 I'll thank you Joyce for that kind introduction and it's great to be here today and it's great to be in Dublin. We've had a very, very warm welcome from everyone in Dublin and I've got to say how impressed I am by your tech sector here. I think I was last here a couple of years after the financial crisis, I don't know, was a tough time for Ireland but it's just amazingly, I know it's been a tough time but how quickly, perhaps quickly isn't the right word but you bounce back and your technology sector is so impressive and I think one of the other things that's impressed me this week is how well your industry or business community works with the academic sector in Ireland to develop course content to promote the skills and capability sets that you want to grow your industry so congratulations on all you've achieved. So as Joyce said, the topic of my discussion today is really to promote international standards and why I think they're important for the application and use of blockchain across the globe. I'll touch a bit on what blockchain is and more about why ICED has been a significant technology and as Joyce said talk about the pathway to international standards and again why those international standards are significant in terms of promoting greater investment, greater innovation in blockchain and also present some economic studies which show how international standards in technology actually improve the efficiency of innovation. So I'll get straight into it and I, sorry that's probably a bit small for everyone to see, I apologise we can make these slides available afterwards but this is really just touching on some of the work, investment and companies and governments that are involved in blockchain around the world and the point of the slide is just to demonstrate how significant it is and this is investment and activity that's happened really over the last couple of years and typically what you see with new technologies is they sort of start at the edge of ecosystems and then they begin to emerge into the mainstream and that's what you're seeing with blockchain over the last couple of years and interestingly not only are you seeing significant investment and interest from large, well pretty well every large company in the world but also the large tech companies and interestingly or as equally as important you're seeing strong interest from governments, central banks, the world bank in fact issued one of its bonds using blockchain technology, the Australian stock exchange is going to use blockchain technology for its next technological system and a lot of central banks are looking at it from a cryptocurrency perspective and many of you that aren't sort of close to the technology have probably heard most about blockchain through cryptocurrencies and it's an important part of the technology but only one very small part of what blockchain can do for the world and this next chart really talks about that second point about the significance of the technology for the world going forward and of course like any new technology there are skeptics and people who don't believe that it is going to be significant as I do but I think it does have some fundamental consequences for how we work around the world in business and more broadly including in government and one of the most significant things is really this capacity to create truly a unique digital assets or identities which can't be double spent or can't be counterfeited so you're effectively creating intuitive digital assets if you like or native digital assets and that's leading to a whole series of opportunities you may have heard about the token economy, ICOs, completely new business models, new new types of money which I'll come back to later and also new forms of trust and one of the most significant aspects potentially of blockchain is that you can develop trusted approaches to business and government without the reliance on a central intermediary and for a lot of people in the world that provides an opportunity to democratise certain things that today are really the soul in the soul control of central institutions or large corporates so I've used that quote at the top of the chart which you may not be able to read from an author in blockchain and if you get a chance he's written a co-author of a great book called The Truth Machine which is a really nice way of understanding the technology and the possible consequences that blockchain can deliver but I've lifted from that quote about the importance or how important data is to the world economy going forward and I suppose many corporations quite naturally look to control or monetise that data and what blockchain potentially allows is a democratisation of that data, it allows an individual potentially to take back control ownership and monetisation of the data on them and that has resulted in many people who talk about the application or the use of technology talk about it almost as passionately in terms of the social implications it can have for how the world operates rather than simply as a pure technology and as you'd expect in a technology and communities within the technology around blockchain that see the opportunity to decentralise and to create forms of trust without a central sort of intermediary or institution there's a lot of passion for that approach and it means that a lot of people wonder whether international standards make sense or not and interestingly Michael Casey this same author makes the point that even in that sort of world where we're looking to avoid censorship and to counter sort of strict control with the central authority that there's still a need for standards and in fact one of the biggest investors in this space Joel Monogro who's written a sort of a preeminent blog on the technology he would argue or he would say that he looks for investment in blockchain in communities that are well-governed and have standards so even though it's sort of a very decentralised and a unique community people recognise the importance of having some sort of over overriding governance or standards. When you think about standards they tend to become formed or developed in three typical ways through regulation through consensus so like ISO where you have an international community coming together to develop international standards through consensus and you also have de facto standards and de facto standards tend to get created often by when a corporation or business might with a leading position in a technology or a protocol or a product that technology or position becomes so dominant their approach to that technology almost becomes a de facto standard and they're the sort of ways standards tend to come together and in some sense you'll have very good standards come together under either of those means of development and also some not so good standards. There's often a debate about technology because it's evolving so quickly let the market decide if you like why would you have