 Hello everyone. I'm Brian Bellendorf. I'm Executive Director of Hyperledger at the Linux Foundation. And we are halfway through our fifth anniversary panel series. It's amazing to believe Hyperledger. We've been around for about five years. We've had great conversations so far in the panel series about the early days of Hyperledger, what kind of led to the formation of the organization, and some of the accomplishments that have arrived since then. Last week we had an event actually on Asia-Pacific time zones focusing on our community there, and in particular on trade finance, which was really well attended and really interesting. Coming up next week we have a conversation on central bank digital currencies and stablecoins and the role that permission DLTs will play in that future. And then we'll wrap it up in the last week with two things, a panel on the next five years of Hyperledger, as well as a networking event on the 17th, which is our proper birthday. So please join us for all of these different things. You'll find more information about this on the Hyperledger website. There's a page specifically about this five-year series. In fact, there's a link there to free swag, t-shirts, and a few other things that you can pick up. You will have to pay for shipping. That's the one part we couldn't do for free, but please go there and pull down some swag as if we were there in person being able to shoot t-shirts out of t-shirt cannons to all of you, which I really wish we could, and perhaps we will do that for our sixth anniversary. Today we're going to have a fabulous panel on disruption, how enterprise DLT is really transforming some domains from climate, to healthcare, to logistics, to really tackling some big issues around trust and global trade. We have some of my favorite members in the community on the call here today, and perhaps the leading chronicler of the enterprise blockchain space and compiler of the Forbes Blockchain 50. Forbes contributor Michael Del Castillo to moderate this panel. So at this point, Michael, I'll pass the baton to you and take it away. Thank you so much and thank you everybody for joining. It's been great to get to know you over the past couple of days as we've had sort of preparation calls for this. I think a lot of what we're going to talk about will be how things have changed over the last five years, how the industry has matured and grown, and how what your customers and users are demanding has evolved. But I think one of the things that has changed most recently is we no longer kick these events off with the obligatory what is a blockchain definition. I remember in the early days we used to always have to talk about, well, what is a blockchain? What is distributed ledger technology? What is the difference between DLT and blockchain? But I think as a way to sort of give an homage to the past five years ago, we're going to start off with a quick definition of what is blockchain. And the reason why I want to start there is because we have two very interesting visual examples of what a blockchain is on our panel today. And so to sort of break the ice, I'd like to ask if Heather and Martin could please just very briefly show us what a blockchain is. And then we had a nice conversation earlier about what a blockchain is. And just for the sake of a historical homage, we'll talk about what is a blockchain. So Heather and Martin, why don't you show us your blockchains? All right, I'll go first and highlight my blockchain earrings for the camera, where you see interconnected blocks referencing a blockchain, a chain of blocks. That is my visual cue. Absolutely. That's a great one. And here's my other visual cues. So you can see that these are two blocks connected by a chain. The soft is made of wood. It grows. It's kind of the data. And here's a solid part that really connects that together. And Gijo and Dale, with those two visual representations of a blockchain, could you just give us a quick little overview? How do you describe what a blockchain is to your customers, your users, your investors, whatever the case might be? So to me, and I can go first, right? I mean, to me, blockchain is nothing but a trust protocol. It actually enables trust in a trustless environment where you don't need to trust any single party in the network. So it's very simple as that. And Dale, how do you describe it to your customers or users? I do it in five words. There's a challenge. We'll see what's here. Digital ledger, permanent, transparent, shared. Awesome. And Brian, what's the problem with the word blockchain? I thought you had a fascinating observation on some of the difficulties of the word blockchain. Well, first, I just want to make sure we remember to introduce all of ourselves so that everyone gets to know who all of us are. Okay. And no, I just, the conceptual model of blocking and being burdened by chains, it's as a marketing term. I mean, who's thought of it? But this is coming from the open source guy and open source itself is a problematic term. And maybe we just accept that all of the community terms that we deal with are problematic in some way or another. But in a way, I think blockchain has grown on us. When we feel like we need to put on a tie, we use the term enterprise DLT, enterprise ledger, distributed ledger, those sorts of things. But I do think blockchain is problematic, but it's kind of earned, it's kind of keeping away. So now that we've had our little icebreaker here, we'll go ahead and go around the room, the virtual room. Martin, if you could just tell us your name, your title, where you work, and where you are. Great. First, again, thank you, Michael. Thanks, Brian, and Hyperledger. It's a pleasure to be here. My name is Martin Weinstein. I'm calling in from Los Angeles, California. I am the founder and lead scientist of the Yale Open Innovation Lab program manager at the Digital Currency Initiative of the MIT Media Lab, which is my academic hat. I'm the founder and co-chair of the Hyperledger Climate Action Special Interest Group, and the founder and executive director of the Open Earth Foundation, which basically is the vehicle that we use to spin off all of our projects in the real world. And Dale? Hi, I'm Dale Christie. I'm a business fellow and blockchain strategist for FedEx. I bring you greetings from Memphis. Heather? Hello, everyone. I'm Heather Flannery. I'm the founder and chief executive officer of Consensus Health. I'm also the chair of the IEEE P2418.6 Standards Development Working Group for Blockchain and Healthcare and Life Sciences, the chair of the HIMS Blockchain Task Force, and the chair of the Healthcare Special Interest Group at the Enterprise of Theory and Reliance. And Gijo? Hi, good morning, everyone. I'm Gijo Joseph. I work for Chania. I'm the vice president for Blockchain Services. Chania is a company, services company based out of North Carolina and the U.S., and