 Today is a great day here in Ethiopia. Today we are bringing blockchain to Africa here in Ethiopia. Today we are proving the beauty of technology and that technology doesn't have boundaries. At a time as early as this in the evolution of blockchain, when people just starting to hear this word blockchain itself, the Ministry of Science and Technology of Ethiopia used its chance to grab the first ever opportunity to go to grab the technology and the people around this beautiful technology. For this out it would be very unfair if I'm not tanking Dr. Lenny with us today who has been instrumental to introducing John to me and also to let us know the IOHK and the initiative IOHK is bringing to Ethiopia. My next tank also goes to Mr. Charles and the whole IOHK team for being willing to give us this chance of putting Ethiopia on the blockchain geospatial map. For many people around the world blockchain is hard in a connection with Bitcoin but as one expert once said blockchain is operating system while Bitcoin is one of the applications. So today we are not talking about specific application but rather we talk about the operating system itself. Ethiopia is a land of origins and blockchain is the technology of the origins. Coffee originated in Ethiopia, today we unite blockchain and coffee. Blockchain is a technological platform for storing and sharing information across a network of users in an open virtual space. The technology provides openness, transparency and undisputable data history from the source to destination. For example, for a given food item or agricultural product blockchain provides genetic sample from the food product to positively identify its species, country and locality of origin, exposures to toxins and unregulated medication, pesticides or insect sites and other key markers. The samples can be cross-checked with a recurve to ensure that the product is authentic and comes from the land of origin. Blockchain represents technologies that efficiently manage supply chain, data across complex network from farmers to distributors, processors, retailers, regulators and consumers. So blockchain is not meant only for Bitcoin but also for agricultural products like coffee. Blockchain provides a distributed and shared public digital ledger that provides a neutral open platform without need of third-party authorized transactions. But rather set of rules all participants, both users and the operators of the system must abide by. It follows users, it allows users to look at all transactions simultaneously and in real time, making food and agricultural products authentic and traceable and secure. Researchers show that even in some developed countries 30 to 40% of the food people eat are either adulterated or mislabeled. And blockchain is believed to be the technology to address the serious challenge across the supply chain of agricultural and food products. In Ethiopia, we have been working on the possibility of adopting blockchain for marketing of agricultural products, especially for coffee. It's all about ensuring the traceability of Ethiopian coffee, for example that the primary quality coffee is not adulterated and that the consumer proves that they drink the coffee they want to drink. Harar coffee, Yerga Jaffa coffee, Sidamo coffee, Limu coffee, Nekamt coffee and so on. The Ministry of Science and Technology of Ethiopia and IOHK are collaborating and researching an area of application to use their blockchain platform called Cardono, to be built upon by Ethiopian developers and entrepreneurs. To this end, the Ministry of Science and Technology and IOHK are launching an educational program that trains young Ethiopian university graduates as professional developers in one specific blockchain platform. We plan to make the first batch of graduates all girls to promote and highlight the importance and participation of women in coding. Ethiopia is very much known for its all women cabin crew in Ethiopian Airlines flights, which has won global recognition. Today, the Ministry of Science and Technology of Ethiopia launched an all-girl blockchain training platform, training facility, for the first batch. We trust that the girls who provide, we trust that the girls would provide better solutions to the authenticity, traceability and security to Ethiopian coffee transactions, thereby benefitting all players across the supply value chain. So, I hereby take the liberty to call upon Ethiopian girls who have graduated since the last five years from the Ethiopian universities in software engineering, computer engineering, computer sciences and electrical engineering to join the first batch of blockchain training here in Ethiopia in collaboration with the Ministry of Science and Technology and IOHK. The selection shall be done based on programming skills and commitments to serving your beautiful country, Ethiopia. So, if you think you are the best and if you think you are born for blockchain, come and apply. Let's blockchain. Let me thank all individuals who have made this their success, John, Yudahi and the ICT team members from most and IOHK. Finally, I'd like to recognize and thank Mr. Charles and the whole IOHK team for accepting our request to make Ethiopia on the blockchain special map at this early stage in time. Blockchain is here. Blockchain