 So, two announcements. One is that we are functioning under the Linux Foundation. And that trust policy, such as this, you can read more about it at the Linux Foundation website, which is linked to from the meeting website. The other is a play to be have the proper court of conduct, which is basically do not be disagreeable, even when you're disagreeing. I mean, that's in a nutshell what it says. Plus, giving people an opportunity to talk other people opportunity to talk, especially when you're questioning the presenter. And today's presenter is Stephen Phillips was no stranger to us he has been here before. At that time he was talking about Dxcd, the, or decash, which is a central bank digital currency that is actually in production, or in pilot, at least, in contrast to people who just keep talking about this stuff. So that's, that's a plus. I know that smaller jurisdictions are the ones who have created, you know, created most of these, but some big guns are going to hit this space. China, as we know, and India certain as started its rollout. Maybe later this year they are coming out with the pilot. There is going to be Turkey and Stephen is well placed to talk about this. So he will guide us through the architecture problems and promise, most of all, of what it means to have a central bank digital currency. In play. Thank you. And, Stephen, please start your presentation, and we will ask questions when we have a chance later. Thank you. All right, thank you so much for the introduction. So as Vipin mentioned, I did speak a few months ago, where I did a presentation, and there were a number of interesting slides on that presentation I encouraged the audience to visit that presentation there, I talked about the architecture of this technology. And it was prior to go live in the Eastern Caribbean currency union. This is a current, this is the oldest currency union in the world that now has the D cash digital EC dollar live in a pilot. So I do encourage the audience to revisit that presentation there's a lot of background information there. So for today, I want to begin with a brief background on bit. This is the fintech company that I'm the vice president with special projects with. And from there we will talk briefly on the problem that the digital currency was developed and designed to solve. And we want to get to the lessons learned from bringing the D cash, this CBDC to market and talk about some of the key lessons that we learned and some of the things we might do differently, etc, as we progress and deploy in new markets. So I begin with a brief background on bit bit was founded in 2013 in 2016, we were the first company in the world to digitize a national currency on blockchain. And we, you know, that's the synthetic CBDC at the time, and we had the support of the central bank governor and the minister of finance. The system is still operational today and continues to grow. We are integrated with the largest bill payment processor in Barbados, and also major telecoms for added value to users and online payments. Since then, 2016 we've continued to evolve our digital currency management system to enable central banks of all sizes to digitize their national currency. The bit DCMS digital currency management system includes the necessary applications for all major stakeholders to transact in digital currency. So that includes central banks as the monetary authority, the financial institutions, merchants, businesses, and also consumers. The two tier system that we have currently, and most central banks globally are configuring their CBDC deployments in the two tier fashion. So bit was key to the development and successful launch of the central bank digital currency pilot within the Eastern Caribbean currency union, and that is managed and the monetary authority there is the Eastern Caribbean central bank. Technology this new digital version of the EC currency went live in March 2021. So we were just about at the six month mark, a good time to revisit this audience and talk about some of the lessons that we've learned in those initial six month sense go live. We are currently deployed thinking specifically about the decash deployment, we're currently deployed in five territories, and we are due to deploy in the additional three territories that make up the currency union, a total of eight. And that's planned by the end of October at latest. So that's the project and our other ongoing projects, we bit as a company plan to be in three continents by the end of q1 2022. And as if it was mentioned and we also just recently were awarded a contract for the giant of Africa, Nigeria. It's the very big player the largest economy in Africa that's also making a move towards CBDC to address problems that they experienced within their economy. So let's talk more specifically about the digital Eastern Caribbean dollar and the lessons that we learned there. There has been a significant innovative and proactive step in the right direction to address problems of high cost and payments inefficiencies within the oldest monetary union in the world. And that union again is the Eastern Caribbean currency union made up of eight territories within the Caribbean islands. According to data from the ECCB Eastern Caribbean Central Bank, outgoing regional transfer costs, outgoing regional transfers can cost anywhere between 60 between 30 and 63 US dollars per transaction and final settlement of checks card payments and wire transfers can take up to three days. So as you can see, there's a lot of inefficiencies and high cost within the Eastern Caribbean currency union for making payments and selling transactions. And this technology that we have worked with the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank to provide is meant to address a lot of those problems by providing instant payment and settlement, as