 Hi, Brian, and it's such a great pleasure to be here. So Brian, you may not remember this, but I first met you back in 2017 at MIT. And here we are, four years later, we have grown so much as a global community. And I'm sure everybody here appreciates your leadership, you've been phenomenal. I'm really excited to have the opportunity to share what we've learned so far about blockchains for business. And my talking points come from our research that we do here at the Blockchain Center of Excellence. So it'll be helpful to have a little background on our center. Okay, so our center was actually officially launched by the governor of Arkansas, Asa Hutchinson, in the summer of 2018. And I love to put this picture up because it keeps me very focused and grounded on our mission. So we have the governor here at the podium, and he's kind of gesticulating to me because he's provided our seed money and he wants us to be good stewards of our taxpayer dollars. And our mission is really to be an academic leader on both education and research on what I like to call blockchain-enabled digital ecosystems. I liked Kareem's talking points earlier in that he just went, that we really don't wanna focus on the technology, we wanna focus on what it enables. And for us, it enables these digital ecosystems. Now to meet our mission, I just have to brag about some of our students. So we've got full blockchain curriculum here at the University of Arkansas. Undergraduate and graduate, our students can earn minors, they can earn certificates, they can earn concentrations. We are technology agnostic, so our students learn about public and private blockchains. Brian will be happy to know that we have one course that focuses on hyperledger fabric. So all of our students in our programs learn how to do that. This is actually a snapshot of my class last Thursday. So I have two classes this summer. And in the upper right, in the upper left-hand corner, we have Dale Christie, who is head of blockchain strategy at Federal Express who came and shared and gave up his time with our students. And Dale is one of our executive advisory board members. Our other executive advisory board members, you can see their logos here. Many of them are present at the Hyperledger Global Forum. So we just heard from IBM, we've heard from Accenture, we'll hear from Walmart. And so what we do with our executive advisory board members is we have these workshops where we bring together global visionaries, early adopters, we do case studies, we tackle big issues like shared governance, interoperability, scalability, the state of standards. And we're really excited to have all of these partners help us with our education and research mission. But we also have additional partners. So we engage with the startup community, we engage with other technology providers and we engage with nonprofits. We also are very committed to open source standards. So our faculty and staff are involved in a lot of different communities. I'm personally very passionate about trust over IP and the good health past. Yesterday, Brian had a conversation to a drum and reed who's very easy leader in both of these. And so I learned a lot from him as well. So today, Brian asked me to talk about some recent research. We had just published this in MIT Sloan Management Review called What We've Learned So Far About Blockchains. And so my co-author and I, what we like to do is study early adopters. So there are essentially many case studies. And we go to the case studies and ask questions like, how did you put together your minimal viable ecosystem? How did you deal with shared governance? How did you sell the solution to your C-suite? What kind of challenges did you have? How did you overcome those challenges? And then hopefully the lessons that we're learning from these first generation blockchain enabled digital ecosystems will be a benefit to other enterprises who might be a little later on their adoption journeys. So here's just some of the case studies that went into the research project. Brian had mentioned we are heavily focused on supply chains here in Northwest Arkansas. So we have many supply chain examples, but we also have case studies in financial services, credentials and news story integrity. So what I thought I would do here today for this community is I'm gonna, one share a new statistic that I don't think Brian's even seen yet. Then I'm gonna do one little mini case study. And then from that case study, I'll talk about the broader talking points across all of our case studies. All right, so yesterday, Brian, when you launched the event, you put up some really cool statistics from Deloitte and PWC and I wanted to share another recent study that was done by one of my favorite advisory firms. They're called HFS. I've been engaged with them for about 10 years now. And about two weeks ago, I was on an email exchange with Phil Furst, who's the CEO and founder of HFS. And he was excited because they had just done an analysis of a survey of 800 global 2000 enterprises. And when I saw this question, I'm like, I have to have that to share at the Hyperledger Global Forum and I had permission to do that. So one of the questions that was asked was, do you see investments in blockchain increasing, decreasing or staying the same over the next 12 to 18 months? And we can see here that 76% of global 2000 enterprises are intending to increase their investments in blockchain. So now we're starting to get a triangulation of lots of different surveys from different places that are all bullish on blockchains for enterprises. So we're all here in a good time to be together. So the little mini case