 Thank you school. Okay, I can stop projecting now Thank you for being here. My name is Michael Gralia. I'm the director of future of property rights. You should have a fancy card in your seat. If you want to know more about future property rights, feel free to take that with you. It's a big week for land and property. The World Bank is having an annual conference and we took advantage of that because there were some great speakers in town as a result of it and a number of you here at the conference. But we wanted to focus a little bit on registries and blockchain, which we're going to try to do in the next 90 minutes. I gave a paper I'm going to briefly talk about at the bank two days ago, which was the result of answering a lot of questions and asking a lot of questions about blockchain and land registries. I'll talk you briefly through that paper. The paper is available on the bank site and you can also circulate it after this meeting. And then I'm going to try to shut off as quickly as possible and let our panelists speak. We're very fortunate to have representatives of three companies who are on the cutting edge of blockchain and land sitting on this podium. And since here at New America, we focus on the intersection of tech and policy. We have two policy thinkers as well. We have Anshala Nan from the World Bank and we have my colleague Chris Mellon who helped write the paper that hopefully you'll all take a look at after we speak about it. There's also Rachel from Bitfury, Henrik from Cromoy and Alex from Popey. There's going to be a lot of questions. We're going to run out of time. I have yet to see a blockchain panel where this wasn't true. So I'm going to try to move quickly. I'll speak briefly. We'll walk through the panel. Just to warn you, Rachel, I'm going to let the company speak first and then I'll ask Anshala and Chris to speak. And then we'll open it up to questions. So thank you very much again for being here. Let me get to work. The paper we presented at the bank is too long, but it's really hard to not be verbose when you're talking about this topic because there's a lot of if ands or buts. We had tried to cover a lot of ground and if someone is new to this space, which there's an increasing number of people, they could start with this paper. That was our vision. In the forward, we talk about the broader trends of blockchain and society and decentralization of data, which we really don't need to harp on in the wake of the current Facebook scandal. In the introduction, we walk briefly through the arguments why blockchain does make sense for registries. And then the body of the paper, we talk about what we think of the seven prerequisites of things a registry must have before they entertain blockchain. Then we go over the eight levels of integration, which I'll talk more about in a second. We touch on five topics for the future, including title insurance and regulation. And we end with six case studies of companies that are doing this work, three of which are on stage. And Chris will talk about another one who unfortunately we lost to the weather. The seven prerequisites are an identity solution, digitized records, multi-stake wallets, a private chain, and then accurate data connectivity in a trained tech population. This is covered in the paper. We've written about it before. I'm not going to dwell on it. But the eight levels is new to the paper. And this was the result of me having a lot of conversations where someone was telling me country X put their registry on chain and then the person smiled. Because they didn't actually know what that meant. And they just assumed that once the magic of the blockchain was applied to a registry, the babies would stop crying and everything would be okay. And nobody sort of knew what that meant. And they were comparing countries that were at different levels doing totally different things. So as we were studying this, Chris and I said, well, we need some kind of framework. And the only thing I can tell you for sure about this framework is that it's incorrect. But the reality will be different. But it's better than what I had before I put it together because I couldn't find one. And basically what we said is level zero, there's no integration, right? I should step back. It's a little bit like autonomous cars. Back when people started applying autonomous technology to cars, they didn't know what a Tesla would look like, but they knew there would be one. And they created the five levels of autonomous driving as a way to have that conversation. So this is, we took our inspiration from that and we reserve the right to change this over time, but it's a start. So level zero, there's no blockchain in your registry. Very simple. Level one, blockchain recording. It's where you're using the power of hashing to basically notarize things that are on an existing centralized digital registry. Level two, we talk about smart workflow. This is a little bit what Chrome away was doing in Sweden, where you have the ability for all the stakeholders within a registry, within an ecosystem to talk to each other quickly through a blockchain. But again, the blockchain is not the registry, you're just using a blockchain in a given jurisdiction. Level three, smart escrow, where you start seeing a smart contract, allow the simultaneous exchange of a deed and the value for that deed. Level four is where we say you actually take the central database and you replace it with a blockchain. This is, this would be a big step forward and it would facilitate the next four levels. Level five, we talk about disaggregating the rights, the rights to occupancy, the right to governance, the right, the water rights, the subsurface rights, whatever kind of rights you have. Once you have that parcel represented on chain, you could start cutting it up on chain. And then the beauty, you know, there's 100 million, as Chris told me two days ago, Satoshi's in a Bitcoin. So once you have a property on chain, you could subdivide that and fractionalize it basically. And the paper talks about the many different ways one can fractionalize an asset. Level seven is where you would actually have peer-to-peer exchanges using a blockchain without all the intermediaries we currently have. Level eight is where different chains would talk to each other. So we span on this at length in the paper, but this was what we introduced a couple of days ago when we presented this. And while I concede right away, there's a lot of good arguments. Chrome always already started to make one to their credit. But it's a start and it gets the conversation going and hopefully it advances the conversation. From there, in the paper we talk through these six case studies. Again, we have a number of these people on the panel and please check out the paper if you're curious for more. So with that, future property rights, you have the card. If you want more, please reach out to us and I want to stop talking now and give it to the panel. So if the panelists could introduce themselves when they start talking and go through their content, that would be great. You guys hear me? Okay, great. So Rachel Pippin, I am a Senior Communications Manager at Bitfury, which if you are familiar with the space at all, we started as a Bitcoin miner and we have now moved to full-service blockchain, so not just Bitcoin. I'm actually going to use a few of my minutes to ask, what's, you know, in the room, what's your familiarity with blockchain? Have you heard of it? Raise your hand if you've heard of it. Yes, that was like two people two years ago, so we're getting somewhere. How many of you think you could explain it to your neighbor? Right, okay, great. So that's completely where we are in this space. And so I'm going to frame my comments that way, which is, when we started, we started as a Bitcoin miner and we expanded to a full-service blockchain technology company. And our first project was in the Republic of Georgia. We can go to the next slide. We wanted to put property titles on a blockchain. And so did they, for security. But the reason we started in Georgia is because when dealing with blockchain, we're in maybe 1997 right now. We don't have the Uber of blockchain yet. But like Mike said, in your eight stages of creating a blockchain registry, whether it's for land or for birth certificates, you have to take certain steps to get there. And so Georgia already had a great digital system after the fall of the Soviet Union. People had come through and worked on their records, digital, yes, centralized, but also we had a very forward-looking country that wanted to adapt this technology. And they were, of course, already ranked third in the world by the World Bank for their land title system. And so we decided to start there. We wanted to take their land titles of a smaller country and put them onto a blockchain for security, but also for efficiency. As you can see in the image, I think the goal is eventually for a Georgian citizen to be able to open up an app on their phone and be able to buy or sell their house, securely in a matter of minutes. To start, we realized the property title system can be a little complicated, even if it is digital. So one of the first things you have to think about is like, well, why do we use these intermediaries? We use them because of their verification. We trust them. So when I buy or check my property title in Georgia, I get the paper and they sign it. The notary or whoever is working in the office says, you know what, Rachel, you do own this land signed with Penn. And even in Georgia and many other countries that have digital land systems, those digital systems are, you know, scanned in PDFs of ink signatures. And as we move into a more digital world, we can't continue using