well as reducing costs significantly for these transfers, as well as addressing additional issues such as financial inclusion for digital payments and generally making it easier to transact for merchants, etc. So lessons learned from bringing the CBDC to market. So here is where I move into some of the things that I can share that we've learned along the road that we will definitely take to our additional deployments as the company continues to grow and succeed. So when considering some of these challenges of launching a CBDC, you know, it's almost automatic to assume that these challenges will be technical and operational. But what we've found is, is that while those challenges do exist, the real big factors to consider are those that are more subtle cultural or economic, you know, logistical go to market challenges, especially in a world where there is a global pandemic also presented some challenges for us. And it's important that you address these challenges head on to ensure a successful CBDC launch. So ranging from instinctive disinclinations from target demographics towards adopting new technologies to difficulties inherent in attempting to convey value propositions. So in this particular demographic of users, there is a natural disinclination for new technologies, especially around those to do with finances we have. And some of the territories agent populations individuals who want to see things written in a book, etc. So launching a novel technology such as a CBDC did present a lot of challenges. So one of the first lessons, the well the first lesson I'll touch on is the fact that communication is key. Being able to communicate clearly and succinctly devalue proposition of the CBDC is not enough well it's important it's not enough to drive adoption. These propositions need to be tangibly and comprehensively conveyed prospective users and their target demographics. The biggest challenge we faced by the ECCB faced by the ECCB and bring in the cash to market was the cultural disposition present within the ECCU the Eastern Caribbean currency union to adopt new technologies, where, you know, individual citizens were not necessarily Russian to adopt new technologies. So we found that providing users with clarity around the advantages can encourage them to think about the value of the product there by creating demand for it, which which may ultimately drive adoption and update. So that clarity around why I should be interested in this what is it going to do for my life how is it going to benefit me how is it going to save me time or reduce my costs. It is super important to get users to change and as we know humans are creatures of habit, and it's difficult to effect change so driving home those value propositions is super important. All right, so the other, the other interesting item, a lesson that we learned is leveraging local and industry expertise. The central banks historically have not had to develop go to market strategies for digital products or marketing campaigns. You know, as you could imagine the adoption of physical notes and coins issued by the monetary authority has been a legal requirement so they haven't had. This is novel for central banks as well, having to create go to market strategies, marketing campaigns and driving adoption of a digital product. We found working alongside dedicated local teams of experts who have considerable experience bringing financial technology project products to market was very beneficial in the roll out of the cash, and we see that in other markets where we have our CBDCs being deployed. It will also be will also be essential in ensuring that the network and associated applications are well received and well used by the target demographic. Drawing on domestic expertise to incorporate regional cultural messages and tactics is also very important. Gaining insight from these experts and involving them in the roll out of the strategy in the jurisdictions can help ensure operating experience is leveraged is leveraged and successful behaviors are considered and adopted. It's therefore important, we have a diverse team to help with the roll out for a CBDC. So, those individuals again, who understand the market very well, they will be critical. Those lessons that they can bring to the table about what works what doesn't work how to communicate effectively to the target demographic. Very important to ensuring that you can hit those key performance indicators for success. I think should also consider involving local payment service providers to participate in CBDC deployments, having well known payments applications integrate with a CBDC network has the potential to provide quicker adoption and easier on board and for customers who are already accustomed to sending and receiving money using their given payment service providers application. They will likely, however, still be marketing efforts required on behalf of the central bank. But it would revolve around areas better suited to their expertise such as education, improving financial literacy, economics and assurance, as opposed to having the central bank drive user adoption. So in many cases, the consumers wouldn't even be aware of this. They would be using the same application. Go ahead. Do you have a presentation that you're looking at or is it, you know, just just notes no presentation today. Okay, thank you. Yeah, where was I right so we're discussing that in many cases, the consumer wouldn't even necessarily be aware of this, they would be using the same application from their payment service provider. However, by the payment service provider leveraging the CBDC, it can create opportunities to move for the payment service provider to move away from their private ledger and now leverage the CBDC infrastructure, which would be presumably a safer asset to provide to their customers. One of the