 As I talked earlier, blockchain technology is really at its base in terms of what the idea means, sort of redefining the internet of trust. How do you, in a distributed, non-aggregated way, establish trusted transactions on the internet? Really, if you look whether it's Bitcoin or Ethereum or Hyperledger, this is really changing a lot of the ways that we will transact with each other in the future. And here to give us an update on the blockchain landscape is Chris Ferris from IBM. He's their CTO of Open Systems. You work on pretty much every project that the Linux Foundation has, so he's at like three, four different board meetings and technical meetings this week, but he's here to give us the update on blockchain. Please welcome Chris. All right. Thanks, Jim. So morning, everybody. So I'm going to talk about the state of blockchain at the Linux Foundation. And as Jim mentioned, I'm CTO for Open Tech at IBM, and according to Todd, that means chief travel officer. I was actually in Amsterdam yesterday morning attending a hackathon over the weekend. So if I fall over in a fit of narcolepsy, just give me a kick and wake me up. So blockchain. What is it? Actually, you know, this technology has been around for a few years. It was actually sort of inspired by a guy named Satoshi, Satoshi Nakamoto, who invented blockchain, who actually applied blockchain, I should say, and invented a protocol called Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency. Now people have been, since that time, people have been trying to figure out, well, can we apply this technology to various other use cases, such as in finance, not just for cryptocurrency purposes, but to facilitate in health care, right? You could use blockchain technology to securely transmit, you know, things like, you know, drug dispensing activity at a hospital to ensure that that can't be tampered with. And then supply chain. You know, think about supply chain transparency, understanding where did you get these potatoes that went into your French fries? And we have the ability to think about how we might instrument all these different types of activities in essentially antagonistic type environments and yet know that the information could be trusted, that everybody actually shares the same copy of information. This is essentially what blockchain and distributed ledgers are all about. Now, as I mentioned, you know, before we started the Hyperledger project last year, and in fact it was almost exactly a year ago this week that we launched the foundation. The technologies that were available, many of them open source, but here's the problem. Many of them had limited throughput. So Bitcoin, for instance, Bitcoin can sustain about a grand total of seven transactions a second. So anybody who's been working on any kind of enterprise systems know that ain't going to cut it for just about anything, right? So if you wanted to apply that technology to your ERP system, for instance, to track all the shipments and invoices and whatnot that go on in your enterprise, it's not going to do it. Slow transaction finality or confirmations. So in the Bitcoin world, for instance, it takes actually a minimum of 10 minutes to finalize a transaction, and it could take as much as 20 or 30 minutes before you know that if I went and tried to exchange some Bitcoin with Todd, that that actually went through and it actually happened. And that means that that money can't really be used for the next 10 or 20 to 30 minutes. It was designed for cryptocurrency, and this is something that actually freaked out a lot of the enterprise CTOs and so forth that were starting to think about how they might apply this technology in their enterprise. Cryptocurrency essentially was designed by anarchists, right? And so to disrupt banking in particular. And so the banks aren't going to go down the path of embracing Bitcoin. Poor governance, right? This is inherent in something like the Dow attack that happened last year actually where somebody actually got in and they had set up and established this distributed autonomous organization where the software, the smart contract, essentially was the governance for this community, this distributed community. And there was a known bug in the smart contract, and some guy exploited it and started draining money out of the account of the Ethereum Foundation to the tune of about $50 million. Now you could say ethically whether or not that was a right or wrong thing to do, but it was legal, right? And so then you have this problem that the rest of the people in the community are like, well, that was bad. He shouldn't do that. Let's vote him off the island. And so they effectively did that and they forked, and now there's two different communities, the sort of the classic and the next generation. But again, there was no real decision beforehand about, well, how do we handle the dispute like that where somebody legally takes advantage of some loophole or a bug in the software and figures out, well, how are we going to manage that? How are we going to manage any kind of dispute resolution around something like blockchain? We have, for most of the technologies that were available, there was no real privacy. There was anonymity, right, but there wasn't really privacy and confidentiality. So if we're exchanging information universally, well, if I'm two financial institutions and I'm trading bonds or other kinds of instruments, I