study that I decided to share with you is called DL Freight, a blockchain enabled solution by Walmart, Canada and DLT Labs. Now, Karim, I do have to disagree with one statement you made. You said invoice reconciliations was a boring use case. It's not boring. It's very, it can be very exciting because it can add a lot of business value. And so when I'm done this case study, I want the audience to think, can you hear it? Can you hear the requiem, the death mass for reconciliations? So I picked this little case study among all of our cases for four reasons. One, the problem of invoice reconciliations is absolutely ubiquitous. Two, the solution was built on hyperledger fabric. So I thought that was appropriate for this community. Three, it was one of the fastest deployments that we had studied as you will see. And four, and most importantly, we have evidence that it did provide business value for all of the ecosystem solution partners. I also want to introduce you to my fabulous co-author. He's the co-author on the MIT paper as well as on this case study, Professor Remko Van Hook. He is a professor of practice. He had a whole career in supply chain management before coming back to academia. He's head of procurement at Disney. So he brings the supply chain management expertise to our research. And hopefully by this time, I bring a little blockchain expertise. Now I'm only gonna do a couple of findings from the case study, but anyone out there, you can go to our website, blockchain.uark.edu. If you go to our research page, you can see this 20-page case study along with the other work that we do here. All right, so let me give you an overview of the context. So it's Walmart, Canada. They have net sales of over $18 billion. They have over 400 retail stores, 11 distribution centers. They process about 500,000 shipments per year. And Walmart, Canada does have its own fleet of freight carriers. I mean, every time you're on a highway, you'll see a Walmart truck go by. But they also engage with up to 70 freight carriers. Some of their freight carriers are quite large. These can be very large transportation companies, but some of them are kind of more like mom and pop operations with just a few trailers. So it's important for you to just hear what I said about the characteristics of this ecosystem. We have a large and powerful retailer. We have some large and powerful freight carriers all the way down to the mom and pop ones. Okay, so what was the business problem? And as Karim had talked about in the prior keynote, there's lots of problems with invoice reconciliations. And at this context, 70% of the invoices would be in dispute at any given time. All right, and that is common across different industries. And many of you know how complicated an invoice can be. So in the freight context, a single invoice can have over 200 data elements. But you don't have to just take my word for it. So I decided to embed a quote from one of the people we interviewed. And his name is Sergey Believ. And at the time, he was the Chief Information Officer at Walmart, Canada. He has since become an Executive Vice President at DLT Labs, the solution provider of DL Freight. And he said, you know, for all these invoices in dispute, they had a small army on both sides trying to chase down facts, things that could have occurred weeks before. The payments were outstanding, which of course is gonna be a strain on the financial stability of the carrier community. Relationships were strained as well. It revolved the back and forth of who's right and who's wrong. This thing wasn't working for anybody. So these, and I loved Kareem's point when he talks about the complexities. And of course, these are complex issues. So in this short keynote, I'm only gonna focus on two root causes of the problems that led to 70% of these invoices being in dispute at any given time. Okay, one of them is the fact that all of these trading partners have their own systems of record, right? So Walmart, Canada has its ERP system, its transportation management system. The large freight carriers have their ERP systems and transportation management systems. Mom and pops might've had a spreadsheet if we are lucky. And of course, you gotta get these records to match and be reconciled before the payment turns go into effect and the carriers can get paid. The other problem is the when the invoices were generated. And this is true of many, many invoice processing systems. They did not get generated until after final delivery, right? So you can imagine the drivers have gone home. What happened that day? It's very hard to chase down facts after the fact. So after Walmart, Canada adopted this solution in partnership with DLT Labs and they did a pilot with some of their large freight carriers, the after solution is now DL freight is a blockchain enabled digital ecosystem. And inside the blockchain network, there is one shared version of the invoice. But the magic of it is how they change the business process. So with DL freight, the invoice gets built along the supply chain journey. So now the invoice gets initially populated when Walmart, Canada does its tender offer. So they can put the driver instructions, they can put the known charges. Now the freight carriers are connected to DL freight with IoT devices inside the trailers. So it's pinging the blockchain ecosystem with GPS location. So now you always know where the shipment is with temperature readings if you're tracking things like produce or meat or dairy. And then by the time final delivery is made, the carrier just has to add the final accessorial charges at the end. And the invoices are now agreed upon within 24 