other lessons we have is extending the reach of the cash. So while the above may be highly useful and effective for seeding the network, and it is somewhat limited to the fact that it only reaches users who are currently serviced by financial institutions and payment services providers that integrate with the CBDC network. Users may very well already be more inclined and accustomed to a set 10 digital project products. A big part of projects such as the decash pilot, which we are talking about the lessons learned is financial inclusion. So reaching people unaccustomed to using digital project products, such as the unbanked or the bank to can't access certain instruments facilities or services is significant part of the CBDC roll out then needs to engage with this disconnected if not disenfranchised demographic. And again, this is specific to the Eastern Caribbean Currents Union, where they may be higher than normal when you think globally levels of unbanked or underbanked individuals. So the lesson learned here is leveraging what we call loosely boots on the ground. So this is a physical present individuals who can provide in person outreach, and we found this very effective. The ECCB engaged with it and prepared it full on the ground outreach campaign across the jurisdictions participating in the pilot. This team of individuals was able to engage the core demographic understand their problems more ensure effective communication. And this we found this really useful while social media digital marketing can have an effect. However, it didn't really fully resonate with this population. We found that the value of in person visits and physical outreach was very effective. So the existing payment systems for like recurring payments benefits tax refund supply chain, etc. Those use cases were very useful as well so delivering those types of use use cases benefits disbursements requires careful consideration so as not to disrupt individuals that rely on those payments. So while these are important considerations, we also don't want to disrupt the lives of users. So in closing, looking ahead, essential banks continue to design develop and deploy their CBDC systems a variety of stakeholders will need to collaborate is a big effort and collaboration is key to leverage those lessons learned. Those with extensive knowledge about the local economy culture and financial system will collaborate with firms who have the expertise in rolling out digital payments products and services, who will in turn collaborate with the central bank and the regulated financial institutions and payment services providers in the financial system is important to keep in mind that the economic needs, the economics need to be sound for the financial institutions and payment services providers to also offer their services that leverage the CBDC infrastructure as well. All right, thank you so much. Thank you. Now is the time for your burning questions to be asked and answered, hopefully by Stephen. And I encourage you to engage. This is a open forum. And anybody can ask questions anybody can talk to us all. Please. If anyone has questions, please do us. Stephen this is Dan Schwartz, just a question so putting something in production is a unique experience putting something in production. At the consumer level. Even more so, can you speak to any lessons learned from the rollout. Sure. I'm trying to pinpoint exactly, you know where I should take this, because wasn't that the whole talk about. Is there anything specific, Dan, that you want to ask him. You know, I think that there are probably some real pain points that that you know when you went through, maybe the talk was a bit more the tops of the waves. And you know something specifically you would either wish you would never wish you had done more of or wish you would never do again. Sure, sure. I can definitely go there. No problem. So definitely, I would suggest doing this again, the value propositions which I mentioned are super important, making sure that you can go to market with a key reason why to use this product. So it's you know it's typical for go to market strategies with fintechs. So you know you need to deliver that minimal lovable product what key set of features. Do you need to have to ensure the success of the project at go live. So that could be a particular user journey a particular use case that will resonate with the target target demographic. To give an example, bill payment is one use case that a bit we found very pivotal for driving adoption. I myself use these products for bill payment I mean I can sit at home. I can run my wallet and I can pay my bills and I'm still on the couch, and it's amazing. And I can do it all from my mobile app. And for this particular jurisdiction, that is a game changer because people generally would either pay online with their, or they would have to stand in line. So to offer this, offer that convenience to individuals who may not have a bank account or choose not to have a bank account because of maybe high cost for owning a bank account. It's a key value proposition that you can convince the population. Hey, you should get this product, because this would allow you to do x, y or z. So having that clarity and messaging, I think is something that you definitely need to have. When people think about the product, they need to understand why it's important for them to know about this product and to consider participating using the product. Leveraging the local expertise, one of the points I mentioned is also super important. So having those stakeholders who may be bio-tested, who've, you know, those fintechs who may be bio-tested, who may understand their customers very well, bringing them along for the ride, letting them participate is also, in my opinion, very important because they bring a lot of expertise. They already have