don't necessarily want anybody to know what I'm doing. Just the two of us. Todd and I should be the only two that understand what we're trading, and Jim should have no idea, right? Because if Jim finds out that Todd and I are trading on IBM, he's going to either go buy and sell IBM, right? So we need to have that. And again, if we're going, you heard what Bruce said earlier, if we're going to rely exclusively on cryptography and encryption to provide confidentiality, well, most banks, most financial institutions are just unwilling to go down that path. So we need better solutions for confidentiality and privacy. Now again, most of the technologies have been designed for this sort of permissionless environment where anybody can join, right, and they join anonymously, right? That was actually a problem for most enterprises. They want to have a network that people understand, that they understand who is involved, something we call a permissions network, where it's basically by invitation. And we can build, you know, we can construct a governance model, maybe a legal framework for how we're going to deal with dispute resolution within the confines of this particular private network. Something we call a consortium network. And again, as I mentioned, there was really no settlement finality in a lot of these systems because you can indeed, in the Bitcoin world or in Ethereum, as we saw with the Dow, you can permanently fork. And so therefore, there is the potential that if somebody doesn't like the outcome, they can convince everybody else, well, let's all go this way instead. So that was the problem. But again, this is a technology that is essentially perfect for open source, right? It's potentially very revolutionary. We don't want to have any one player in the ecosystem that controls all of it. We don't want it to be monetized only by an IBM or somebody like that. We want it to be used universally by multiple parties. It requires special skills and it requires a diverse set of special skills, right? You have to have deep cryptographic capabilities. Deep understanding of distributed computing, containerization, databases, database query engines and so forth. There's a whole lot of different disciplines that are required to build this technology effectively and it needed a strong governance model. So about a year ago or actually a year and a half ago, I gave Jim a call and said, hey, we're thinking of doing this and he was like, this is perfect, this is the perfect project. So we established the Hyperledger project or organization almost exactly a year ago this week and again, it's the intent is to develop open source for blockchain and distributed ledger technologies hosted obviously by the Linux Foundation and it would be a global initiative and in fact it's turned out to be exactly that. Again our goals obviously to develop and create open source solutions for these technologies, to provide that neutral open governance model to sustain these things, to develop a diverse ecosystem of communities, to educate the public and government and so forth on what this technology is, how it can be applied and to educate ourselves by bringing people together to help us explore different ways that the technology might be used in various industries. And then again, to promote this notion of a community of communities and in fact that's exactly what we've done. I'll get to a second in terms of the leadership but Brian Bellendorf who Jim mentioned a little bit earlier sort of came with this notion that this isn't just about one project or even just a couple of projects. We want to create sort of this umbrella organization where we're dealing with potentially bringing together all different diverse approaches to how we might solve this problem because again as I mentioned, we are trying to solve some very difficult gnarly problems. A lot of the consensus research that's going on today is really sort of bleeding edge. Right? Nobody really knows how are we going to get past seven transactions a second to get to the scale of this technology that's going to be usable and useful to enterprises that are trying to get to thousands of transactions per second or even beyond. And so we've created the Hyperledger project with this notion that it is an umbrella organization where we're going to have a set of frameworks and we've got three and I'll talk about those in a bit and then maybe we have a number of different other capabilities that we build out around whether it's tooling to help provision and deploy it like cello, to deploy chain code or what we call smart contract languages. These are tools that essentially facilitate the use of these other platforms. And that's exactly what we've got. I mentioned the leadership. So a year ago today, we hadn't yet hired an executive director and I know Jim has really psyched about this, but Brian has really been sort of the perfect person to fit the role of executive director for the Hyperledger project. And I think he actually travels more than I do, which is saying something, but he's out there really sort of constantly helping people understand what we're doing. And he's really done a fantastic job of growing the organization. Blythe Masters, who is the chief executive of digital asset holdings, is our board chair, that ugly guy, the third one there chairs the technical steering committee. And then Dana Prey also from digital asset holdings is the chair