations, something like between 50 and 80 million dollars, depending on what time you you estimated the worth of the Bitcoin, but it was one of the biggest fund raises and one of the biggest donations we've ever seen in the space. A little bit more mainstream. We have UNICEF who is a really big mover. They got into crypto and blockchain quite early. They came in 2019. They said that they really wanted to get a jump on this innovative technology, not only raising in Bitcoin and Ethereum, but also then deploying it. So they have what's called a crypto fund. They have invested in a number of startups over the years. They've said they wanted to raise about 25 million dollars. I don't know where that stands today, but they've been very vocal about the benefits of blockchain and what that can do for people and nonprofits, particularly especially when it comes to, again, the movement of money, we can move assets around the world in less than 10 minutes and typically for a point 1% of the typical transfer fees. So they've been big proponents over the years and we'll touch a little bit more on their work as we go. Another really big organization that you all probably already be aware of if you're out, if you're looking at blockchain fundraising at all is called the giving block. This is a couple of guys that started a little scrappy startup back in 2018 and are now some of the biggest in the space in terms of helping on board nonprofits. So they've got a couple of options in terms of just being advisors or they've got a whole back-end toolkit that will help the nonprofit organization figure out their strategies. Do they want to hold the Bitcoin in the Ethereum or other currencies that they're raising? Do they want to settle at the end of each day so that the board doesn't have to worry about the volatility of the value of those tokens? They set them up with exchanges so that they can go ahead and sell into fiat. There's a whole back-end tool set that these guys provide. And as you can see by the numbers, they're making a pretty big impact. And obviously some of those charities that they're working with obviously have really big raises. If 26,000 is just the average. Next, we are going to touch on governance unless there's anything that people have questions about in terms of fundraising. I love seeing that Nick is working with voting on blockchain and here, which probably have him come up and chat with us a little bit on it. But there's a bunch of different ways that we're looking at how this technology is going to add more transparency and more visibility into governance systems and governments around the world. For voting particularly, there's some really interesting things happening and there's some implications here. So blockchain voting was one of the biggest topics that came out in 2017-2018. People were really talking about how this was going to change systems. There was a bunch of pilot projects getting launched. And as with anything in politics and with technology, it's a little bit sticky. There's something that you might have discussed in the last session that has to do with the security in blockchain itself. It's called a 51% or a civil attack. And that has to do with what happens if a system isn't thoroughly decentralized and you end up with the ability to take over just over half of that system and then you can change the results. So that has to do with the strength of the system itself. Scalability is always going to be a concern about what happens when we're picking the wrong systems again and we outgrow them. Interoperability, a lot of people here are from the US and you can think of it as when you have all of these different municipalities, but they pick different systems and now you're trying to get them to interweave across different counties within a state, across different states. Regulation within technology and touching government is always going to be tricky again across different regions within a country. And then we worry about what happens if we leave anybody behind. Many of you have already had conversations with loved ones who struggle to use text messaging or like the first emails were a little bit clunky. So we have to be really careful that everyone gets included regardless of text avianess if it's going to come down to something as important as like civil engagement. On the plus side, blockchain is really wonderful because it adds so much ability to see what's going on across systems. So the fact that we could basically preclude the ability to alter the results of an election ever again, the ability for anybody to look at it, think about how much happens in your local area when a vote takes place. All of that tallying everything happens behind closed doors and we don't have very much information about what's going on, how accurate it was, how well it was managed. This would mean that all of us were able to audit and see exactly what happened and see what those numbers were in real time. That when you include it along with geographical implications, I think it's really exciting. There's a lot of times I was just spending time in Paris and they had a vote about the little scooters that you can rent around the city. And it was joked that it was really political because the vote about whether they were safe and should be kept was only held from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. So basically only the retirees were able to vote on it because everybody else was at work. So of course they outlawed them and then the entire city was stuck with that. They had an 8% voter turnout. So blockchain voting and this kind of digital access would also open up a lot of opportunities for people as well. In terms of pilot projects, just to give you a quick overview, this is probably just scratching the surface, especially if we have people in Taiwan that are being represented in different kinds of projects that are emerging today. The ones that I'm familiar with, this is a quick overview of what's going on around the world. Estonia has an e-residency program that's pretty well known where you can be a digital resident based anywhere in the world and still have access to medical inclusion, still have access