brand identity built up and having them participate also adds value to them and to the CBDC. Ideally, you want a very inclusive ecosystem where different participants like fintechs and payment services providers can leverage the CBDC infrastructure to provide a safer asset than mobile money, token or a private or synthetic CBDC. And then the, one of the things we would definitely use again is that concept of boots on the ground. Individuals who can actually go visit merchants, give them a demo, show them tangibly how it works, how it can add value to their business. That's also super important. I mean, you can watch an ad on YouTube, you can see something in the press in the paper, but until someone brings it to you in a way that you can absorb it, you may have problems adopting it, it just seems like something out there in the ether, but having that person bring it to you and show you how it can add value to your business, how it can transform your business with maybe e-commerce payments or reducing the need to have physical cash and to manage physical cash. These types of in-person outreach are, you know, I can't overstate it enough. You know, people may have some technology hesitancy and having someone face to face to break it down for them. I think that that's super important in this jurisdiction. It may not be the case in all jurisdictions, but these are some of the lessons that we will take with us as we move to other jurisdictions. I see you. Brad, yeah. Thanks for doing this and hosting the call. Taking these questions. I said a few questions. One, you didn't really talk about like what the startup cost is for the central bank to develop and deploy the system. I'm just curious about that. Also, from a volume or a payment volume perspective, or just even if you can comment on the level of engagement you're seeing across the five territories with the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank that you've already deployed. And then lastly, I'm curious, like what is the ongoing cost for any central bank that manages the digital currency that's bit charged like a percentage of transaction processed or a small fee or how does that work? Okay. Well, as you can imagine, this is all very sensitive information. So I'll be very careful here. So this technology is provided to central banks through licensing. The deployment is owned and operated by the central bank. So it's provided to them through licensing. In regards to the level of engagement, the volume of transactions, it's been steadily growing. As you could imagine, you know, the global pandemic COVID-19 that has really driven adoption aggressively. Businesses now want to do more online. They want to learn about it. Ecommerce solutions play a big role, especially in the Eastern Caribbean currency union where traditional e-commerce solutions were generally prohibitive. You know, you needed to have a bank account and you needed to have a large deposit to gain access to the Visa Mastercard gateways. So having a local infrastructure that can facilitate e-commerce payments was also pivotal in driving great adoption. And again, having those specific use cases, being able to pay your bills, being able to purchase online using the e-commerce solution that we provide, these are super important for driving adoption. So the pilot in this case has limits around adoption. The central bank wants to use this period to test. So they, you know, it is a pilot by invitation only. And we are definitely hitting those numbers with regards to merchants. We are oversubscribing the merchants at the moment and consumers as well. So it's going very well. Transactions still need to see some improvement. But the ECCB is looking to address that with a broader marketing campaign. So it's not as great as we would like to see it, but it isn't bad and it's going very well. I hope that answers your questions. I was just asking that as you go forward, you license, I guess, your digital currency management system. Is there an ongoing role financially that it has with the central banks? Yeah, there is opportunity for ongoing role for maintenance and support of the system, as you could imagine. So we will continue to upgrade the system, you know, deploy new features as a central bank would want. So, yeah, there's definitely an ongoing role to keep support for the system ongoing. And just one last question. I know there's a lot of activity I saw that you guys are in the final 15 I think in Singapore. Yes. I think it's more about, you mentioned earlier that in India or considering systems. Are there any other countries you'd identify as that people should watch to see what their pilots might look like and areas where you think it has a good opportunity. So we recently, as I mentioned at the top of the presentation, we recently got awarded the contract to deploy the E Naira, which is the Nigerian dollar digital version of the Nigerian currency, which is a huge win largest economy in Africa. And I think Nigeria will play an important role as an influencer through for other territories in West Africa and Africa in general. I think for now, majority of the early movers are those develop developing economies, economies that have issues with financial inclusion. In my opinion, those are the ones that are moving more quickly than the more developed economies like in Europe, etc. Financial inclusion plays a role and then some of the efficiencies that can be had from a CBDC are kind of convincing central banks to move faster. So I would suggest that, you know, any jurisdiction, you know, large numbers of jurisdictions upwards at 80% from the last bank for international settlements survey, show that many of the central banks globally are investigating CBDCs. It's also important to plug hyper ledger here, you know, our infrastructure is built on hyper ledger fabric. And we've