 Hey everyone, we're back here in Austin. This is actually gonna be our last interview for the day. I wanna introduce you to Hart Montgomery. Hart is the CTO with the Hyperledger Foundation and you may or may not have heard of the Hyperledger Foundation, but it's Hart's job to tell you about it. Hey Hart, welcome. Thank you very much for having me here. It's my pleasure, my pleasure. So Hart, let's start with the Hyperledger Foundation. What's it about? Absolutely, so the Hyperledger Foundation is the Linux Foundation's umbrella organization for blockchain projects and for projects that are very related to blockchain, like blockchain tools or other things that are very closely related to blockchain or ecosystem, like identity, for instance. So yeah, no, so we work with a lot of the Linux Foundation's services. We do the open mainframe project with my friend John Murdoch and that has like 26 or something different projects underneath that umbrella, if you will. So familiar with the concept, let's dig in a little bit though. Give me an idea of what kind of projects are under the Hyperledger. Absolutely, so the main project and sort of the ones that get the most attention are distributed ledgers. So we have Fabric, which is probably our project that most people are familiar with. We have Beisu, which is exciting because it's very, it's an Ethereum mainnet client and it's connected to the Ethereum ecosystem. And we have Sawtooth and Aroha. We also have a bunch of, we have a stack of projects focused on identity. So we have projects called Indie, Aries and Ursa. And their focus is a digital identity ecosystem built on top of blockchain. Let's talk about that a little bit, right? Sure. In many ways, I think, you know, identity and access control is the killer app for cloud security, right? But we haven't really done a good job. I mean, yes, it's for cloud security, but it's the same, it's your poppy's identity stuff, maybe with two-factor authentication added in or something. We haven't, you know, back in the heady days when Ping Identity first came out and we started talking about Federation and all of these things, I thought we would have made more progress around secure digital identities. And, you know, frankly, not just for people, but for every entity that needs it. I don't know, maybe I'm jaded, but I don't see the progress. So there has actually been a lot of progress made recently. Okay. And one of the things that our Hyperledger Identity Community focuses on is something called Selected Disclosure. Okay. And this is really nice. So the idea is, I'll use an example that we bring up all the time with sort of driver's licenses. So today, when you go to the bar, you know, you have to show them your driver's license, they examine it, they verify you're old enough to drink and you move on. Now, from a privacy perspective, this can be suboptimal, right? You know, the bar tender or the bar staff sees your exact birthday, see your home address, your driver's license number. And, you know, maybe you're not so worried about, you know, a bar tender and a bar scanning this. But when your credentials are going across the internet and when they're fully digital, you know, you don't want everyone swiping this. Well, and if someone's paying that bar tender to take a picture of every license he looks at. And that's what's happening on the internet in many cases. So the idea with selective disclosure is instead of revealing to you my whole driver's license, I can reveal to you some kind of anchor that proves it's my driver's license. So in practice, I could like give you a picture or something. And then I could give you a zero knowledge proof that I have a driver's license tied to me that says I am over 21. And so you would provably learn nothing about me other than the fact that you're convinced that I'm over 21 because some agency you trust has attested to it. So that's the idea behind selective disclosure. Love it. So how far along is this now? So we have systems that use this and, you know, you can go to our webpage and our GitHub and find them and use them today. We have a number of governments that are building on this platform. So Canadian provinces, there's an organization in Germany, there's an organization in Finland. So, you know, people are really excited about the possibilities of digital identity. So Hart, you know, bigger issue of blockchain. I almost feel, and forgive me for saying this, but I almost feel like cryptocurrency might have been the worst thing that ever happened to blockchain in some ways because people, you know, people have a lot of opinions about crypto and cryptocurrency. It's a scam, it's not a scam. It'll set the world free. It won't set, you know. What they don't understand is that the underlying blockchain technology is not pie in the sky speculative pirates or anything. It's solid. It's solid technology. And whatever Bitcoin is worth or Ethereum or whatever your coin of choice is doesn't really concern blockchain. Absolutely. And there's so much more we could do with it than that. Totally. So I like to think of a blockchain as a distributed database with decentralized trust. This is sort of a very abstract primitive, right? But if you think about it, you know, what is Bitcoin? It's a distributed database with decentralized trust for money. You know, Ethereum is the same thing for