 I'm Steve Nunn, president and CEO of the Open Group. Welcome to Toolkit Tuesday, where we highlight the various components and leading experts of the Architects Toolkit, a collated portfolio of the most pertinent technology standards for enterprise architects. During the series, I'll be calling on a number of recognized experts who will bring their particular insights on how to most effectively use the various tools in the Architects Toolkit. We'll have a mix of interviews, panel sessions, and pre-recorded presentations along the way. While all standards of the Open Group are designed so they can be adopted independently of one another, the greatest value for an organization can be derived when they're used in unison, that some of the parts should be greater than the whole. In the Architects Toolkit, we have collated a portfolio of the most pertinent ones for architects together, all in one place. For most of these tools, certification from the Open Group is also available, so practitioners can demonstrate that they have the skills required, and recruiters can take the guesswork out of the recruitment process, all backed up by our Open Badges program. There's a lot of interest currently in metaverse. Some say it's just second life, but with tech that can make it work more readily this time. Others feel it's the web-three angle that changes the whole proposition. Either way, as an architect, what's the challenge? Is it the tech or the immersive experience? For me, neither. Most use cases today seem to focus on the consumer experience B to C, with the concern that if I can't try on a new hat, in the metaverse, perhaps I won't buy it in the physical one. I'm simplifying, of course. I don't believe it's about replicating existing processes in another place. Instead, it should be about performing augmented capabilities, such as collaborative engineering design or visualization of uncertain patterns. Could we, for example, view someone's headache? So, yes, we have the traditional architect role of interpreting existing, but we also have another role, a creative role in an uncertain domain. Now, that's exciting. Welcome to Toolkit Tuesday, everyone, and my thanks right off the bat to Paul Holman of IBM. Some more interesting thoughts from Paul. Hopefully, you remember to pick his hat up. But great to start off. It's nice to have somebody, and I have the benefit of getting to interact with Paul quite regularly, and it's great to have somebody with those creative ideas and thoughts, and to get us all thinking, an important part of what we need to do in the architecture world. So, welcome, as I said. We are back for the second episode of Season 2 of Toolkit Tuesday today, and we have an interesting topic lined up. Our main topic today is going to be architecture and blockchain, the intersection of architecture and blockchain. I'll say a little bit more about that in a moment, but just a bit of housekeeping. I can see that there may have been some challenge registering or needing to do so more than once. Apologies for that. But we do have a nice healthy list of people online. So, I guess you figured it out. One real housekeeping thing here, the way that we ask questions on Toolkit Tuesday is through the Q&A channel, not the chapter channel, preferably, the Q&A channel. And if you don't see that on your screen, then if you click on the three dots in the bottom right-hand corner of your screen, that will give you the option to click on Q&A. That's where you should submit questions, please, for our speakers today. But do use the chat channel to say hi to each other, and we love to know where you're from. It's always an international group here at Toolkit Tuesday. And in fact, one of our speakers today, Rick Ross, I'll introduce in a moment, but he's joining us from Australia today. So, all sorts of times of day and night, folks are joining us for Toolkit Tuesday, and we appreciate that, and thank you for taking the time out. So, without further ado, I will introduce our topic for today, which is basically the use of enterprise architecture and Togeth to describe requirements and create architecture's enabling blockchain across a number of use cases. We're going to touch on cryptocurrency, decentralized finance, asset tracking, and other enterprise applications. We also want to try and start off the process of getting some feedback from you all on the general topic of blockchain and EA, and what particular areas you're interested in and any topics that would be worthy of more of a deep dive than we're able to do here on Toolkit Tuesday. So, we'll hear a bit more about that later on. So, our speakers today, we have a double act. We have Rick Ross from EY, Rick's an experienced technology specialist with over 20 years in business and IT, re-imagining and transforming business and including enabling technology. He's the director and consulting blockchain and emerging tech at EY. And with Rick today, my colleague, Jim Highteller, who is the VP of business development and security at the Open Group, meaning that Jim is responsible for managing our security and risk management programs and standard activities, as well as our business development team. So, two nice short bios so that we can spend more time on the content. Thank you, gentlemen. One welcome from Toolkit Tuesday to Rick Ross and Jim Highteller. Rick, I think you're up first. Thanks, Steve, and good morning, everyone. So, let's get started. So, what I want to cover today is a background around blockchain and where it's covered from a number of different angles. So, we'll talk about some key concepts from an architecture perspective. We'll talk about standards. And towards the end, we'll get... I have a bit of a chat in terms of where to next and some hot topics that might be of interest later on for the architects. So, what's blockchain? There's going to be a couple of slides here where we just set out some ground rules in terms of context here. So, what is blockchain? So, blockchain is... If you think about of it as a network where you have a shared ledger, so shared information that is distributed in a decentralized manager management practice across those participants in the network. And the umbrella term for that is essentially what's called a distributed ledger technology, DLT. So, keep that in mind because we'll talk about that in a minute. And so, what happens is that if you're having information shared in a decentralized manner, you