hours. So it's a much, much better solution. So I promised you that this solution delivered business value. I'm having a little trouble with my clicker application. Here we go. Okay, so I promised you that I was gonna share with you the business application from the solution. We went from 70% of those invoices being a dispute to fewer than 2%. So that means 98% follow what I call the happy path. But even now, when there is a discrepancy, it gets solved much quicker, right? Because there's an excursion from a smart contract, we investigate it, it can get done much quicker. There is more transparency. So even the small carriers said, this is great, I can finally see the rates in shipment details that Walmart uses and applies. There is significant ROI, I'm not allowed to say what the number is, but there's significant ROI, believe me, you'd all be impressed. But the freight carriers are thrilled too, because they are getting paid the right amount on time. So the payment terms are now going into effect after 24 hours instead of days, weeks or sometimes months. When you pay your partners the right amount on time, it leads to better carrier relationships. And of course this also presents so many more opportunities. So now we have business intelligence where you can track the providence and freshness and transportation conditions. You do more analytics like, you know what? This route doesn't ever work, it's always clogged up. Let's find another route going forward. There are also new opportunities for new revenue streams. So before Walmart Canada never felt comfortable offering financing services to their freight carriers, there's just too much uncertainty. How do you build a risk model when there's so much opaqueness? But now with the transparency and you can do a risk model and so you can offer financing services. So hopefully you get a sense of, you know, these first generation solutions coming together to deliver business value for the ecosystem partners. Now I'm gonna just mention two statistics because again invoice reconciliations are a huge, huge problem. And so in our paper here, so this is the paper if you can go download, I'm gonna reach two statistics, right? Number one, up to 38% of invoices are overpaid because enterprises think, you know what? It's just gonna cost me too much and too much of a pain to try to figure this out. So they just decide to overpay it. Now in the transportation industry and this number, I apologize, it's US centric. It's in the US every day. There is $140 billion worth of invoices in dispute every single day. So hopefully this little case study and other case studies you'll be exposed to at the Hyperledger Global Forum can show us a better way. Okay, with that, now Brian had said I was going to give you seven lessons but I decided to give you three bonus ones. So we're gonna do a top 10 list, our top 10 learnings from across our case studies. Number one, applications are business led collaborations and you know, blockchains are really just a backstory. So what do I mean by that? So the first generation solutions, the trading partners came together because they're trying to solve a shared pain point in the ecosystem or maybe there's a new regulation that everybody in the industry has to comply with and it's gonna be much more efficient to come together and solve it once as a community than every individual enterprise trying to do it. And we saw this over and over again in our case study. So yesterday, Frank Yanis was one of the keynote speakers. He's now at the FDA, but when he was at Walmart he was in charge of food quality and safety. He was trying to address the real problem of tracing food from the retail stores back to the farm, it was taking too long. And so they got together because they're trying to address this very serious problem and blockchains weren't even in the conversation until they brought their technology partner in which was IBM who said, you know what? This is actually a really good enabling technology for what you're trying to do connecting your supply chain partners. So, you know, I always say, I really don't like being the center director for the blockchain center of excellence because it puts blockchains in the forefront. First thing I do with my students is say, let's talk about all the situations where we shouldn't use blockchains, right? It's about fit what finding the right context where these technologies make the most sense. All right, number two, the solution has to create business value for each participant type. So that's kind of an obvious statement but you really do have to learn to stop saying what's in it for me and look at it as what's in it for us. And many times you're gonna have to do things like tiered pricing to bring on smaller players who are less powerful or less able to make investments in technologies. You're gonna probably give this software away for free to your end consumers, right? You're gonna probably have them download apps. So you have to think about the different business value and it's gonna be different for the different stakeholders in the ecosystem. All right, number three, I love this one. Okay, so as an academic, I can't leave a stage without mentioning a theory and all of those of you out there who have an MBA are certainly familiar with Clayton Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation. And over three decades, he continued to observe that the incumbents, the traditional enterprises, many of the companies who are here at the Hyperledger Global Forum, you're gonna say you're gonna disrupt yourselves but you're not going to. What you're gonna do is you're gonna do what he characterizes as