to voting within their systems. In the U.S., West Virginia and Colorado have already piloted some projects both specifically towards overseas military personnel to be able to vote in municipal elections. These were both very small pilot projects and as far as I know, both very successful. And then I'm not sure what happened afterwards. So hopefully that continues to spread across the country. Russia has deployed municipal voting in Moscow. So they've been playing around with that since 2019. Switzerland as well. ZUG is a very well-known crypto hub and they've been voting on blockchain systems since 2018. South Korea since 2020. And Sierra Leone was a little bit of a surprise to me, but they even started looking around national election, blockchain voting as early as 2018. Japan is also doing municipal voting and Dubai is really coming up to be a leader in the blockchain space as well. They're super keen to do what they can to continue to stay relevant. And so they're talking about also doing national voting. Another thing that we talk on a lot in terms of governance in decentralized technology is this thing, it's a little bit of a mouthful, but a decentralized autonomous organization is also lovingly called a DAO in this space. It's a new way to bring people together and have them coordinate. And because it's full of humans, they are incredibly messy topics. So we'll scratch the surface a little bit here and forgive me for the slightly low res images, but I wanted you to have a little bit of an idea on the difference between what a decentralized organization would look like versus a centralized. So the latter is the one that we're most common, we're most familiar with. Obviously organizations have a leader, that leader makes decisions. We often have middle management and then many of us exist on the employee kind of contract role. So that very much kind of top down structure, it's streamlined, it usually works well unless you've got bad management and then it creates a big mess. These decentralized systems, the idea is that it's very flat and that everyone gets to coordinate together. You would have, if we were to use something like Microsoft, for example, you would have people coordinating around the topics that they work on or that they care the most about. So maybe you would have a group of the DAO be focused on Microsoft Word and another group would be focused on PowerPoint and then they would come together at the end and that creates the office suite rather than having all of those things be coordinated from above. And this is a little bit of a sticky explanation, so please feel free to fire away comments or questions if you have them. What are people doing with DAO's? Because this is a weird idea. In many ways, they're similar to the clubs that we've seen across the years in different ways that people have formed co-ops and brought communities together for any sort of group coordination. Within decentralized technology, we have some of these are protocol DAOs. So MakerDAOs is a very big example where they come together and they create the technology and then the groups that's created that and bought in early gets to say on how that's governed and how it's managed together. People are doing collector DAOs for art, investment DAOs. Those are pretty straightforward where you can pool funds and then move the needle in terms of buying big pieces of art or buying significant. Some people are buying cars and other collector items. Some people are creating VC DAOs. So there's a lot that you can do when you pool those funds. And pardon me really fast. I didn't quite work in here. It's not a drill. And then there's also grant DAOs. If you wanted to do something along the nonprofit link, there's a good way for people to come together and to make a difference. So there's a lot of that happening in the impact space. One of the things that I think is really exciting is what happens with media. So right now we've got a lot of independent filmmakers who are really struggling to get their projects funded. And when you can bring a group of people together, imagine that you were part of the next Netflix series that you really cared about before it got paid. Imagine that you got to help create the next music studio that put out an album that you really loved. There's ways that people can come together around things that they're passionate about and really make a difference. And then social DAOs are also a really big topic, which we're going to talk about in just a second. And I'm so sorry, I can't put it in the light so it should not be me. The ways that as these are clubs and very much a group of people coming together in order to maybe there's token gating, there's different ways that you can unlock different benefits based on how you buy in, how much you are participating, et cetera. I just wanted to pop in with a question from Susan. She's saying, is a social DAO the correct type for the org I'm starting for all entrepreneur center to meet other international entrepreneurs? So maybe a good time to chat through that piece. That's a great question, Susan. It would probably depend a lot on what the goals of your group was going to be. One of the things that we talk a lot about in blockchain these days is that just as you don't need a company for everything, you don't really need a DAO for everything. So it would depend on what your goals are. And if you really needed a natural organization or if it was just going to be an informal introductory network. Does that make sense? Hopefully it does. One example of a social DAO is called friends with benefits. They were one of the first to come out in the space. They were mainly paid attention to you because a lot of the early members and some of the governors were really well known in entertainment circles. So they got a lot of traction as being one of the first token gated DAOs. So you would buy some of their tokens as like your dues to enter into the DAO and then they threw really great parties which was the for benefit, the with benefit part of it. At one point, a membership with the amount of tokens that you needed to buy to attend these parties was something like $5,000. So that was an