ink signatures or even Adobe signatures where you just scroll in your name and anyone can do that, anyone can pretend to be Rachel Pippen and take my house. So that was the first thing we started with. We wanted to find a way to replace those written signatures. We replaced them with digital signatures, which is, if I'm a Georgian citizen, I can go request a copy of my property title online. But instead of just having that written signature, now at the bottom of my property title, there's a string of letters and numbers, which is my signature. For the people more familiar with blockchain, it's called a hash. You take all of the information, me, my address, what day I requested my property title, the government agent I dealt with, for example. You take all that information, compute it and get a very unique string of letters and numbers. So now as a citizen, I have that on my land title and say, this is accurate. I have a copy, the Georgian government has a copy. They actually took it one step further, which is, okay, what if Rachel comes in tomorrow and her land is now owned by somebody else? She has a copy of her signature, and we think that's right. She says it's right, but what if there's, you know, a bad actor that says it's not? Let's put it out there publicly. So the Georgian government started taking these digital signatures and putting them out publicly onto the Bitcoin blockchain. So again, if I were to go into the Georgian land office tomorrow and someone has given my house to someone's cousin, I can point to the Bitcoin blockchain and say, at this date, at this time, you said that this property was mine. And that's a pretty essential step when you're looking at adopting blockchain technology or really digital systems at all, which is you have to start building in that trust. And you have to find a way to replace this written trust even while still, you know, continuing to use government intermediaries. We trust them. I'm blessed to live in a country where I can trust my government intermediaries, but it's good to have that extra step. So that's where we are now. We are now taking their entire centralized database and moving it onto a private blockchain, a new form of data storage, basically. And we are going to continue to put those digital signatures onto the public Bitcoin blockchain. And when you do that, no public information besides that string of letters and numbers is put out there. So in case anyone's worried about privacy and being able to see, like, what land everyone in Georgia owns. And then the next step is smart contracts, which I know my fellow panelists will talk about. Being able to, again, with your phone, sell and buy your house and have it protected with the security and the code of the blockchain. So that's Georgia. And I do want to say, as a term of success, the World Bank brings them the best in Europe and Asia for their ease of doing business this year. Not just blockchain. They've made a lot of amazing improvements, but it's definitely effective. Thank you very much. Is there... Yeah, great. So I'm Henrik from Chrome away. I had too many slides into a little time and a little bit double. Todd will take over on the panel, but he's totally up to date with what we're doing. So a little bit about Chrome away. We're very old in the blockchain space. Our CTO created the first way to issue tokens in 2012. Before that, Bitcoin was just a currency that we could use for buying stuff. But then suddenly, you could issue shares and bonds and real estate titles and so on. So basically, what became blockchain, we call it Bitcoin 2.0 of the back of those times. And we started to stumble upon this case with the Swedish land registry in 2015. We started off with public blockchains, then moved into... Did a platform for private blockchains. That we're doing on this. Now we're also doing work in... We're doing some work in Andra Pradesh around the blocks. A land title system and in Australia. Yeah, so we have three parts in our tech stack. We call it consortium database. It's a combination between a relational database and a private block shape. And then we have secure workflows, otherwise smart contracts. So stuff that you can use that we are using in the Swedish case. And we have tokens, of course, that could be used for fractional investments and stuff like that. But we are not currently using them in the land registry cases. Yeah, I mentioned Andra Pradesh, Sweden, Australia. We also do other projects in green finance and payments and crowdfunding. A project around... There's also a little bit of real estate and land registry related for you and women together with some other parties. I mentioned them later. So in Sweden the target is more on the conveyance and getting the process before buying and selling real estate. That's the focus here. So the actual type of system. Which is fairly decent centralized, but they won't change that in the first phase. Maybe in the future, but not in scope for our project. In Andra Pradesh we are looking more at the actual titling system, the registry. But in Australia we're looking more at the infrastructure and everything around this. Connecting to other players, etc. That's also part of the administration system. So the project in Sweden is a collaborative project. It's not only us. It's a consulting company, Kairis Future, a telecom operator, an Italian company. And of course the Swedish land registry. Over the time we onboarded more players. Two banks, SPR and Nancy Petir. Now we onboarded a consulting company because we can't do all the integrations ourselves. We now also have other government players involved that prefer to run an anonymous right now. But there's a lot of interest. These are the public officials from various departments, etc. In a meeting around the blockchain governance that we're having. Except Jörgen to the right, which is from us. There's a lot of involvement from the public sector, which is exciting, I think, from all parts. So we produced two white papers on this. The third one coming soon. You can find them on our homepage. There's also a demo of what we'll be doing. So we're looking at the process, signatures and data. Taking all the players involved. The buyer, the seller, real estate agents, the banks. All the steps that leads up to moving the type of everything that happened before. Having a data signature and a secure process that is fully transparent. So this works with a legal system. It integrates with existing ID solutions. So it's not something very futuristic. This is something that works right now. And there is no bearer instrument. There is no private key that can lose your house or anything like that. So again, it's the process before moving the type of. And we're looking now, we're on the third phase. And we're looking more at the governance. Technology is basically ready. We're looking at the governance of the private network. We're looking at the main legal aspects, et cetera. It takes quite a lot of time to look at the legal aspects, in particular in democracies compared to some countries where you can sort of make decisions faster. Which is both an asset and a liability, in a way. So in India, that's another product. We're looking at a registry. How can we make a secure registry that's tamper-proof, make sure they cannot be corrupted. So everything that's added to the registry is fully transparent and in multiple locations controlled by different parties. For us, it's a showcase that you can actually do blockchain in a simple way. This looks like a traditional database, except that it's totally secure, just like a blockchain. It's quite easy to do this product. We did it together with KPMD. Now we have Tec Mahindra trying to look at this in other parts of India. This is exciting that we're doing with KADASTA. KADASTA is, they have a frontend for basically for land registry and collecting information. Together with them, we made a project for United Women, intended for refugees. How can you add information with the original information? Information about your identity and your assets, et cetera. Try to get that into what could eventually become a land registry system. We're having tomorrow an event with them. Talk about that. So lessons learned. Quite a lot of lessons learned, of course. It takes time. Some people expect that we change the Swedish system in a few weeks. That doesn't work in the public sector. It takes years. So it's not a surprise, but I think that we have a very strong interest. Very well received before. The land registry is getting more and more excited about blockchain even more on the blockchain. I'm hoping to talk more later. We'll take over now. It's the chaotic world in the start-up. Thank you, Henrik. Thank you very much for making time to be here. The tenorix being replaced by Todd. It's his stunt double on the panel. Todd is Karimaway US. I just want to emphasize, only because I'm so excited, that we've been talking remotely with all of these companies for so long. And if you're new to this space, this panel is a real treat. I mean, to have all of these people together talking about this is pretty exciting. And having said that, Alex, you don't have slides, right? No. Okay, please go ahead. My name is Alex Volotian. I'm a CTO at Propi. And Propi is the Silicon Valley-based start-up which goal is to basically improve the land registry system and optimize the transactions themselves. So, if you look at what we're developing, you can basically see three parts to it. We have a listing platform. We have a transaction platform, which allows you to buy real estate online directly from your computer. We have a real estate registry software to store these records. And currently, we're running that software in parallel to existing