 Welcome everyone to the first edition of the DC3 conference from Cryptocurrencies to CBDCs organized by the ITU in collaboration with the future of Digital Currency Initiative of Stanford University as part of the activities of the Digital Currency Global Initiative. My name is Bilal Jamonsi, Chief of the Study Groups Department at the Standardization Bureau of the ITU. To begin, I would like to first invite Dr. Chesa-Plee, Director of the Standardization Bureau, ITU for his welcome remarks. Dr. Lee, you have the floor. Now, thank you very much, Mr. Bilal. Colleagues and friends, it is my great pleasure to welcome you to the first edition of the DC3 conference. I hope that you and your families are in all good health and good spirits. Our discussions over the coming three days will share expert insights on how money, as we know, it is transforming. Digital currency could make transactions more secure and cost-effective. It has great potential to increase financial inclusion for the unbanked. ITU's international standards can help us tap into this opportunity on a global scale. Standards can enable the security and interoperability necessary for digital currency to own our trust and make a meaningful difference in our daily lives. But successful standards are built iteration by iteration, consensus decision by consensus decision by all players in the ecosystem depending on them. This highlights the value of the inclusive dialogue of this conference and the inclusive pre-standardization studies supported by the digital currency globally initiative. This initiative is an open platform offered by ITU and Stanford University that launched in July 2020. It brings everyone together to discuss the new opportunities and the risks introduced by digital currency and their implications for technology, business, and policy. The initiative shares experiences with the digital currency applications, benchmarks best practices and develop specifications to be proven in the market as they make their way into the technical standards developed by ITU. This annual DCC conference will highlight the progress of this world and share unique insights on emerging industry trends and pilot digital currencies. ITU is the UN specialized agency for ICT. We are unique as a UN agency with a membership, including private sector members. And we are also unique as the only ICT standardization body with a membership, including governments. So the digital currency globally initiative follows an ITU focus group on digital finance services. The finance includes a global initiative and an ITU focus group on digital theater currency. All those builds on a substantial body of prior growth. In particular, the initiative continues the research and dialogue set in motion by the ITU focus group on digital theater currency active from 2017 to 2019. This focus will dictate the requirements of CBDC as they relate to regulation, technical and business dynamics and security. It delivered a set of recommended design principles for CBDC as well as a reference architecture for the different implementations of CBDC for retail, wholesale and cross-border payments. The Bank of International Settlements reported that all of its member central banks had launched investigations into CBDC. Over the two years, the focus group was active. The group's work was driven by collaborating with a diverse range of experts in ICT, banking and fintech. As you're interested in the topic group, the focus group offered central banks a venue to find the expertise to assist the digital currency investigations. This work continues in the digital currency global initiative, but with a broader scope considering all types of digital currency. It's organized into three working groups. One study is architecture, interoperability and use cases. Another study is policy and governance. And another study is security and assurance. So all three focus on identifying where technical standards are needed for digital currencies. Their work will feed into ITU to ensure that ITU standards meet this need. So collaboration among various standard bodies will also play a key part in ensuring comprehensive standardization solutions for digital currencies. And our round table later in this session will discuss how we will achieve that. So I thank you all very much for joining us. And I look forward to our continued work to bring trusted digital currency to everyone around the world. Thank you very much. Pull it back to our bill. Thank you very much, Dr. Lee, TSP director. I would like now to invite Professor David Mazieres who is joining us from at night from California. A director of Stanford Future of Digital Currency Program at Stanford University for the welcome remarks. David, please. If you could unmute your line, David. Great, can you hear me now? Yes. Okay, thank you. So basically, CBDCs are happening. We're hearing about all the progress that's happening all the time. And I'm a computer scientist and I've been basically working in large part on operating systems over the past 22 or 27 years. And what's so exciting to me is that the interfaces that we design now for these CBDCs that are coming are really going to define the operating systems for money. And like operating systems in computers, what features these interfaces provide are going to determine what new classes of applications we can do. They're potentially going to speed innovation. And ideally, this innovation can be used to increase financial inclusion, raise living standards, bring market forces to bear in places where people are potentially not getting fairly compensated for their goods and labors because they just aren't well-functioning transparent markets. And all of these things can be bootstrapped with good CBDCs. However, possibly the most exciting thing about this is that CBDCs, if we design them right, can actually leverage blockchain, which is this incredible FinTech innovation that we've had this 13 years ago. So since I don't have very many minutes, let's just say what does blockchain really give us? Well, if you cut through all the hype and look down and say, at its core, what do we get from blockchain? It kind of boils down to two things that are both of which are incredibly surprising. And in 2008, I never would have thought we could solve these problems. So the first is we've learned how to distribute novel digital tokens, namely cryptocurrency, in such a way that there's a limited supply, but they achieve a huge amount of value. And we've seen the Bitcoin market cap be over a trillion dollars, it's down a little bit now. That's incredibly surprising, but that's a particular monetary policy. That might not be the monetary policy that we want. Sometimes you wanna be distributing you money like this, sometimes you don't. But it's surprising that we've been able to do it in this kind of decentralized way. The second thing that we get out of blockchain is the ability to execute secure atomic transactions between kind of any two parties in the world. They don't have to know who each other are. One of them can even be malicious. And yet these transactions are irreversible, right? People can't reverse them once they've committed. And this is incredibly powerful. And I think it's probably gotten less attention in the press because it's easier to talk about this trillion dollar market cap than it is to talk about what it means to have atomic transactions between parties who weren't designed to operate together atomically. But I think that in the long run this is actually gonna be the bigger revolution because among other things, it means you can very easily bootstrap markets and kind of interoperate with other markets and also eliminate a lot of inefficiencies. And so what I think the real promise of CBDCs is that we can actually achieve these secure atomic transactions just like Bitcoin, just like all these other blockchains but without having to throw away our monetary policy while still using kind of existing money. And if we're gonna do this, standards are incredibly important, right? So first of all, standards can help ensure interoperability. And interoperability is actually one of the things that can help preserve kind of self sovereign monetary policy because we want people setting prices and wages in terms of their local currency. But of course, if that currency is less useful then people may be tempted to use Bitcoin or other things, right? And yet if we can create seamless cross CBDC transactions then money will be much more useful. If my bank account is in US dollars and your bank account is in Jamaican dollars, I should just be able to pay you and really just not even worry about this, right? Because it's all just ones and zeros. And if we design our CBDCs properly