interesting case study and they're still going and continuing to change the way that they govern themselves which is interesting. People might have heard of Constitution DAO. This made CNBC and some pretty mainstream headlines in 2021. They started as a joke on Twitter and pretty quickly became a force of nature and under a week, this group of humans raised $47 million in an attempt to buy one of the original presses of the U.S. Constitution. It was all happening really publicly because it was on chain. It was auditable and because they were new and didn't totally know what they were doing, they announced how much they were going to bid in the auction at Sotheby's. So not terribly surprising to find out that they lost the bid because it's not really helpful to announce how much you're going to bid in advance when the investor Ken Griffin came in and outbid them by like a million dollars or something like that. So they again tried to do that in 2022 and try to do a repeat and actually went at this time but they lost a lot of the steam after the first time around and it didn't get very far but pretty well known. And then within the blockchain space, the most notable doubt is the Hadao, which the original group before there were any other organizations like this and now today there are thousands of them, the original group came together with the intention of creating what they call the universal sharing economy. So what they wanted to do was come together, do a fund raise. The original goal was to raise five or $10 million across Ethereum users and to deploy that in positive manners. What ended up happening is there was a hacker who found a vulnerability in the technology in the contract very quickly drained $60 million. People noticed that this was a big problem. They put all hands on the deck. That was like 5% of the ether that was circulating at the time and the funds just kept getting drained and ultimately the hacker drained almost all $150 million that was group shared into this massive account, if you will. And what ended up happening changed the course of Ethereum forever. We won't get too far into this, but just so you have got the cocktail party knowledge, what happened was basically became this decision of either we essentially rewind the technology and go backwards and recoup the $150 million from this bad actor or we let it happen because this is the way the blockchain is supposed to be immutable. If it doesn't change, that's the end of it. And Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin put the proposal out to go ahead and rewind and change the code and let the community decide and let them vote on it. And ultimately the community decided to recoup the funds and pull them back from the hacker. And in that case, because there was a dissent because it wasn't a complete agreement, what happened was the code ended up forking. So just the fork in the road. Part of the Ethereum community went with the rewind and a whole new set of a blockchain spawned off of that and part said we refuse to accept this and kept the old chain with the old data on it and all of those funds gone. And now we have two chains and very much the one that voted to pull the funds back as the winner. But it's just a weird part of crypto and that you can have communities that ultimately decide for themselves what's going to happen and how to vote among these things. So that's a deeper topic for another time, but something to know as you dive into this. So next up, we're going to talk a little bit about humanitarian aid. There's again, there's a bunch of different ways that people are utilizing this, but we're just going to touch on a bit because obviously you guys are mostly do-gooders here and care about a lot of these topics. So feel free to ask questions. But before we can talk about what happens in the field and helping people, we just need to do a really quick brush on identity, which is a much larger topic and really goes into a rabbit hole. But just starting to think about what is currency when we talk about blockchain and cryptocurrencies themselves and how is that different from a fiat dollar that I can hold or for a euro that I can exchange with somebody in real life. Identity when it's in real life versus online and digital also poses a bunch of questions and we have to rethink what this is and how we engage with it, especially when it comes to dealing with people around the world and people who are vulnerable. So the World Bank estimates that there's 150 million people around the world who don't have an official identity and official is also a really interesting term who issues it. Where does it come from? Do we have control over these kinds of things? Is it mutable? Can I add to it? My driver's license in the U.S. is pretty static, but there's all sorts of ways that my resume can be a living document. And do we have ways to meld those kinds of identities so that you can see a little bit more of my history? There's all sorts of ways that we can pull apart the threads here. Today, we're just going to really focus on what happens with digital identity and how we can make that immutable and trustworthy, but there's a lot more in here. Like who controls the chain that they exist on? What wallets they exist in? Do you have an Apple app store or a Google store? There's all these different ways where that even just that basic platform alone would really change your identity out in the world. Topic for another time, but just wanted to bring it up because it affects so much when it comes to humanitarian aid. There's what I thought was like a make-believe metaphor for a long time that I've been using when we talk about these kinds of things is if you think about somebody in Syria who was a lawyer and had to leave their country because their house was set on fire, they were displaced during the war. They didn't have certificates. They didn't have access to university records. And very often you see things like they're driving a cab in New York. Like as a refugee, they don't get that continuity of life because there's so much about certification and proof that didn't come with them. And I found Ferris along the way who was exactly that. Now he is