been using that technology now for maybe three four years and it's been going wonderful. Thank you. Thanks for the presentation. Very interesting. One question I have is, does the solution you are presenting does that does those solution work offline because we're looking at this from, from a European perspective and of course and, and basically we seem to come to the conclusion that if you really want to have a cash alternative you need to have something that works fully offline but then the question is you know how to implement CBDC checks offline as well. So I was wondering if if you could, if you could elaborate a little bit on that offline topic and functionality and how does offline works with hyper ledger or DLT technologies. We are currently developing an offline solution is kind of the unicorn of this space. It's not an easy solution to implement because it introduces additional risk if you don't, if you don't, you know risk for double spend, etc. If you don't implement it properly. So we are currently filing for some patents for this so I really can't discuss too much. However, I will say that it's in the works and I can offer that the Bank of Canada has released some interesting papers around opportunities for offline payments looking at specific hardware as one option, as well as the central bank of Bahamas, they've implemented a separate infrastructure to facilitate payments where the internet is not available. So in a nutshell, there are a few paths you can take for offline payments, you know, with a with a ledger that's online settlement still needs to happen on that ledger unless you want the ledger to reside on the mobile devices. So it's a very complex problem. No one in market has actually solved this yet. One of the things that the competition with monetary authority is Singapore. I think offline solutions is one of those items that will be discussed there so we will get to see some of the kind of solutions and technologies so you can definitely look out for a bit and our presentation there on offline as well. Okay, thanks. Anyone else. I guess. It's my turn now. Oh my goodness. So, so we have, you know, talking about offline. There are several, let's say strategies to deal with this. The Chinese seem to have a strategy to deal with this which is a multiple approach with the limits on the wallets and tearing of the wallets. That means no AML KYC for amounts that are low. And you can only transact so much using those. And plus it's, it's meant to be a pure peer to peer system with phones communicating with each other, creating that interaction. That's the first thing. Eventual consistency is the aim, because that's obviously will prevent the double spend problem, but the wallet design becomes very important there. Other presentations that we have had in the space include people who have implemented very strong smart card solutions for this, which are, you know, which do not need internet, but they still need electricity because electricity is available for a card processing device. But again, it needs to communicate somehow. In the end, to some. Yeah, it needs to settle eventually. Yes, but we have that, you know, we have that settlement, the net net settlement problem already handled by central banks, quite effectively. Where they do, you know, liquidity management through settlement that is not, you know, immediate, but then, you know, they use intermediaries. Anyway, so I just wanted to put that out there because we have that material in our presentations, and I can actually put that up in the, in the meeting minutes, so that people can actually link to those presentations to see the offline capabilities. And I noticed that a couple of people here are working on that problem but I think the guy who I wanted to invoke is not around right now, because he's the Vice Chair of the Financial Inclusion Task Force in BCGI. The question that I have for you is, one, and the E Naira project is on a totally different scale, because the number of people in Nigeria is, I don't know, I don't know what the multiplier is probably 10 or even 100 times more than the number of people in, in, and plus, there are a lot of more sophisticated people in Nigeria, you know, and Nigeria is of course well known for some other activities which we shall not go into right now but which should be a problem for something like a central bank digital currency My question is how do you, you know, and besides scaling the solution or taking the solution to Africa to Nigeria in particular from your experience in ECCB. Yeah, thank you for the question. So, of course, being able to scale the solution effectively was a big kind of determining factor for the central bank in Nigeria in choosing bit. You know, the Nigeria has over 200 million people and the idea is for most if not all of these citizens to have access to E Naira. So, scaling the infrastructure is important. And we've been able to demonstrate through low tests and etc that we can definitely meet the demand using hyper ledger fabric, at least for now, given the existing projections that the central bank has purported for determining their selection. So, in a nutshell, we use a cloud infrastructure for this deployment and we were able to scale that effectively to meet the transactions per second requirements that the central bank had put out there. So, yeah, we're, we're, we're good. We are confident and we've done the little testing to demonstrate it so it's, you know, we're happy to move forward and to see it happening in real life. Are those figures public or do they have are they not currently not public, but we will likely publish something soon. And there are there are a number of opportunities within hyper ledger itself for performance scaling as well. So not just adding new nodes and orders and validators but there are other configurations within