and we have standards for interoperability we can actually achieve this vision. Another thing is that standards facilitate innovation in central banks. And if we know what kind of we have to be backwards compatible with then we can be more free to kind of continue to evolve and try other things that aren't backwards compatible as long as we're preserving a backwards compatible subset of our API. It's also extremely important that central banks themselves not become bottlenecks to innovation. And if we design standards properly then the CBDCs will be able to interoperate with third-party systems and also with blockchains that people will be able to leverage actual blockchains in order to transact in central bank digital currencies. And so just kind of to wrap up I wanna just say a little bit about what's happening on the Stanford side of this collaboration which is that we're working on research challenges that we think can vastly improve interoperability. And so the kinds of things that we work on on the Stanford side for example ensuring good liquidity across assets or ensuring that there's fair markets in digital assets that people are introducing credit networks things like communication protocols that are robust to sabotage so that we can allow the systems to interoperate without the risk that if some participant is compromised they'll destabilize the international transactions. So that's all I have. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you very much, David for your opening remarks. We'll now move to the keynote addresses. Indeed, the interest in central bank digital currency has grown in response to changes in payments, finance and technology as well as the disruption caused by COVID-19. A 2021 Bank of International Settlement Survey of central banks found that 86% are actively researching the potential of CBDCs, 60% were experimenting with the technology and 14% were deploying pilot projects. In simple terms, a central bank digital currency CBDC would be a digital bank note. It could be used by individuals to pay businesses, shops or each other known as a retail CBDC or between financial institutions to settle trades in financial markets or wholesale CBDC. Central banks are exploring whether CBDC could help them to achieve their public good objectives such as safeguarding public trust in money, maintaining price stability and ensuring safe and resilient payment systems and infrastructure as David mentioned. So it is my pleasure to introduce our next speaker, Ms. Cecilia Skinsley from Rick's Bank and Governor Richard Bailey's from Bank of Jamaica for their keynote addresses to share their experience on CBDC pilot experimentation. It's a great pleasure for me now to invite our first keynote, Ms. Cecilia Skinsley, first deputy governor, Rick's Bank for her address. Cecilia. Thank you very much for that kind introduction and thank you ITU for inviting me at this conference today. I think it's fair to say that no time in history before has the speed of innovations when it comes to money and the payment market being as high as we are right now. We have moved from a stable situation where the sort of limited set of players and only gradual changes into a world where we sort of say have many new kids on the block trying their luck in issuing, trying to issuing new versions of money and new versions of payment services. In my speech, I was start by outlining four observations and what they mean for central banks and then I will talk a little bit about the rationales that I see for central bank digital currencies, some comments on the crypto asset world and finally some words about the Swedish central bank digital currency project or the E-Krona project that was launched a few years ago. So the first observation from my perspective is the decrease in the use of cash that we are seeing in many countries. And in Sweden, this has been very significant during the last years. While cash in the year 2010 counter for about 40% of point of sales payments in Sweden, last year we estimated that cash is involved in less than 10% in point of sales payments. And we think this is a trend that continues. It's probably even lower than that with the contribution from the pandemic adding to the decline in cash payments as well. The second observation is the increased usage of instant payments or payments with instant settlements which is the more correct way to describe it. Not many years ago actually use cases for those kind of payments were actually seen as quite limited within the payment industries. And so was also the interest in the banking or payment industry for introducing such services. But this has rapidly changed and you can no longer really stir up a discussion by claiming that instant payments will actually one day be the new normal and the most dominant form of payments. And the main drivers behind both these changes are obviously technological improvements but also changes and increases in the appetite and expectations from end users. Third observation is that central banks also must relate to the increasing volume of cross-border payments. Now cross-border payments have clearly not slowed down during the pandemic, it's rather the opposite. And the growth of cross-border payments in recent years is due to several factors including the expansion of e-commerce and the steady increase in remittances. But as we look around the world, unfortunately cross-border payments are characterized by serious inefficiencies. The longer distance you want to send money, the services get more expensive, more opaque and the longer it takes. And a fourth development is obviously the current wave of crypto assets. In the last couple of years, they have not only mushroomed in numbers but also grown substantially in market cap. And they come in different forms with free floaters as Bitcoin at one end of the spectrum and stable coins at the other end of the spectrum. I would say that the free floaters among the crypto assets, they are not meeting what the economists usually call the money test, meaning that a good version of money is providing its user a stable store of value and also works as an efficient medium of exchange. But I would also say that the jurors still out regarding stable coins, which is the new feature within the cryptocurrency world. And I will come back to stable coins a little bit later. So what are then the role of central banks in all this? Well, these are four important developments which we can't ignore. For each of them, we first need to consider what kind of action, if any, does it require. And if they do require action, we have to assess our options. And quite often you can make a case that international initiatives is needed to address certain issues. But I'd like to remind everybody that central banks, they are ultimately responsible for their own jurisdictions because that is regulated in their statutes. And sometimes as an individual central bank, you can simply not wait for the international community taking urgency, lead time into account. We have sometimes to act in our own. And at the same time to the instance, for instance, improving cross-border payment systems, international corporations is key. And that's why you sometimes can see that there are a little bit of difference in the pacing in this area between, on one hand, national central banks and the international cooperation of the other. So what can we do then? How can we contribute? And where can you expect central banks to step in? Well, let me just first point out the central bank's main reason, the raison d'etre in the field of payments. First, by providing the currency for final settlements in an economy, central banks have the means to provide trust to the entire payment system. Second, it's also within our mandate to promote efficiency. And thirdly, central banks are the guardian or may in many countries be the guardian of inclusion, actually making sure that the system is efficient enough that no individual is left behind without an accessible means of making payments. And finally, I would say a part of our job description is also to uphold resilience because if payments doesn't work in a society an economic crisis is imminent. We do this by fulfilling various functions so we can say that we wear different hats. First, we have oversight responsibility of important payment systems. We aim to ensure that they obey to a set of internationally-grade sound principles that make the systems secure and efficient. And secondly, we are operators. We offer final and risk-free settlement on central bank accounts. We issue notes and coins to the general public for their payment purposes. And fourthly, we also, over history, act sometimes when it's needed as facilitators, influencing