sustaining innovations that's improving your products and services for your clients with your existing business models, right? And that's exactly what we're seeing with these first generation solutions. You can think of them as a gentle rising tide that's raising all the ships in the ecosystem. It's not a tidal wave of disruption yet. Disruption is coming, make no mistake. And Clayton Christensen's theory says that that's gonna come from spin-offs and startups. It's not gonna come from incumbent enterprises. And the problem and the challenge that we have here is disruption is on a path right now. And when it finally, finally hits, we can turn around in the rear view mirror and see the clear path. And people say, how did they miss it? How do you miss it? It's got such a clear path. It's because when you go back in time, there's 2,000 other paths that are also being pursued. And you have to, it's hard to figure out and monitor 2,000 different paths. But we are going to end up with both sustaining and disruptive innovations. All right, now these first generation solutions, there was a lot of sweat equity that went into these. 80% of the effort was management effort and only 20% was the blockchain effort. So let's talk about external management effort first. That's when you have the representatives from the different enterprises that come together and in your little consortium, whatever. And of course you're gonna battle and fight, but then you're gonna iron out what are our data standards, what are our business rules, what is our governance? And you go what I call native. So you go native and then you kind of have to go back to your internal organizations and do all of this selling again, selling your C-sweets, dealing with your compliance people, perhaps involving HR. All right, so that means that you're gonna have to have a business opportunity that it's gonna be big enough to warrant all of this management effort plus the effort of the technology to compensate for the costs and the different risk profiles that you're gonna have to manage when solving and creating these blockchain enabled digital ecosystems. The best solutions minimize change management. So I'll use the example of DL Freight since I just talked about it. So think about this little mom and pop freight carriers. They don't have ERP systems. So how are you going to connect them in a low cost way? Well, DLT Labs operates a web portal on behalf of the smaller carriers. So now these carriers can access it by uploading documents directly to the DL Freight solution. They didn't have to do a lot of other stuff to connect. So trying to make it onboarding as painless as possible. Now the large carriers connect to it through APIs and that takes about four or five weeks because you got to go through all of your vetting when you're connecting to external systems but you're not disconnecting your systems of record. They're serving as data feeds to these blockchain applications. All right, number six. All right, everyone in this community knows this but it's a good talking point when you're going back to your C-sweets that blockchains are not all data for all that data must be confidential. As an example from the DL Freight case a freight carrier can only see its invoices that it has with Walmart Canada. It has no idea all of the other activities, business activities that Walmart Canada has with the other freight carriers. Number seven. In our study, blockchains were choosing private permission solutions over public blockchains but that may change. So first of all, why are we seeing so many permission blockchains with our first generation? Well, you have to think about many of these solutions take a while if you're working with ecosystem partners. So what we see today that might be live for a couple of years probably started in 2016 or 2017 and remember Ethereum didn't even launch until the summer of 2015. So when they were thinking through their solutions public blockchains were really not on the forefront of enterprises but that is changing and changing rapidly. So one of our executive advisory board member firms is EY. They're really committed to public blockchains and in particular to Ethereum. They've already developed multiple enterprise systems on public blockchains or have hybrid models. So that may change in the future. Again, I'm not gonna make any predictions here. I believe that the world is emergent, not deterministic and where we end up is going to be the result of all of the conversations we're having today. All of the lessons we're gonna learn from early adopters all of the effort we put into these open source communities. All right, number eight. Okay, there's lots of people that I love to learn from and one of my favorite people in this space is John Wolpert, I'm giving you a shout out. Every time he talks he'll give me some kind of soundbite that'll just rattle around in my brain for a couple of days. And the last one he said that just really resonated is he said, blockchains are digital nudist colonies. Public blockchains are public beaches and private blockchains are private beaches. So from his perspective, the only thing we should be putting on our blockchains are immutable proofs that events occurred and that we shouldn't be sharing a lot of data. So now we've got a lot of different models out there that are emerging for enterprises, permission, public, you share data, you don't share data, you just share proofs of events. And I think we're gonna end up with a very rich set of solutions because the world is complex. We're not gonna end up with just one. All right, number eight. There's still trusted third parties people, right? So