 Hi, and welcome to a coin telegraph interview. My name is Joe Hall, a reporter for Europe. I'm here today with someone very special, Daniela Borboza from the Hyperledger Foundation. Daniela, how are you today? I'm doing wonderful. Thank you for speaking with me today. That's our pleasure. So the Hyperledger Foundation has been very busy recently. We actually recently spoke with Karen, who's partnering with the Digital Dollar Project. What else is keeping you busy at the moment? Well, I think our core mission is really to continue growing our developer ecosystem. We now have many projects that really follow a lot of different use cases. And we've been busy building those communities. So building an open-source community is hard to do. And that's what the Hyperledger Foundation does. So we gather end-user companies, we gather the builders and developers, the government agencies, anyone that is using blockchain and blockchain-enabled technologies together to build our code bases. Okay. And as I understand it, you are a WEF veteran or a WEF Turin, if I can say that, as you've been to several WEFs in the past, pre-COVID, now that everything's back being physical again. How have you seen the WEF develop with regards to the blockchain and cryptocurrency industry over the past, is it five years now of WEFs that you've been to? No. So it's been two, three years of WEFs, and then obviously there's no WEF. I've seen, you know, the thing I was talking to you about before is this year we're walking from one part of the promenade to another to go see different blockchain startups or different blockchain ecosystems. We're in the past, everybody was kind of in a more central place, so my feet are suffering from it. The other thing is cool is that, you know, you have the big companies, the big banks, then the big service integrators all like next to the big banks, the big blockchain brands. And then last but not least, and I think everyone's saying about this, there's huge ads everywhere around Davos with all the crypto brands, which is pretty interesting. It's like you've come a long way, baby. Great. And so you first got into Bitcoin, was it the mid-2010s? How did that happen? And you know, how did you come across your first Bitcoin? All right, so I was living in San Francisco, okay, and I was in technology, I was doing some work around digital identity specifically, was of my interest at the time, and I was working for a big, Dow Jones, a big financial services company, but I was very interested in what was happening in Bitcoin and, you know, essentially it was just Bitcoin at the time. So I did go to a meet-up once, and I walked in and I was, you know, older than everybody else and also female, and I was like, maybe this is not for me. And I continued, you know, just following the market as long as I, you know, had the time to do so. And then eventually I found, you know, Hyperledger, so this was in 2016, was doing some interesting work with the concepts, the basic concepts of blockchain technology, right, of DLTs, of why you want a distributed system and why there's a lot of use cases in the enterprise to do so. And I said, I'm pretty interested in that, and that's how I joined the Hyperledger Foundation. Very good. So we can't talk about cryptocurrencies now, especially in Davos, without talking about CBDCs. I think you have quite a positive outlook about these. Would you be able to share it with the viewers at home? Sure. So I think, you know, central bank digital currencies is a natural evolution of digital dollars and, you know, digital currencies, and the central banks are going to have to look at different options, and not all central banks are going to have the same approaches. We like to think that here at the Hyperledger Foundation, we're building a base of options for central banks to use, from, you know, Hyperledger Fabric to Hyperledger Basu, Hyperledger Eroha, and perhaps others that might come into the Hyperledger Foundation as we continue to grow. One of the things that's important, and we really are advocating whether we're talking to the central banks or other organizations in the space, and even the private sector, is that open source and building these things collaboratively in an open source environment, not just open source and, hey, this is a piece of code, we'd like your comments on it, but hey, here's a piece of code, you could look at it, you can contribute to it, you could build upon it, is really important. And I think that's one of the initiatives that we're working with the Digital Dollar Project and FINOS, which is an organization, a sister organization at the Linux Foundation, focused on fintech open source, is really helping the central banks, the private sector, and also, you know, down to the consumer understanding that the code is something that needs to be built collaboratively if we're going to be building currencies, if we're going to be building new systems for a global audience. And last but not least, interoperability, right, because when you have choice, people are going to make different choices. So how do we make sure that we can enable people to have choices and have an understanding of what they're doing there? Okay, so we shouldn't be scared? I don't think you should be scared. Okay. I think that, you know, they, in privacy preserving methods will need to be implied first. I think that, you know, we need to continually to just educate. And if, yeah, I'm not scared. I don't think I'm scared because they have options and I think we're going to see many approaches over the next few years. There's already lots of experimentation, there's some already in production, we're going to learn from those. Some of the smaller companies, countries have done implementations. The larger companies and the larger banks will learn from that and perhaps build even better, right? Okay, okay. And so there's a question I've been wanting to ask about the Hyperledger Foundation and this idea of, you know, enterprise blockchain solutions. How does that differ from just a regular database, for example? I mean, that age old question here, why do you need a blockchain for that? Well, let's start with the enterprise part of it, right? When we talk about enterprise blockchain, it's really enterprise grade, right? So if you are a major bank or a pharmaceutical company or a big supply chain retailer, you want to make sure that whatever technology you use is enterprise grade, right? Even if you're trying to implement a startup, a software service that a startup has, you're going to go through the processes of making sure that it's enterprise grade. It's secure. It has a commercial ecosystem around it that if your vendor goes away, someone else can help support. So when we talk about enterprise blockchain, that's specifically that, right? It's enterprise grade, so government agencies can use Hyperledger code bases and feel confident around that. So that's the first one. On the second, there are many situations that a blockchain is not ideal and they shouldn't be used and we tell people that all the time, less and less so. Do you have any funny ones there? Has there been someone putting boots on the blockchain or I don't know, a club behind those clubs in the blockchain? Have you had any funny ones recently? Not recently because I think people are now educated as to what, when you want to use a distributed ledger, right? So when you want to use the distributed ledgers, when you have multi-parties that are working together, right? And what you don't want, you don't have to create another middle layer, right? That helps this and mediate all the assets that are going around. So when you're talking about blockchain and many blockchain use cases in maybe early 2016, 2017, it was really they were trying to get you guys, the media to pay attention, right? And you put blockchain on it and suddenly CoinTelegraph and CoinDesk and all is going to go give you a call. So I think we've come a long way from that and there's use cases that it doesn't mean that you need a public blockchain per se. You might have a permissioned blockchain network and maybe there's five participants. But the efficiency that you gather from those five participants and the ROI that you get from being able to work in that trust environment is much greater than having to have a database that then needs to be reconciled all the time and then you have a third party to audit and make sure that it's done. So I think there's a lot of confusion still around what is enterprise blockchain. Think from an enterprise blockchain perspective, it's enterprise grade. It's something that a government could build a CBDC, for example, on top of it and not worry, but also that it is for different use cases. And is there a use case that personally you're looking forward to the implementation of or maybe that excites you? Well, I think anything primarily related with digital identity and being able to travel cross-border, for example, all this morning I've been trying to get all my passes and everything done to go out. So, but digital identity and having control of your data and it's why I got involved in blockchain because I think it's a really important element of it. In Hyperledger Foundation, there's some great projects, Hyperledger Indy, Hyperledger Aries that are working specifically on digital identity and these are being implemented in some of the European credentialing systems like ID Union and EPC and I think that's the future. So, I'm really excited about what we've built here at the Hyperledger Foundation in the identity space since 2017 because now these tools are actually really being implemented across pharmaceuticals, across manufacturing, across finance, obviously. Fantastic. Daniel Barbosa from the Hyperledger Foundation. This has been a Cointelegraph interview. Thank you.