developments in alignment with our overall objectives within payments. An example of this and a very recent one is that central banks actually act as facilitators for change is the ambitious program initiated by the G20 to enhance cross-border payments. This is about making these payments less costly, more faster, more transparent and accessible for ideally all people and businesses on the planet. At the Riksbank, we are involved in this work more concretely. I am chairing some of the building blocks of particularly the work on new payment infrastructure and arrangements, including looking into if and how central bank digital currencies, but also stable coins could actually work as a part of a solution for potentially improved cross-border payments. And that brings me a little bit deeper into the theme of today's conference. So central banks motives would consider CBDCs, I would say differ, but the motives rhyme. As mentioned in Sweden, what triggered our interest was the development in cash usage I described. And back in 2016, we realized that we were looking into a future in this country where cash would be marginalized and where notes and coins would be very hard to get and hard to use for transactions. Or put differently, we were facing a future where people and businesses would no longer be able to really pay each other with what I would like to call the default option in a society, namely money issued by the central bank or state money, if you like to call them that. And that future was actually coming pretty soon. Is this a problem you may ask? Or perhaps you could see this as being happy to see that inefficient old-school technology, cash payments could be replaced by digital payments. Well, efficiency is traditionally one of the central banks objectives. So strictly from that perspective, I could probably say, yes, it is okay that cash is going into the history books. However, as explained, we are also valuing public trust, hugely important when you are in the money business, resilience and financial inclusion. And this is more than only providing customers access to a particular payment services. It is also about allowing them people to have choices and make them allow them to be able to pay as they manage and favor. So at least as important, cash or central bank issued money play a larger role in society than only indicated by its actual use. In today's digital world, we often now forget how cash actually serves, in my words, as a monetary anchor in the financial system. Central bank money that is accessible to everyone and is interchangeable with commercial bank money, I think is a key to maintain uniformity and public trust and confidence in money. We accept as individuals to be paid in commercial bank money because we have the trust in banks and the ultimately the transferred into central bank money, namely cash if needed in its position and retain its infrastructure to ensure that we maintain the possibility to pay in cash in various contexts, providing choices to members of society we think is a very important. The Riksbank Z-Corona project is investigating the case for what I would like to call an upgraded version of central bank money, one that is more suited for the digital society as we go into the future. For centuries, we have been issuing notes and coins to the public for payment purposes and now we're thinking about modernizing these notes and coins. Whether this is more or less of a revolution than if the public were no longer able to pay or get paid in central bank money is still very much an open question and is being discussed over the world. Some view an E-Corona just really as a historical continuation of a long tradition of developing our very most basic means of payment to society. Besides, we also see other potential benefits of offering an E-Corona to the Swedes. For instance, by providing a platform where the private sector can innovate payment services, we can innovate payment services with an E-Corona, it can contribute to increased innovation and competition in payments. The private sector will always be a lot better at innovating and use the services, but we can provide the infrastructures on the platforms for this. Also, depending on the possible technique solutions, it may strengthen the resilience of the overall payment system. And as we speak, although no decisions have been taken yet regarding issuing an E-Corona in Sweden, we are working on the issues. And formally, the question of an E-Corona is currently the subject of a formal inquiry by the Swedish parliament originally suggested by the Riksbank. So this is not something we do all by ourself, but this is part of a dialogue conversation within the Swedish society. So from that then to say a few words about the crypto assets. So there is a wave of CRISPR assets over the world and I have noticed that a common sales pitch to why people should invest in crypto assets is to criticize monetary policy that central banks have performed very much since the basically global financial crisis and the years that followed. So let me say a few words about that monetary policy. Standard monetary policy is based on law and the most common objective for central banks is to set the monetary policy in such a way that we meet a price stability target or an inflation target, if you like to call it that. And in recent years, it has become clear that in order to be successful meeting that kind of target, central banks have worked with quantitative tools to affect the financial conditions. And different way to explain this is that central banks have purchased interest-bearing instruments to affect interest rates in order to move the macro-economic development in a way that we meet our inflation objectives. So we have really been using these tools to meet our objectives set by our national politicians, by our legislators in our respective countries. And when I look at the money that central banks offer to our societies, they are with few and they are noticeable, but there are few exceptions. Actually, in my opinion, still the best version of money you can find because they meet the criterias of being stable store of value and they meet the criteria of being an efficient medium of exchange in people's everyday life. And I've still not seen any crypto assets even coming close to that level of quality. How about stable coins then? Well, in this area, I think the jury is still out. Depending on the sign, what we have seen so far is stable coins that I would say piggyback on the trust that fiat money already provide. But more is to be seen in this world. And as the world progress, I think it's clear to me that stable coins as well as the whole crypto asset universe in general is not supposed to be left unregulated and unsupervised. A lot of work is done in this area as we speak. And last but finally, just a couple of more comments and short update on where the E-Krona pilot is at the moment. First phase one of the project, it started in February 2020 and since then work has focused on developing a technical platform for a possible E-Krona or a retail CBDC, you can call it, including demo versions of user trolls in isolated test environments. In phase two, the project has tested, among other things, offline function for the E-Krona, examine performance, scalability, integrated external participants into the E-Krona network and also integration of point of sales terminals as well. Except from the E-Krona pilot actually doing these technical issues or exercises, the project has also investigated regulatory issues linked to the E-Krona, issues that have been examined, such as legal status of a future E-Krona, maintenance of banking secrecy and also data protection issues. And the Riksbank continues to work on the legal issues in the years to come and also provide support to the formal inquiry by the Swedish parliament during the year. Most likely legislation need to be adapted in order to meet future needs. E-Krona would near be subject to AML, KIC, and if anonymous payments are supposed to be possible, caps will be considered. And what lesson learned regarding the technical solution so far is that a central storage of E-Kronas and keys to the E-Krona at the PSP providing the E-Krona wallet would actually enable the same level of payment services as banks can offer today. For example, direct debit and standing orange. On the other hand, local storage of money and keys at the end user would on the other hand mean that the end user would have to actively approve every single withdrawal of E-Krona from the wallet and this might not be very practical. This is something we've learned and need to assess further. The technology is inspired by distributed ledger, DLT and blockchain technology. We