of the marketing committee. We started out with, I think it was 11 Premier members and we're now up to 13 and I think there's a few others in the pipeline, some really interesting ones. Most recently we had Airbus and American Express join us as Premier members. But most importantly, we've been growing the general membership population considerably. We started with 30, which was in and of itself, it was amazing. We started with 30, we're now over 110 members total. Almost 100 general members have joined since, which is a 270% growth. That's really fantastic. And then we established a new class of membership for associate members so that we could get other non-profits and NGOs and various regulatory bodies to come and also participate and join in what we're doing there. And so actually this afternoon, Brian gives his talk on hyperledger. He's going to talk a little bit about sovereign and the role that they're going to help play in setting up some identity work in the hyperledger project. From a marketing perspective, it's been a huge hit. It's really garnered a whole lot of attention, surprising amount actually, with about 600 or more hits in any given month. I mentioned that we had 270% growth. This just blows my mind because actually the largest open source foundation, which is OpenStack, didn't grow this fast. So that's just something to sort of keep in the back of your mind there. We now have five top level projects, and I'll talk a little bit about those, 149 engineers contributing to these various projects. We've got a diverse technical leadership. We started where each of the premier members got to designate an individual to represent them on a technical steering committee. And about halfway through the year, we said, no, we're going to have an election. Those who are contributing meaningfully to the project get to select their leadership. And we actually do have a very diverse technical steering committee. Over 6,500 commits. Now, this isn't sort of OpenStack territory yet, but it's getting there. Our Slack community had 5,400-plus people in it. And we had a problem because we actually couldn't keep more than two days' worth of history in Slack. So we got rid of Slack, and we now are using RocketChat and self-hosting that within the Linux Foundation. And a really solid example of why it's so fundamentally important to put these projects in an open governance situation that's funded so that we can actually run and stand up our own tooling and not be dependent on some third-party providers like Slack to give us free chat services. But to think about, we get 10,000 messages that can be in searchable archives from Slack, and we use that up in two days. That's mind-blowing. We have nine different working groups, including a technical working group that we established in China to sort of help bridge the different communities. There's an awful lot of interest in blockchain in China. And so they're doing a lot of work around translating the output and the minutes of the technical steering committee, some of the documentation for the various projects. But they're also there to help bridge these two different worlds where the engineers are speaking very different languages. And they're separated by at least 12 hours of time zone. We have a global meetup community ecosystem with 38 different meetup groups scattered all around the globe with 8,600-plus members. And this is in addition to the sort of the generic blockchain-type meetup communities. But there's an awful lot of interest, as I mentioned, a hyperledger. We have had eight bimonthly face-to-face meetings of the technical community where we all sort of get together and not only sort of share what it is that we're all doing and updating everybody on the various status of the various projects, but also to work on talking about and starting to engage in cross-project collaborations that start to fulfill the vision that Brian has for this notion of an umbrella organization where we have multiple projects and we drive towards integration and interoperability. We had a member summit back in December, which was the first time to bring the entire hyperledger community together. Over 100 different members came and participated in that. That was really quite a great event from my perspective. It wasn't your typical conference. It was an awful lot of sort of interaction out in the hallways, really. And it wasn't just about the presentations. It was really more about just like this event here is where it's really about people getting together and talking about where they're going to go with this stuff. So I mentioned we have five top-level projects. When we started the project, there was proposals from a number of different members of the initial members of the community to contribute various projects to be worked on. IBM was one of those. Intel was another. They had something called Sawtooth Lake, which is a distributed ledger technology platform that was implemented in Python in Intel research with the intention of providing an environment that you could use to experiment with different approaches to consensus for dealing with smart contracts. So it was a very flexible type of thing. And they actually invented something called Poet. So for those of you who aren't deeply familiar with how Bitcoin works, but it does work on a consensus model that's called Proof of Work, where basically you solve a puzzle, something that's