international standards and do they actually benefit technology and as I said there has been some academic research into this topic and it does demonstrate that there are real benefits in having standards in technology and so examples for the benefits and I won't go through all of them but they allow for the design and development of modular systems and therefore you get specialisation, you get greater scale and you get innovation in componentry in the modular break up of technologies. It also avoids asymmetric switching costs and that means where you invest in a particular technology and because there are no standard it sort of limits your future choices about future technologies you might invest in going forward and it also leads to the greater efficiency in innovation going forward. So there are clear benefits and I thought I just as Joy said one of my other roles is a non executive director of the largest telecommunications company in Australia and telecommunications very different technologies but you probably be aware that international standards in that space are pretty critical. I mean from the even more obvious there'll be some in the room that are old enough to remember 2G we're now coming up to 5G but when there was the world of 2G and if you were an international traveller there were some countries where you had to buy a different phone in that country for it to work. Now that's an obvious advantage of having a common standard across the world but the benefits of international standards in 3G, 4G and the soon to be 5G are really significant and they're significant because they allow for much more investment and when you think about if you're rolling out a global telco network we're talking about billions and billions of dollars. So you want some surety that the technology you're rolling out meets certain standards and also can be have interoperability around the world. If you have international standards it also means assuming that there are no global barriers to trade that you can pick amongst the best in the world where that technology is developed because you know you can apply that technology to your network. So apart from the obvious thing we can use the same phone wherever we go around the world there's huge benefits in terms of the efficiency of investment and the efficiency of innovation that comes from standards in technology and that's a good example is telco. One of the challenges that you have in the development of any technology standards and blockchain is this is especially true because blockchain is still an emerging technology. As you saw from an earlier slide there's a lot of money a lot of investment a lot of interest going into it but it's still an emerging it's still a developing it's not a mature technology and so the question arises is when do you apply standards because if you go too early do you apply a standard on a technology that's immature that can be improved. So how do you get that balance right and some would also argue it's better let the market to work. Let the market to decide which is the preferred standard of the preferred standard for a technology by consumers or businesses or governments voting for their feet for that technology that applies a particular standard. So there are differences of views on international standards but the danger is if you don't move soon enough the danger is you do get de facto standards arise from the market. I'm not saying that's necessarily a bad thing because many of them have proven to be effective but they're not always and this is an example I really love around speed versus quality and it goes back to an ancient technology called the typewriter which again some of us in the room will remember using not you Joyce you're too young but I remember doing typing skills at school and it's interestingly that the configuration of the typewriter and in figuration of the keyboard that we all use today was actually invented by a manufacturer to slow down typing because the technology of the day meant if you type too quickly the keys of the typewriter used to jam and manufacturers used to have different setups. So if you were a typist depending on the typewriter it was very difficult to type because the key configuration was different. This one company brought out this configuration it slowed typists down which meant they didn't jam and therefore it became the leading technology. Now you might say that's a good thing. I'm not saying it's a bad thing but then later in time in the 1930s the standards body in the US said well this is mad this configuration is really slow. Let's invent a new one because typing typewriters that improved and the keys didn't jam because it didn't it didn't take effect because everyone was so used to using the existing keypad. It's a simple example but it demonstrates how standards whether they're created by international bodies or through de facto leadership don't always lead to the best outcome and it's a judgment around when you apply those standards and the approach you take. When you think about blockchain as I said and I won't go through this in detail because it's quite technical but there are still a range of challenges or limitations for the technology. It's not a mature technology it's an emerging developing technology and the technologists in the room like Terry and others would know that's the case with most technologies and therefore there are limitations or challenges. One of the advantages of international standards is we can help deal with those challenges or limitations and through that encourage greater investment create greater innovation to cut through some of these challenges. So there is a very strong case in my view for international standards and I'm probably coming to time so I'll be quick choice. So what we've done internationally is create a technical committee under ISO to develop standards for blockchain and distributed ledgers and I won't go through the detail but really the objective of that committee is to get international agreed ways of working standardisation if you like that allow for improvements in security privacy scalability and perhaps the holy grail and a lot of technologies the interoperability of the technology across a range of different blockchains and like and that will then lead to its greater adoption greater efficiencies greater innovation and the better outcome of the application of that technology for the benefit everyone around the world. So there's a whole range of areas that we're working on and importantly it's an area that's very well supported so I think we started in Sydney in our first meeting in April 2017 with sort of 17 founding members if you like one of those was Ireland which is great and we also have external liaisons one of those from the get go was the European Commission of the great supporters of the development of these standards but I just use that chart to demonstrate there's a lot of interest in this space and it goes right across