solutions. And we're running pilots with different countries. For example, back in autumn 2017, we had our token sale, and we sold about 16 million tokens, with current BTC and Ether exchange rate, would be close to like 30 or 40 million dollars in equivalent. And right after the token sale that we had, in about two weeks, we already ran the first phase of our pilot, and we sold an apartment in Ukraine for Ether completely remotely. The buyer was from California, and he'd never been in Ukraine. The seller, he's Ukrainian, he's one of the biggest real estate developers in Ukraine. The seller actually was traveling, and he said, I don't think we can do it right now because I'm traveling, and we said, well, that's the point of having remote deals. So he was in New York, and he managed to complete his part completely online as well. And we've sold the apartment for, I believe, 200 Ether. Back then it was 60,000 dollars, and now it's 200 or something like that. So that was a successful pilot. We had an MOU with Ukrainian government, with Ministry of Justice, and we ran everything online with the front end being web, and the back end was on smart contracts. Every step of that transaction was recorded on a blockchain, and some of the functionality was actually automated. For example, in that case it was escrow functionality, so we didn't need to use outside escrow or notary or anything like that. Smart contract just held Ether in escrow while the deal was proceeding, and when everything was done and the property was already recorded, the Ether was released for the seller to withdraw. So that was our first success, and Ministry of Justice of Ukraine was very happy with that, so they moved with us to do the second pilot. Not the second pilot, but the second stage of the pilot, which we're working on right now. Ukraine is not the only country that we're working with. We are here in the US, started pilot with Vermont, specifically in the south of Burlington, which I'm flying to today, to talk about the second phase of the pilot. The first one was completed just a few days ago, and we released a technical post about it yesterday, so you can check it out on blog.profi.com. We did the government sanction recording on a blockchain, and the significance of it, just like the one in Ukraine, on the deed itself, we have the address of the smart contract and the QR code. So when you get the deed, you can just directly use your mobile phone scan to get to the Ether scan and actually check all the transactions that took place and verify everything. We use in public Ethereum to store the data, but not all the data. Obviously, there's a lot of information, so we use a combination of public Ethereum and private, actually partially private, consortium-based blockchain as well. So it's still completely decentralized, so every registry which joins your platform basically can have its own node, and the more registries join, the better it would be, the more decentralized. So basically, you will not be able to lose your data or anything, it will be spread throughout the world. So right now, there is one node in Ukraine, there is one node for Propi, and once we complete pilots in Vermont, we hope to have more nodes available in the United States. So regarding Propi team, I wanted to point out that the CEO of Propi has more than 12 years experience in real estate. She was a real estate developer for many years, and she actually was doing title recording as well. So this is the problem that we've been facing for, we've been working for a long time, and Propi is basically a result of many years of R&D. So I just wanted to also give you a little overview how Propi platform works internally. We have a full registry on blockchain, spread between two blockchains, where everything runs on smart contracts, quite literally everything. So you have user smart contracts, you have registries, you have deeds, and everything connected in a relational manner between each other. So essentially, you have a property object, you have a user object, and you have deed, and property can have multiple deeds. But only one owner, which is basically the one which is recorded in the last deed. So this way you can actually inspect all the history, you can search the data, you can see everything. But also there are privacy issues, and this is something that everybody who is familiar with blockchain struggles with. We believe that the data has to be stored on public blockchain, or at least provide authenticity there. But not everybody wants to openly put the real estate records there. So we developed a system of encryption. This is basically a hybrid crypto system with proxy encryption, if that makes sense. And it allows basically to delegate responsibilities and delegate the rights to read the registry and decrypt the data. And the registries themselves, they can decide, okay, I want to show the data to the entire world. They can just basically flip a switch and everybody will see the data online. If they want to provide the access to the data right in there. Registries, that's also an option. People will come and see that, which is basically the way how it's mostly done in the US, even though the records are public, nobody just throwing them. Well, few registries would actually put them for a complete open access. Well, that's basically an overview for property. Thank you very much. There's a lot there, but two more speakers to get through. So we're going to shift now to the policy side and ask Anshal to speak from the perspective of the World Bank who gets the first phone call. When a country decides this is interesting, sometimes it was called the London Anshal's Desk and it's important to get that perspective here too. I do not have slides, because as part of the land conference I am suffering from overslides saturation. Sorry about that. So I did not prepare slides. Is this working? It's working. So thanks, Mike. It's always daunting to follow speakers who have done pilots and have already rolled out solutions. I feel a bit like this helpless human mogul in a pack of very strong wolves. But we have done, at the World Bank, and my colleague, the local from the blockchain lab is here, we have done three proofs of concept of blockchain technology and I'll get into that in a little bit of detail, but why did we decide to do proofs of concept in-house when we clearly know that those exist outside? It's largely because the technology is complex and you sort of have to sink your teeth into it to understand how it works and because of the nature of the technology, if you don't know how it works or what it does, you can't fully understand or appreciate the opportunities that it can bring and at the same time, you don't fully understand the challenges that come with implementation. So that was really the key behind the proofs of doing the proofs of concept at the bank. It was an internal knowledge and learning exercise and as Mike mentioned, we're getting phone calls from countries. Can you help us think through this? Can you look at that? Should we go all out with the blockchain registry? And it's very important from us at the bank site to be able to sit with them, speak intelligently about the technology, not only the possibilities, but really help them see the challenges that will also come. Perhaps the pace of the technology is such that things have changed since we started talking, but we have to keep in mind that when we look at the legal and policy issues, it should not be seen as a bad thing or as something that's slowing down the technology and its development. You don't drive a car unless you know the brakes work, right? So this is just to help you think through another lens and this is where I personally see the World Bank playing a role of really understanding not just the on-chain technology and the opportunities that that can bring, but also some of these off-chain issues, legal, policy, regulatory, also capacity. I think some of the things that will play an important role is our client countries are fully aware of what this technology is about and can they implement it with a good degree of confidence or do you always need someone else to help them? We care about sustainability of clients being able to roll out their own solutions and manage them, so I think that's important. The other thing is user interface and user comfort with the technology. So I'm speaking at another panel on gender and new technology later today that perhaps blockchain is not a new technology for women in Sweden or Georgia but this will be new technology for women elsewhere. So how do you package this technology in an easy enough way that it sort of starts to resemble an iPhone or an iPad that even a five-year-old can understand and operate? So I think some of these considerations will be important. Now let me get into the slightly technical aspects of the proofs of concept that we did. We did this on an Ethereum blockchain solution and we looked at three proofs of concept. The first was the first registration of a parcel. The second was transfer of ownership and the third was virtual notarization. Now we picked these use cases because these are some of the most common services that all land registries across the world give so we wanted to start with something that was going to be directly relevant to our clients who are looking to roll out services. And now let me start getting into challenges because they appear immediately as we started doing this work. So why do we do a first registration of a parcel and not a registration of a parcel? Because blockchain at the moment, at least the way we did the proof of concept, does not have the ability to have transaction history on it. So we went in with a first registration so we didn't have to worry