have to have a process of agreeing what should be shared in a decentralized manner on a shared ledger. And this is where a consensus algorithm comes in. And there's a number of consensus algorithms that are out there. You might have heard prefer work. You might have heard prefer stake. Bitcoin uses prefer work. And what that essentially is, is an algorithm which has agreement in terms of what should be approved and what should go on a ledger, essentially. The other part to blockchain version two, I should say, is what's called codifying contracts. And smart contracts is what it's called. And why that's really important is it gives the opportunity to actually build onto a blockchain an agreed set of business rules that can run an execution in what's known as a virtual machine on a decentralized solution, on a node. So, I'll talk about some examples a bit later, and I'll focus specifically in this discussion today around supply chain, just so I can grant it with some key examples in the area around supply chain. So, I mentioned DLT, and it's an umbrella term and for architects, there are so many different types of DLTs that are out there. We hear this word blockchain, and essentially what it is, is every transaction that is created. So, for example, in cryptocurrency, you have Bitcoin, and a transaction is a payment from one person to another. That transaction goes into, it compiled into a block. And when there is an agreed number of transactions in the block size, that gets posted to everyone on the network and put onto the chain. So, what's really interesting with this diagram here is from left to right is, I guess, mechanisms that are quite heavy in terms of the time it takes to actually record information on a DLT. And blockchains take quite a long time to do that, whereas the others, which is a hash graph, is another mechanism which is a lighter option. Instead of putting it into a block, it's basically one transaction to another which gets stored onto a chain, but it doesn't have to go through and be compiled into a block first. And the third option is a direct-to-dice graph or a rectangle. And there's lots of different public chains that are out there, but essentially it does the same thing as hash graph, and it doesn't require you to compile all your transactions into a block before it goes onto a chain. So, from left to right, the more efficient, the more less latency that you might want, you might want to choose a faster option, which might be a DAG or a hash graph compared to a block chain. So, that's just something to think about. In terms of the different types of distributors that are out there, so if you think about this from open and closed systems, as we're aware of, so open systems you can refer to as public blockchains. And what that means is public blockchains as an example, Ethereum is a good example that's out there. It means that all the infrastructure is taken care of because the general public is hosting nodes of that network, and therefore it is a public infrastructure, it is a public ecosystem where everyone can make use of it. So, that's the best way to describe it. A couple of concepts around there is that there's no direct identity of any type of users on a public blockchain. You have what's known as a public address, which is created from your wallet, and that's not uniquely identified to a person as such. Whereas a private blockchain is very different. It's about setting up an agreed consortium, which might be, for example, for a health solution and a number of health providers that are coming together, and they will create and stand up the nodes in the network, and they will have much clearer identity in terms of who can enter that ecosystem from a private blockchain perspective. So, I was going to focus on supply chain and a couple of key business things to think about where transparency fits in from a blockchain point of view, and this is quite interesting from a macroeconomic trend point of view, is that we know that there's been a lot of disruption since COVID-19, and especially around some of the supply chain dependencies in China, and they've had their additional issues as well with the zero COVID policy, which is stopping people working in and around supporting supply chains. In fact, most of the supply chains that have been operating in China have started to move elsewhere, such as Vietnam is starting to really get involved and support supply chain movements more, but around 94% has been identified as disruptive supply chain issues, which as Fortune has mentioned that. We're seeing that there's a lot of interest in sustainability. It's a hot topic in industry, and blockchain is a great use case for that in terms of understanding from the downstream and the upstream of supply chain and what makes up that, especially from a customer point of view. If you're ethically positioned to understand where your products are coming from and that it's not being manufactured from slave labour, from modern slavery, right at the upstream part of the supply chain, then blockchain can really help with that sort of thing. In terms of traceability. Some of the impacts from a supply chain perspective are because of inflexible IT systems and inability to provide visibility in a supply chain. What of interest is there's a prediction that a lot more blockchain applications will be implemented by 2026, and they think that the economy around blockchain will be around about 3.32 billion, and here at EY we're doing a lot around traceability, and I'll explain some examples. I've got a couple of use cases to talk you through. So there's a couple of interesting things to talk about in terms of what's the value of blockchain in terms of transformation. So we talked about, already talked about the value around transparency and understanding it not only from your enterprise perspective, but from an industry ecosystem perspective. So this is when parties come together. You can start to track movements and supply of goods into your organization, out of your organization. You can manage third-party risk better, that sort of thing. You can eliminate with the use of smart contracts for 0.2 and 3 that's there. You can start to eliminate some of that manual handling that would be in place, and the automation of contracts just helps with the execution of those business rules that I had talked about before. And the value in terms of making sure that information is not changed, that