 I'm just going to start very quickly, there's quite a lot to get through in this presentation and I won't be able to cover all of the technical elements but I'm around during the day for anyone who wants to follow up. I really want to talk about a really strange, ambitious idea of using the blockchain to send financial value to wild animals which are threatened with extinction. And I use just to start with this example of a giraffe and you can imagine if the animal actually owns a digital wallet and that wallet is full, the ranger's family, the local community, the government itself are all potentially incentivized to mine the value of that animal in order to improve its life quality and critically to raise the number of endangered animals in the wild. And why are we doing this? Some of you will have seen this picture, this is from Kenya, this is Sudan. He was the last living northern white rhino and he died a couple of months ago so that species is dead now, it's gone from the planet and it's unlikely that we will find a way to return it. I really want to just emphasize some simple points about biodiversity because it's really important to get a sense of scale about what's happening at the moment. First point is the most obvious point that we as a collective, as a species have massively failed so far to be good stewards of the planet which we have. We have at the moment the sixth mass extinction event happening on the planet. We can see in Africa the numbers are actually higher but on the planetary basis we've lost 60% of large animals on the planet. In Africa it runs up to 80% in many areas. And obviously the large animals are important only because they are an indicator of what is happening underneath them. So when you lose a giraffe you're also probably losing the ecosystem underpinning it and that includes plants, insects, soil and this is a critical problem which is only going to get worse. I always think about this problem for a long time and it seemed to me that one novel approach is offered by the blockchain. An animal doesn't have any value to offer in and of itself unless it's an elephant or a rhino in which case the value it has to offer is the reason why it's destroyed. And so I feel that giving the animals financial value it maybe empowers them and gives them some agency in the world that they would not otherwise have. And just this point which in the Ministry of Science and Technology I think you're all very aware with. You won't be able to see all of the detail in the charts but you'll all see the uptick. So on the left hand side we have the socioeconomic trends. So what is happening to human population, what is happening to GDP and on the right hand side what is happening to our planet in terms of the pressure on the planet. And when we think about Ethiopia, the critical point I want to make is that Ethiopia is going to double its population and try to become a middle income country at this point in all of these graphs. So the pressure on Ethiopia is quite staggering. We can talk about climate change, we can talk about degradation of living systems, we can talk about the rising cost of food and materials. The pressure which Ethiopia will come under during its transition is quite significant. In terms of biodiversity, most of my work is in very advanced technology in the tropical bells of the planet. So I'm very much interested in this bells of the planet. And you'll see the red indicates population growth and these rings indicate areas of very high biodiversity. And you'll see that in Europe and North America the more north you go the less biodiversity there is. So we're in a situation now in this tropical bell particularly here in Africa where human population is growing, continuing to grow very fast. And the biodiversity which is contained there is of planetary importance and is not properly valued by the planet itself which is a critical point. If we just speak specifically about Ethiopia, most Ethiopians in the room will know about the Simeon Mountains and the Bali Mountains and in terms of botanical plant life they are very, very rich. But the area that I'm most interested in in Ethiopia, a little bit up here on the border with Eritrea and Sudan, but mainly it's this region bordering South Sudan and Northern Kenya where we have extremely rich biodiversity which has survived. And what we'd like to see is to try and trial this project, maybe in Canbella here, maybe down in Omo here and obviously there are a lot of operational challenges but we think it's a really good possibility. And the obvious point to make from an Ethiopian government perspective is Ethiopia is committed to a green economy future. So when you think about this project think of it in a 50 year, 80 year cycle. So what would your great grandchildren want to inherit in Ethiopia? Do they want to inherit an ecosystem which is biodiverse and rich and alive? Just the numbers, the lion is the symbol of Ethiopia. This is the great symbol of Ethiopian civilization. There's about 900 to 1000 lions left in the wild in Ethiopia. And in 1970 there were probably as much as 10,000 lions here. So we've seen a complete collapse in those animals. The same with giraffes and we can talk about all other species. But in particular with this project we're really interested in giving digital wallets to these large animals and seeing what happens and whether that helps the local community to protect them. I think the most essential point about this Linnaeus project is the idea that you use the planetary capital and direct it towards a small number of creatures for maximum effect. We often talk about wild animals as being priceless but the opportunity for them to actually have value and to spend that value is something that the blockchain can provide. And I'm using the word, I haven't really thought of the right word here. I'm hoping that the minister will come up with a good verb to blockchain. But the idea is very simply that if the local community understands that an animal has a large amount of value attached to it and if they understand that they can change their behavior and be rewarded for that behavior in incremental financial payments then maybe that will have a positive effect on the ground. We named this project after Linnaeus. Obviously we're here in the Ministry of Science so many of you will know him but those who don't Linnaeus was an 18th century Swedish taxonomist and he really left a legacy which we still have today of species and subspecies and the idea with this project is that we build on his legacy by directing value towards these species. We don't have time to get into all of the details but I think the main idea around Linnaeus and the concept is to develop as it were sovereign wealth fund for life forms and the capital flow will come into Linnaeus but it will be highly targeted towards endangered creatures. And we have a very good scientific underpinning on which animals are the most endangered in which places and in the early stage we'll direct the digital wallets towards those creatures and see if that can have a positive effect. What attracted me most towards Cardano and Charles and more largely into the blockchain community is this idea of smart contracts. The idea is that if you were actually to physically go and negotiate a financial transaction with the local community for example not putting their cattle into an area where lions are that would be really prohibitively expensive but it's possible to architect and to write smart contracts which are quite sophisticated