about the history but obviously when we do this in-country with clients you do need that aspect to have data storage of all this history which means not only do you need a complete set of records in the country, you also need them digitized so they can be put on a solution. So what you call preconditions in your paper we call enabling environment. And I think that is what you were talking about with Bitfury doing their work in the Republic of Georgia. Georgia ranks very highly on the doing business rankings of the World Bank when it comes to registering property. So you start to see that the enabling conditions are very important and perhaps important enough that that's how private sector will even see that I'm going to go and work in this country and this country might not be ready yet. And perhaps another role the World Bank can play is help these countries that are not ready yet get there with the infrastructure investments because in this craze to be blockchain ready I see a lot of countries are 2020, 2025, everything on blockchain. So there is this moment of craze but I don't think that's a bad thing because I think that's making a lot of countries and governments look at the enabling environment and the infrastructure that actually supports the blockchain. So I think it's great if you find a new flavor of ice cream and you're ready to eat your broccoli for it. So I think this craze is fantastic because it is opening up this dialogue on some of the more difficult questions that I don't always get asked. Having said that, I do want to say that the technology alone will not solve your problems and in many cases you'll see that the blockchain is the easy part of the solution. It's really everything else around it that will help not only design the right kind of solution but make sure that it's implemented in a way that is truly bringing benefits like safety, security of tenure, transparency of records, reliability of those records and being tamper-proof, et cetera. So I think all of this sort of ties in well. I'll just mention a couple of other things. A lot of times we're seeing this debate between public and private blockchain. So far I've seen that the private blockchain model has tended to work a little bit better for land registry simply because as you both noted that there is a need for the government to be able to control that, the set of transactions. When we look at it from the World Bank side, where does the legal recognition come? So really you will see government-backed solutions and they seem to be the way it's going but of course things change, it might change and there are certainly very interesting examples with the data being put on public blockchains like the Bitcoin blockchain or the Ethereum blockchain. So I think this space is still evolving. It may be leaning one way but it could quite easily turn another way. And I just want to also just note that the design of how you develop your solution is going to remain very important. Let's not think that the technology will solve all your problems because the internet can be used for very productive things and the internet can also be used to burn 24 hours a day on Facebook. You can do a lot with the internet and you can also... It's just like any other technology and the way you design it, the way you use it is going to be very important. And on that, for instance, this question came up during the land conference and in my internal discussions with my colleagues at the blockchain lab, can having something like smart contracts speed up some of the bad things that happen in land administration since a land grab can... a smart contract enable a land grab very quickly and the answer is yes and no. If you design it poorly, yes it can. It's an auto-executing program and if there are very few conditions and lack of transparency around that process, that thing can go very quickly and you can see the blockchain will start to hurt the rights of the poor and the marginalized, which is what the World Bank really wants to make sure that everyone's included in the economy but at the same time, if you developed a smart contract with conditions that say included civil society participation or you wanted to include third-party institutions like Transparency International to sign off on something. You could design it in a way that there is more transparency around it so don't just think that the tech will solve your problem. I think it's the tech plus the country context plus the design. I don't think I'm out of time so I'm going to stop there but I'm happy to take questions later and of course thank you all for the very great points you all made. Thank you Anshale. I would point out for those of us who are at the World Bank Conference and remember last year's conference and this year's conference, the amount of real-estate blockchain has this year gone up tremendously and as a World Bank alum, it's exciting for me to see the bank and to hear from and despite her understated manner she's definitely one of the leading thinkers in the bank so I'm really grateful for her being on this panel. So Chris has two hats. He's a representative of New America and deserves a lot of the credit for the paper. You'll hopefully all read tonight but he's also standing in for Corbin from Consensus and we'll talk briefly about Consensus's work and I think we're going to hijack Corbin's slides and hopefully Corbin, if you're watching from the internet you can give Chris feedback later. If my phone rings all of a sudden I don't know if you can balance it. You know, something went wrong. So I think it is worth backfilling here a little bit to talk about what Consensus has been doing especially in the context of our framework for levels of registry integration. A lot of the economic benefits of the higher levels of integration is premised on the idea of there being really high levels of liquidity which typically involves tokenizing real estate and Consensus is doing some interesting stuff there and also briefly talk about what they've been doing with the government of Dubai. Okay, so in Dubai the government of Dubai for those who don't know launched an initiative to put all of their government services on blockchain by 2020. So this is a very high level well-funded effort to integrate a whole bunch of different services and to address a lot of the prerequisites like identity that are required to do that and the technical partners are Consensus and also IBM and for the property registry in Dubai Consensus produced something called Land Stream which they use for workflow management digital signatures for things like purchase agreements progress reports even development plans and they're trying to basically have a single integrated system so you can take a property from the initial concept and development all the way through sales and you know with every step of the transaction recorded on the blockchain and also people are sharing single records so you don't have to deal with you know reconciling records between different parties. Okay, and so there's a second platform that they're working on right now which is called Pangea and I am not Corbin I cannot talk you through this with the level of detail the slide requires actually it's a platform for selling and trading in fractional real estate investments and tying together property owners investors and service providers to trade in real estate tokens so basically if you are a home owner you can can we go to the next slide actually because there's a bit more detail here actually one more and then we'll backtrack two more, Corbin had a lot of slides Corbin was here Oh I know so effectively you can take an asset and it has to be this is not totally decentralized by the way it has to be verified by the legal team at Pangea to make sure it's a stable asset so that you're not putting junk on the blockchain because there is a real risk otherwise of fraud right but essentially you can turn some of the equity in your home or your commercial property into tokens which are then traded on the Ethereum network and this all happens in real time and can be done peer to peer so this is a really interesting concept when it comes to the promise but also the risks of really high liquidity in the real estate market and we can discuss that more I think once we get into the questions on the panel so with that high level hopefully you've heard from now hearing from these companies you've seen the spectrum of what's possible and I think being in dialogue about blockchain for the past few days of the conference one of the things I keep finding myself saying is there is no script right just like we had the eight levels what it means to put a registry on chain this is a tool and it's up to you how you configure it and how you use it and among the many things this panel illustrated it was that right you've got working with national registries working with UN women with refugees doing what Propie is doing is trying to architect a global system agnostic exchange Pangea is talking about fractionalizing assets and helping Dubai do boiling the whole ocean of all government services to where you started in Georgia Republic of Georgia starting with the registry but if I understand that's expanding so there's all these different ways that blockchain can be applied it is a very powerful and very malleable technology and while I take the point that you can slow it down and make sure things don't go wrong with thoughtful design and things like multi-sig wallets we also have to remember that different technologies the way humans and technologies interact changes and there are changes on behavior so what would it mean if every transaction was recorded if instead of replacing my name as the owner with somebody else's name