is in Ethiopia. Blockchain for coffee supply, value chain and the let's blockchain. Thank you very much. I would like to welcome you all to the person that is in charge of the African markets, Mr. John O'Connor to the podium. Hello. So, first of all, I'd like to start by welcoming everyone in this room to Ethiopia's first blockchain forum. The purpose of today is to start a conversation around a single question. That question is how can blockchain technology be used to improve systems and industries in Ethiopia? For IOHK, there is a second crucial question, which is how IOHK as a company can help drive this movement. A disclaimer before we start, we have not come here today with the answers to all these questions. However, we have come with a commitment to spend the time and resources to discover the best solutions for Ethiopia. For this, we will need the help of everyone in this room. And so my hope for today is to begin a dialogue and a knowledge exchange that will allow us to find the structures in Ethiopia where blockchain can be most effectively used to accelerate economic growth, leapfrogging outdated systems, and unfettering the lion. We hope to encourage Ethiopia to be the dynamic and powerful economy that we all aspire for it to be. And so, what is IOHK? You may be wondering this by now. We are a global technology company and the world's leading blockchain engineering company. We design and build blockchains for government and for the private sector. Some of you in this room may not have a good understanding of what blockchain is, whilst others may do. I'll leave it to IOHK CEO Charles Hoskinson to explain simply and clearly what blockchain is and what the value is for Ethiopia. But before we embark on this journey, it's important to drive home one key point which Dr. Gatahun has already started to discuss. Blockchain is not the same as Bitcoin. Whilst Bitcoin was built on blockchain, it is just one narrow application of an incredibly diverse technology. As you will hear today, blockchain can be used to do some magical and unexpected things. And so many of its applications are so incredibly relevant to Ethiopia today. One of my goals in organizing today's conference is to share some of our initial ideas about what these applications might be and to have you all share in our excitement about blockchain's potential in Ethiopia. Yes, these are only ideas, but with your help, we can turn them into real solutions that will create jobs, drive exports and generate foreign currency inflows into Ethiopia. We are not the experts on Ethiopia. However, the government officials, university fellows and private sector workers in this room are. And I hope that starting from today, we can leverage your expertise to create a leading understanding of Ethiopia's needs, which will enable us to build bespoke solutions for this wonderful country. Having introduced IOHK, I'd now like to introduce myself. Looking around the room, I've had the privilege of meeting many of you already. But for all of you I have not, I'm Jon O'Connor and I'm the head of operations, director of African operations for IOHK. I've spent the last two years working with IOHK to showcase the power of our blockchain technology. Whilst recently, the market cap and public interest in crypto currencies has exploded across the world, this has never been my personal interest. The reason I joined this project and have invested so much of my energy into promoting IOHK around the world is because of the power this technology has in enabling countries to leapfrog traditional understandings of development. By now, the world is familiar with Kenya's and PASA, which enabled mobile payments to happen years before financial institutions in the West had used their existing infrastructure to provide the same functionality for their users. Blockchain offers even greater promise. Done right, blockchain will allow countries like Ethiopia to build their infrastructure with lower cost, greater efficiency and more functionality than their Western counterparts. IOHK hopes to support this shift in any way it can and so do I. Myself, I've been lucky enough to be raised in the mixed race background. My wonderful mother and father is actually sitting over there. My mother is Ethiopian and my father is Irish and from both of these cultures, I've witnessed and learned a sense of entrepreneurialism, which is so apt to welcoming a new technology like blockchain. In Ethiopia, this entrepreneurialism is powered by a number of excellent universities, an increasingly educated population and a diversity of cultures and ideas. And so when we were evaluating the options for where to launch IOHK's African operations, for all of us, there was a clear answer in Ethiopia. Whilst we're excited to come to Ethiopia ourselves, we are even more excited about the opportunity to harness these great attributes in Ethiopia to foster further growth. We hope to hire Ethiopians to work for IOHK by providing training in the cutting edge Haskell programming language that we use, which will enable Ethiopians to be the ones building bespoke solutions for this country's needs. I am so excited with IOHK to be able to work here to implement this technology and to help Ethiopia grow into a technology leader in Africa as well as the world. And