 Well, Input Output is a global company, and we really do enjoy building infrastructure and finding people in many different places. Like for example, we have personnel in Buenos Aires, we have personnel in Tokyo, in Osaka. As a Hong Kong-based company, though, we actually haven't done a great job of getting into China. So we're extremely excited to be here at the Shanghai Winter School to build some great partnerships and relationships, both academically as well as industry-wide, so that we can continue our mission to embrace cascading disruption. The Blockchain Winter School is an annual event, or semi-annual event. They usually have one in the summer and one in the winter. We attended the summer school over in Corfu, Greece, and the winter school is here in Shanghai. But basically the idea is to bring students, people from industry and professional researchers together for the purpose of understanding what is Bitcoin and what is blockchain technology. Starting from the very deep, detailed foundations of it up to the industry applications and uses. As an academic conference, it's also an opportunity for people to present research that they've been doing. So it's a good way of getting an entry point into the space and getting a deeper understanding of where the state of the art is and where is the pedagogy for the space. So what we decided to do is say, let's start from bedrock. Let's start with really good engineering, treat this like high assurance code, let's write this in a functional programming language. In the case of Cardano, it's Haskell, and let's really have meaningful discussions about how do we build a cryptocurrency where we admit that we can't always be secure and we can't always be perfect so we're planning for the future. But at the same time, let's put a lot of engineering practices that you'd see from high assurance spaces like the aerospace industry or the healthcare industry where if the software fails, people die. So as a result, they develop better techniques. So really the first problem was the engineering problem. We wanted to start from a different perspective and make a huge effort into trying to build things correctly. The other half of the engineering problem is how research is done. One of the biggest problems in our space, the cryptocurrency space, is that people just tend to release white papers. They're not peer reviewed. They're not written by domain experts. And so they make very bold claims. And these claims are only discovered to be false after the system has been released and has obtained some commercial value, much to the sadness of the people using the cryptocurrency. So our goal is to invert this a bit and say let's do things like we're proper academics. Let's actually write proper white papers with domain experts. Let's go through peer review. Let's implement them. Let's iterate. Let's listen to people. And so that's really the first component of the Cardano project is how do we be good engineers dealing with high assurance code? And at the same time, how do we be good researchers and do things the way that academics have done things for a very long time? That alone is probably a pretty good product, but there's more. So there's four other areas where we want to innovate. Briefly, the primary innovation is actually regulatory speaking. So one of the big issues in our space, we live in a false dichotomy. We either have Bitcoin or zero cash or any of these projects. And they basically say, we don't really care about the government. We don't really care about regulation at all. It's own ecosystem. Just do whatever you want to do. This is really not practical for the trillions of dollars that are locked in the conventional money service business industry. On the other hand, you have things like Corda and Ripple where they say, and they're great products, but they have this issue where they're completely beholden to the whim and the will of the government or the regulator. And they don't care too much about personal property or immutability or some of these core principles that we've seen from the Bitcoin space. So from a regulatory perspective, what we'd like to do is embrace the third option where we preserve some key things that have been learned from the Bitcoin space, namely privacy and property rights and irreversibility and free flow of transactions. But at the same time, we create infrastructure that allows regulated activities to occur in a way that governments are happy with, in a way that also respects that we live in a global economy and that there's going to be many different governments that are going to have to have a say in this. So Cardano wants to innovate there and we're doing that by separating value from computation. So the value layer of our system looks a lot like what Bitcoin looks like. And it has similar principles, it has a similar design goals and so forth. But then we have these notions of computation layers, these computation domains, and each and every one of them can be scoped for particular regulatory activities, such as gaming and gambling or general exchange and so forth. And you get all these great cryptographic guarantees, but at the same time you can embed in KYC and AML, embed in automated tax compliance and so forth. So the second goal of our project above and beyond just engineering is to try to be the third option for regulation, a completely new paradigm there. But there's other things, for example, interoperability as an example. And this is one of the bedrocks of the financial sector that we live at. The reality is we have many countries, we have many companies, we have many different philosophies about how to do things. And if everybody was free to just do their own things and we didn't care about standards and we didn't care about how things were going to talk to each other, then we would live in a paradigm where nothing worked. You would never be able to move money, for example, from America to Germany, because these would be different systems. So it's incredibly important to have good standards. The problem with cryptocurrencies is that Bitcoin, for example, is blind, deaf and dumb. It lives in its own world, lives its own ecosystem, and it's incapable of communicating with the rest of the world. And it's extremely painful and time consuming to try to find ways to make Bitcoin work with other systems. There's even very well funded companies in Silicon Valley that are attempting to do this, and it's a very slow meticulous process. So with Cardano, what we wanted to do was make it very easy for Cardano to talk to legacy financial systems as well as other cryptocurrencies for the purpose of interoperability. So for example, we have a really rich and robust scripting language called Plutus that we've developed and we've put a lot of resources into refining, which will allow people to write custom hookups for overlay protocols and other such things. We're doing a lot of research into sidechains, and we hope to support a much more intuitive native and secure version of sidechains than what's been previously proposed. And we also have another product called Dedalus, which is kind of like a universal wallet. And Dedalus is going to be an added layer of