seems to be an ongoing issue with centralized systems in terms of you can go in there, you can change it, and no one can understand whether it's been changed or not until you do an audit, a third-party audit external or internal audit that can detect if there's been a change. And then five and six, the value around providing, once the data is being stored on blockchain or off-chain and then validated, then you can provide more accurate data analytics and also information bridges across silos as I talked about the industry ecosystem essentially. Okay, so next slide. So there's three killer applications that we're seeing that has had some movement in the industry. So this is obvious which is the cryptocurrency side of things. Bitcoin's led the market since 2009. It's been the primary token that's out there. NFTs over the last four to five years has been of great interest in terms of artwork, in terms of music. There's a lot of adoption and support for that. Decentralized finance is another term that you might have heard of, and Stanford is taking centralized finance and moving it to public blockchains where you can make use of cryptocurrencies, digital tokens, and do the things that you would do in traditional centralized finance, which is buy, borrow, lease, pay for things. You do it within the ecosystem of your digital decentralized token ecosystem. And the other term you might hear about is DAOs, which is decentralized autonomous organizations. And what that is is an ability to set up a digital agreement between parties around fulfilling an outcome, which might be a social good outcome. It might be a not-for-profit solution that you're working with. And you might hear quite a few examples around that. So some principles to help with selecting blockchain architecture and making sure that you use blockchain for the right use is if you find that there are multiple parties in the ecosystem, that is number one for actual blockchain because that's where you can get the most out of interactions between multiple parties and stakeholders. If you find that you want to establish more trust as well, so storing data and data confidence to know that that data hasn't changed or other information hasn't changed, then that's another good reason why. If you want to make sure that none of the information changes in terms of that it doesn't get tampered with, that's another good reason. If you want to make sure that you're securing the ownership of your tokens and that you're owning it instead of some other third party that's owning it, for example, instead of a bank holding your safekeeping of your money, you're doing it yourself. And then finally, that the ecosystem itself has a benefit from improved transparency and we've talked about that already. Okay, so there's some lots of different standards that are out there, every different product call. So when I talk about product call, the example I've got here is Ethereum. There's lots of other chains that are out there, the layer one protocols that are out there, they all have their own standards to some degree. What's interesting is that there's no real integration of protocols as yet. So there are some examples out there that are starting to, there are some example projects out there that are starting to work on that, but there's nothing finalised in terms of integration of those protocols. But here are some examples with Ethereum. So Ethereum, you can create a fungible token which is called ESE 20 and that just means that it can one token as the same as another token essentially. So there's no distinction between a dollar note to another dollar note as an example. And ESE 721 is your NFT type of token which is unique. So it can be representative of artwork, it could be an asset that you're representing, such as if you're working within the mining industry, it could be an asset of your fixed asset of a plant that's there. And there's another standard around a combination of both those tokens, NFTs and, which is the ESE 721 and the ESE C20 where they can be brought together and compiled together as a standard. So there's quite a few different examples that I have here in terms of working with customers in EY. I'll just mention one on this slide and one on another. So the first is around logistics which is on the right-hand side of this slide. And again, from a supply chain perspective, it can be near real-time movements, probably not real-time but near real-time movements where you want to see a container that has moved from a dock to the ship to the actual customer port that it needs to go to. So, and with that process, you want to have contracts that run against that as they arrive at those different destinations. So that's one example. And another one that I'll talk about is around power and utilities. So the example there is that there are many different renewable renewables that are out there such as solar batteries that are available. And to some degree, there are contracts that are need to be put in place. For example, when you generate, when there are large organisations that are generating renewable energy, they need to have contracts around the output of the energy. So that all can be put on a smart contract and then that can be executed as part of the process. Okay, so I'm going to talk you through an example really quickly around piece of work that we did for Peroni beer in Italy. And this is around supply chain traceability. And what we had pulled in place here is to support the marketing department at Peroni and also the sustainability department at Peroni because they wanted to look at rebranding their beer so that customers felt that they knew where the barley had originated from. They have over 1500 farms that generate their barley and then get sourced from those farms that have been processed. So they came up with, as you can see down the bottom, a really cool unique way which is to put the actual QR code onto the actual beer bottles which as the beer goes from the farm to the processor to being bottled to then being shipped to the retail stores and then being bought by the customer, the customer can then scan that code and see where it's come from essentially through that process. So we created a number of, there's a lot of data that was captured in that process. There was as well as we created NFT tokens to represent different parts of the tokenization process in the supply chain. And it also supported a number of different