and a database that was corrupted if every transaction who did it where and when was recorded how would behavior change there's some very first level questions you need to think about when you understand what a decentralized ledger looks like so and that is where I'm going to stop talking don't worry just by quoting Anshal here I like the analogy of the nuclear of ice cream and eating your broccoli that there are people who have concerns about blockchain and it's too fast and they confuse blockchain with bitcoin and say oh this is bad people use this but there are those of us who care deeply about formalizing land as a way of driving society forward and I am excited about the attention blockchain gets because it gets people who maybe weren't thinking too hard about land registries to stop and say well what's going on do we have a digital land registry and how do we address fraud today these are important questions and if everybody is excited about the ice cream and they start eating their broccoli I am thrilled because when we eat our broccoli is when these registries get healthy to death and more people maybe get land rights and then more people who are at the bottom of the pyramid that the UN women program is exciting we start talking about giving identity to refugees and understanding where they've been and doing proof of location this is important and necessary the planet we live on has gotten pretty complicated and we need powerful tools to address that so I'm going to assuming there are some questions I could ask this panel questions and they've all received them from me over time but I'm going to open it up to the floor I think Tim you have the mic right so we have a runner in the back Tim from our team and if you have questions please raise your hand and Tim will come to you I'll just take three and then we'll answer them you can stand and introduce yourself please Hi Paul Nelson from USAID a lot of questions but maybe I'll just focus on one the question of vendor lock-in so maybe this is more relevant to government procured services if you're researching your relationship with the government if you do extend to expand to other areas but then also the issue that you are raising of government capacity to manage or to take on these services if you guys step back great thank you that's a good question a couple more and then we'll answer three at a time Trent, Tim right here Hi I'm Trent Larson a developer from DeSoto so mine's a little technical for Rachel and Todd our proprietary and permission and first of all thank you for making those inroads and thank you for sharing your experiences with us this is immensely helpful learning wise but with those kind of platforms you don't you may get immutability and distribution but those are already internal anyway you might as well use a distributed database and the protocols like using a shared protocol that you don't benefit from because you have your proprietary platform so what is the benefit of using the blockchain in your solutions and if it's in the coming in the future how do you migrate to that you know external benefit give you guys time to think about that we'll take one more question right here Hi my name is Adrian from Bloxa in Accra Ghana I have a question for I think it's Todd from Cromaway in the Swedish case with actors in the smart workflow process within these actors I can understand there's a lot of value created for them in terms of security and speed and transparency cost cutting etc etc who would you consider the biggest gainer in this whole process okay maybe let's just walk down the panel and take whatever questions you want to take and start with the vendor locking I didn't actually fully catch that question so it was on government capacity so you'll correct me but I think the question is with blockchain you find your private company is working with government and how was the issue of vendor lock-in addressed like once now that Georgia started working with Bitfury are they are they going to be forced to work with Bitfury forever roughly yeah I think Bitfury's better position to answer that actually it tackles both of your questions which is yes right now the Republic of Georgia is working with Bitfury and their land title registry but the code that we use is our blockchain framework it's exonym but it's open source it's you know we're not putting their code based on the way they customize it out publicly but it is a code base that their developers are already becoming familiar with and using so the goal of course is I think for us to continue to advise and we are like the blockchain experts but we're not land title experts and I think we know that and it's important too that we have designed exonym with interoperability in mind let's say at some point in the future they want to use exonym but maybe they also want to use propi or they want to use interluder or they want to put in the lightning network micropayments whatever it is there is an ability to do that so there's not this lock in and I think we have learned some lessons from the internet and I think interoperability is one of them I don't know about you guys but whenever I say okay Google my Alexa also turns on so we're trying to fix that in the next iteration but I will also say you're right you know a blockchain is not the right solution for everybody if you like your centralized database if you feel you know it's secure and you don't need that distribution you don't need the extra you know you don't want to commit the extra computing power whatever that reason is you don't need to put on a blockchain the reason they want to in Georgia is because they want those titles to be able to be executed via smart contracts they are not they at least my understanding they have not seen a way to do that securely by using your typical database code they want to execute it on the blockchain but happy to talk to you about that more let's just keep going down talking yeah I agree with Rachel on the notion about sort of interlocking remember the good thing about this industry obviously it's all open source so that allows that allows communities to form around different software solutions that will sort of sort of allow sort of you know greater adoption of these solutions and the data that sits in these in any of these blockchain nodes is going to be available to be connected to other blockchains but they might have that on the sort of the highest pyramid level and so forth so I think that's a good point didn't want to address sort of the question around permission versus public blockchain there was a really interesting presentation this week at the bank by a professor at Swinberg University in Australia and he did a survey of land registries around the world and found that something like 98% of them were sitting on relational databases and if you look at core banking systems if you look at title plants if you look at the industries as a whole they're all sitting on relate common commercial relational databases that is the world that we live in so what we came to the conclusion of after starting and anchoring to Bitcoin was that the government, the NGO the commercial world is not going to be able to participate in blockchain in any real way because they would end up having to move out to an external data store either on Ethereum or on the Bitcoin and so forth that presents very significant issues around fundamentally around blockchain which is now what is the single source of truth is it in your relational database at your bank or the property registry or is it in an external data store because you're going to have to build then interfaces between those things so I think in the long run I think public blockchains and when I say the long run are we 10 years away, are we 15 years away from public blockchains being a real solution but in the interim I think we're going to have to go with more hybrid approaches and evolve towards that and that's why in Sweden in India and in Australia they came to us in the conversations we had with them they said this is a more nearer term approach Todd, do you want to answer the question on who wins in Sweden about the smart workflow? Yeah, I think two places if you ask who is the biggest beneficiary and I mean I would say at the end of the day the land registry itself and the citizens of the whole because what the land registry Mike close with you what the land registry wasn't able to isn't able to do today there's no there's no view into the process through which property is transferred or acquired even in Australia or most places because today it mostly takes place the transfer of property and the agreement takes place in a closed room with witnesses hopefully that are that you can trust but that that agreement is happening in a dark place to the registry all the registry sees is a document typically a paper document typically that two people and maybe a notary signed off on a transfer of property with the blockchain and with smart contracts and the solutions that my colleagues are sort of presenting here they're going to have a view into the provenance of those agreements so that's why they wanted to start with the land's process because it's almost secondarily important about what's in the registry database what's more important is how it got there who signed off on it when was it signed was it changed at all and that's what this these processes are going to be able to shed light on so one thing we definitely all have in common is that we have this so-called blockchain spirit which is the community sharing the information open source we all do in this you know if you look back in time for example the Cook County what they did if you look at work that Velux put there it was a really nice foundation for people