designed to take about 10 minutes, so you're going to compute a hash, basically, and it takes about 10 minutes to do this by most computational sources. And whoever gets it first wins a Bitcoin, and they get to mine a block. So the problem with that is it's very expensive. Generates an awful lot of heat, uses an awful lot of energy to do this computation. And again, you've got thousands upon thousands upon thousands of different nodes all doing this. Intel came up with this really great idea of applying their trusted execution environment, SGX, to this notion that instead of Proof of Work, we get a Proof of Elapsed Time. So we'll randomize, essentially, sleep, come up with some predetermined time for how long you're going to wait before you say, I won, no, I didn't, sorry. And so they developed this thing called Poet out of Sawtooth Lake. And then they've also developed some interesting things around smart contracts. Eroha is our most recent addition. This was contributed by a FinTech startup in Japan called SORIMITSU, and collaborations with some academic institutions in Japan, along with Hitachi and NTT. And this is sort of a very simple sort of hyperledger fabric, if you will, it's an implementation of some of the architecture of the hyperledger fabric, I should say. But it's designed to be much more simpler, less flexible, less modular, but more applicable to solving sort of point problems. But their primary focus is on sort of the mobile side of things, and the clients they've developed for Android and iOS are potential for building out clients that can be sat atop of our third platform, which is Fabric, which was contributed by IBM and Digital Assets, and is probably the most active project of the three projects. And again, the Fabric essentially is a blockchain distributed ledger platform designed to be architecturally modular, so you can substitute consensus, encryption, you can substitute the back end data stores, pretty much in a plug and play mode, with the intent of being sort of truly enterprise grade software. The final two projects are that sort of modular level that I talked about, one is called CELO, which is orchestration for deploying and provisioning blockchain networks. And then the final one is Blockchain Explorer, which was a user interface that allows you to sort of introspect into the blockchain, into the ledger, to understand what the state is and how it's performing and so forth. From a sawtooth perspective, they've had a couple of stable releases published, they just published one in January. They're exploring adding these new transaction families, transaction families is what sawtooth calls a smart contract. They've been working on improving this notion of proof of elapsed time, and they've actually sort of got a version two of that, that they just introduced to the rest of the community last month. And they've been working on enhanced performance, again, the platform itself wasn't designed to be performant, it was really designed for experimentation. But they're finding that it actually has use potentially as something that you might deploy in your enterprise. AROHA is, again, their newest one, the project was only added in late November, December timeframe, and so they're working on some improvements of their deployment using Docker Swarm, they're working on some of the network stability, they also have a very unique approach to consensus, and they're trying to tune that. And then they're working also on aligning the APIs that they use with the Hyperledger Fabric project to improve the potential for interoperability and integration of those two. And then finally, Fabric, we published a stable release in the fall, version 0.6, but we then embarked on sort of an architectural refactor based on a lot of the feedback we've been getting from people who had been deploying and using that particular version of the software. And we're on the cusp now of driving towards our version 1.0 that the release that we hope will be sort of general availability grade suitable for deployment in an enterprise in a production context. And in fact, we actually have our first production deployment in the IBM Global Finance solution is basically IBM has a program where we essentially provide loans to some of our customers and partners to buy our stuff. And this is, you know, it's about a $44 billion system overall, but at any given time, you can have $100 million in dispute. And so by putting those transactions on a blockchain, we share the information with all the different partners, and we've actually reduced the dispute resolution time down from about 30 days to about 10, and it's actually netted us about $40 million, so that's, you know, that's real money. And we're driving towards consolidation, right? So we've been talking with Intel about integrating Poet into the Hyperledger Fabric. We've been working with Sir Amitsu and the community around Oroha to integrate their APIs so that they can actually, instead of having to have their own unique bespoke back end, they can apply their front end, their client technology on top of the Hyperledger Fabric. And then again, the Blockchain Explorer is looking to sort of be able to sort of sit on top of any of those three top-level projects, and then Cello is offering to support multiple back ends in its provisioning. So come join us, and please come visit Brian's session this afternoon at about 1.45. Thank you. Thank you.