think it brings opportunities like increased resilience in the payment infrastructure. However, it's also important to secure capacity, scalability and availability of these new solutions and we haven't made any kind of firm decisions on what future technology to ever to choose. When it comes to the preferred distribution model of the E-Krona, the Riksbank would be the operator but not supply payment services to the general public. As the Riksbank maintains the infrastructure, we believe that it can promote competition and innovation. It would be up to the payment service providers to offer solution to end users and therefore a continued dialogue with the general public, payment market participants and other central agencies will be important in the Swedish society. Last but not least, you have a great conference ahead of you, whatever the future holds, the speed of innovation is breathtaking and whatever it holds, we know that safe and efficient versions of money and payments are essential for the society. Central Banks has skills and experience of providing safe money and as a digital society, just come closer and closer, we need to assess the best ways forward in order to serve people's needs in the best way possible. Thank you. Ms. Skinsley, what a fantastic keynote, very informative, very clear. I really thank you very much for being with us today and for sharing your thoughts and your experience with E-Chrona with some close to 300 live participants and we have about 700 registered participants so expect a lot more colleagues to view your thoughts today around the world. So thank you very much for that. I'd like now to invite our next keynote speaker, the Governor Richard Dades of the Bank of Jamaica, who is joining us today by a pre-recorded video message. Would you please play the video? Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, my sincere appreciation to the International Telecommunication Union for inviting me to its first conference of 2022 from cryptocurrencies to CBDCs. In particular, I'd like to thank several working groups of the ITU, the AIRU, the PG and the SA for the work being done on digital currencies and look forward to further published works from them. Two years ago, CBDC was not a concept seriously considered by many central banks. In developed markets, electronic payments were gaining growth versus cash as credit cards and debit cards and online platforms took a larger share of the payments business. Then cryptocurrencies exploded in popularity, mostly as an investment asset, but in the process demonstrated how much more efficient a digital currency can be. Let me use our experience at Bank of Jamaica to contrast cash to CBDCs. Each year, Bank of Jamaica orders notes and coins costing tens of millions of US dollars. These orders must be placed months in advance of target use dates to accommodate frequent shipping delays and contingencies. The orders follow on decisions about design, paper quality and security features, all important considerations for printing paper currency. On arrival at our airport, there are considerable logistics and security requirements involved in receiving, transporting, validating, storing and ultimately over the course of a year distributed it to the banks. In addition, every day there is a tedious process of redeeming, separating all notes and destroying them. Remember that at every stage, we are dealing with millions of dollars of value and so security and accountability at every step is vital. In turn, the banks and businesses all have the same processes, responsibilities and costs, albeit on a different scale. Compared to digital payment platforms like credit cards, debit cards, online and even cryptocurrencies, the entire currency ordering process is laborious, expensive and inefficient. Our first minting of CBDC in August of 2021 took us all of 20 minutes and it took only that long as it was done in a ceremonious manner. It costed us nothing, save for the capital expenditure of the computers and the service fee, which are trivial compared to printing currency. Furthermore, we minted only what we needed immediately. It's not like we were ordering cash, which has to last us for the whole year. Indeed, we can mint CBDC every day if we wish. From the beginning, Bank of Jamaica took the decision that CBDC had to genuinely replicate cash and therefore should be costless to the user. Any telecom cost would therefore be covered by the bank or better still be absorbed by the telecoms as they see CBDC as an opportunity to get into the payment service arena and offer customers other value-added financial products. For a country like Jamaica, where cash is still king and continues to grow year on year and where financial inclusion is limited but cell phone penetration is almost universal, there is a very compelling case to leapfrog the relatively slow-growing credit and debit card and online platforms into the digital payments age by adopting a digital currency that is backed by the central bank and performs every function of cash just more efficiently and securely. In Jamaica, where AML safety standards are vitally important, there are two important steps required in creating an enabling framework in support of CBDC. First, we have enacted legislation which allows for graded know your customer information to be used to open small bank accords. Thus, documentation required by banks to open small newer codes is considerably less than that for larger accords. We expect that this will reduce some of the resistance of persons joining the formal sector. Second, the government of Jamaica is in a process of establishing a national identification card which will be universally accepted as a standard means of authentic identification of everyone, doing away with the plethora of alternative and duplicating means for applicants seeking to open a bank account. Together, these two steps will allow for the far easier onboarding of new bank customers while still scrupulously meeting all AML safety guidelines. Looking ahead to our next big milestone, the national rollout of the currency, we see five key ingredients of success for Jamaica's CBDC. Firstly, getting the major banks to sign on and vigorously promote the currency with their business and retail customers. A retail customer will only find CBDC useful if it can be used at frequently patronized merchants. For their part, merchants should welcome CBDC usage by their customers as it is a zero cost means of payment unlike credit or debit cards or cash with its attendant handling costs. It also meets every bank's objective, reduction in the handling of cash. Second, we need to mount a national awareness on communication campaign which emphasizes the advantages of digital payments. Acceptance of CBDC will be anchored by confidence in the central bank and encouraged by the security, convenience and zero costs of usage. It requires a cultural change which a bank will affect through public education. Thirdly, we have to recruit telecoms to proactively participate in the market by registering as payment service providers and selling the concept of digital payments and CBDC to their massive customer base. They have the connection to millions of potential CBDC customers and they have the tradition of creative and assertive marketing. Fourthly, we have to ensure that all government welfare payments are made in CBDC form. This should be a quick win for CBDC. During the course of the pandemic, Jamaica made millions of dollars in payments in support of those severely impacted. The problem, though, is that many recipients could not be reached by national payment method of checks delivered to postal agencies. They therefore receive no assistance. Every beneficiary in the future, with a phone and a CBDC account, will receive payment instantaneously. Welfare payments are an opportunity to build critical mass quickly. Fifthly and finally, the successful role of the government's national identification card is crucial. The legislation has already been passed to facilitate the implementation of Jamaica's national identification card, a single source of identification to facilitate full verification of one's identity. Along with graded KYC, it will allow for mass issuing of CBDC accounts. Ladies and gentlemen, let me conclude. Jamaica is proud to be amongst a few, but growing number of nations pursuing a central bank digital currency. We have carefully done the technical background work. In 2022, we will begin the critically important job of planting the roots of a digital currency in the hearts and minds of our citizens. We expect that its eventual adoption by most consumers and enterprises will have a transformative impact on doing business in Jamaica. I thank you for your