 And now with blockchain, there's a technology that is decentralized, that relies on each individual participant to contribute to a consensus. And conceptually, one could argue that blockchain is a new type of or new kind of institution. So in that sense, you should be afraid because blockchain is a competitor. Your trust may be replaced by decentralized trust, so you should be afraid. And that's why maybe you're not visionary enough, but how can we leverage the trust that we have in a blockchain ecosystem? And that's why I mentioned this broad range of blockchain technologies. I think the radically decentralized approach is nice, but it's costly. And if it's a pure private blockchain, that's nice too, but that's an expensive database. And I think the sweet spot is in the middle where a few or a certain number of trusted participants come together and create their own blockchain, their own consensus. And I think that's where the opportunity for post-lopers really is. Not rely on an existing blockchain, but create your own as members of UPU. And UPU might play an important role in bringing you together on your own consensus. Just building on that, picking up the final point that was made, or one of the final points made with Latte and talking about a global thing. Do you think the opportunity is now for a global postal blockchain application as such? Definitely. Well, consortium are forming all over the world, so it's really time to act. And I think if you want to have blockchain-based services, you need a blockchain to rely on. And which blockchain do you can rely on? I think it should be a postal blockchain. I'll give you an example in Switzerland. There is not the sector-specific, but the national blockchain. Swiss Post together with Swisscom, the telecommunications incumbent, form a consortium to have a Swiss blockchain. As a new kind of infrastructure, Swiss companies can rely on to do business. We already have over-the-counter stock market on this platform run by Swiss Post and Swisscom. We have a pilot project by Swiss Post together with a local energy utility running on this consortium blockchain. And I think that's the way forward. There are applications, but there's not yet a good infrastructure, and I think you have to build infrastructure as well. So that infrastructure in Switzerland is working for the benefit of Swisscom, Swiss Post and all Swiss companies? It is run by Swiss Post and Swisscom to provide services. So that in a way is a micro-model of what could happen globally. Exactly. It's not sector-specific like the one that's proposed here, but it's country-specific. And I think both approaches have to mark merits. Okay, so we might interject. That's a great thing you said, but the reality is we've already followed that. The decentralized ID standard is already supported by IBM Hyperledger, which is permissioned, and Ethereum, which is unpermissioned. And what we're doing is we're proposing something called a decentralized ID. It's called a DID. We're doing something called a DID method. So a method is this new term for how do you create a trust anchor. So we think that the Posts and the UPU could actually form the ideal trust anchor because you are more trusted than Facebook or governments and banks. Right, so the universal service agreement that you've made for hundreds of years has actually paid off in your branding and also in your performance. So again, I invite you to sit in on the workshop tomorrow afternoon to talk about this, where we'll delve into these issues. Can I ask you, while you're speaking, Maurice Moses, any reflections on what you heard from the session before from what the postal operators were saying? I mean, applications that you thought were promising ones. I know you're talking about the future vision and everything else, but things that we could build on. Yeah, all of the work that Egypt and Croatia and Turkey have been working on are spectacular. The biggest issue is if they didn't have access to international players, they may have implemented regional solutions that have to be globalized at a later time. For example, what blockchain identity system do you want to use? There are about 100 of them. It's the standard ones that we want to work on that are supported by Microsoft, IBM and Ethereum. So those are the issues that we need to talk about. But the idea for consortium is actually to integrate those learnings into the broader network. So one of the things that our company has developed is something we call the IP blockchain for intellectual property. So it allows some posts to submit with their learnings and monetize it by licensing it to others. So there may be ways to use a blockchain to do that. And even the governance problem of not having a quorum, you can actually solve that with blockchain voting and a mobile device that has a hardware wallet that can tie each UPU, postal representative into system and have 100% quorum all the time online. And we'd love to talk about those solutions and deploying them first in this industry, which would literally take the industry by storm. Okay, thank you. I'm going to have one more question for these guys. But while I'm doing that, have a think of what questions you have for, if you like, experts in the blockchain who you might want to ask in a minute. And I'll come to you to involve you. But the next question I want to ask was really about the scope of applications and how we think about this. Because we've heard lots of different kinds of applications from ID, from addressing, from supply chain, from payment systems, from philatelic, etc. Is it literally, in your opinion, I'll start with you, Christian, is it in your opinion that every service, a product and internal process, I mean, we've heard of some of those internal processes, well, can be enhanced or improved with a blockchain application? In other words, is the scope for using blockchain throughout our business, not just one little bit here to do something on the edge? It's actually could turn a business upside down and be involved in every aspect of it? I would say potentially yes, but we have to be well aware that blockchain is a technology and there are other competing technologies. So blockchain is not... Not the answer to everything. Yeah, it doesn't answer anything, it might answer specific things. And some of these things are not quite obvious. For example, e-commerce is a very important business for post-operates