programs. And, you know, if you just think in terms of these, you know, very abstract primitives, you know, you can very quickly see, you know, is a blockchain useful for an application or is it not? And unfortunately, we have seen a lot of people build centralized applications or even on top of blockchain or even centralized blockchains, which, you know, sort of defeats the purpose. Right, it flies in the face of what it's supposed to do. It's just less efficient than using a centralized database in many cases. And, you know, the blockchain is just there for the hype. But, you know, that sort of masks the fact that, you know, this distributed database with decentralized trust is a primitive you want in many real-world applications that deliver value. And, you know, we've seen it from, you know, supply chain to finance to, as I mentioned before, identity, you know, these are all general areas where a group of people or entities want to maintain an information store and they can't agree on who should be the root of trust for all of this, so. Great, I'm going to ask you a hard question. Sure. I need your honest answer. Do you think blockchain's gone mainstream yet or is it still ahead of it? I think it, I'm going to sort of sidestep that and I think I'm going to, it's a hard one. I'm going to say, you know, it depends on what you mean by mainstream. So certainly people know about what blockchain is even if they don't have a deep technical understanding of it. So in that sense it's gone mainstream, but in some senses it really hasn't. Like one of the big applications of, you know, this kind of distributed and decentralized technology are things like central bank digital currencies. And we haven't seen, you know, widespread adoption there. You know, even though it, you know, seems like it should be an excellent application. Obviously, you know, bankers are extremely conservative. So we don't expect anything to go quickly and they want to be, you know, extremely convinced that, you know, the solution works and it's secure and everything's going to go right. So from that perspective, you know, I don't think it's gone mainstream. No, and you know what surprises me with that though? When you look at like technologies that finance or financial vertical has adopted DevOps, some of the things around security, there's so much pressure on them to do more faster, to give their customers what they want at their fingertips instantly, to do it securely above all else. You would think that they would have put the cycles in to trust blockchain for lack of a better word, right? To get behind this. Absolutely. I mean, I think a lot of traditional finance companies are discovering that they're going to have to become more or less tech companies to succeed in the modern world. And you know, this is difficult, right? It's very difficult to sort of change your company from a financial company to a tech company. And I think, you know, this is one of the reasons why we're seeing some of the, you know, delay in financial adoption because a lot of these companies don't have hordes of, you know, tech folks, deeply experienced software engineers who can just, you know, and they can't, you know, sort of, it's hard to spin up a huge dev staff. No doubt, but you know what? I remember meeting with the folks at Citi. It was actually called Citi Bank then. It wasn't even Citi, 2005, 2006. This was around patch management and vulnerabilities. They had a sprawling infrastructure of people. They have what they know they know. It's the new stuff that often takes them, you know, while they get their head wrapped around, but once, so it's very much a me too industry. Once someone else does it, they all want to hop the bandwagon, right? Because they're afraid to get left behind and that they'll have an offering not as good as their competitor. And then secondly, it just, until they kind of internalize it, it's not the technical folk that have to be convinced. It's the managers, it's this as your makers. And that takes time. Absolutely, before I worked for the Linux Foundation, I worked in a company where parts of the company had a lot of, you know, open source knowledge, but others didn't, you know, and... It was that open source snobbery, right? Well, actually it's open source out, yeah. Yeah, and just getting people to, you know, to adopt new technology. Some of my great coworkers and I, you know, it was an uphill battle, but you know, we had to say, hey, this is the future. You know, we need to use blockchain. You know, we need to use open source. I, you know, just like open source is now 98% of organizations, I assume it's going to be too. We got a bang out of here, but I wanted to let our folks know, if they want to get more information about the group, maybe they want to get involved, or maybe they just want to learn a little bit about, more about blockchain. Where can they go? So the best place to get started is our website, hyperledger.org. We have links to our Discord, to our communities, and like everything else in the Linux Foundation, we're a completely open organization. You can show up, you can join meetings, you can join our Discord, you can sign up for our email list. So it's very easy to get started. So it's hyperledger.org. That's correct. Love it, man. Hey, thanks for stopping by. Absolutely. It's a pleasure meeting you. Good luck.