compatibility for our system where you can install plugins and install specialized software to allow Cardano, by extension, now to talk to other systems. So interoperability is our third problem. The fourth problem we'd want to solve with the project is sustainability. So all cryptocurrencies suffer from this, who is responsible for maintaining them issue? And this is a common problem with all protocols. So for example, if you're TCPIP or you're BitTorrent or you're Tor, or any of these great protocols that we've come to rely upon and love in our system, the issue there is that these systems require somebody to be a custodian, to maintain them, somebody to work with them. And as a consequence, you either live in a reality of you have to get a government or a corporation or a patron to come in, or you have to rely upon the hard work of volunteers who may not be able to always be there. And you cannot build a multi-billion dollar ecosystem when you have that level of uncertainty. So one of our core goals in the Cardano project, the fourth goal is to try to find ways of sustaining the resources so that five years, ten years, 15 years, 20 years into the future, there's somebody who's going to be there. There's going to be funding there to pay for ongoing development upgrades and maintenance. So we've actually innovated quite a bit. We wrote a very extensive paper for a treasury model for Cardano. And that's something that we're going to put into the protocol. The second part of sustainability comes from this notion of upgrades. So one of the biggest issues with cryptocurrencies, it's a double-edged sword. On one hand, cryptocurrencies are great because they're super hard to upgrade. That means you get certainty that people just can't come in and change everything instantly. On the other hand, they're super hard to upgrade. And as a consequence, when you find flaws, problems, or you want to do something to dramatically increase the utility of the system, it's a very painful process. And it's an uncertain process in many ways. Who, for example, is in charge of that? Is it the stakeholders who control the currency? Is it the developers? Are the exchanges going to be? Who's the key faction here that you go and talk to if you're Microsoft and you want to change something in the cryptocurrency? So another core piece of technology that Cardano is integrating is this notion of an update system, both for soft forks and hard forks. So basically, we've created a way to make it easier and more deliberate and meticulous to propose reasonable changes to the system. And if you go through that entire process, which is slow, deliberate and reasonable, at the other end, you get some certainty that that upgrade can get pushed through if there's community consensus. And you have a clear understanding of who the stakeholders are that are involved in that. So sustainability is both a money question as well as an upgrade question, and Cardano's innovating there. The final part of our project is the practicality component. You can build an amazing technology stack with just great stuff. You can have a great proof of stake algorithm. You can be provably secure. You can have amazing engineering. You can be interoperable as heck. You can have a beautiful GUI. But then the question is who's going to use it? Why are they going to use it? Why do they care? What does your currency do over standard X, Y and Z? So one of the things that we focused very heavily on and for the initial days of Cardano is how do we make this platform usable for problems that particular industries are facing, in this case, the gaming and gambling industry? This is an industry where no one's happy. The consumer's not happy because they have no idea if the house is cheating and a lot of the houses live for online gambling and jurisdictions that are less than desirable. Second, the government's not happy because they don't really have good fidelity of compliance and also there's a lot of issues behind tax collection of winnings and other such things. And so this is a persistent problem there. And third, the house itself is not happy. They have problems with payment processing. They have problems with bank relationships and they're always living in a gray area. So this is a great market that could be disrupted in a very cascading way. So what we're going to try to do with Cardano is say, well, we have this beautiful stack that's very interoperable and it has all these hooks to allow regulators to do things. Let's use gaming and gambling as our test bed there. And what that's going to give us is an ability to do things like automation of an email and KYC. It's going to allow us to automate taxes. It's going to allow us to build a wonderful, provably secure, and also provably fair gaming experience to the users. That's a practical problem that many people face. And if we can solve that problem, Cardano has a strong utility. But the great value in solving that problem is once you've solved it, you can reuse the very same solution for a general financial system for the developing world. Because you'll have an identity system. You'll have a universal wallet. You'll have the ability to issue multiple currencies. You'll have a lot of efficiencies that have been built into the system. Gaming requires low latency, for example. This is not something that blockchains normally do very well. So we're going to solve all of those problems in the process of solving that one problem. And it's an open ecosystem because it's a cryptocurrency meaning people can build things on top of that as well. So that's basically Cardano in a nutshell. It's five problems, things like engineering and interoperability and practicality and so forth. Our goal is to solve all those things, or as many as possible, and do it in a very iterative, systematic, rigorous, and academic way. China is a really interesting and unique market. It's an emerging economy. And at the same time, it's a superpower. And it is just filled with tremendous industry partnerships, tremendous researchers, and a strong appetite for cryptocurrencies. In fact, it's the largest cryptocurrency market by trading volume and by hash power in the entire world. So if you're a company in FinTech or you're a company in the cryptocurrency space, you have to do something in China. So we at IOHK, we really are two companies in one. We're a research company and we're an engineering company. And a lot of our engineering is abroad, particularly in Russia and Eastern Europe, as well as some in Japan and Argentina. But what we would love to do is build a coalition of university partnerships on the research side so that we can include China in that. We would love to reach out to Chinese researchers who are really interested in cryptography, mechanism design, distributed systems, and other fields that are relevant to our space, and bring them into this conversation. The industry here is quite well developed for the practical stuff in cryptocurrencies. But it's just getting started for the research side, which is really a shame. So one of the reasons we came to the Shanghai Winter School was to try to see what the appetite was in China for this and to recruit as many researchers as we could.