all of you have probably read Satoshi Nakamoto's Bitcoin White Paper back in 2008 and the impetus for the first blockchain was to get rid of trusted third parties. But for these first generation solutions, we're not seeing the elimination of trusted third parties, we're seeing that they take on different roles. So while they're not sitting in the middle of transactions, they are doing a lot of managed services, doing things like taking care of custody of digital assets, doing things like auditing smart contracts before they're deployed, or managing the nodes in the network, or most importantly, helping with software upgrades. If you think upgrading software within the boundaries of the firm is tough, it's much tougher when you are doing this across firm boundaries. So we do see that there are trusted third parties. And Brian just earlier today just put up a lot of vendor communities because there is a demand and a need for help. All right, here's my last talking point. These first generation solutions are going to have to evolve or they will die. There are concerns by enterprises of vendor lock-in, they don't want that situation to happen. So the ones that we have today, the ones that will stick around are going to be the ones that add product features. Remember, we're starting with minimal viable ecosystems developing minimal viable products. Well, the products have to evolve with additional features. They have to be able to attract additional ecosystem partners. And most importantly, going back to what all of the speakers have talked about so far is this need for interoperability, creating networks of networks. Because ultimately what enterprises and customers want is the ability to share digital assets in a seamless way. All right, with that, Brian, I am done with my talking points. Okay. I think you're not gonna leave me hanging. I think you're coming back. I'm not gonna leave you hanging. I promise. Thank you, Dr. Thank you, Mary. That was just an amazing collection of different observations, the lessons learned, really powerful. We had some commentary and questions from the chat. So while we pull that together, there's some things that occurred to me as I was listening. So one of them is, you cited the 80% management overhead in the development of these technologies, which I can certainly concur with. Something we see a lot. Do you think there are things that the technologists can do that we can build into these systems at whatever level, at the ledger layer up above, that lessen that overhead, that make it easier to get past some of those? Yes, I think you're already starting to do that and starting to build those today. So right now, these are not easy technical solutions. So let's even just talk about public blockchains. I'm gonna say even most of my students rely on exchanges, because it's not easy to manage your own digital assets on your cell phone. In fact, all you have to do is lose your Bitcoin once and you learn your lesson. So once these become easier to use and easier to engage in, yes, I think that we're gonna see a different balance of that effort. The other thing is it's still early days, just like we had at the beginning of the internet, enterprises were adopting intranets and they were afraid and it took a long time, but for now it's just a no-brainer, right? You pop up a website, you don't have to go through all of that vetting. So it's still early days, we're still all learning together. I hope the balance will eventually change. The other thing is as we get governance models, so there's a lot of technology standards, but one of the reasons why I'm excited to participate in the trust over IP and the governance stack is developing governance frameworks so that we don't have to have the same, same painful conversations over and over and over again. And you had Drummond Reed as a guest on that, him and Scott Perry are leaders in our governance stack and I highly encourage this community to look at it. So yes, it will get easier. In fact, I wanted to ask a little bit about the governance kind of question too because I see an interesting dichotomy out there. A lot of folks in the public blockchain space are very committed to this idea of kind of algorithmic governance that most decisions can be made by an up or down vote amongst people voting with the amount of stake that they have or something else, proposals even for changes in the underlying technology can be voted up down, right? Versus others who think that governance in these kinds of systems is almost unavoidably and necessarily a human kind of process driven a bit more by consensus by hearing of differences. In the networks that you see being built or and where you see like the trend line, do you see a balance between these two? Do you see much more heavily human or should we be more automated? Human, human. That's all problems. I see human, mostly because we're talking about enterprises, right? And even when we use the terms like deploying smart contracts, right? That is essentially instantiating business rules today. But a real contract has all kinds of ambiguity like change of character clauses or goodwill effort. So I don't see that we're going to have on chain governance as a preponderance of the governance model for many of the types of applications that I'm looking at in enterprise situations. Now, the other ones, if you're talking in that you could put bounds around something, right? Like the EOS would be a good example. If you say this is what our community agrees to, we never want to change it, then you can do on chain governance. So it's not necessarily an either or, it's really the suiting the governance