the globe. I won't go through these next charts partly because you can't see them and also they're very detailed but they just they're just going through the areas of work and the focus points in terms of developing standards for the technology. So I'll just leave you with this final quote that just reinforces the benefit of international standards and why they're so important in terms of sparing innovation and investment in a technology and I just do want to make a case for international standards. Most technologies today affect the whole globe particularly if they become significant. So their digital world is not something that individual countries can ignore and we sort of have to partner on for them to be effective. You've seen that in the Telco standards. The great thing about ISO is they develop through consensus. It's the international community coming together. We're trying to get the best experts around the world the users of the technology the developers of the technology to come together and create the standards. International consensus means that a standard is more likely to be effective if the whole world's been involved in the development of the standard. It also means they take time because international consensus is much easier to say than deliver but the value of getting it once you get it is the whole world gets behind it and it has real impact. So I'll finish up with that. It's a powerful new technology. It's still emerging. It's still developing but this technology like some other technologies in the past has the has the capability to fundamentally change the world and how we work, how we govern, how we work as businesses, how we operate as individuals and it's important given the potential significance of that technology that we have standards that are supported by an international community to make it happen in the best way possible. Thanks for listening to me. Great for that really powerful presentation. It's a complicated area but I think you managed to do it so clearly for us which was great and with great passion and even even under time. So amazing. The point you made I think about partnership and the importance of working with the EU. We're very cognizant here and we're very pleased to have Amelia de Villa Gonzales here with us. He is head of ICT standardisation, digital innovation of blockchain unit in DG Connect in the European Commission. He's responsible for the coordinating of ICT standardisation strategies with a particular focus on the interplay between standardisation, research and innovation. Emilio has been director of the Spanish Association of New Technologies and also has worked in other areas of the Commission in particular intelligent transport systems. And today Emilio is going to look with us at the blockchain EU strategy and key objectives. And I think this is really going to be important to key. It links in very much with what Craig was saying, the international side, to see what Europe is doing now and what efficient it has for making blockchain applicable in all kinds of situations. So thank you very much Emilio. Thank you very much for the invitation. I really like to be in Dublin because I feel like at home in Spain we say a lot of things. Then in the house of Europe so again I feel like at home and the weather is like in Brussels. I'm not going to talk so much about the standard because I mean Craig made already the brilliant introduction about the standardisation goal and what he's really an expert on that. But rather on why the European Union has taken a position to really promote the use of blockchain and to promote a European vision there and how we are structuring the work of both the policy side and bringing all the hoarders together because we would like that European Union, it's clear that blockchain is a hot issue, an important issue in the international sphere so we'd like the European Union to be at the front of this development. And why are we taking this so much serious and in particular I'm working in the unit that is following the blockchain in the commission. At the very beginning it was started to be followed by the financial directories in general but now we are doing it in Conect because we have seen that it has a high potential not only in the financial technology sector like Craig has explained but also in many others including public services so you can have it in health, energy management, all identity trusted applications, it has clearly a cross-border effect so this is important for Europe being able for instance to have an electronic identification and trustable identification all around Europe this is important for us, has a clear value for citizens, think about all the health notaries, tax, financial technologies, there is an incredible vibrant ecosystem including the startups and we have seen it from many different research projects in Conect we are funding the research project in the ICT domain and before having a specific topic on blockchain there were already many sectors projects dealing with blockchain applications and on top of it we need to develop in order to make it progress also and a regulatory framework within the European Union, the European Union you know very well we have this 28 for the moment member states and we need really services that can be provided to the citizens cross-border so for that reason also we care a lot about standards that can promote interoperability so what is our strategy and again is a combination of on one side setting up a policy vision and a political vision so together with European institutions the European Parliament and European Council with our member states but also trying to promote the cooperation with all the stakeholders that should be involved in the in the value change so from industry academia startups and also citizens consumers so to bring all together and something that could also be very useful in our opinion to provide for standardization because you already create some preconceptions that then could be brought into standards arena and then we care not only about European perspective I fully agree with what has been said that this is a global issue is the same that with global telephony and we saw the importance of having global solutions and it doesn't stop a blockchain services in the in the European borders with thinking that so we want to have a disconnection with the with the global areas we are you have say the supporting the work of the TC307 this is the very beginning because we believe that there should be global solutions of course that will take into account the European requirements for instance GDPR data protection or the electronic identification that we are promoting there this should be brought into the standard requirements but we really value to have global standards that also help the European industries to go and develop solutions for other regions in the world we will continue investing on research innovation and startups so we