I live out of a small city called Cochin in the Southern India. So Gijo gets the prize for the latest meeting time. Now that we've kind of got to know a little bit about who's here with us, I want to get started with why. Why are you here? Why Hyperledger? Why a non-profit public organization like Hyperledger? In our warm-up calls for this meeting, one of the things that really stood out to me was sort of some of the limitations that you guys face, maybe at the companies that you work for, maybe at the companies you work with, but the limitations of for-profit private companies. And why is it, what do you get out of joining, out of working with a public non-profit entity? What's the difference there for you guys? I can go first. I mean, there's three things to me that resonate. One is the institution, the strong institution behind it with Linux Foundation to be able to carry out important projects, particularly in the governance process. The other project is of course the community. I mean, we had our Hyperledger forum and it was vibrant to see people working together, and it's that really collaboration that makes it possible. The other one obviously is the underlying tech, but the three together are when one has to build on an open digital infrastructure that business sets on top of common standards, common protocols, common code. It's really the non-profit that I think is best positioned to be able to be that neutral partner when there's many different conflicting multi-stakeholder motivations. Heather, it's unusual for technology to be associated with the non-profit world. I feel we talk about these sexy, high-tech, fancy, billion-dollar, trillion-dollar companies in the technology space. What are the limits that you see with the for-profit space and what brings you and Consensus Health and other similar organizations to a non-profit world? Yeah, absolutely. I think there's a critical value alignment and acknowledgement of the intrinsic limitations of what a private for-profit can accomplish in an incredibly interconnected, complex, adaptive system that has as powerful and important stakeholders, humanity as individuals, governments, academia, and all of private industry. The notion that any one corporation could introduce a product or service that could turn enough levers and dials to write all of the the distorted incentives and so on is simply unrealistic. There's many important ways that we need to collectivize our thinking and our action. Standards is one of those ways. Burgeoning, vibrant, global, open-source communities is another one of those ways. Those have models for convergence as well. I think that it's critical in my industry from a healthcare and life sciences perspective as well because for any one private for-profit company's solution to actually reach adoption and scale, it actually has to prevent vendor lock-in in parallel because our industry will reject a solution that would repeat the kind of pain that they've experienced with vendor lock-in in previous paradigm shifts of technology. So it's vital that we have, we have, we create flexibility and choice and mobility even as we defend our proprietary value propositions. Dijo and Dale, you work for very definitely for-profit companies here and there's nothing wrong with that. And your customers are all, I would imagine in large part for-profit. Talk to us a little bit about what brings you to a non-profit organization. What do you get out of working with an open community as opposed to sort of the stuff that happens behind closed doors at a for-profit company? So I can go first. If you look at the evolution of the blockchain platforms, I mean we started with the public blockchains and then when we are looking at an enterprise level, so this hyperledger came at the beginning. And so we see more brains coming to quicker convergence so that technology actually get adopted very quickly. But at the same time, some big names like Martin said, some big names are standing behind it to support that. That's exactly the combinations these days and people looking at especially in blockchain. It's not like one company is working, it's a technology. I mean the blockchain is for an ecosystem. There are, the blockchain is for a, if you look at multiple companies are working together scenario. So in such scenarios, we find that the open source kind of an environment where good companies are backing up a solution works very well. Dale? Yeah, I think it's helpful to share a little bit of our journey from that point of view. Again, by comparison to the rest of the panel, I'm on the business and strategy side. And so my audience typically is not the technician, right? It's not on the technical side and I have to figure out a way to go down the other path of that. So between that and the logistics environment and all that, here's how we got to that point. We certainly didn't come to that conclusion initially and then back in from there in our own journey. As all of us have talked about blockchain to media and to panels and interviews and conferences back when we were all still traveling and all those kinds of things, what we all saw. So if you go back, you kind of did the five-year thing, I've actually got on conference material, I kind of go back, here's the last five years in 60 seconds, right? Hey, it's Bitcoin, we're all going to get rich. Hey, we're going to treat it like the internet. Hey, hey, hey, what's blockchain and all the rest of those kinds of things. Our journey has kind of followed that same pattern, which is we, most people early on, I think we're treating blockchain like the internet, which is we can get a few smart folks, we can get together, we can sign non-disclosures, we can lock people in a room and kind of slide pizza under the door until they come out with something. And then traditionally in that case, FedEx would slap a logo on it and put it out into the world, right? And as a proprietary product. Well, that logic may work for five or 10 or 50 or 100 or maybe even a thousand entities, but the friction, the complexities of that relationship won't scale, we don't believe in global commerce. So at global commerce level, it's a hundred thousand or multiple hundreds of thousands of entities down to a bicycle delivery company. And so the fork in the road from our point of view in our journey was, does that scale? Yes or no? We believe no. We believe we hit a wall at that point from a global commerce point of view. On the contrary, if you could hang an open source license on the threshold of this now virtual global door, you know, Apache or MIT or something and say, are you okay? Could you use that? And if the answer is yes, come on in, we believe it just scaled globally. So that's a non-technical way of what Heather and others have just described. But we don't, it's not an altruistic thing from our point of view. We're in business to be in business, certainly. That's