hyper ledger you know you can modify various things like block size and you know various other key components to facilitate the transaction velocity that you that you need to see. Yeah, I mean I'm a member of the performance and scale working group, we have had probably about three different main ways of doing this one is changing the infrastructure itself of that is fast fabric. The other is doing things on the front end that group the transactions in different ways. The third is creating a faster processing using two things one is cryptographic acceleration using GPUs, which is work engaged with Xilinx, which have now they have now taken over the performance and scale working group. The other is the work done by Oracle where they created in memory databases, rather than databases that are that have to store their transactions, you know, in a durable way, but they have very strong in memory capability, and that increases the transaction so a combination of these methods should certainly get to around 20,000 TPS, if not more. Now, are you using the latest 2.4.2, or are you using an earlier version of fabric? We're still on an earlier version. And just because of the fact that we needed to move quickly at this point in time. But as you remember, our infrastructure is lightly coupled to the blockchain so it allows us to upgrade very easily. So we do have on our internal roadmap, the need for upgrading. And I also know that fabric from 2.0 onwards has as more support for tokens, which is something that we are also looking at and considering as well. Well, you might, you might look at something like the presentation by Oracle on tokens, which which covers a lot of ground, two things. One is use of standards to create the token, like IWA standards, but also linked to that is the use of the most commonly used standards in Ethereum, ERC 20, ERC 721, ERC 1155. I mean, so they have created a parallel implementation of these standards using these two techniques on hypolygia fabric. I don't know whether they, that is public meaning open source or not. Right, so that's a very interesting set of developments that should help the tokenization further. Yes, so interestingly, tokenization is probably also one of the opportunities for offline. Because if you can, yes, if you can create, or without saying too much, if you can find a way for your CBDC to become a true bearer instrument. And if you know what I'm saying, you know what I'm saying, then that really advances the opportunity for offline payments, because you're literally transferring value from phone to phone. And that's, that's one of the areas that we're investigating as well. Well, e-currency claims that they already have that solution. And they are implementing in a, I think one of the central banks. Yeah, so they already have that's, you know, I don't know the technical details because it is a closed source. You know, it's a closed source implementation, they do not make their internals known, which I think is a mistake when most of these implementations because open source have been shown to be less prone to attacks because there are more people looking at the code or whatever. You know, there are a lot of ways in which opening up that code allows researchers to deal with this, you know, this important topic. And if everything is closed source, then you won't know until you've been attacked that you've been. That was one of the key reasons why we went to Hyperledger Fabric because, you know, there's a whole community keeping it safe and advancing the technology allows bit as a company to focus on the layers above the blockchain to add value to clients and the, the blockchain becomes like a database almost. So that was one of the key factors for us as well the open source ability. Well just having open source is not enough to protect the protect anything that is being done with that infrastructure. As we have seen. So, you know, most companies have are using open source, even though they're not even aware of it, because underneath it goes down into the bowels, if you even use Linux or any any open source technology there that can be, you know, we have actually been spearheading a movement to increase the supply software supply chain, sort of transparency and let's say using automatic audit tools. So you're checking the code in, and I've already run this on many Hyperledger components. And let me tell you, I found many that are not up to the standard, and I've notified the people. I want to make this part of the build process itself, so that when you check anything in, and you bring bring in new dependencies that you're not dependent on something that has already known to have problems. And that can be easily, you know, attack. So that brings us to the next question which is, you know, the security I briefly touched upon it when I asked you about the Nigerian situation. So, instead of continuous monitoring or auditing processes that you, you have in order to detect such attacks when they are in progress. That's the first question. Second question, what if you detect those attacks, do you have a way to short circuit or pause the infrastructure so that large amounts are not drained in a short period of time. This technique is used in, let us say, in even in stock exchanges, because when a stock falls by a certain huge percentage in a short period of time, they disallow any more transaction. Yeah, so they have those kind of circuit breakers. So the two questions. One is the monitoring. Do you use AI or something for that. And two, what happens when you detect problems. Sure. So security, I know enough of security to know that, you know, you need to be an expert in security. And we do have those experts on staff and the central banks, our clients, they also employed those experts. So I can tell you that we do have real time monitoring through