attention and hope you have a successful and productive conference. Thank you very much, Governor Bailey from Jamaica, for joining us today. I'd like now to take this opportunity to thank Dr. Lee, Professor Masieres, Ms. Kinsley and Governor Richard Bailey's for their participation and sharing their insights with us. We will now move to the second part of the opening, which is the round table on the role of standard setting bodies in digital currencies. I'd like to invite the panelists to turn on their videos and join us for this panel session. Technology is moving at an incredibly rapid pace, which raises issues on how the economic stability of currency, the non-digital, could be affected. What will be the initiative applications of emerging technologies such as blockchain in this space? What are the various political and regional regulatory needs to be addressed? And how to connect these elements into a robust framework that can be used by all? Physical money is already well supported by policies, laws and rules, leading to banking regulations. Yet, while convenience appears to be a big advantage for money in a digital format, there are some issues that need to be solved. Binding trust in digital currencies so that the supporting international financial ecosystem can warranty its financial payments and financial transactions. Two, binding liability, so that investments supporting a financial ecosystem do not have negative legal ramifications. Three, privacy, so that the individual as a consumer with the supporting financial infrastructure can ensure that information remains private when needed. And four, interoperability, so that the payments across digital currency types and currencies can take place and are more efficient than current systems. Our panelists today are Mr. Wei Kai, the head of Blockchain Research China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, CAICT, Ms. Sandra Rowe, CEO of the Global Blockchain Business Council, Ismail Arribas, member of INATBA, and Edward Scheidt, governor of ISO TC68SC2 Working Group 17, convener of this committee. The session will be about 45 minutes and we will have a panel discussion. First, I'd like to invite each panelist to provide opening remarks and then we will go into Q&A after that. So perhaps we can start with the introductory remarks by the panelists on the topic of our panel, about five minutes. And I'd like to start by inviting Mr. Wei Kai, the head of Blockchain Research at CAICT. Mr. Kai, the floor is yours. Yeah, thank you very much, Mr. Bilal. In general, personally, I am not expert on CDBC, but I work for the area in the area of Blockchain and DLT for years, especially in ITUT study. I used to be the chairman of the Fox Group of DLT in ITU. And generally, I, from my understanding, the international standard can benefit through the CDBC in general could be in three, in four areas. I think firstly, standard can provide the guarantee of interoperability. I think in the opening remarks, and experts already agree that benefits. Another benefit standard can contribute to the CDBC system is that the standard can provide the guidance to assess the system, the functionality and the performance they can provide. And third, the standard can provide the guideline for the system of security and privacy protection. And finally, I think the standard can provide the guidance of the governance of the system because the CDBC, I think, many players and rules participate in the different sectors. We need to, a very fundamental principle to how to governance this collaboration. So generally, I think the standard can benefit in three, in these four ways. So that's a very general remark to the topic today. And next, I will spend minutes to introduce my work and the ITU work on that area. It's not very closely related to the CDBC, but we have done a lot of standard research on DLT in ITU. So I see some discussion in the chat box and answer a platform, a Q&A platform that people want to know the relationship between the CDBC and the DLT. I think the CDBC does not necessarily rely on the DLT technology, but I think it is very closely related in some way. For example, in the hotel sectors or in the distribution of the token because in the DLT system, we need a vehicle for the value. So the CDBC may be a very good container or the vehicle to convey the value in the DLT system to facilitate the process. So in activity, we did a very good progress in the DLT standardization in the past two years. We currently, we already published several technical recommendations, including the general requirements, the architecture and assessment criteria for the DLT system. So I think this kind of fundamental DLT-related recommendation standard set a bottom line for the interoperability. So if in the future, some projects of the CDBC relies on the DLT, I think this kind of work standard, the standard provides the fundamental mutual universal understanding of the DLT system, what can provide to the CDBC scenarios. And currently in study group 16, we have a dedicated question named the DLT and the E-Services. So in our group, in study group 16, we did the study in a two-layered approach. On the bottom layer, we discussion the technical aspects of the DLT and in the upper layer, we study the standard for DLT E-Services. So currently we already started the interoperability, the risk management, the test and evaluation standard for DLT infrastructure. And for the bottom area, the application-centric area, we already started several new work items to define the use pieces in financial sectors, in public services sectors. For example, the invoices and the digital media areas. So I think it's a very good starting point for future to explore the potential application when conservation of DLT in a CDBC as an infrastructure. So in the future, I think these two groups, these two community, the CDBC community and the DLT community could have a very good collaboration like this, like this event. We can share some minds and some view how to move forward. Thank you very much. If you have any questions, we can get questions and answers. Yeah, thank you, Raj. Thank you. Thank you very much, Mr. Kai, for sharing your thoughts and also for outlining the distributed ledger technology focus group output. And I see that my colleague, Vijay, has put the link on the chat for the colleagues who might wish to download these reports. I'd like now to move to Ms. Sandra Rowe, who is the CEO of the Global Blockchain Business Council to provide us some highlights of the report on the standards mapping initiative 2.0, analyzing blockchain and digital asset landscape and focusing on the standards development aspects. Sandra, the floor is yours. Fantastic, thank you to the entire ITU family for the invitation. And I look forward to the conversation. First of all, I am here to introduce you to those who are not familiar with the Global Standards Mapping Initiative. There was a 1.0, there was 2.0 released last year in November, 2021. The GBBC is a Geneva-based nonprofit association with over 360 institutional members and our core focus is providing sound, fact-based information that is crowdsourced from many different places around the world plus public sector and private sector. And we are convener to provide education, advocacy, and also a partnership as we scale the business of blockchain and digital currencies as well as digital assets. So let me take a moment here and explain how this all started. In 2019, there was a problem and a lot of our members asked us the same thing over and over again. And we got to a place where we said, well, why don't we map what is going on in the global landscape for standards? There are lots of different groups creating standards, but where is there any sort of bringing together of what is the activity? Where are the gaps? Where are the potential overlaps? And what does this landscape look like? So that was our initial mission. And we linked up with the World Economic Forum back in 2020 to do a technical, legal, and regulatory landscaping. And with that mapping, we were able to map both 170-odd different jurisdictions and we create interactive map. And then we also laid out some technical standards that were developed over the course of obviously the last decade. What we have done now with 2.0, I'm gonna fast forward another year, is we've actually expanded that mapping. And when you think of, when you hear of mapping, I wanna be very clear here. We are not saying that we are setting the standards or telling anyone that this is what they should do. What we're saying here is look at all these different groups. We've put all of these various standardized work being put together and let's analyze that as a global community. And so we