nowadays. E-commerce very much relies on the trust between the seller and the buyer. And with traditional payment systems, payment is expensive and the risk is with the seller, because the buyer can always reverse his payment transaction. Now with cryptocurrencies, transactions can be irreversible, which shifts the risk from the sellers to the buyers. And then again, it comes to who trusts whom. And this has an effect on electronic cores. My expectation would be that it's going to get another boost if payments become irreversible because of the better allocation of risk in the system. So post-operators are affected by blockchain technology, not just by employing it by themselves or using it for their internal services, but by how their customers, the sellers or the buyers, use this technology. So that's one thing that would not be directly obvious. Another point that has not yet been talked about is tokenization. I personally believe that one of the biggest applications of blockchain is the tokenization of real-world assets. So to put... I think a value, really. Put values on a blockchain and make them transferable and tradable. And this transfer might be trustless because it happens on a blockchain. However, somebody has to guarantee for this digital representation of a real good, has to issue it. And who can do that? It cannot be me personally because you might not trust me. There we need trusted institutions like Postal Services. So I think an important role for postal operators might also be issuing digital goods. Like a stablecoin, for example, guaranteeing for a stablecoin. Or guaranteeing for other things that you might be able to guarantee to your local presence that makes you the best option to report to the blockchain what the state of the world is, for example, if there's a need for smart contracts to be resolved based on a certain local state of the world. You are the ones that are trusted that can give real-world information back to this virtual ecosystem. Thank you. Just adding on that on the e-commerce side, there's a very nice application heard of two or three years ago in New Zealand Post who are using it for provenance for their using real goods. When there's a lot of fake goods on the market, they're using blockchain to guarantee that this is really New Zealand honey or New Zealand wine where many fake goods are being presented as well. So some things about security and authenticity and that sort of thing can enhance the process of e-commerce. And you can only do it if you're locally present. If you know where the honey comes from, that's you. One of our pilots is called the in-person proofing pilot. If the UPU could help create a global standard for in-person verification and binding to digital identities, this would be supported by every e-commerce company in the world. It's a multi-billion dollar market. And it's something you could do now, but you need to make it standardized so that everyone deploys the same way and talks. And we think that decentralized ID is the way to go because everybody's supporting it right now and it's the next thing. And again, the experts at the UPU have studied it and said it looks like the standard to back. Can I open it to the floor now? You might want some questions for these experts on blockchain or what they've been saying so far or following up our discussion before. Who would like to ask a question now? Yes, sir. My friend's coming to you if you could say. Thank you. Thank you very much. My name is Warsaw Trezyk. I'm the Chairman of the Consultative Committee at the UPU, so representing the wider stakeholders here as well. I was looking through the UPU standards and I'm happy to say that I found a standard where all that work could actually be based on. It's our S68, Postal Identity Management and Trust Framework standard. I think we found a basis for the next steps of the work already. The next standard sport is in three weeks time, so I will refer that back to our good friend from PostItaliano and ask him the question, what should be done with our S68, which currently has status zero, not really used by anyone. That would be very interesting. Are you familiar with that standard? Absolutely. Have you seen those standards? Yes, we've been studying that. However, I want to say that actually the easiest standard to get embedded into a worldwide web browser standard is S42 for addressing. For example, the pilot that's being done at the Port of Philadelphia being developed by the US Postal Service now, that actually is using the, it doesn't have an addressing standard in it. So actually using S42 could be injected into that pilot very quickly and you could get adoption outside of the postal industry using it because it's very good data that you have. S68, it looks like it's an easy one to integrate and I think you could get adoption as well, but I would recommend doing S42 first. It's like an easy win and it would introduce the postal industry into the wider technology world. Thank you, Walter, for that question. It may be by setting the standard that it brings other people on board and puts the post in the front position. Although I have to say getting standards agreed and sorted out isn't always the quickest thing to do. Maybe just one additional... Talking about applications within the UPU, we did a study a few years ago with Swiss Economics about parcel quality of service and one thing we found was that quite a number of parcels seemed to arrive earlier than they were sent. So time stamping seems to be an issue and this issue can easily be solved by blockchain. It might be a very low-hanging fruit for your cooperation at UPU level to use a blockchain to agree on time stamps for parcels later. And there's lots of authentication of tracking events and supply chain things and quality of service statistics and data generally that will benefit from it, wouldn't there? Right, some other questions. I'm sure we've got some other questions or comments on if you've got your opportunity now to ask. I have a good question. What are the primary inhibitors of success for the postal industry? So what's stopping you getting involved in this? Anybody want to volunteer? What are the difficulties? To get involved in blockchain. At the microphone here. Let's get down to practical things. It's all very well talked about in theory. What are the practical things from Cote d'Ivoire? No, I'm interested to discuss with him for the next day