improvements around carbon as well so they can start to measure their carbon emissions through that process. Okay, I'm probably going to stop here because I'm starting to run out of time, I believe. And I will probably end off here by saying that at EY we've invested in public blockchains ourselves and we believe that there is an enormous opportunity to get behind the development ecosystem around public blockchains. So we have a product called EY Ops Chain and that helps with the software as a service product but it helps with fast tracking the development process so that developers can use APIs and they can continue those APIs to create a token, mint a token, burn a token, interact with any blockchain. At the moment we've got it linked up to Ethereum, we've got it linked up to Polygon and we've got many customers that are using that product. I will pause there. I'm really sorry it's a fast presentation, it's just limited time but hopefully that's piqued your interest in terms of some of the concepts, in terms of some of the standards and we'd love to actually see if there's interest in talking about other hot topics and at this point I will hand over to Jim to see if he can talk through those opportunities. Thanks, Rick. Well, as Steve mentioned at the beginning of this we are looking at a series of webcasts on this general topic, EA and blockchain. So we would like your input on potential future topics. We can have some listed here, looking at blockchain, EA requirements and opportunities, maybe in cryptocurrency use cases we know that with increasing regulation there comes an increasing need for standards so that might be an interesting topic to dive into. Maybe surveying enterprise blockchain use cases where EA is an integral part in putting out an effective blockchain. Our commercial aviation work group has written out a white paper around blockchain in that sector that we can present on a webcast and we are interested in any other topics that you all have as potential inputs for us. And then not just webcasts but we are looking at potential blockchain EA standards opportunities. So whether you're from a member organization or not if you have an interest or a perspective on this we'd like to invite your input. And you can give us that by reaching out to myself, my email there, or Kelly Cannon who is part of our architecture portfolio team to let us know your interest. So that's it for me. I'll hand back over to you, Steve, to close things out. Great, thank you both, Rick and Jim. Great stuff. I think there's a lack of clarity around the topic of blockchain and a lot of people associate, that I've spoken with, associate blockchain with cryptocurrency for example. So maybe Rick, if you could take a question or two on this. I mean, one of the things that we, I think hear a lot is that there are concerns around blockchain technology being used for illicit activities or a way of keeping the funds for things out of sight. How does, what's kind of your response to that as a practitioner in this field? Particularly when it comes to public versus private blockchain? Yeah, that's a really good question. You find that most of cryptocurrencies are on public blockchains. So Bitcoin is a public blockchain, for example. There's a lot of tools that are out there, such as chain analysis. There's many other tools that we can, you can have a look at what activity and forensics are happening on public blockchain. So it doesn't go without not being able to look at activity that's on a public blockchain. Essentially, it's harder because most interactions with cryptocurrencies on a public blockchain uses what's called exchange. So if you're using crypto.com, using Binance, using Coinbase, for example, you have to go through KYC processes, which means you're signing up, you're creating a wallet, and your identity, which your public address is there, is then on the blockchain. So there's a tie in there in terms of forensics. And lastly, private. Private is a bit more challenging because whoever creates the private network really can create it quite close and small. And there is a challenge there around, if you're creating it for the wrong type of purpose, then sure, that's a closed system. And with any closed system, those sort of activities can't be audited unless you get an external ordering. Sure, I understood. And in the interest of time, we're almost out. I'll just take one more question and came in from one of the audience today. Any thoughts you have on using something called Ops blockchain or leveraging AI and machine learning to look for patterns and use cases? Yeah, absolutely. In fact, we're doing a piece of work for a large mining company at the moment, which is helping with their decarbonisation. And what we're doing there is we're using AI to calculate the carbon emissions for their organisation and then putting the actual, the output on chain so that it's actually a time stamp. It's there on chain. It can't be changed. And then that helps with actual reporting. So yes, there is huge opportunity in terms of converged technologies with blockchain, such as AI, ML, and also quantum as well. Quantum's going to have an effect. Yeah, now that's great. Well, we'll leave it there in the interest of time. But a last thank you to you, Rick, and to you, Jim. Again, the way to give us some insight or some feedback on topics that may be of interest in this area for future broadcasts, then please do contact Jim or Kelly Cannon. And those email addresses are in the recording and the recording will be made available on our YouTube channel very shortly. And you'll be notified that it's available. So that's it for today's topic. Thank you all for joining us. In two weeks' time, we have something a little special. We, in two weeks' time, the Open Group has a quarterly event, an in-person event in Edinburgh, Scotland. And part of that event is a Togaf user group meeting. And so for Toolkit Tuesday in two weeks, we will take you to part of the Togaf user group, the actual user group meeting is longer than the 30 minutes we have for Toolkit Tuesday, of course. But we will give you a taste of it and I'm sure you'll find it interesting stuff. So please join us in two weeks for that, October the 18th for Toolkit Tuesday. Meanwhile, thank you for giving up your time today. I hope you found it useful. Thanks to Rick and Jim again and to all of you for joining us. I'm Steve Nunn. See you next time. Thank you.