are open to all public sector and private sector. We actually have had over 100 institutions involved in this last cohort. We will have a GSMI 3.0 and we can talk a little bit more about that. But 2.0 expanded our work to also include not only the regulatory, legal, and technical standard development, but we also added university courses and accredited degree programs that relate to blockchain and cryptocurrency as well as expanding our industry consortia list. You can find all of that on our GSMI website. And this is just a couple of numbers to be able to show you what we've actually mapped. It is a fairly comprehensive mapping of the world as we know, but we understand this is a constantly dynamic evolving and ever-changing industry. And so we continually update this information. And in the last round, just to highlight, it is not about cryptocurrency or CBDC in a individual vertical. It has a lot of connectivity. It's already been mentioned. Digital identity is a major component to how we can actually knit together the world of CBDCs and cryptocurrencies and how that will fit to actually scale in a way that is beneficial to society. We talk about all the benefits, but at the end of the day, if we don't have standards and common ground to knit all of this together, the execution piece, if that fails, I think we're gonna end up with potentially silos like we have today and frictions that we have today. It's just there will be different frictions. So I think coming together as we have today and as we continue to have these dialogues, it's really incumbent upon all of us to be mindful that there are often a lot of common overlaps. And just to give you a sense of directional pull from version 1.0, we were told taxonomy was a major issue, just general terms related to what is CBDC? What is cryptocurrency? What is a digital asset? What is a crypto asset? And so we went and defined 180 different categories from different sources. Is it a definitive list? No, but is it something that we've put together based on many, many sources that we've called? Absolutely. And what we would like people to do is to take a look at that, refine it, give us feedback and then hopefully as a collective community, we can actually arrive at some common base. We also instituted a GSMI fellows program. We absolutely believe in bringing academia into the conversation and as well as students across the board. So we also had a number of students involved and I'll show you a slide on that in a second. But this is just to give you an indication of how version 1.0 is now involved into many different sub topics. And I can't tell you right now whether 3.0 will have all of these same working groups but the concept will be as we will take in feedback as we have been doing from the community and then we will decide which working groups will evolve into 3.0. I wanna thank ITU in particular, VJ for participating in the technical working group. It was very valuable to have you there. And then these are our 12 GSMI fellows who did a lot of our research work. We appreciate them. And we had 131 organizations, over 200 plus individuals contributing. I invite anyone who is interested in this topic to also reach out to us to participate in 3.0. We have not kicked off yet but what we typically do is we work for about six months and launch the report in, well, 3.0 will probably be dropping in October, November of this year. So we will get the roster for open registration soon. Here's the GSMI web link as well as the QR code for those who are interested and happy to discuss more in our session. Ms. Roll, thank you very much for sharing this really important initiative in mapping. The standards around blockchain and the taxonomy is quite important. People who use blockchain or distributed ledger technology. And often these are referring to the same thing but used in different forums in different terms. So the taxonomy is an important first step towards really understanding this whole ecosystem. So thank you very much for sharing this work with us and also for including the courses in your 2.0 because capacity building, especially in developing countries and we see from the chat that we have hundreds of participants from around the world. It's really important to have these resources at the fingertips of many of our member states and private sector entities to be able to develop the capacities in the various countries around blockchain distributed ledger with the various applications including financial sector. So thank you for that. I'd like now to invite our next panelist, Mr. Ismail Arribas, member of E-NATVA. Mr. Ismail, what we need you. Thank you. Do you see my screen? I do. So, okay. Hold on a minute. Okay, that could be perfect. Okay, first of all, hello world. Good morning from Spain. My name is Ismail Arribas. I am the CEO of a small and medium enterprise named Coomfoot which is a founding member of the International Association for Trusted Blockchain Application. I am here to spread my commitment with the standardization. Let's say that I am a standards activist. In 2019, I launched the Chrome Computing in the ITUT for the SDGs and in defense of the technological piece for the SDG-16. And in that moment, thanks to the focus group on DLT, I received a certificate of appreciation that encouraged my soul and my spirit over the standards. And I learned during this five years, almost six years that it was necessary an atmosphere to dialogue, not to set in standards to dialogue because there were a lot of different procedures, overlapping activities and so on. And our enterprise, who is for independent compliance and a technical legal assessment, joined in the foundational statement at the International Association for Trusted Blockchain Application. I would give a very short summary because I want to spread my expertise and experiences in the dialogue, in the session itself, but this summary is going to be in the site for all of the audience and anyone in the globe. Well, in ADBA, indeed, really supported by the European Commission and the Abu Dhabi Global Market to recently join this initiative and give us this international space because we wanted to create this permanent dialogue with public authorities, regulators and promote the ask and questions from the members' interest. So this is the way that we can transfer the private initiatives to deliver this kind of unique ecosystem. Well, we are more than 170 members right now covering a global culture vision in a multidisciplinary way for 32 countries in different working groups. And I am co-chairing with my colleague, Monique Batchener and Gilbert Berdian, the Standards Committee, which is a very transversal entrepreneurship and mutual leadership with all the working groups to provide that dialogue. During this year, we will deliver in different kind of reports, public events, working group position papers. Well, all is public in the website that you can download everything over there. In response, sorry, because that is related. In response to the topic of today, I recommend you to go also to our response to the European Central Bank on the Digital Euro. There are different kinds of round tables and this one was very interesting with the Bank for International Settlement with the European Central Bank with International Monetary Funds and the World Bank discussion in a long, long numerous topics where today we're highlighted in the key notes. These are another evidence of how we can provide our conclusions in a very neutral leadership to the different multi-judicions that could approach to us in the different working groups and in different spaces, like in the G20 and the COP26 with this climate action group, but under the loop of this social impact where we are doing a tremendous work in providing some measurement and where we are going to approach and the contributors granted a diversity, diversity and bilateral engagements that are topics for different jurisdictions. We are in a partnership with LagChain where it's covering the Latin and Caribbean countries and the richness of that multi-judicional equiptonship provides a lot of engagement to other jurisdictions for instance to trans-European services or trans-American services itself. We are talking with governments directly like the Spanish government, the German government or the Canadian government, the Australian government. So the voice is neutral, but this by listening. One of the policies contribution was to the marketing crypto asset regulation. The MICAR proposal is going to be enforced in the European framework and really we provide more than 100 pages with amendments, recommendations and policy positions provided from 16 countries that represents not only the private members also the governmental level of the INATVA members. We also help in another very important document and consultants from the European space which is the pilot regime which is a kind of infrastructure that could be providing some highlights about the policies that are needed not only for the marketing crypto asset regulation even though for a global adoption so with the European blockchain service infrastructure by weekly policy monitoring in Europe and United States are published and received by the different tax forces share their interest. And this is what we offer. And in the discussion, I will offer all this liaison statement that we have with ITUT in particular with the Q22 and the study group 16 but we offer our know-how and our digital human community this space to dialogue in this convergence. So let's talk in the session in a few minutes. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much, Esmael. And now I'd like to invite the convener of the ISO TC68 SC2 working group 17 to provide an overview on the work of security aspects of digital currency in this committee. Mr. Edward Scheidt, the floor is yours. Thank you for having me today. Next slide please. As an introduction, I'm convener of the ISO standard as it was stated in development identified as ISO 23526, which deals with security aspects for digital currencies. I'm also co-computer of ISO AG5 CBDC. And of course today, a lot of the discussion is on CBDCs. There are just two examples of a global financial reach that ISO supports as indicated in the slide. ISO is building trust for global financial ecosystems for all types of digital currency platforms for many national bodies. Next slide please. I believe we all recognize that technology is advancing in incredible rapid pace. The illustration on the right is a prototype for a quantum computer device that promises to advance what banking can do in the future. Lots of technology changes are happening within the international communities. The roles that ISO and ITU bring forth are standards for these technologies to be effective in world ecosystems. Next slide. The international communities include many financial ecosystems that can be defined as fiat or non fiat. It will be necessary to accommodate and recognize both financial models. ISO and ITU are active in their capacities to bring forth new ideas in international communities and address the economic advantages with the fiat and non fiat architectures. Next slide. Digital components that can support various financial architectures vary. Digital wallets, digital hardware security modules, just to name a few of needed components that have been identified. Of course, there are the digital processing and digital communications that support these architectures that represent digital currencies and their security. And we must not forget that within these architectures are roles for standards. Next slide. Within ISO standard development is ISO technical standard 23526. Leading the development, I am convener of ISO 2C68 banking SC2 Bank Security Working Group 17. The financial landscape has expanded into the digital realm that has caused a re-examination of what has been security technologies that have years of use while the digital applications are constantly changing. Adding an additional digital dimension for secure payments and secure transactions with a digital currency pushes the security paradigms and adding a mix of threats that become real for every level of the financial ecosystem. ISO 23526 presents several security frameworks that reflect happenings within the digital currency communities. One framework is non-Fiat digital currency which can relate to digital assets and includes stable coin linkage with security. Another framework is developing a digital currency with an ISO 4217 standard base. Adding identity security to digital currency representation further aligns virtual currency architectures to KYC, no year customer policies. The intent of 23526 is to be a technical building block that can be aligned with business case in the support of existing international standards. In short, an ISO technical standard becomes a bridge to a full ISO international standard that can meet national regulatory criteria. Next slide. In conclusion today, both ISO and ITU organizations offer capabilities that a higher level of liaison could advance other avenues of cooperation beyond the working group security which exists today. That's end, please. Thank you very much, Mr. Edward, for your collaboration. We always value very much the ISO, ITU collaboration at the international standard setting. And thank you for your remarks today. Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like now to move to the Q&A. We have about less than 15 minutes left. We have a few questions that I'd like to ask the panelists to consider starting with the following. The ICT infrastructure underpinning digital currencies, whether it's CBDC, stablecoin or crypto, this infrastructure should cater to openness and interoperability. And this can only be achieved with coordinated adherence to common standards. What are the priorities for standardization across standard setting bodies in developing technical standards for digital currencies? Any of the panelists wish to take that question or start? Sandra? I'm happy to kick off just to say that for us, the resounding 2021 feedback was around just common language and common taxonomy to start. I know it sounds very basic, but there are still groups and jurisdictions arguing about definitions of things. And it's very difficult to build standards when you still have differences. And there are sometimes substantive differences in how someone defines a class of things. And I think that's one. And then the other point that we see a lot more is we've gotten feedback that we need to map what's going on on the technical side, what's going on in the layer two world as well as layer two protocols, as well as the DeFi world, because the smart contracts that are being laid out there, there is a lot of negative feedback around the lack of standards, the lack of auditing, the lack of ability to assess components that should be standardized. So just throwing a few things out there. Very good. Thank you. Thank you very much. Mayan? Thank you. Well, I do touch my heart because during the last two years, I was coaching in the interoperability working group in Atva. Further this, I was exploring in the Etsy in the industrial specification group for permission distributed layers as a rapporteur for the interlayer interoperability document, how other standards developing organization were approaching and trying to harmonize because I detected that for instance in ITUT, where I was working in the focus group, it was like two levels, as you mentioned very well, it was the level of the infrastructure, which is one part of the interoperability and the level of the digital services or products over the infrastructure, also another aspect or dimension, let's say there are other approaches in ISOT-C307 where are different kinds of layers like business layer, governance layer, legal layer, operational layer, et cetera. So the exercise in this PDL group of Etsy were to harmonize all these approaches in a different way without reinventing wheels. Let's keep the interoperability more generic, unidirectional or bidirectional way. Let's say unidirectional, I transmit data or information to your infrastructure whereby your infrastructure is affected for a new data and both are utilizing this data, but this directionally is unidirectional. Independent of it is indirect or direct tools, APIs or whatever is unidirectional. And there is the challenge, the real challenge of the nature of the interoperability definition which is this cross-chain interlayer we are calling really in the Etsy group which is bidirectional. And with this approach, I think we are harmonizing the different efforts that somehow we detected that could overlap dimensions of these layers and somehow it's perfectly understandable. The essentials is the physical world. The physical currency utilized for a unique transaction techniques to identify this currency like inks, papers or whatever. This is our traditional world. Now with the internet and the online banking system, we came in another way to do that habits. And the community impact is tremendous. And the open source gave a lot of lessons of listening and asking because responding came naturally. So I think that could be the way to harmonize unit directional interoperability by directional interoperability could help to distress multiple choice of regulatory barriers. Excellent. Thank you very much, Ismail, for sharing your views from the experience in Etsy and ITU in Spain on how to approach