a barber. And what could happen if we have these self-sovereign identities? This is a topic that I care a lot about in terms of what happens if I'm in charge of my identity and I can decide what is on there. That my university also adds to the fact that I am a U of S citizen that I prove to drive, that I have this degree from this university like this becomes this whole picture of who I am that I get to choose where it unlocks and how I build it so that it comes with me if for some reason I have to leave home and I don't have access to the regular documentation. In terms of, sorry, that was a little bit heavy. Hopefully not too much and we're moving along to again the UNICEF projects that we talked about earlier. Building Blocks is a really well-known program that's been running for quite some time. Obviously, these are really big numbers in terms of how many people around the world they've touched. What this looks like, this picture specifically is their program in Syria. What happens is that they take biometrics. In this case, an iris scan so that they set up kind of grocery store-like systems. Rather than doing the traditional analog, we're doing food aid. We will just hand out a bag of rice to everybody who queues up in line. This is a big store where you get to go in and choose the items that you want and these blockchain-based identity systems help them make sure that there's no redundancy and there's no fraud. Because you've scanned my IRS, you've seen that I've already been here. I can't keep coming back in and taking more food out. So this has allowed them, obviously they're doing cash transfers so that refugees can decide for themselves what kind of supplies they're buying and obviously they're saving a lot of money in the process. So really big program that's been going on across numerous countries. There's a lot to be said for how this helps. Obviously, security is a really big factor. What you can do to make sure these databases don't get exploited in cases of corruption, making sure that the transfers are happening quickly, seamlessly for almost nothing. This is obviously much cheaper than a wired transfer, especially when you're dealing with millions of people across millions of recipients across numerous countries, the ability to go back and see where the funds are going so that you have much more auditability and you don't have so much wastage as we've often seen in international development projects. And then something that I'm super interested in is what happens when we start experimenting with something called staking. And I don't know if you guys talked about this on the last session, but this is essentially, you can think about it, a high yield savings account. So if you were to take a bunch of funds that were raised for a nonprofit organization and stake them on a platform, those staking that gets rewarded depending on the platform, the rates vary, but you get rewarded for that. And so in some cases you can start to see how staking would then create its own income stream. So you would leave the original amount staked as you would leave the funds in a savings account and just work off of the interest accrued. So in some ways this ends up being its own revenue stream for an organization, which I think is super exciting. There are also big problems. Obviously in the case of iris scans and biometric data for where people are vulnerable, do they understand the implications of that? This is not a password that I can reset after I get out of the refugee camp. You have my biometrics until I die. Like that data never changes. It's not something that I can then revoke from you. What's happening to that data? How is it being used? How is it being leveraged? Do we have insight into if they're doing anything else with it? Who else are they working with? Unfortunately, some of these programs are working with. There's a number of providers and they're working with programs that I personally think aren't completely benevolent. And so then what happens on the other side of that? Are we feeding more data and more resources into things that are actually worrisome, depending on who's yielding those platforms? And then the questions of what happens when I'm a refugee and I need the food handout and maybe I do understand what happens if I give you my iris scan. Maybe I don't want to hand over my biometrics, but I need to feed my family and now I don't have a choice. So it becomes a little bit of a quagmire there when you start thinking about, do I have the right to say no? Can I opt out? How do I get that back? How can I reclaim that if possible at all? Finally, our last topic today is traceability. This has implications across impact projects, across all sorts of different supply chains and global movement of goods and all this is like one of the deepest project topics we could probably get into. We'll just lightly touch on it today, but obviously the implications for blockchain here are really wonderful when it comes to the visibility that it offers. Regarding impact in terms of helping humans, again, we're touching on the identity issue. How can we make sure that people are helping to stay safe for this? Unfortunately, modern day slavery is still a really big problem across the world and a lot of it has to do with not being able to verify the identity of the person involved. There's a lot of cases of forced labor in Arab countries where people would fold then say that it's a domestic worker and they will withhold the passport while the domestic worker is in the house and then it makes big problems for that person to be able to leave. Having a digital version of this would then keep that person in charge of their own identity rather than it being something that's external to me and can be taken away from me. The same with not knowing who is crossing a border. Aldova has been an example of this over the years for a long time. They were one of the most trafficked people in the world because they didn't have a good identity system for children, especially. So there have been a lot of hackathons focused on this, a lot of different consortiums coming together. There's a big company called Consensus that hosted this kind of idea