not the point. The point is, we don't think it will scale without that. We think there's going to be an open foundational layer and then there will be all kinds of proprietary things on top, much like my Android phone or whatever the case may be. So it wasn't an altruistic thing. It was a long journey that led us to some conclusions. And from that, I'm incredibly proud. Our CIO, Rob Carter, who's been in the position for many, many years, came out a year and a half ago at the Blockchain Revolution Global Conference and calmly said, we actually think in this case, open is the answer. And for blockchain to be transformative, it has to be bigger than FedEx. You mentioned two interesting examples of how things have changed over the last five years. One can be summed up in one word, which is scale. Five years ago, we were talking about proofs of concept and prototypes and pilots. And to a large degree, we still are, let's be honest. But increasingly, we're talking about live implementations that are looking at problems associated with scale. The second thing you mentioned that I think is really interesting is that your CIO knows what a blockchain is and has an informed perspective. Five years ago, the C-suite was not paying attention. The C-suite at big companies was not paying attention. Blockchain was happening in basements, in skunkworks, hidden off in the dark corners of enterprises that people didn't want to talk about. That's changed. And it's changed rapidly in the last two or three years, I think. I'd love to open it up and just kind of hear an exchange of ideas between the panelists of what you've seen that most has changed since you've gotten involved. It could be from technical issues that you're overcoming to demands of your users, your audience, regulatory issues. What is the single biggest difference between blockchain now and blockchain five years ago? Could I jump in on that one, Michael? Yeah. So just to kick it off, the thing that immediately comes to mind for me is that if we think about the conversations we were having in blockchain, say 2015, 16, even into 17, the whole focus of the discussion was on blockchain as a discrete technology and digging into all the intricacies of what it was and wasn't and needed to be and so on. The biggest single change that I'm observing right now is that it's entirely about convergence at this point. It's blockchain's convergence with a number of other equally transformative powerful emerging technologies and the whole discussion has a wider and deeper, wider aperture and more depth up and down a whole stack, not only at a trust protocol layer. And I can follow on that. There's different things I can say, but I often mention that blockchain has helped people think in a different way and so we're now able to talk about the system, which is the invisible part that connects us all. And it depends on which system we talk about. And so I bump myself with high level folks at United Nations, World Bank, that understand the importance of developing infrastructure for managing a global system and that they may not know the details, but they're like, blockchain has to be part of some of that infrastructure. And so it makes it very easy to be able to talk about in those terms. And it also on thinking about that systems level is the power of peer to peer, which I think five or 10 years ago was something seen very much as a grassroots and not as something where that can power business. And I think that has changed a lot. Martin, could you expand just a little bit more on what you mean by change the way that people think? Because I think that's just really crucial. How is a distributed system requiring people to change the way they attack problem solving? Yeah, I think it's probably similar to what happened in the internet. I think that Brian probably can speak a lot more to it. There's that people who are having a really hard time explaining what the internet was because it's somehow invisible, but it's a vector that connects things. And when we talk about systems, it's not the total is more than some of the parts. So you need to be able to explain what connects those discrete objects. And so I think that it helps people visualize that and that that itself requires an infrastructure requires the trust between those parts. And so I think it also helps with business model ideas. The internet produced in the academic world a whole shift in we didn't even talk about business models before the internet. But eventually we had to explain how do you sell something that's free? And so it really helps people start thinking about new business models. And we've seen I mean the blockchain has powered so much entrepreneurship in the last five years. A lot of it fails, but that's normal. Yeah, Michael, if I just add to add two centers now, I see a three way transition happening, right? I mean, when I joined early days, blockchain was just Bitcoin, right? Now people will say, oh, that just Bitcoin, right? I mean, second, as a services company, the second thing transition, we see that now people come to us, tell us, I need a blockchain, right? Now they just come back and say, I want to put blockchain in my solution, right? I mean, they never used to say what solution it is. But from there, in the last one year, what you've got C is like a clear understanding of business value of blockchain is coming up to people. As an example, nowadays, people don't come to us. I need a blockchain, but they come up with more innovative ways of doing new business. It could be as an example, real estate as a tokenization. And people now coming with those kinds of business cases to us. So we see an understanding level of people has increased, especially because blockchain requires both technology as well as business, and there's a good understanding of business is happening now. Michael, can I weigh in? So back to Martin's points, I've spent many years in process improvement and in quality and in strategy. My brain connects dots. I'm not on the technical side. I'm on the business and strategy side, but my brain connects dots. And most businesses are simply just a series of processes. And one of the graphics, one of the visuals that I use, I've just pulled off the internet, which is a bunch of people handing sandbags to each other in a flood scenario, right? So if we envision that you've got multiple people, I hand it to you, you hand it to Heather, blah, blah, et cetera, et cetera. But that's a business process. That's an analogy, a metaphor for a business process, basically. So part of the discussion around blockchain that he's referring to where we are now thinking differently is that certainly we can use blockchain as a process improvement involvement, right? So if there are this many steps in that process, and if I eliminate one of those steps, that's a huge percentage improvement. So I think process improvement is