to start looking how to solve this problem and basically build on top of that and many people did that including Ropy who used that in research as well and now we're giving back too so we publish all our research we have open source as well and this is definitely consensus here but the technologies that we have are different we're taking different approaches and from our experience working with the governments and I think I forgot to mention that we're working with developing countries as well and this pilots that we're doing here in the United States are extremely important for them to see how it actually works and I try to implement something for them as well because many of those countries don't have even registry at all and when we talk to them different governments have different goals so while in U.S. you might not need to have public blockchain recording because you know you could have everything done privately many countries actually want to have public recording for security and for trust so for example if country has corruption who would invest in property in that country everybody wants to invest right developing countries they are growing and people looking at investment opportunities but they are afraid they are afraid to invest because they think what if I invest somebody will change the record and I don't owe anything anymore so they want the proof to be publicly available this is why we split the platform in two because of the technical limitations of current blockchains which have been resolved now and if you follow the latest Ethereum news the CASPER protocol is already in testnet and how Buterin said the CASPER of CASPER works it's just some things around to fix and test so I think when CASPER is there and everything starts to work much faster and cheaper maybe we're going to completely move to public Ethereum and regarding control the registry still maintain control they know what they can write the data they can change anything they want but it will be reflected publicly so they cannot go ahead and do something under the cover even though the information is not readable right away because some of the information is hashed some of the information is encrypted but let's say if somebody would say well somebody claim my house that it's theirs I could actually go ahead and public ledger and ask the registry to basically decrypt and provide the evidence and these evidence can be then used in court can I actually ask a follow up question to that I'm very interested in this idea of how you guys choose jurisdictions I know you've invested a lot in legal research and have been building up to this for a long time when it comes to emerging economies in green field scenarios where there may not be existing records or there are paper records that have to be digitized how do you partner with that country or with other organizations to make sure those records exist in the first place it seems like it would be really hard to introduce your platform there right so so we're working with governments of Antigua and Papua New Guinea and we had this discussion with them and they have the records on paper which is not trivial to digitize and we created this program that we call title mining basically people putting the data the records inside of a registry and receive rewards for that and for different jurisdictions there's different consensus in this mining but essentially it's a decentralized process mostly so it's your crowd sourcing the data collection pretty much yeah because the people who put the records on is that officials at the government or is that down to the super local level that people validate their neighbors I'm just curious about the process it's both essentially like proof of authority that's one if people can actually put the data but then the data can be validated by an authority or it could be validated by the crowd so there are a couple different solutions available for example if multiple people upload the same data or if finds that who's an authority then you are pretty much sure that this record is correct some of the situations are more complicated but we're still working on some specific cases it's not going to be one universal solution for everybody but title mining is there we'll go back to the question just going back to the first question from USCID so open source is music to my ears I'm going to have a very good day thank you but no yes we do advise governments to look at more open source platforms the other thing is this is a non blockchain story but we saw a case in a country that I won't mention where they gave away data ownership to the private company that was advising them and what's interesting about blockchain is that data ownership and data access work very differently that they would participating governments would have that data because it's distributed it's on different nodes they would be part of that participating node structure so I think there are some of these good points that come out of having a blockchain platform but having said that I do think it's very important for anyone, any piloting government to understand this technology of course private sector play a key role in providing the solutions but it's still very important to have the in-house capacity on understanding how this works, what are the opportunities what are the challenges and really work together with the private sector on developing some of these solutions Any more questions from the audience and in the back Chris Tim maybe we'll start here and go around Hi folks thank you for cracking presentations my name is John I'm from HM Land Registry in England, Wales I was really interested in particular to the Pangea discussion and property and kind of following on from some of the points you're just making how you got I wasn't clear on whether the share of my property that I sell through Pangea ends up on Dubai's registry and likewise how property actually integrates with the land registry Okay so I did a very bad job with that in Corbyn that's not actually a Dubai specific thing that's just something that Consensus is going to launch on the Ethereum network and it'll essentially be public trading of those tokens in exchange for Ether No So all of Dubai's systems are going to be on chain and that is a case of centralized control a lot of resources and they're on the point of vendor lock and you had IBM and Consensus working in partnership so you had Dubai Dubai is an example of what happens when you go for it and then in addition to that Consensus is developing a platform called Pangea where any asset can be fractionalized and one could take their house in Yorkshire and sell it into 200 shares of people to own and receive rents or something conceptually You'd have lawyers who would have to get in there because it's not all on chain yet but those are two different things Yeah I know this is a very good observation because I think we had them listed as an example of what you might see where as in fact it's sort of a model of what you might see where that to be integrated with the registry service and to be able to trade fractional ownership but I think in this case it's an investment product so you're not actually trading ownership of the asset itself That's a legal question that I wish Corbyn was here to answer and discuss a little more Yeah I think one of the other obvious questions there becomes if every property instead of being a single property becomes if you divide it a thousand times or a million times with the goal of having a very high velocity of microtransactions and using them for some of the use cases that they talk about here like you might give little shares in your local shopping mall to local people to incentivize them to shop there to return from the collective profit all the vendors they make or something like that It becomes an interesting tool for economic incentives but you need for one thing and maybe this is the thing the vendors can address probably very high transaction throughput on whatever chain you're using to manage all of this and you might be issues of scale just technical capacity Is there a second question for Popi in your question? In that form is do I actually get you integrated with the registry so it follows on from the conversation about digitizing data and so on So how would I use Popi to buy property governed by his registry in the UK? Sure So currently you have two registrations done the process runs in parallel You get your normal process done as you would usually use well it's called legacy process and you have everything at the same time recorded on the blockchain so first of all you can use this recorded data later on as an evidence and second of all when let's say your registry wants to use Popi software then this process just becomes much faster and streamline and regarding the recording of the fractionalized ownership and interoperability the way we design the registry to work with this is for example if if the house is in the county which uses Popi registry and now they want to for example consensus wants to record fractionalized ownership we can actually specify a smart contract as an owner and then you have certain tokens on this smart contract and you can always see all the token holders and how many tokens they hold so this way you can see basically everything who owns what right in the registry so we definitely can easily work with consensus or other companies who's going to be the provider of fractionalized ownership services Sure you guys go ahead Mark Weston I'm going to make a quick comment around this fractionalization I know there's a lot of interest in certainly I think in the developing world where one of the challenges around property rights is that even if we can extend a property