the various aspects of standardization and interoperability. Edward, would you like to address this question of infrastructure standards? Yes, I had mentioned in my presentation about collaboration. And I think that's a key element here also. We, both organizations ISO and ITU offer a vast list of experiences. And what has been discussed is we are perhaps at a stage where a high level of cooperation could be sought. And there's been dialogue along these lines. And I think that can be important. As you heard from me also, I focus on the security element of that. But this collaboration could be extended into other dialogue. I mentioned earlier in my presentation that ISO was actively involved in the CBDC discussions as well as right now doing the study work. But the intent is eventually look to the community which would make sense to include ITU and others as contributors to this direction. So it's another element in all the dialogue that we have for like in this convention will be establishing. Can that be fed into comparable community as such? Okay. Fantastic, yes indeed collaboration is an important element in this space. And there is the example of the liaison that you mentioned liaison between the digital currency global initiative and ISO is currently being discussed for collaboration on security aspects of digital currency. Perhaps to pick up on that point to the other panelists are there any other collaboration mechanisms that could be envisaged for collaboration at the international level among standard setting bodies to coordinate the development of standards for digital currencies? Well, there is a question. Anyone, please go ahead this way. Thank you. It's because there is a common question on the chat that probably brings that, okay? Well, Henri Gasso on the question on the table before I could offer my opinion on the question to Mr. Francaio Casomso. I would say that on behalf of my experience I represent a small and medium enterprise committed, strongly committed with the standardization as a competitiveness reason for the future and growth. So the lack of how to work with is very important. I miss a kind of training with the global liaisons that are trying to connect the different protocols of consensus with one body and other body. And this is what you know by suffering this dialogue atmosphere, right? Because there are commitments between copywriting rules and many other IP tasks. On behalf of the question, I think it could be easy to respond on behalf of the key notes that we were listening. There is a regulatory aspect. Let's say that the CBDC is running over a monetary regulatory framework. An unstable coin is something more unregulated in this instance. Moreover, the model of taxonomy and ontology impact in this difference. Thank you, Bilal, for taking it. Yes, thank you, Smayin. Sandra, from your mapping exercise, what are the other international collaborations other than the ongoing ISO and ITU? Any others that you have seen the need for? Yes, so there's very high level and then there's more granular collaborations that are happening. So we've also participated in the World Economic Forum's digital currency governance consortia. I have to make sure I get that correct. There is a phase two starting in 2022. They did actually release a white paper on CBDCs and stable coins related to wholesale and retail. Might be worth looking at sort of their take on it. I think there are lots of different groups working on different angles. And I think ultimately where we need to get to as a community is figuring out how do we normalize or I will use Ishmael's word, harmonize all of these different bodies of work. It's not for a lack of us doing a lot of work. Everyone is doing actually quite a bit of work. It's now we're at the place where how do we bring these together to actually harmonize? And hopefully we can do that. And then I'm gonna point to one that's very granular that's happening today, which is around trading. So I come from the financial services side. And I sit on the ESA, the International Security Services Association. That group is predominantly financial infrastructure, as you can imagine, the triad five guys. And they are looking at the DLT Standards Group is looking at digital identifiers if related to cryptocurrency and any digital assets. So it might sound very trivial, but we need common standards to trade and have these new products trade easily on the global markets. And in order for that to happen, we have to agree on which identifiers. Right now, there are several. ISO is working with one group I know that's got a set of digital identifiers for trading for cryptocurrencies. And then there's the Bloomberg-Figgy version. There's several others. So again, we have lots of bodies of work, which ones will prevail or do we all coexist? That's the question. Fantastic. I'd like to close that maybe the final question and pick up on the comments on the chat related to blockchain or distributed ledger. What are the key areas of blockchain standardization which will have an impact on digital currency implementation? And for instance, in terms of interoperability, anyone would like to comment on, yes, please, it's Mayil. Because you touch again. My heart with the word interoperability is a strategic word at some times and governance sometimes miss the algorithmic governance, which is a kind of thing. I would say that a blockchain is not the solution and it's not the DLT and I am another blockchain activist. Let's say as a collective entrepreneur, I defend how to harmonize that. The factor specifications or standards that are happening in the blockchain space with what it should be in a common order, let's say. I would say that it's about to manage the way to offer accountability. Everything changed to offer accountability. I don't need to know you. I don't need even what is your aspect. It's up to my, let's say, a style to weigh if the courtesy imply my agreement, but there are automatic smart contracts that are working on it. Well, I want to thank you for the delegation in Azure TC 307 that vote for my candidacy was very impressive because I didn't expect it and ITU. So I am very responsible and committed with that automated process because the automated process is something that in a blockchain could detect the mutability. And that is something new in our space for anti-corruption measures for the ultimate business owner of a deposit or a silent investor or many other circumstances. So I would say that this is a matrix for very favorable accepted trust between or among that community. Okay, great. Thank you, Smain. Mr. Kai, there was the question about GLT. Would you like to address that? And then we will conclude the session. Yeah, so the question will be what's the relationship between GLT and the DVC? And the state of standards, yes. Okay, yeah. I think as Sandra explained the situation, yeah, many organizations done a lot of work. I think in ITU, we are very focused on the interoperability assessment and governance areas of the DRT standard. I think we should be focused and try to collaborate with the different organizations and listen to the industry and the open source community to work together. So we open up the open source community to work together. So we open the door of ITU, we organize the series of the meet-up to hear about the voice from the industry from all over the world. So I think it's on the way for different organizations to find their focus, yeah, so thank you. Thank you, thank you, Mr. Kai for your answer and also to all the panelists for your participation and insights into the role of standards in the digital currency space. And I see that the chat is quite active. There's a lot of Q&A activity as well. Unfortunately, we are running out of time, but fortunately, this is only the opening session of a three-day event. We will have an afternoon session that will look at the architecture options for CBDC and cross-border interoperability for CBDCs and Gifty will be displaying the slides in a minute on the upcoming sessions. So I'd like to use this opportunity to thank you all for your participation today, all 300 live participants on Zoom and also our keynote this morning and the panelists. Big round of applause, a virtual round of applause and we look forward to your continued engagement throughout the next few days and hopefully we will be able to answer all of your questions and also invite those who are on the chat offering to share their experience like Nigeria and other countries to join us throughout this week and in future events on this topic. Thank you very much and this session is over. Bye for now. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Gracias. Thank you very much. Bye-bye. Thank you.