we're starting to think in the last couple of years about process improvement, but that would be no different than digitizing a document into a PDF, right? It is a step, but let's not limit ourselves into what we can think about. However, if peer-to-peer technology, if you need a ride and I've got a car, then maybe a ride sharing app or something like that is a better mousetrap than the original currently models. But it's still a middleman that sits between supply and demand. And blockchain allows us to completely rethink that. That's breakthrough thinking, which is if you need a ride and I've got a car, comma, and we can find each other in a trusted environment like blockchain, that's a different world. And by the way, I would go one step further, which is I don't, you know, people ask all of us all these questions all the time. Well, what happened? Well, what if blockchain just doesn't come about? What if it's just all hypes? I would argue that no matter where it goes from here, it has already changed the world. It has already changed the way we are able to think of issues and contemplate and consider and freeze us up to go, wait a second, if you can do that, then why not this and et cetera, et cetera. Love it. Brian, did you have anything you wanted to chime in with? Yeah, I think, you know, the parallels to kind of earlier days, and earlier days specifically of open source software and some degree the internet kind of ring for me. It used to be that we'd have to make the case for why a piece of open source software could be dependent upon commercially by collections of organizations just by itself. And then an even higher challenge was convincing them that there was value to them and actually feeding whatever bug fixes and contributions and such back into a pool. Now that's become a much easier, more commonplace kind of thing. People understand, companies understand why to do that. But the whole Web 2.0 cycle was about companies saying we want to be platform providers, we want to be the Uber of this or the Airbnb of that, getting VC funding to say, hey, we want to be this central infrastructure. And DLT technology, blockchain technology kind of says you don't have to do that. You can take a collection of organizations with a common interest in sharing information and conducting transactions. And you might need a lightweight governance kind of organization to help facilitate that, but no one has to own the center of that and play God in the center of that ecosystem. And that's a revelation. That's still something that a lot of companies are not getting, but I'd say a big difference between now and five years ago is that no longer feels like an alien concept or an impossibly idealistic concept. Now that people can map that to, oh, no, there's consortia in all of these different industries who'd been doing standards and such who now can be a governance organization or perhaps new kinds of organizations around these blockchain activities. And that's more accepted and normal than this pie in the sky kind of idea from five years ago. I remember that it was an easy way to talk about it that working together could create efficiencies that would save money. But people weren't, you know, a lot of these big businesses are more in the business of making money than they are in saving money. And it was kind of a difficult sell to some organizations about, you know, is saving money by working with my competitors worth all of the effort. And I like something that Dale said about the sandbag metaphor there, because the sandbag metaphor paints a picture of people who are not thinking about long term benefits. They're not thinking about sort of strategic impact of working with their neighbors. They're building a dang wall to keep a flood back, right? And we recently had a real world example of a flood in the form of COVID-19. And I think a lot of these questions about whether or not fixing these inefficiencies in the system was worth all of the effort were laid bare by COVID-19. And all of a sudden, you were seeing people rushing with their sandbags to try and shore up the walls of the global supply chain and many, many other areas. I'd like to open it up to the whole group to ask if you could shed a little bit of light on both the positive ways and maybe some of the negative ways that COVID-19 has changed the way that your organization, your customers, or you personally are dealing with blockchain. I'll jump in here. I'd like to react to that by first building on something that Dale was commenting on. And I would summarize it by two categories of value creation. One, optimization, and a second transformation. And we can see opportunities in COVID-19 for optimization. And we have new transformative possibilities that are also being created. I think that one thing that hasn't been mentioned yet is that there is an emerging discipline that is made possible by this technology. And I'll name it and call it applied behavioral economics, which gives us the first collective human infrastructure by which we could hypothesize about some set of incentives in a complex system. We could implement a model and then iteratively adapt and optimize to what we're actually seeing in the complex system. That's an optimization case that has extraordinary potential. And we talk so much about distorted incentives as being the reasons why the healthcare and life sciences industry and its data silos are so distorted and polarizing in the way that they engage one another. Longer term, we have the potential to use AI plus blockchain in the classic scenario of optimization in the model of modifying incentives and iterating quickly based on being able to facilitate all of that. There's never been that capability in all of human history that this is completely new. So bring that back really specifically to what's going on as a result of COVID. Yeah. So with COVID, we've got, let's say the first half of the COVID-19 problem space is oriented around supply chain, around PPE, around the brittleness in those supply chains and the inability to have visibility and transparency to real-world information, real-world evidence immediately. Those were problem spaces that we would have been able to make a massive impact on the pandemic if our whole blockchain world and healthcare had been able to move forward faster. Frankly, we missed the deadline in terms of being able to realize that value in real time at the beginning of the pandemic. And it will, however, affect us on taking future epidemics and preventing them from turning into pandemics. I'm confident of that. Is there a project in Consensus Health that you'd like to highlight that is currently in development that in future pandemics might have some sort of an impact? I'll speak to that at a high level in terms of the back half of the problem space of the pandemic. And that includes vaccination, immunity, therapeutics, all the