right to an individual landholder say a small landholder or leaseholder the question is the property still of any value you'll hear a lot of people at the World Bank conference this week struggling with this issue of only 20% of the land in the developing world is titled right now how can we expand that and one of the main issues is really around what's the incentive to the landholder to report that a property has been transferred or they own it and so forth and the analogy I always give is how many people in the room have ever taken their rental car to the car wash probably very few because you have no economic incentive in doing that so I think the fractionalization is really exciting around is there an opportunity to create land markets around that in the developed world I see a lot of problems with this and maybe part of the reason is before joining criminal way I was with Fannie Mae so I worked in the secondary market and I know that any property that is sitting in a registry here in the states or oh sorry sorry a property sitting sorry sitting in the states or it could be in Europe or Asia is going to have other leans or encumbrances on that property so how am I going to then fractionalize it from a legal perspective because those other lean holders have first rights and you get into a lot of legal issues around that so the only thing I would say is before we sort of jump ahead you know to this sort of future world which does have a lot of promise and we should do experiments of it we should also sort of be grounded in kind of where we are today from a legal and political perspective so and I would say this is why in the framework fractionalization comes after disaggregation right so and let's take a more developing world scenario forget I own my condo and I want to fraction it let's assume my community my family my tribe my social collective unit has collective rights to this forest in country X if they all had wallets and we could fraction the rights to the right of use as opposed to the right to sell which wouldn't maybe be available to a communal lens then everybody who's represented on chain as being a member of community having enjoying the right of use if that right of use was fraction could then be given the right to vote blockchain voting it's a short hop once you get down to the software you're talking about identity of population you're talking about voting you're talking about property ownership the reason I love this topic of property is it touches everything so so this is really you can get into a lot of interesting foundational issues the idea of you know stock markets for condos is where everyone goes in this example but with a niota of imagination there's a lot of other fascinating social use cases if I can just add so absolutely agree with what you said this is going to be legally complex and use that fractionalization of rights and that could be something but what's exciting in this space is you see poor farmers etc and sometimes the only asset they have is their little land plot and with a little bit of money stashed away can they have a crack at a bigger asset that could help them move out of poverty so I think there are exciting applications that could be possible I don't think we're there yet but things are moving and we might be there soon but if we get there it might be because of someone on the stage these guys are really like the title mining thing is a huge thought do you want to see okay I'm gonna we have 10 minutes left on the clock so if you have a burning question please get your hand up I'll try to harvest them all and then we'll go Tim run my name is anime green I work for radiant.earth so as we all know there are discriminatory discriminatory practices with land rights worldwide whether women or religious religious and ethnic minorities are prohibited from owning land what if the government wants who has these practices wants to use your technology to either consolidate power or to further these practices what do you do let's please take all the questions we'll just come back around hi my name is Manohar and I'm heading a working group on fintech since couple of years and also writing standards for blockchain and BLT so my question is actually I mean it's been burning since a long time so when you guys talk about property rights and blockchain revolutionizing these things what's the percentage actually that blockchain has impacted so far and what do you mean to say that and apart from that is the governance of blockchain you say that you were dealing with countries like india or sweden are they comparable actually or are you not touching a legal element of land administration aspects here because land in india is a state subject and land in sweden is a central topic so you can't compare two countries when the central administration is different so you're getting into a legal risk it's a word of caution when we are saying we are promoting blockchain we are also part of the model so as a word of caution please use the country names appropriately more questions good morning Jill Urban Carr with Trimble I have a question so I've written it down so I get it I've been pulling all my thoughts together so bear with me so where as you progress down the table of adoption levels where do you start to truly see business government and public value emerge you know at what point does do we actually start to see even a fiscal return on that investment right so is there value in the early stages you know because essentially blockchain is an auditable database and the validity of the data is only as good as the input and so I guess again at what point does that value actually emerge and then as a follow on to that what is the advantage for the early adopters in land registry you know compared with the risk and the cost and as we've talked about this emerging technology that's evolving you know to be an early adopter you know why let's take three more please gentlemen Kugana Soto and then this one right here yes for Bitfury on the Georgia case so you were talking about the process going from ink signatures to complete digital signatures how is this process going to work because I can imagine putting something on the blockchain you have to first start with I think digital copies of the ink signatures so how will you get them from there to complete digital signatures only based on a blockchain cryptic system can you get the mic over to Team DeSoto and then back to one more I'm Lauren from DeSoto so in Georgia how much blockchain knowledge does the average citizen have and was there any effort to educate the community on blockchain when you guys launched okay two more I guess yeah I'm Eric Murray Bogic from Georgia Mason University my question is on a lot of one hurdle to developing countries is the transaction costs of transferring title and then there's the user fees associated with running the land registries have you guys ever tried to measure just that benefit of it for people who want to use title registries through blockchain and then for the developing world like the US related to her question what is the financial incentive or the economic incentive for the counties to go and invest in this technology or are they going to pass that cost on to their user fees for titling gentlemen there and then we'll everybody gets a minute hi I'm Henry from Kenya I have one question I mean two questions are the first one when it comes to the legislative or law requirements how did you go about it in Dubai and Georgia because I'm sure in my country it's quite rigid when it comes to having a new system being used in a public office there's no law requirements the second question is how secure is it having the blockchain right now we have a digital system we're implementing but it's a bit porous because we've had complaints on the system being a bit manipulated so how secure is the blockchain and also the rate of returns because you want a system where it's transparent and it increases the revenue for the government thank you I'm going to start at the end and then everyone gets about a minute so please try to try to use your minute wisely how much of the minute do I have to review this menu of questions so for the first one we're already on earth this issue of codifying an existing inequality is a very real and serious one and in the past for a lot of measures like the mobile application is your tenure which is a program that USAID ran to issue land certificates in a few countries in Africa you need to have really strong systems in place to ensure participation like equal participation so for example women in places like Tanzania haven't traditionally owned as much property as men in spite of having the same legal right to do so so when they had village councils who were certifying who owned what or this was codified they would make sure that women had equal representation on those councils so something like that has to be done before you especially with blockchain which is you know depending on the system it's ostensibly immutable right you do not want to take existing inequalities and codify the minute immutable system alright so first of all economic incentives for the government they work with us well the registry is free and open source currently they depend on what solutions they use but it's pretty much millions of dollars they pay so that's pretty good economic incentive for the government then for people they record in itself it's going to be couple bucks so when you sell in a property buying a property couple dollars not going to change much in the US then for developing countries there are actually economic incentives that we provide and in terms of tokens reduced or absent fees and I forgot what I was going to say I tried to do it so fast