now on to the most important parts, the thank yous. This conference is being held in partnership with the Ministry of Science and Technology. I cannot thank enough Dr. Gettahund, whose vision and drive has allowed this day to happen. The memorandum of understanding which we signed here today is a product of his desire to make Ethiopia a leader in the technology space, not just in Africa, but also globally. When I arrived here in Addis not so many months ago, late on a Sunday evening, IOHK had no expectation or even hope that just two days later I would be meeting with the Minister of Science and Technology. To have such an enthusiastic and forward thinking partner gives confidence in our belief that we would not only like to set up operations in Ethiopia, but run our entire African operations right here from Addis. Of course we are at an early stage, but with the support and talent I have seen here, I see no reason why this should not be the case. I would also like to thank our speakers, Brooke, Dr. Eleni, Shem, Jonathan and Vince, who will all share their time and experiences with us over the rest of the day. Finally, I would also like to thank Aaron, the event organizer who has been working with me here in Addis, who has gone above and beyond the call of duty, as well as Yodehe, Dr. Gessin's technical advisor and stick employee. He has not only managed the ministry side of the event, but has also been invaluable in helping me navigate the process of setting up our operations. With the thank yous done, I would now like to introduce IOHK CEO Charles Hoskinson. As you will find out, Charles is a modest man with little to be modest about. Charles will help me for saying this, but he is an academic who has also set up three multi-billion dollar businesses all before the age of 30. And yet, his greatest achievement, perhaps, is the fact that that is actually the least interesting thing about him. Google's motto is don't be evil. If I were to guess at what Charles would have chosen, it would be just try and do good. And so I would like to thank you all for coming today. And as I ask for a big round of applause for IOHK's CEO and commander-in-chief, Mr. Charles Hoskinson. Hi, everybody. It's good to be in Ethiopia. We started in Israel, and we worked our way over here next stop Rwanda and after that London. And I finally get to take a vacation for a week. It's been three years and I'm still not sure where I'm going to go. So I'm Charles Hoskinson. I'm the CEO of Input Output. I've done a few companies before that, Ethereum and BitShares. And I'm an accidental entrepreneur. I never thought I was actually going to start a company. I was a mathematician and I thought I was going to be an academic. And I kind of stumbled my way into this space. And it's a pretty magical space. See, blockchain technology, cryptocurrency technology is really a human field. It's tremendously interesting from an academic perspective. You have an intersection of all of these different fields of study, cryptography, distributed systems theory, game theory, economics, law and policy. But at the end of the day it's about people and it's about how people relate to each other. It's about trust. It's about coordination. It's about representation of value. It's about identity. It's about reputation. It's about a collection of these factors that we all take for granted. In countries like the United States, in places like Europe, we have very good systems at the moment for coordinating. So we have lots of wealth. And other places in the world, those systems for whatever reason aren't where they need to be. And so it's hard for people to build wealth and maintain wealth and sustain wealth and be able to trade. And these problems have only been exacerbated by the consequences of globalization. As we globalize, it's bringing opportunity to many, but it's not quite getting to all. So the magic of blockchain technology is it's going to, in a way, restructure the entire global economy, much like the internet did and much like many institutions did before that. It wasn't too long ago that if you were in the financial industry, you didn't go to the United States. You went to England. In the 19th century Junius Morgan, the father of J.P. Morgan, couldn't actually get a stable financial business in New York. He had to go to England and work with George Peabody. Think of that. The country now that has the largest financial markets, it's in charge of a large chunk of the world economy. And most people look to us for financial innovation was considered to be a joke in the 19th century. Our currency wasn't very strong. Our bonds often defaulted. And yet just 50 years later, we were a goliath. Why? Because technology changes. Social processes change. Trust changes. The arc of society changes. And so what blockchain technology is doing for the world is it's a great reset. The people who run things today will probably not be the people who run things tomorrow. And the people who are hungry today, the people who really want to make an impact today, can have a chance and a generation or two of being in charge of the next world economy. And we've already seen great innovation amongst people very hungry in Singapore and in Switzerland and Lichtenstein. You know, recently I was in Barbados, old