way to the data management problem of test data management, vaccination data management, immunity status, data management. And ultimately, that brings you back to something that I believe in very strongly as a blockchain-enabled part of our future state, which is a person-centered infrastructure with sovereignty, agency, dignity, privacy that is made available to humanity generally. And the power for that in enabling things like everything from clinical trials matching to precision medicine to the coordination of care across organizational boundaries and beyond. Ultimately, it's not blockchain at the center. It's the human being at the center and a new class of infrastructure that facilitates that human being being able to aggregate and curate and ethically monetize that information about themselves that is constantly expanding. So I'll pause there, but that transformation of the person in the center and their empowerment and their freedom and their privacy and their agency is at the heart of a huge constellation of healthcare and life sciences relevant use cases. And I'm happy to continue, Michael, on at least my reaction to COVID. Like Heather, in some sense, my work focuses on the Earth system. That's in my centers. Like, let's not destroy this. Climate's a key part of that. And I think there's been three aspects to how COVID affected our work on climate. The first one's quite straightforward. At the beginning of the year, Australia was on fire. Climate was the important news of the year. That was where we needed to focus on. And then after that, with COVID, it was very hard to mobilize capital, attention, resources to climate space. I think things are changing a little bit more. But that was one of the things that was quite obvious. The second one on the positive side in the sense that we now realize that we are a highly globalized civilization, but we're definitely not orchestrated and organized. And unless we have that open digital infrastructure to help us work together, where the total is more than some of the parts where we can do a lot of sense making, we're just not going to address these macro challenges. And therefore, we might peril as a civilization. So we now have to build infrastructure to be able to cope with these large-scale impacts. And I think COVID brings that example straight up in our faces that climate has a harder time, because climate has a lot more latency. There's an impact, and it takes a while, and COVID is very strong. And then I think the last thing I want to say is we now have an imperative, not just of what happens with COVID, but what happens afterwards, which is the economic impact that it has, is we have to create jobs. We have to create green jobs, tackle climate and job creation at the same time. Of course, climate change and the transformation of our entire energy infrastructure is the most interesting new deal we can have. We have to rebuild our infrastructure, but we also have to rebuild our digital infrastructure. There's a lot of remote green-friendly jobs. And so that's an important horizon ahead in fusing both challenges. Hi, Michael. Just to reflect from Chania, so we have a solution called trustier supplier in the procurement space. So this is a digital identity of a supplier that can be cross-utilized across multiple buyers. So we had the solution running in the March when this COVID hit United States. So the supply chain is one, typically when pandemic such thing happened, the supply chain is one gets hit first. So we found hospitals are struggling to procure quality and essential PPE equipment, and mostly the availability was uncertain, and we had quality in questionable and the trust on suppliers as they rode. And like Heather said, since we had available with us, we and IBM immediately joined together to say that how do we improve the trust in this PPE procurement? So we had the trust of the suppliers in the trustier supplier solution and availability and inventory available in IBM Sterling solution. So we jointly leveraged these two, put together a rapid supplier connect and introduced in the market, and within six weeks, more than 500 buyers and suppliers started buying that. I mean, using this platform. So which gave us the confidence that few things one, the trust is the paramount important factor when such pandemic happens. You need to have system and trust does not come not from the blockchain. You need how the ecosystem created. So we had companies like Dunn and Brotsy. We have companies like Thomson Royties. We have other companies like CDACs, rapid rating. They're all joined this ecosystem to create that end to end trust. And that's from the product solution on the solution side, something we found is code has accelerated digitization. We see that, you know, all levels from enterprises to government. And we see that the the people in the past looked as an example, voting using blockchain. They were very hesitant. Now they started looking at that. We have seen people looking at vaccine, you know, track, even there's a case came to us saying that, like, you know, track the the food delivery, you know, how much traffic it has increased, you know, put a blockchain solution so that they wanted trust in the system, right. So opening the borders was another example, like came to us, like, you know, when people crossing the border, they wanted to show a trusted certificate of COVID clearance, right. So so we see an increasing adoption digitization and more focus on on blockchain with COVID. That's interesting that you mentioned an increase in interest in voting applications as a result of a pandemic. Could you connect those dots a little bit more concretely? How how did the pandemic contribute to an increased interest in voting? Because people are we don't want people to travel during this pandemic, right. We don't want people to come and stand in the line. At the same time, especially remote traveling in this very specific case, which came to us was they don't want people still voting from the phones, but they could go to like, you know, small, small, many different location, even outside their state. An example is one state is voting, you know, I don't need to go back to that state. I can vote from a different state from a different location, but still a predefined polling booth. But that booth will be like, you know, you can how much that booth will be in an outside the jurisdiction jurisdiction area. Any other variables there, maybe in the United States voting system that you want to talk about? No, no, no, no, not now. This is not the platform. Can I jump in on that? Please do. Yeah, I want to go back to the to the the original question here was around COVID and some of the changes and things like that. As I said earlier, my brain connects dots. So we connect into the fork in the road, which we don't think global commerce scales, which led us to open, which open is