because I heard that blockchain is not all about script money but also for other activities. Absolutely. And I'm interested to have a chance with you regarding our e-commerce project and all the stuff as well. I look forward to it. I'll just be out there. So you want to talk about other possible applications? Thank you, Isaac. Okay, let's go back to inhibitors. Oh, to Dr Khalid from Jordan. Sir, thank you for the question. I see that blockchain and the cryptocurrency, there are main obstacles in the central banks in our countries. For example, in Jordan it's not allowed yet to use a cryptocurrency net at all. So I think the legislation part is a very important issue in developing and going with the blockchain and the cryptocurrency. So that's an inhibitor in your particular case, in your country? Yes. Salam alaikum and thank you for that. So I wanted to address this directly. We identified that as one of the critical issues. The reality is that when you have a bunch of crypto anarchists presenting stuff to the government, it's not going to go over well. Instead, we found someone who worked at a central bank and it's doable if you do certain things. For example, all you have to do is put in a circuit breaker into the wallet so that the central bank has control over how much money flows out of it or into the economy. And then that actually will get them to say yes. We need to have a team of economists run economic models and simulations and show data. It's like we believe this will actually improve the economy. If you show the data, they'll say we'll take a chance on the pilot. If you don't have any data and you have people saying we're going to burn down the system with crypto, there's no way it's going to get adopted. So I think we can actually produce the ammunition you need to show the government that you know how to deploy something. Now Facebook didn't even do it right. They built it first and told the government we're going to deploy. And if you look at countries like... I forget, it's one of the African countries getting destabilized by crypto right now. Do you know which one I'm talking about? Probably, you know, so basically... There's quite a few destabilized countries at the moment. Yeah, that's true. So it is possible that crypto could accelerate destabilization of local fiat. And you actually have to worry about that because you don't want mistakes. You actually want to put in technologies that are for smart deployment. So circuit breakers would be the first thing we would look at and test in our economic modeling. Yes, thank you. It's an economic model, more than technology. The easiest part in this blockchain on any solution is the technology part. I wish that the way you explain it is to convince the government it's as easy as you explain. And our service is that we will actually go and explain it to your government, along with a study by a number of economists. Because the governments have to see, the invention of paper money helped America. America financed its revolution by printing a paper money. The success of the revolution made the European bankers go, that's an interesting invention. Kickstart like an ICO for the country. Maybe we can use this later. Digital currency has as much power as paper currency. It is the next thing, but it can't be just only revolution run. It has to be a merger and a collaboration of the revolutionaries with the central banks. So that's our model. And I think it's doable. We will definitely produce a package that you could show to a government official or ministry that they'll say, okay, do the local version of this for us and then we'll consider it. Okay, so thank you. So for Jordan then maybe some credible approach to the government, not crypto anarchists or something like this. Let's go to Paul and then go to Kenya or Nigeria again. Nigeria or Kenya, yeah. Kenya first and then Nigeria. We're in the stable parts of Nigeria. Thank you. Thank you, Moses. The only thing, I appreciate your presentation and I think it's something that we as Kenyans want to. My only, your language is so silicone. Is there a way of simplifying it? So that for our everyday application, it's so simple. Just because one of my employees are 45 and about and they are permanent employees and they are supposed to be really the ones who are to apply. So when we come to you tomorrow, am I going to take something that I can take home and apply without too much translation? It's simple, so here. Yeah, so to answer that, the two things that we're offering is we have a kickstart training and we have a kickstart training that we can actually deploy either online at a very low cost or we'll come to your country and do this because the emerging economies actually need to catch up and we want to be there to help you do that and become literate in blockchain and decentralization technology. It's not that difficult. Now in terms of actual applications deployed, we have very good Silicon Valley developers that are like Apple-like. We believe in interfaces that don't require technology. So the interfaces that we can show you will, for example, have a localized chatbot that will explain what a crypto is to a user in the local language. So we're working with a computational linguistic scientist to create a multilingual chatbot that can actually explain crypto and how to manage it to regular users in your language. Okay, so we're getting there. We need a credible person, a simple language that's come to BC that's behind you to the side of you. Night post. Thank you, Mr. Noam. As the biggest market for e-commerce in Africa, you know that we've got a number in Nigeria in terms of population. So naturally, talking about blockchain, visa, visa, improving processes in e-commerce will be interesting to us. Now, I drive an organization that is driven by government who are commercializing now, landlayed, constituted, bureaucratically. And then the workforce is aging to use the expression of the which I'm going to talk about. Now, is it advisable to leapfrog from simple processes of automation to blockchain? Well, that's fair. That's where I come from. You must learn to crawl before you walk. I have a very good answer for you. I helped one of the major banks in the U.S. do a transformation project and the head of the innovation group who later was advanced on the success of the innovation project to be number three in the bank. He actually was the snowboarder, right? And so when