Barbados known for its rum. And the government's extremely hungry to welcome the market here. And we actually ran a class there in partnership with the University of West Indies. We trained a whole group of Asian developers. And they're extremely excited about everything from innovating the money to supply chain management for production of sugar cane and rum and other such things to how to better handle identity and reputation as they globalize. So it's extremely exciting to me to have the opportunity to come to a place like Ethiopia, a very ancient country with an incredible history. In fact, this is the birthplace of humanity. I believe one of the oldest fossils was discovered right here, Lucy. And it's an extraordinary culture. To be able to come here is quite humbling actually. And to be able to actually learn about the problems is incredibly humbling as well. Reality is we have the best scientists in Scotland and Japan and many other places. There's actually even media here from Japan. But while we can build pretty much anything, it's hard for us to know what to build without actually interacting with the people that need it. So the only way to do that is not to show up and assume you know everything. The only way to do that is to talk and to train people, to learn from people. And in our experience, the best way of learning from people is to teach them what we know and then have them teach us what they know. So how do we do that? Our model is simple. We go and partner with the university, partner with the government and say, give us your best. And then we'll give those people a great opportunity. I'll bring my best. When we say we're going to teach you a class is the person who created the programming language. He's a world famous professor, Phil Wadler at University of Edinburgh. He's got a Wikipedia page, I think 25,000 citations in the academic world that means you won. He's at the top. And this is the kind of thing that most excites him throughout his entire career. And when we teach students here he's going to be involved in that, as will Duncan Coots who came from Oxford, as will Lars Brunjes, a German mathematician who trained at Cambridge and others. That's our best. They're experts not only in the technology we deal with, but technology in general. And after we've trained them, you know what? We're going to set them loose at the local industry and say, tell me about coffee. You see, I grew up in Hawaii and we also have coffee. It's Kona coffee. And actually it was a bit disheartening growing up there, looking at the sugar cane, the pineapple in the coffee industry, which used to be a big chunk of an economy, completely go away. It's all been replaced. When I was growing up, I'd go into the pineapple fields and steal pineapples. It was fun. I think a lot of the kids did that. Now it's just condos and golf courses or vacant land because the industry wasn't sustainable. So agro tech actually and agriculture in general in our family's history, my dad grew up in Montana. My grandfather grew up in Montana. They were ranchers. It's a big chunk of our family's history. It's where we come from. It's exciting to ask about innovation, whether it be how do we improve yields or how do we combine AI and IoT and blockchain technology together to get a better understanding of the supply chain and what we need to do to actually reduce waste, fraud and abuse and improve profit and equitability for all. You know, that's exciting. But you know, I don't know a damn thing about the coffee business, but you guys sure do. And you know a lot more than basically anybody else in the world came from. So what's amazing is that we can talk to the best here, bring our best, train some people here and within a very short period of time, months to years, build products and innovations that are more sophisticated than the ones you'd see in Silicon Valley or you'd see in Tokyo or you'd see in London. That's a really amazing thing and that just shows you how powerful and scalable this technology can be and what we can do. As a closing thought, you know, throughout the arc of my career, yes, I've started a few companies and apparently they're somewhat successful and I made a few dollars here and there. But a mantra I like to live my life by is it's not what you do for those who have the most that define you. It's what you do for those who have the least. That's what we have to live our lives by. And for the first time in human history because of the internet and because of this open source movement, because of blockchain technology, we are starting to have discussions about markets, about identity, about property in a global perspective instead of these siloed perspectives, which means everybody in the world has equal opportunity and everybody in the world, no matter where they're born, whether they won the geographic lottery or not, if they're hungry and they really want to push forward for something, they'll have a chance to actually compete at the same level that I got to and other things that I came from got to. And that's really humbling and that's really exciting and I think it's actually going to make the world a much better place. So thank you all for coming. I look forward to learning from you and this is going to be a really exciting trip. Cheers.