have different funds for that in particular the different frameworks program for research and innovation and now we are just opening now in full a new call for proposals specifically devoted to blockchain and we will continue with more funding and also to develop infrastructure in the in the next framework program Horizon Europe and then the legal framework and you mentioned that already that there are legal issues there that has been need to to get some research how to find solution and then how to promote a legal framework that could work for everybody within the EU and even beyond interoperable standards again in Europe we really needed we cannot have a system that works in Ireland and doesn't work in France when you cross the border there and then skills we are also trying to support the development of digital skills and including in blockchain so we are very glad to see that you are announcing this morning a master on skills we believe that this is really important to promote the appearance of blockchain and another digital solution in Europe so all these activities the first one European blockchain observatory and forum this is related to stakeholders management this is a common actions we launch with the European Parliament and it was to bring all the community and to try to understand what was already going on what are the challenges or the challenges you may know and what are the possible solutions and identify where you need more investment or resources so on one side is an observatory to gather information and research was going on but also forum to bring people together and they have already produced many many valuable deliverables and it brought attention worldwide because we are talking about the standards for instance that report on scalability interoperability and sustainability of blockchains it is we were discussing the other day in ISO because it provides related to how to develop possible scalable system that we need some standardization activities and interoperability what is missing what are the gaps what do we need to do but there are others like what is the relation between blockchain and GDPR the general data protection regulation and how to use it for the government and public services and they also develop workshops and this has been very useful and honestly I attended a couple of them and you see people really committed and exchanging views and you see there the number of workshops are more that will be organized the last one was last Friday in Brussels on digital assets so this could feed and all these all these activities and results are available and we really like the global community to take into account and to get advantage of these results then on the other side we have the policy engagement and this was important again because if we have one solution that works in one member states and then the other member states goes in another direction then we are back with some issues then better to have a full European blockchain strategy so this is really to mobilize our member states of our public our policy makers and then we we promote the European blockchain partnerships with the declaration on 10th of April 2018 and now it has been joined by all our member states with the exception of Croatia but they have already applied to do that plus some from the area and here is on one side to develop a common strategy a common political vision another side also to make a cooperation to establish this European blockchain services infrastructure so to build the the foundations for having public blockchain trusted services using this infrastructure and they are aiming really at concrete deliverables that you have here so developing the use cases for this cross-border digital public services identifying what could be the priority once or where to start then think about the possible functionality and the architectors to to develop these services and then to set up a governance model so here again you see a lot of interaction with the standardization because they need to have an architector they need to develop technical specification in which to be based the the European block change service infrastructure and it is organized with two groups the policy group which are defining the political ideas and the technical group which is looking to the different use cases and trying to promote the architector it's working quite well so we were surprised because sometimes we really need to chase our member states to join initiative but in this case it was the other way out and they were knocking at the door so you see that there is a real interest in Europe for block change and now we have these 29 members so including Norway and Liechtenstein from the European economic area and then that it was already been disagreement with the orientation in free deliverables and the group is working well to have there so we have an initial set of use cases which are in the public area like notarization how to exchange diplomas then develop and Europeans of sovereign identity framework or in the taxation areas there may be new ones coming on and they are looking also what will be the principle the architector and there and there again we need to have these interactions with the standardizations on one side to bring the results of these activities to the standard arena and this is something we are trying to do and see for instance that use cases are contemplated to get feedback and to use the standard that are already there and then we will also use the connecting European facility this is some funding we have in relation to the framework program for research but for implementation so here it will be used and there is budget allocated to develop this European digital service infrastructure so it's working well we have also not only from the member states but also from the European Parliament in the European Parliament they are really motivated to the to the block change and they organize some workshops they get the blockchain observatories at the beginning of the horizon 2020 we had not aligned on block change but they put our disposal some funding they have to make the observatory and then clearly they made a resolution supporting them to make a European Union leading player in blockchain technology and also supporting the activities that we are doing in the European Commission we hope that the new European Parliament that has recently been selecting and I saw still the candidates all around the blend so we'll continue with this support so here you have that they call the Commission to propose this regulatory approach and to continue with these activities and not only that the most important in this multi-annual financial framework they accepted to have funding for develop both the infrastructure and provide more funding to to research activities but now we we went a step beyond and it was to promote the creation of the INATVA the International Association of Trusted Blockchain Applications and I