inevitable, right, which led us to the CIO, all those kinds of things. But that concept, which is the longer we focus on individual profits and proprietary solutions around here, I think we think it actually slows down the adoption of blockchain. So it's not altruistic. It's a this is the way to go. And if we the quicker we can all work together to do that, we think that accelerates all kinds of things that led me to a word I've been using for a couple of years, which is co-operative. And co-operative initially, you know, we had to have conversations with the legal team. Wait a second. That's an antitrust discussion. No, it's not. There's hard, fast lines with antitrust. We're not going to get anywhere close to that. That is not the point here. It's simply Michael and Dale, Heather and Dale and others finding out it's not about where we compete. It's about where we can agree. And that's a big space, right? We could all talk about safety. We could all talk about a number of things from that point of view. One of the examples that I mentioned in our previous call is that we are part of an association called the Global Express Association that only has three members, FedEx, UPS and DHL. Almost nobody knows that. However, we all agree. Where can we agree? We are certainly competitors, but where can we agree? We can agree that reducing friction across borders, we win, our customers win, and global trade also wins. And so a tangible example of that is that last year, a year ago, we worked on a position paper together, the three of us, for blockchain and emerging technologies that we provided to World Customs Organization and later to World Trade Organization. So that's a tangible example where it's not where we compete, it's where we can agree. So where can we agree? That's an example of that. However, now we pivot into the virus, right? So a year ago, you and I could have been arguing across the back fence in Long Island or whatever the case may be about our favorite sports teams or about something else that may have seemed important at the time, but in the big scope of things, we very quickly found out a few months later was not at all important. So co-opetition or this shared purpose, where is a shared purpose? And now we've been talking about that. Now we all dropped everything and we are no longer arguing about the Celtics or the this or the whatever the example might be. Now we're all working together. We're instantly dropping everything to pick up that sandbag or in this case, to work through finding PPE, legitimate and authentic PPE, by the way, that brings the blockchain back into that or ventilators or many, many, many other things. And so while I've been using co-opetition as a blockchain reference primarily, it is absolutely not limited to blockchain. It is a broad cultural thing. And you could argue that it's an optimization. Where else could a company like FedEx or ABC or anybody else be more efficient? Many of them are fairly mature, but by working together, again, as I think Martin said earlier, you know, the total is greater than some of the parts, we can work together and find something that elevates all of us to the next level. We're seeing that with the front row seat right now from COVID in terms of health and PPE and other very important types of things and soon to be vaccines. But it's a broader concept. Again, as I would say, blockchain is a technology discussion, but it's not only a technology discussion. And a lot of what we've been talking about right now is really cultural. It's not really the technology. It's not in the R&D department. It's the broad focus of who are we as good corporate citizens and what else can we do by working together? And we're seeing that play itself out real time in the COVID. So I want to take that and address a question directly to Brian. I actually, on a personal note, I don't agree to moderate many events at all that are run by organizations that I write about. I just think I need to make sure that I keep that separation and I don't want the appearance of endorsement. And me participating in this is by no means an endorsement of hyper ledger. But one of the things that, gives hyper ledger an exception to a degree with me is that it's nonprofit and that it exists by its very nature to get competitors to work together. And talking, taking a cue from Dale, by the way, Dale, you're giving me a lot of good transitions. I appreciate that. Taking a cue from Dale on working with competitors and that this isn't altruistic. You must have one of the broadest perspectives of what competitors working together looks like in the blockchain world. And you've been conducting that complicated interaction between competitors for five years. Have you seen, let me rephrase that, what have you seen that has changed with that broad perspective? Your membership has been over 200. I'm not sure where it's at right now. Many of those represent direct competitors. What's changed over the last five years as these competitors are learning to work together or maybe not work together? That's a really good question. And I do sometimes refer to what I do and other peers of mine at the Linux Foundation who are leading these other projects as nerd diplomats. Because at one level it is about helping the developers figure out how to work together, which has its own challenges. As a developer, when you've got a clear concept of what you want to build, you sometimes don't want to deal with the noise of having to take a lot of people's other voices into account or have to read up on what somebody's already built. So sometimes you end up building somebody that already is built. But there are ways to deal with that. And it's about driving common purpose amongst the developers. And actually the good developers don't want to reinvent the wheels. They want to build upon what other people have done. So finding them and powering them, giving them courage to kind of participate publicly, which in 2020 participating publicly in an open source project is a little more fraught than it was when I got started in 1995. The risks of being wrong and having somebody see that you were wrong feels a lot more real than back when it was just a couple, you know, it felt like a couple thousand of us on the internet. And then there's a second table, sorry. What are the benefits of being right? Well, and they're huge, right? Because, you know, that forms essentially your alternative CV, right? You know, people these days, if you're a developer, your GitHub history is far more important than your LinkedIn profile. So that's one level of it. And that can help, certainly. And especially if you're shown as a developer to be positive in your communications and collaborating with other people, that reflects well on your employment prospects. So all those cases can be made, but it's also really when you've got someone very passionate about how to build a