and they change according to time and they change according to circumstance and they change also spatially so it's possible to write a smart contract for one ecosystem and to build in certain conditions for example they might have a drought and if there's a drought then maybe they're allowed to use water in different ways than they would otherwise. And the ability of writing smart contracts I think is the absolute killer app of blockchain even above trust and transparency because it allows you this flexibility and we know one reason I moved into this space is I studied very heavily micro insurance schemes that we have in Africa at the moment which is often run off mobile phone payment systems so a farmer will buy a micro insurance for his crop or for his animals and then that will pay out automatically according to the climactic conditions and that is a really really positive outcome we've seen from that. You lose a little bit of accuracy but in terms of cost it's quite affordable. What we'd like to see which is very ambitious is to get a billion euros or equivalent into Linn we call it Linn before 2030 and obviously in the early stage we have to test quite extensively and we need to work out exactly what are the operational pitfalls and what are the effects on the ecosystem of actually handing animals this money. Just a few key points we want to build it on the next generation blockchain and we really hope we could build it on ADA which is the currency of Cardano. The Linn as we said is a digital wallet sent to the animal. This is a really important point it's kind of like reverse life insurance concept so the value exists in the animal when the animal is alive and then when the animal dies it's redistributed back into the fund and then redistributed to another animal. I really like the idea that local people will get to see how much animal is worth and I think that the money and value really do help to change human behavior in that way. As we spoke about the idea is to it is to allow local communities to change their behavior and be rewarded for that. We talked about grazing and cattle which is probably the biggest single problem in terms of destruction of these other species and then cutting down trees for charcoal possibly poaching lions subject to poisoning and again that's related to tension with cattle. The idea as Linnaeus matures if it can prove itself is that this sovereign fund will invest locally in other income streams so it should be possible if you bought a thousand dollars worth of Linnaeus in three or four years time to imagine that over a long term you would have a low rate of return on that investment. It's obviously not going to be a high rate of return but it should be a safe rate of return and in that case Linnaeus is really a prototype of a natural capital product of which we're going to see a lot more. One of the most interesting elements for me about Linnaeus is the idea that built into the value of it is the monitoring ability. The one problem we have and Ethiopia is a good example but not the only example is that we don't have enough money to send scientists out into the field and they haven't been particularly efficient at counting animals or knowing where they are at any given time and Linnaeus would build in a new layer of intelligence into that and we can imagine open source database for different regions for example Gambella may have a database in five years time in which you know most of the major species where they are at any given time what is happening to them and this obviously I'm coming at this from an artificial intelligence point of view and artificial intelligence is really really critical for that and we talk about convergence of blockchain with artificial intelligence I think this is one of the most interesting elements for me so this is a cheap monitor which is now available for $12 it has a Raspberry Pi computer built into it and you can hook it up in a wild area and then download the data of Bluetooth at a later date one of the most interesting points is machine vision so now we are developing drone technologies and satellite technologies which will allow you to track and to monitor animals in ways that have not been possible before and of course when we talk about local community there's a lot of interesting stuff that can be done using smart phones you can distribute smart phones in the community they can take photographs, gather data and so on this is something which just came out last month these are primates who have been thermally imaged from a low orbit satellite and you can actually identify the species of monkey just from that data so we are in a position to move to a much higher level of resolution but the question of course is about money and how you finance that and we think Linnaeus might be a way to do that in terms of partnerships we'd love Minister to partner with the government of Ethiopia in the early stage so we run a couple of pilot projects and really try and understand the complexity of the challenge obviously in the first few years probably for the first decade you can be working mainly with major conservation groups who've had a 50-60 year history on the ground working with local communities and essentially become a finance and intelligence mechanism for them to do their work we have already very strong cooperation in the artificial intelligence industry I actually think the insurance industry is going to be one of the very big players in this space and I do think the applications that we develop here will have direct crossover to the livestock industry so I think for Ethiopia obviously livestock is a huge industry then as Charles has developed very well the connections with universities is quite critical and having peer reviewed work which is very open source, very transparent I'm just going to click now to just a couple of points I mean my previous life before I worked in technology I was the Africa correspondent for the economists so I have a lot of experience on the ground in Africa and what I really love most of all this is a Samburu tribesman in Kenya I love most of all connecting the very most advanced technology in the world with the absolute ground level and thinking in a very realistic way in terms of those communities their education level, their income that's available to them the challenges they have in their life and thinking about what are the opportunities for them so I think this is really ground truth this I think is just a point to end on maybe the reason I'm on this stage right now and having this conversation about blockchain was that when I arrived in Africa most of the stories I initially wrote were about this Kalashnikov and then in 2002, 2003 this Nokia 1100 phone arrived and it was known as the Kalashnikov of communications in Africa and I remember really profoundly having discussions with development actors with African governments who said that there is no chance whatsoever that ordinary Africans would have access to a mobile phone that would never happen and they would say things like well you know, the village how would they take care of the mobile phone mast who would pay for that how would that network work and what we've seen is that they have underestimated the power of new technology by 20 to 50 fold and I think it's exactly the same situation we're in with blockchain right now people are finding it very hard and difficult to see how it will become operational it's never going to work for poor people but I think exactly it can and it will so thank you very much