third party service providers, as well as inbuilt monitoring provided by the cloud providers as well. So there are multiple layers of monitoring and support. Looking at stuff from CPU usage to incoming requests, you know, all the usual things you would expect. And the central bank clients that we have have been very bullish on ensuring that they can meet the highest standards for security for their deployments. Regarding the ability to pause. Yes, definitely. You know, we have a whole threat monitoring framework, etc. And within their central banks have the ability to pause the network and to take any corrective action as they deem fit. We are the service provider, we provide the infrastructure, but the central bank handles most of the operations so they have the ability to pause the infrastructure if something is right, or if they are, they want to limit the impact of any nefarious activity on the network, they can definitely do that. Well interesting, you talk about pause again because in the IWA standards that is one of the interfaces available. In fact, when we created the E-Taller project inside Hyperledger Labs as a sub project of Capital Markets Group, money I see money on the call that he implemented most of it, I helped a little bit. The main thing that we did was we were able to call this function pause, but I think forgetting that the so-called security experts have, I'm telling you why, because Microsoft, which is one of the biggest software providers in the world, and probably has more security experts than the entire population of Bahamas or Eastern Caribbean, they were hacked with using some techniques from software supply chain attacks. So just having the experts is not enough. You have to continuously be humble. Yes. And make this part of the infrastructure itself, security by design, security as a first class sort of a process, but I think the most important part of that is automatic monitoring, and even probably automatic circuit breaking, but you don't want false positives there. Obviously, you don't want to pause if nothing is wrong. Right. And that automatic pause can also create a threat of that too as well, you know. Yes, because somebody- To trigger that. Yes. So all of these things, you know, there's a lot of discussion on all these techniques, which are very humbling to most of us, and I think larger jurisdictions like China, India and Nigeria are going to be very ripe for these kinds of attacks because the amount of money involved is huge. Yes, yes. So yes, on that point, it's been very good working with the Central Bank of Nigeria because they have, as you mentioned before, quite an advanced payment system infrastructure. So they have been sharing some of the tools and mitigations that they have in place to help shore up the CBDC infrastructure as well. They've been coming with additional requirements and additional things that they see could be useful to help. And that's been very useful as well. Having that expertise from them, having had, you know, they operate these payment systems today. So they are very familiar with how to protect them and, you know, they do things a little differently. And it's been very interesting to learn from them about that stuff. Yeah, I mean, it's a collaborative game. Anyway, we are coming to the end of this presentation just in case anybody else has any other questions. This would be the ideal time to ask. Yeah, thank you so much, Stephen for joining us today. It's so great to hear about your experience and really hear about the lessons learned like we really have many live CBDCs. And so to hear from your perspective on how it's been going and what you would do differently next time is so valuable to our community. Maybe you could just finish it off with sort of what you see as a head what's up ahead for bit in the next year and also just what from your point of view what you see. What are your thoughts based developing in the next year or two. Sure. So for bit, I see more deployments you know we have a healthy pipeline of clients coming down the line. You know, more features, deeper integrations with existing payment systems and payments infrastructures and different jurisdictions. And the second question was what, if you remind me. And from your point of view, working on a live CBDC and seeing, you know, all the different experimentations being done out there. You know, there's the recent BIS speech from Benoit Coray talking about how central banks need to accelerate so just kind of from your perspective where how you see this is going to accelerate in the next year or so. Yeah, sure. Yeah. So for me, I see the next year probably we will see a lot more retail level cross border payments, CBDCs to CBDCs. There's a huge opportunity there for innovation and reducing costs and driving value to add the last mile so consumer to consumer cross border with CBDCs. I think that that's something that we may see some additional progress on in the next few years as we see dependency on the US dollar there are lots there's lots of conversation on reducing the dependency on the US dollar as a kind of a real for for cross border payments. So being able to do atomic transfers between CBDCs is something that I think we may start to see some more of in the next 1216 months. Awesome. Thank you so much. And we look forward to the the announcement for the MAS challenge and and seeing your project and the others that are using hyperledger come out of that so there's lots of news to catch up on and awaits very soon. Thank you so much Karen. Thank you again. And hopefully we'll catch up in about six to eight months to see how things are going. I'd love to come back again and talk about Nigeria at some point. Yes, that'll be the next one. Great. Thank you Steven. Alright, have a great afternoon have a great day. You too. Thank you so much. See you. Thanks.