we deployed this, he said, something occurred to me. Innovation is like snowboarding. And I said, why? And he said, because it's actually safer to do it a little bit faster than your comfort zone. You'll fall off a lot less. On a snowboarder, skis or motorcycling, if you go as slow as your comfort, you'll just be falling off. You have to go a little bit faster than you have a higher success rate. And so what I'm training is to learn how to just move a little bit beyond your comfort zone. Because staying within your comfort zone is the marker for not succeeding in the new technological world. So, and the other thing I'm going to add is that if you do the proper use of blockchain and AI, it simplifies everything. It's actually simpler to do that. It's harder for your technologists. You'll need external developers to help you. But in terms of your users and the workflow process for your customers, it'll actually simplify them. Okay? Can I come to Christian? Any reflections on these last couple of questions? Because Moses has been asking them. My point would be to try to force blockchain onto everything. It's just the technology. It's not great per se. It's great if it serves a purpose. And my advice would be look for a situation where you have between a certain number of parties. These parties may not trust each other fully and it's a process that can be automated. Those are the situations where blockchain fit. If it's a situation where everybody trusts everybody anyway, you may use a simple database. If it's a situation where you are on your own without interaction with a lot of other parties, just use a database. So, a blockchain is not fit for every situation, but should be well traded off against technological possibilities. Okay, can I come back to another? Oh, Linda Wei there first. Then Fiji, then Paul. That would, I think. Thank you so much. I'm just thinking about understanding that different countries have different dynamics and different regulatory framework. And others are highly regulated and others, they can just keep the ground running. And where I'm sitting to simplify the process, I'm more interested on the possible application beyond just the financial cryptocurrency aspect of the blockchain. I'm now thinking that innovation is about also working smart and disruptive methods to get new ways of doing things with what my colleague from Nigeria was saying and what you would say in relation to a discomfort because sometimes when you're incremental you actually you could actually be caught napping. You know, sometimes you have to be being banged to adopted being banged approach. How do you reconcile all these complex contradictions and in our situation coming from a developing country South Africa it contrasts it's very complex and contrasts with other regulatory framework but at the same time it's adopting digital transformation agenda and in the context of postal operations where around potential applications especially in the context of the e-commerce because that is the future intent of our reform where should one place themselves strategically dealing with the economic disruptors using the blockchain as a catalyst for reform. Good question. Thank you. Who wants to take that first? I think there's still a lot of skepticism regarding this new technology and so the first step would be make people familiar with the opportunities that it brings and for example from a governmental or regulatory perspective the opportunities, accountability, traceability so I would approach regulatory bodies because I'm a regulatory economist so I do very much in regulation and regulatory frameworks so if you want to get something started we need the right regulatory framework so if you have a project if you have an idea buy in the regulator by pointing out his opportunities it will become more easy for him to oversee your activities because blockchain is about trust, it's about transparency as well towards the regulator so get the buy in from these stakeholders by pointing out the opportunities they get from this technology. So get the regulators on board and it makes their job easier actually with the transparency as well so thank you for that. Fiji Thank you speakers for all this technology but I think most of us know all those technology which is blockchain, AI, machine learning cryptocurrency unfortunately none of them has really proven within a couple of years time that they are with second technology. What we really wanted to know is what are the resources required to put the blockchain technology into the postal services second is what sort of duration is required to establish this technology, what sort of costing you will be working on those things I think these are the important parameters we need to know I think the presenter has kept all those secret as a trailer giving today and then maybe the movie into the workshop tomorrow is that right? Realistically what's involved, what are the resources what's the timescale, just be brief if you could. Okay so I'm going to tell you that you can't do it on postal timeframes right it's like can we talk, the first response I got when I said we wanted to do this from the UP is can we schedule this for next year right so you can't answer that way for our projects we actually look for existing technology projects that we can just inject some AI into and then make you leap from but it's like already working stuff so our timeframe for everything we're doing is about 6 months which I think is faster than you guys could do is that correct but anyway so we can definitely do that and also if you have enough partners investing in a consortium the cost of it is divided by those a number of people so that it would be a fraction of what you would have to pay to do it yourself with internationally qualified talent. Can I just ask a question of Christian I know Switzerland is different from Fiji a little bit but Swiss Post has developed a framework which they're using nationally, quick comment about that so Swiss Post has a few projects related to blockchain and my point would be don't start by conquering the world start small you can start small with blockchain pick a small project like Swiss Post pick the collaboration with the local energy utility to meter certain electricity usage that's a very small use case and see better it works once it works go big I want to tell you that working together you can't conquer the world it's like up front