it's good we'll keep it going alright please answer the question about sort of cost also and who pays for it I think I talk to Mike about every week and he says I'm going to update on what's going on on these projects and the challenge is that we have like a classic from an economic perspective it's a tragedy of the commons problem because blockchain is distributed the benefits are distributed the good news is the costs are distributed because if you look in Sweden or India or any of the projects my colleagues are working on they have a number of different participants working on this who are going to stand up their own nodes to be able to download a client from the Google Play Store from the Apple Store to be able to work on the blockchain so the actual cost is actually in many ways I think this is a really good story it's going to be more compatible with the developing world because I'm sure and Shell will tell you or other folks who are with the World Bank or the donor organizations they spent hundreds of millions of dollars the last 10 years the last 20 years on trying to update central databases centrally managed land registries and it's been a real struggle so I think and I know they're putting a lot of time into this they're looking at this as a better mechanism for achieving the goal of land security and so forth so I think I'm going to try to group a lot of them together which is Georgia was a great place to start because I like to call it a step C country like the records were already digital yes they were ink signatures you know scanned into a system you know not ideal we're moving up from that but also like to your point about codifying inequality you know lower levels of corruption and why we wanted to start there I think I speak for everyone on this little stage that we are not interested in supporting authoritarian governments that are keeping rights from their citizens and so again like why we started in Georgia and they have actually really committed themselves to education and what I will say is pretty essential and I love like the world bank has their blockchain lab is to understand what they're getting into and we actually just founded a blockchain program at one of the universities in Tbilisi to start getting in you know people younger and I think we're seeing especially with the millennial and younger generation that they already expect this to be this secure and this fast and this frictionless and the fact that you know when I send my little brother like money for his birthday he has to wait three days on Venmo right but like that could be pretty world changing to someone in the developing country but because it's the step C country the next step of course would be to go somewhere like okay well maybe the records are only on paper okay well that means maybe we don't need to scan in that PDF of an ink signature maybe we start from the beginning and put that entire title enter to get slowly into a system and then put the digital signature on it immediately not even needing to like print out the PDF and sign it right well yeah so having a note or having one of the like Transparency International the government the notary however that system works is land across the world is complicated to verify it so immediately inputting a digital signature verifying it versus needing to continue using paper on your last point I think digital identity blockchain based identity solutions will become more and more important to look at every time I look at blockchain not just land other things it's starting to emerge as a hub and spokes model where really the identity on blockchain is the hub and then you have land records, medical records you know what not just you know I'm going to touch a few points too so knowledge of the average citizen on blockchain if you think of a microwave I think most of us don't really know the inner workings of the microwave but we can still make stuff in a microwave so when I say that the citizen should be aware I think it's that they should trust the technology it shouldn't blow up in their faces it should be something simple that they understand that they don't feel that their privacy is at risk or something like that and then and this is probably the most important thing what can they do to appeal if something goes wrong I think this is the most important thing to tell the citizens that if something were to go wrong whom should they call is their grievance redressal mechanism is there an appeal system etc so I think that's really key when designing the system what can the average citizen do if they needed to call someone on the return on investment so first of all on the cost I don't have I have this empty benchmarking sheet so if you would like to anonymize some of the costing I would love to see this because one of the big things has been what is the fixed cost associated with developing such systems and then what's the marginal cost say any transaction or putting say a title in so I think this fixed and marginal costing is important and I would love to get some figures to do some benchmarking so this is perhaps more to you than to the audience here having said that so the return on investment will be important but a wider blockchain adoption would really come if blockchain starts to compete with the digital systems in terms of cost and ease of roll out so what is the added advantage of having blockchain and why should a country spend a lot of money developing a blockchain solution when say it could either develop a digital solution or if they have a digital solution they could just simply do an add-on with a blockchain feature so these are things to think about on the last thing that which was I think the first question actually on women and minority rights I think this is I feel this is an exciting space because of the signature function of blockchain that you could actually give a man and a woman so husband and wife their private keys to marital property and nothing moves without her also giving her private key away now I don't or entering it I don't mean to say that off-chain coercion is still not impossible of course but it just gives you an added layer of security whether you know you're a woman or somebody from a community community so I hope that this technology will move to a better direction and this is what I meant earlier when I said it's all about the design you can design it to do bad things but you can also design it to do good things and I can tell you certainly the bank will not finance any bad thing coming out of the blockchain so we'll definitely look at democratizing land rights more I'm going to wrap it up don't worry so you'll be out of here five minutes late I don't know minorities can a government use a centralized database to do things that are inappropriate if they're so inclined yes that's true today and that'll be true in a future state but in a block on a distributed ledger that will be well documented and if those minorities say I used to own that land until it was taken away from me there will now be a record of that distributed I see transparency in the room I've told everybody who's talked about having a national chain that they need to have one of those nodes and to be clear I learned this from Rachel who's a bank in transparency international to have an observer node who can both do an audit by a human or by a robot and can keep that record so it is one more level of immutability so there's a lot of opportunities that this technology affords that people haven't even started to think about yet what do you mean that the centralized database that my registrar owns could be distributed across friendly countries and certain super national organizations it's super exciting there's countries where the law is and that just doesn't happen well if that was dictated by a smart contract you would no longer have you would no longer need someone that's not follow the law on the question of what are the benefits and what are the advantages of early adopters I think that's an important one and it gets to one of my final point the advantage of an early adopter is that you can read all the papers you want and please read mine but until you sit and play with this you're not going to get it the nation will not be lit up until you stop and understand oh my gosh we can do this too you read these papers and you read some of these blogs which are exceptional and it's awesome that they're sharing them and you kind of just get a headache and you have a copy of what you do but if you stop and understand what they're talking about and understand the potential of distributed technology things change really quickly so while I don't want to be seen as a hand waving I'm not going to change everything there are risks I am a strong advocate for engaging with this technology it's not going anywhere you don't see a lot of people say I spent five years studying blockchain and it's a joke I'm walking away I know one of those people I'm still working on it but everybody else is running into the fire and saying there's something exciting here and I encourage you to study it and come to your own conclusions because the potential is huge and then what's the cost of not engaging look at what's happening with Facebook right now a huge centralized repository of a lot of information on 50 million people and a hostile government potentially hijacked another election what are the costs of centralized control of data and should we decentralize it is there something interesting there what are the costs of not engaging that's to say that for the 15th time I'm going to read my paper thank you so much for being here and thank you to the panel I hope this was fun for you it was great for us please give them a round of applause thank you