fest a few years ago and I think it was in 2018. And a bunch of good projects came up with ideas on ways that the Moldovan government can help issue stronger and more secure identity systems so that it was mostly women and children were getting trafficked. Then now because of all of that attention and because of the collaborations with the Moldovan government, they've actually implemented laws that say things like you need to have this kind of identity. It needs to be verifiable. You need two sets of people to make sure before any minor crosses any borders. So it's having a big impact and the numbers cited here are way down now which is encouraging. But it's still a little bit tricky. So they do have a big orphan problem in the country and there are organizations that are working with them on it to help create these databases so that the kids do you have a way to, they've got people looking and they've got fallback systems to make sure they're being verified so that it makes it much harder for them to move in ways that could create any sort of vulnerability or them being taken advantage of. So this organization win systems was the winner of the consortium with consensus in 2018 and they've gone on to create more programs and offer more templates for people around the world to start adopting this. I followed up with the Rohingya project. So quick background, I almost worked on a project in 2019 that was going to bring decentralized and self-sovereign identity to the Rohingya refugees in the Bangladeshi camps. And for me, this was going to be a dream come true because it meant that I got to take my in-field international development and combine it with my work in the crypto sphere and go implement one of the projects that's nearest and dearest to my heart and I got really scared looking into it further to realize that the technology was still and it's testing stages and it wasn't totally tried and true that we know that this is going to work without a doubt and for me and hopefully many of you working in these kinds of projects unintended consequences are really concerning in terms of are we going to end up doing more harm than good or is there going to be something that we didn't see coming that we ended up causing problems to the people we were trying to help? And for me, I had to step away from this project that was my dream mission because I just wasn't willing to take the risk and I was worried about the technology getting hacked and having the Burmese government or the Myanmar government have access to these people who are really vulnerable and being persecuted and what ended up happening in reality was UNICEF shared the data with Bangladesh because it had to do with identity and how many people Bangladesh were hosting just completely understandable but the tragedy happens when the Bangladesh government then just turns and hands it over to the Myanmar government and now they've got all of this movement happening of Myanmar trying to repatriate the people who left being persecuted and pulled back into to for slavery. Again, not trying to be too heavy but we just really need to make sure that we're paying attention and that we are thinking these things through because any tool blockchain can be wielded for good and it can be wielded for really questionable and often harmful uses. We just really have to to hammer at home that this is serious stuff that we're working with and and we don't know yet. These are early days on a lighter note. Sorry about that. There are still really great things that are being done in terms of of aid and traceability and all of these wonderful impacts that are coming out of some of these case studies. So this organization Aggie Unity was another kind of hackathon winner hat tip to Singularity University that our friend Ann is associated with. This hackathon happened in 2018 posing the question of how we can help bring more transparency to the last mile of farming. So that means the people on really small family farms who are often excluded from global markets they don't totally know what the prices are going for they often get taken advantage of by middlemen who come in and have lied to them or cheated them a little bit out of what's happening on the other side so that they can swing a profit in the middle and this adds transparency across the full spectrum. Just a quick overview of how these guys work. It's the hardware of a resilient smartphone the app that they've built which also works on Android if you don't have the phone itself along with a digital identity component basically validates that the crops are there that the farm exists that the farmer has what she says she has and then is facilitating the trades and the financial transactions so that everything is on chain and very verifiable in between the two. This kind of stuff I think is super exciting it starts out small you guys are in countries like Kenya, Ethiopia, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia Trinidad and Tobago they've got a few different projects around the world but they're really getting traction and it seems to me making a huge difference for sesame farmers for bean and cereal farmers people who are doing vanilla crops around the world like getting if you want to talk about fair trade this is one of the best ways that we can create that for people and making sure that they have the the visibility that they need. This is a topic that is wonderful and is gigantic so I didn't get into specific case studies here because there's so many people that have added to the especially the carbon trading markets but climate action is a huge huge space for blockchain these days in terms of how we can add accountability how we can make sure that the transparency is growing and that people are doing actually what they say that they're doing we're all facing a lot of this kind of SDG and like the corporate responsibility greenwashing in certain firms these days and blockchain is a really wonderful tool for making sure that you're doing what you're saying you're doing that the carbon trade the credits are actually there or the impact has actually occurred that you're really making sure that we are not messing around with