thing, how do you get them to share that passion and find room in that passion for other people, especially ones that are not sitting close to or don't work with at the same company. But that's both a science and an art. And then the second tier is really getting the companies back to your original question to find common cause and work together. And, you know, blockchain does that kind of inherently, right? Most use cases do involve these multi-party kinds of processes, taking middlemen out of the equation for sure, but also kind of standardizing and routinizing a lot of things that today have resisted digitalization because of the resistance and trust, right? So we have members in hyperledger that represent healthcare companies and banks and end user organizations. And we've found that bringing them in and having them tell stories and having them meet each other and meet with the technology companies in a more neutral field is a way to pierce through some of these competitive concerns, so much so that, you know, with hyperledger, we focus very much on the software and lift it up to everyone else to build their own networks and go and and I kind of figure out how to put these pieces together around specific use cases. But we're starting to see a call to participate as kind of a governance authority on some of these networks in the long term. We put up a page to talk about this and how, you know, modeling not just after how the Linux Foundation has built these communities, but also how organizations like ICANN or the CA browser form, which manages the TLS route infrastructure are practicing this kind of what's the smallest thing we can all agree upon so we can build a bigger network together. And we think that's pretty important as to be connective to this issue in many of these industries. So, you know what, Michael, I just have to interrupt and say, Brian, if you were a political leader on Capitol Hill driving positive bipartisan policy change, you would be so amazingly effective. Your leadership style in those those kinds of polarizing discussions, I'm just saying you may should, you know, reconsider. I worked in DC for two years and I don't think I'd last a week in the current but I appreciate the vote of confidence. Thank you. Because it does require good faith. I want to nominate Brian for our political position. I want to get to some questions that have been submitted by our listeners, our audience. So, I'm going to interrupt there. And, you know, we did talk a bit about the impact of COVID-19 and, you know, I think one of the things that you all could agree on if you read between the lines is that it reminded us that we live in a borderless world and that the pandemics are not controlled by borders. And in fact, they remind us that the borders are created by us. You know, one of our audience members, Jason, asks, we've seen some cool open technologies that offer interoperability for permissioned ecosystems. Do you see this as the next big step in order to share data in most company solutions you see built on hyperledger today? This question of interoperability I think is really at the core of some of the things that COVID reminded us. Where do you see the future of interoperability? I, going back to the COVID situation and obviously in my case, Earth and climate, the challenges are actually attractors to interoperability solutions. So they're actually helping drive them more than anything else. So they're, in some sense, the macro challenges, let's say the borderless challenges are pushing us to drive the interoperability solutions. That's one thing that I think is encouraging in some sense. And the climate space, of course, every carbon or CO2 molecule that we pump out, it doesn't derive from a border. It all ends up in the atmosphere. It's a single jurisdiction that we all share. So how do we manage that? And at the same time, we have companies that have, obviously, one have their permission registries and permission accounting and the inventories at the national level and the UNFCCC level. So as soon as we start looking at this in the climate space, without interoperability, we're going to have, keep track of different atmospheres, but not a single one. And so I'm hoping that these wicked problems that we're facing, and obviously this is my day-to-day, actually helps the technological folks working on those interoperability solutions actually have a shared purpose. If we don't derive them, we can't address these macro problems because we are all stakeholders of addressing COVID, addressing climate. Thank you, Martin. So Jerry asks, doesn't blockchain, doesn't blockchain enabling the data make it more difficult, maybe impossible to ensure privacy? Well, that's just bait for me. So I'm going to address it to you directly. I thought you would. Absolutely. This is where another family of emerging technologies that I'll refer to as privacy in depth that's converging with blockchain is on that critical path. Blockchain as a discrete technology, independent of other technologies, you're absolutely correct, Jerry. But when it's converged with zero-knowledge cryptography and also hardware-based confidential computing modalities, such as represented by the Confidential Computing Consortium, also under Linux Foundation, those combinatorial processes where the data itself is in tightly coupled off-chain storage and compute infrastructures that are also part of a new infrastructure layer, I'm not necessarily talking about in enterprise systems. And then one other quick point is, with respect to interoperability, I think it's important as we're conceptualizing private blockchain networks to not build great big giant new silos. And that there is a role, a critical role for neutral public infrastructures in the form of public blockchains. It's not a competition between private versus public. There are certain capabilities and discoverability that is critical and possible with a neutral public blockchain, a permissionless blockchain that can allow discoverability and onboarding of private networks that could be conceived of as sidechains. Those private networks also have to have hierarchical relationships. And regardless of the protocol and interoperability of the protocols themselves, that way of conceptualizing how those networks need to work and be able to roll up to something neutral and public is a critical mental model, I think. Great answer. Great question, Jerry. If you want to do any more research on this, you're looking for zero knowledge proofs. Do a Google search for zero knowledge proofs and look into that. It's really counterintuitive. But I think to Heather's point, there are some technical breakthroughs and honestly, some mathematical breakthroughs that might go far beyond blockchain and might not be fully appreciated for decades that are resulting from this industry, and particularly from that space. So do your research