mechanism to the application. But you asked the question, what do I see? I studied traditional enterprises, it's human governance. I'm on team human as well. I do like automating things. Back to the early point about the 80%, I think it is a lot of trust building. I remember building corporate websites in 1993, do the math and how much trust building was needed at that time to not just explain the technology to people to get them to understand why this isn't a wacky thing. So team human for sure. But one of the things that also comes up when we talk about governance is the government. Notice there wasn't any mention, maybe I missed it in the top 10 list of regulators and the role that they play. And we talked a fair bit about this with some of the other keynote speakers. What role do you see them potentially playing in standing up these networks and being a part of these networks in setting rules for these networks? I mean, where do they fit in all this? Okay, well, again, I'm primarily studying enterprise ecosystem. For example, the MediLedger, which you're very familiar with. So the regulator there is the FDA with the Drug Supply Chain Security Act. So they're kind of, at least they have a roadmap of what needs to be done to comply with that regulation. I think the harder one is when you really talk about payments. So when you're talking about traditional payments, we just had a guest speaker, and you're probably asking the wrong person, Brian, because who I'd love to just pull up next to me is we have one of the leading professor lawyers from our law school here. Her name is Professor Gohfor. She literally wrote a book on crypto transactions. She monitors the space she posts on Cointelegraph, and she came and talked to the students last week saying, there is a lot of regulatory ambiguity that different parts of the government say that these digital assets are security. Some say their properties, some say their commodities, and keeping up with it is quite a challenge. With that, I'm very optimistic. I certainly like Biden's choice for who's gonna run the SEC. I'm very optimistic about looking at Wyoming as a test case with all of their pro-crypto regulations and their enactment of the speedy banks. I think the rest of us can learn from them. So I'm not one, I just wanna go on the record of saying, I am not anti-regulation. I wanna live in a society that protects citizens, protects the environment, protects investors, and bringing them into the conversations with us is probably the most important thing that we could do. We're all still learning together. Yeah, well, on the regulations front, I mean, there's the view of regulations as kind of the barrier or the reins on innovation and progress. There's also a view that maybe regulation might be a driver for some of these use cases. With that actually, to meet those existing regulations that pre-exist blockchain and don't even talk about blockchain, maybe there's a way to use this technology to better meet those. So there's a session coming up at the end of tomorrow on OpenIDL that encourage you and others to check out. It's a new insurance network that actually the Link Foundation is helping stand up. The stand up specifically focused on meeting regulatory reporting in the insurance industry. So, and there actually the regulators are asking for these kinds of functions. They've become fans of the technology as a form of reg tech. So really eager to get your take on that at some point down the road. We had a question come in, which was a little bit about the, I know you mentioned a bit the question of how do you onboard smaller companies onto these kinds of networks? You mentioned that they'll probably be in the form of web based onboarding through proxies, through organizations that run one of the core nodes. Can you speak any more about like, how do we make sure that startups are vested as participants in these ecosystems and given a sense of agency? And it doesn't these kinds of networks that we see built don't just come down to the five big boys and kind of like defending their terrain. Yes. I think you do it one ecosystem at a time. So our senior managing director, Catherine Carlisle works very closely with Heifer International. And that's a small, I shouldn't say small, that's a nonprofit. They have a lot of traceability for like coca from, you know, from farm to retailer trying to empower farmers. So I think it's done by, you know, one ecosystem at a time. And I will also say, I know there's a lot going on at GS1 where they're trying to bring together the different food platforms to address issues of interoperability. Kareem had also mentioned that in his prior keynote. Right. Well, the nerd in me says, you know, the more that we can also make it easy to always add one more node to the network, always add one more ability for a new voice to come in and be able to confirm transactions, broadcast transactions, participate in the, in the ledger, participate in the ecosystem, the more I think we have a response to concerns about hegemony and antitrust and those sorts of things. So really fascinating set of range of topics. Thank you so much, Professor Lassidy, Dr. Lassidy. Mary, I'm married to you, Brian. I honor you, believe me. I've learned so much from you over the years. So looking forward to the rest of the program, can't wait to hear the rest of your keynote. So have a great rest of the day. Okay, and Mary was also far too humble to mention she has authored a book recently on enterprise blockchain technology on many of these topics. Be sure and check that out. Mary, thank you so much. And let's transition now just to wrap up this section.