anything and brushing things under the rug and doing some of the kind of shady environmental protection that we've seen at least in the US in the past that actually wasn't the truth so there's a lot that this can do in terms of breaking those transactions down making sure that you and I can then participate in some of these things because I think you talked about this last time about you have Bitcoin visible by eight eight decimal points we can do that across so many things now that we can make these micro transactions really matter and start to to add up so again there's a million ways that we can talk about what environment and different actions and different organizations can be impacted but just go do the research on your own because there's so much going on here if you're a climate activist this is one area I'm super excited about especially when it comes to being able to trade credits peer-to-peer as well so big implications here and I just want to say thank you to all of you guys for listening this is a lot of kind of high level topics without digging too far into the weeds and completely boring you with slides for the full hour but it's something that I'm super excited about I think the internet was the first way that we were really able to democratize information for each other rather than having to be a published author or a journalist we can now share information across the world in a matter of seconds this is going to do exactly the same thing for value and the ways that we can now interact directly with the rice farmer in Uganda or the fisherman in Bali this is going to change everything for financial inclusion and the way that we can help really help the people that need it most thanks for all the good work that you guys are doing because you're helping from the ground up which is exactly what we need and I'm totally happy to be here thanks to the guys from TechSoup for having me and for inviting me in and having to answer any questions and give you some time back in your day we have one question from John that's come through what about HIPAA, CCPA, GDPR or data privacy regulations do these acts currently interplay with or address blockchain traceability? That is a great question, John and one that I would love to see movement on a few years ago I met a college football player who had gotten really excited about blockchain because while he was traveling interstate in the US he got injured and he had he happened to have a condition where he really couldn't have some sort of medication and because he was out of state when he got injured they didn't have access to his medical records and then gave him the medication that he wasn't supposed to have and he got really sick and it ended his college football career so he had created a system that would allow we have something in crypto that you guys probably haven't touched on yet it's a little bit of an advanced topic but it's called a zero knowledge proof which would essentially mean in this instance that the doctors in Chicago or wherever he was were able to then ping his medical records and access is this a thumbs up or a thumbs down without having access to things that maybe they weren't supposed to see across HIPAA lines or across state lines it basically means that there's ways that we can keep people safe without having to share all of the information so there's a lot that is possible when it comes to using blockchain for this kind of thing really in a lot of these ways where you know when it comes to voting when it comes to identity when it comes to health records all of this stuff like stands to benefit from implementing a blockchain based system it has to do with adoption and the desire of the systems that control them to make these kinds of changes the implications are great the adoption so far has been very small if that answers your question and you maybe also talk about what are the challenges for implementing blockchain like why have lower nonprofits not gotten on board yet what are the barriers that we're seeing sure personally I think a lot of it just has to do with fear there was a lot of narrative around silk road around this is what happens with criminals there is a lot of concern especially with people who are in nonprofits we have to so take care of our fundraising abilities and our reputations that we don't want to be seen as associating anything that could be risky or potentially risking our donor's funds there's a lot to that unfortunately people do way more questionable things with US dollars or euros or any other fiat currency than they can do with a digital currency so that is also a larger topic but I think a lot of it has to do with just concerns about changing systems as well there's a number of organizations that are accepting crypto donations on the side and not really enhancing it just to experiment there are fewer like like UNICEF that are being very straightforward about it and saying here's what we're working on Mercy Corps is another really big organization that has a big crypto fund that's really come out and staked their claim but and you're a great resource on this you've helped a number of organizations on board explore are the different options can you tell us a little about what you're hearing as well? Yeah absolutely my experience is usually that the people in the lower levels of the organization are very excited it's the leadership that is hesitant for the reasons that you talked about looking at protecting reputation and just fear and so my best experiences have really been around like massive levels of education across the organization before really rolling out any projects and then when you roll out do it slow show traction show benefits and the best way to do that is as you mentioned like the fundraising so to set up a crypto donation program it's an easier sell because it's going to bring in money it's easy to show right away if it's working if it's if you're getting funds in the door and then from there it's a little bit easier to say okay this worked what can we do next? and then let's explore the different possibilities and strategies that might work for the organization now that we've already dipped our toe in the water