there, Jerry. Great question. Moving on, Patrick asks, I love this because I love the idea of audiences getting involved and of readers getting involved. So what policies can local citizens start advocating for to their local municipal governments to ensure effective implementation of these new and emerging business models? To reiterate, what policies can local citizens start advocating for for this emerging business model? Dale, go for it. Yeah, it's a great question. And as I said, the process improvement and the connect the dots thing helps me do two things. One is drill down into the depths of that question. But basically, one of the things that I've learned and is I can't ignore at this point is the luxury that I have to work for a company that goes to 220 countries and territories. So essentially, our default position from blockchain and many other things is essentially the International Space Station. And from that level, there's no FedEx. There's no industry. There's no borders. So data knows no borders, right, from that point of view. So it gets to the broad concept, the broad point of this question. But yet, you know, how do you address it locally? I think the answer is both. I've been involved with multiple states in the US that are trying to solve for that Tennessee had an effort. We started a couple of years ago working through that to try to understand how do you get some combination of academia, big business and government to work together? Again, where can we agree that co repetition piece kind of a thing, where can we agree and that gets you to economic development, it gets you to jobs, which gets you to the academia piece, what classes are we providing, what skills are we providing, etc, etc. Also worked earlier this year with South Carolina, there's a number of people in the US that are all trying to solve this from that point of view. And one of the challenges is we don't really still have a single definition at the US government level, right? We're working with US Customs, Department of Homeland Security, FDA, there's a number of people, but even at that level, we haven't solved it yet. So there's there's a lot of movement going there locally. I think one of our challenges for this group in this audience is just defining blockchain, right? We all had different definitions of blockchain. But locally, it's even a wider spread probably in terms of what is it and how do we do that? So I would identify people, whether that's a local congressperson or whatever that may be, to bring that up to get those things up. If you take a look at the 50 states, there's a number of initiatives that are working their way through legislation right now that are either already there for Wyoming and many other states or are coming up to there. So it's a slow bill. It's hard to build, but it's going to be critical for us to move this thing forward, not only locally, but at a state level and also at a US government level. So to wrap things up here, I wanted to end with a question by a student. And the reason why I wanted to end with that is just to give a quick little story. I know the moderator is not supposed to talk, but I've got just an anecdote here I want to share. One of my good friends is a developer who can more or less estimate when you started learning to write code based on how elegant the code is. People who start learning to code when their children tend to write much more elegant, simple solutions. And those who learn to write code when they're older, it's a little less intuitive and there's occasionally longer, less elegant solutions. I've always been excited at the idea of seeing what coders do who were born into a blockchain world. To a degree, us adults, we're all rushing to learn this with quasi-hardwired brains and even the most open minded of us are still learning a second language. Blockchain natives are going to attack these problems completely differently than us. And so to end things with a student question, Mohit is a third year undergraduate student and Mohit asks, what are the differences between the different blockchains and how should I learn about them? Should I start with the developer course first or go elsewhere? Brian? Sorry, I had to unmute. All the great developers that I know have been largely self-taught. Even if they took classes in college, even if they had some formal training, they approached from a linguistics point of view or even an artistic point of view. But a lot of them were the ones who approached the problem as an end user, not as somebody being paid to solve a problem. And so I think what we'll see is these blockchain use cases driving different perspectives on the developers and the people climbing that learning curve. And I can't wait to see what the results of that are. I mean, we being a services company, we get a lot of developers out there. We are hiring all the time. So I completely agree with Brian. You don't start with the blockchain. You get your fundamentals right. So the blockchain is just like another platform you're learning. But if you have the fundamentals right, it's very easy for learn something new. And we hire people with the good fundamentals. We don't specifically look for blockchain. Dale, any closing thoughts on the future of blockchain and students learning? Oh, I'm incredibly excited. I'm incredibly optimistic about it. Again, I would tell you the world is these business processes. You don't have to, whether you're a developer or a business student, whatever the case may be. If you can understand those processes, trust me, I agree with the creative discussions that Brian and others just had. You'll figure this out. You're going to find a way to do it better, more efficiently, using blockchain and other emerging technologies. And I can't wait to see how you do that. So what are you waiting for? Let's go. Heather, no pressure, but would you like to take a stab at closing words? Oh my goodness. I would say that for young people considering moving into STEM fields generally, I loved what you had to say, Michael, talking about elegance. And think of technology also as poetry and discover the simplest and most expedient means to solve problems that matter most. And if you focus on those big audacious goals and force yourself to think differently, you'll be able to do extraordinary things. So Mohit, maybe to sum it all up, don't start with the blockchain, but start with what you're most passionate about. And pursue that. And if it takes you across blockchain, so be it. Thank you all so much for taking the time to join us. This was an awesome talk. A special thanks to Gijo for joining us at midnight. I hope you can online and get some sleep tonight. And looking forward to seeing what you all do over the next five years. You all have my email address. I expect inside scoops on all your big projects. And I look forward to learning what happens next. Thanks, everyone.