think the Commission we are good to bring the holders together we are very bad in developing acronyms but the idea is because we need all these consensus and we need these common solutions is to bring all together and this is not Europe it has been founded in Europe we launched it in in in Brussels in in April but it has a global scope so we're really there are already some partners from Japan from India I think from Australia there are also some members there and we'd like them to join the INATVA and the idea is really to create a multi-stakeholder forum bringing the industry academy to promote all what is needed to develop this blockchain not only European globally so promoting interoperability transparent governance legal certainty and trust and then you see that these different working groups that are looking at different areas so interoperability specification they will most likely create a working group on standardizations for instance and there we need also to ensure that there is a liaison with all the different standardization organizations but also to have these regulatory dialogues because there are many many of the applications that will be fostered because they are beneficial for the citizens by the government so this is a place where industry service providers can meet regulators in order to find a solution so it's also there is a lot of momentum there and it's progressing well and again we encourage all the partners to join INATVA because then this is where important discussions may take place legal framework this is also amazing we are looking at the legal framework with the different partnerships and also internally in the commission and things like smart contracts with the impact of smart contract which is the legal validity that it has which will be things like which jurisdiction where was the smart contract there so there are things that possibly need to be updated in the international law as well and these are things that are being looked at or again the legal framework for tokenization so you see that there are different body looking at that one side the working group legal from the blockchain observatory in ADVA is looking as well to some of this there and we have the opinion of for instance of the European banking authorities there and we are launching a study looking with more detail into all these areas important thing and you can get the date we are also in ADVA and supported by by as by the European Commission we are launching the this world blockchain confidence wanting to have a world change congress but it was already copyrighted by somebody so it's a confidence but the idea again is bringing all together with the different strands for three days in Malaga in November there the weather is nice even in November so it's a nice place to be and we really want to bring all the constituency and discuss about what's going on but mainly with prospective view what do we need to go and how we need to cooperate in order to promote all the block changes services and applications way forward so with all the actions we will continue of course funding research and innovation and they are resisting new programs and here we ask when we have some of these topics we ask the projects also to contribute to standardization it's important we know and if you are there attending the TC 307 you see how many different working groups are there in parallel how many resources you need to invest so we try to push our projects to bring the results in a standardization and we will continue funding it again there is an open call for proposals so if anybody's interested it will be announced in October we have proposals there in Helsinki and then normally we will close it on December but be aware of that if you want to apply for it we will continue addressing regulatory aspects and we are really looking forward the results of the study and how then this can be brought into the digital single market then we need to build with the disconnected euro fatality the European blockchain service infrastructure for public ends with pilots and practical cross-border use cases and this will be important also because it will be able to test the standards that have been developed architecture and also provide feedback then to standardization bodies what else needs to be done and then generate cross-border services for the citizens then promote this public private cooperation and again I encourage everybody to come here engage in international outreach through NABA but also here and that's why we are participating and we are also having blockchain in our dialogues with other regions of the world like United States, Japan, Korea etc. work in standardization and again my colleague was since the very beginning of the TC307 but we are also following all the other standardization activities in Etsy they have an industry specialist group dealing with permissioned blockchain and in ITUT there is another focus group and something that is important there also is that I think because the resources are what they are that all the different standardization organization work together and cooperate and exchange information so we don't go into different standards that could be a disaster to be honest but rather every expert group goes in this field of expertise and then they try to maximize the synergies between there we have for that in Europe created a multi-stakeholder platform on ICT standardization where we bring together all the different standards organization active in ICT and we will pass this message there as well and we need a real interpretability so we will continue pushing for that and then we are also paying some investment fund together with the European Bank for investment with this new multi-financial framework that could help to mobilize venture capitalists to support both artificial intelligence and blockchain so how we can implement projects in these two areas and the last one related to the master will continue promoting digital skills and education so again in Europe just to summarize we really believe that blockchain is not the future is the present but we need really to make it to get at most advantage as possible we believe is an important policy initiative and we are trying to do it from the European Union and in collaboration with all the policymakers and we will continue supporting the investment in research in infrastructure and also we believe that international standardization is important and we will continue there for that we have developed these tools because in the European Union we don't have a magic one in our offices to decide what is there but we rather believe in the cooperation with the different stakeholders so here you have all the all the different addresses and we really encourage you to join in APA to look at what has been published in the observatory being both in the activities in the workshop and if you have any doubt there we are there also you can contact us thank you very much