 Good morning. So a blockchain conversation may be a bit of a stretch for 9 AM. So I hope all of you are caffeinated and ready to roll. And to some degree, I'm going to try to answer your questions about what is a blockchain? Why should you care? But I also want to talk about what we're building at the project, which is as much about technology as it is about the way that open source communities come together to write code, especially in a part of the technology landscape that is still very unsettled and is still emerging. And before I dive in, how many people here feel like they could do a 140 character tweet explaining what a blockchain is? OK. So at the most general level, a blockchain is really a decentralized database. It's a way of taking a circle of computers, basically, owned by different people. And publishing to that circle information, basically entries that get added to a ledger. And this is the distributed ledger portion of a blockchain. And then building on top of that to be able to publish scripts written in a language that is particular to that chain. It differs from all the different implementations out there. But to be able to write scripts and have those scripts execute across all these different nodes. And if they all agree on the outcome, then the next link in that entry in that ledger can be written. So this is kind of cool. And it's something that wasn't invented by Satoshi Nakamoto. This is something that actually goes back to some degree to papers from the 1980s on distributed computing, on ways to scale databases to much higher levels. But we kind of forgot about it as an industry, as academia, until Satoshi Nakamoto's paper in 2009, suggesting that you could combine that with a consensus mechanism. Consensus is how everybody in that circle agrees to the next link in the chain, the next entry in that ledger. And his proposal was something called proof of work. And I'm not going to talk a lot about cryptocurrencies in this talk, because to many degrees, Bitcoin and even Ethereum are kind of the systems that are about building very large global platforms for distributed computing, in addition to being about cryptocurrencies. And cryptocurrencies have their own political issues. They have their own social issues as well. What Hyperledger was started with was this idea that if we can boil down this underlying data structure, this distributed ledger technology and the smart contract platform, and take it to the business world. In fact, many of the people who were involved in starting the Hyperledger project came from the business community, the banks, the other technology areas, where they felt this need for a very flat distributed multi-party database ledger and smart contract system, there was a need for it and a need that could be separated from the cryptocurrency side in a really interesting way. So that was the genesis for the project. The project actually began with conversation starting about a year ago with organizations like IBM and Wells Fargo and JP Morgan and Intel and others coming to the Linux Foundation saying there's a need here. There's a need to build technologies that focus on this blockchain space that help build these kind of building blocks for building these kinds of systems. And when I joined in June, I went out and talked to all of the members of the organization at the time, which was about 40 odd members, and said, what is the most valuable thing that the Linux Foundation and the Hyperledger project could do for this community? Especially given that projects like Bitcoin and Ethereum are pioneering some really interesting things, there's this long tail of a lot of other open source projects, what's the best thing we could do? And so the goals that we came up with were to build a developer focused community of communities, right? So a collection of different projects to benefit an ecosystem of solutions providers and end users building blockchain technologies, right? And through building these communities to build a family of frameworks, of platforms and libraries, upon which anyone can build and run their own applications. Kind of the open source story in some ways inspired as much by the Linux Foundation as by the Apache Software Foundation, right? Where you find 300 odd, maybe it's even 400 at this point, projects ranging from Hadoop and Spark all the way back to the original web server project, sitting side by side with healthy communities building technologies. We also, as a project, want to make sure that we're involving these developers and service providers and others in promoting the software publicly and building a commercial ecosystem on top of it, because that's really how you build resiliency into an open source community. Make sure people can make money with it, right? Make sure that it's something that they can put into practical use and derive some value from either indirectly as a service provider or buried inside their organization or even directly as providing support or products based on top of it. And finally, as a project, host the infrastructure for this, not just the mailing list CVS repositories or Git repositories and other things, but also the legal kind of infrastructure that you need. You all know about the Linux Foundation, you know who we are. You know that in addition to the Linux ecosystem, there's all these additional kind of template communities that have been built. Cloud Foundry, Node.js, Zen, and this is what the Hyperledger project is plugging into as a framework. Within the Hyperledger project, we've added, we now have over 85 members. This is, I refer to as kind of my NASCAR slide of the companies that are supporting this effort. And supporting means making a financial contribution. It also can mean, I mean it can mean that, it can also mean participating technologically in terms of using the code, but also contributing bug reports, contributing enhancements, being a part of the open source project. Anybody in the world can obviously like any, with any Linux Foundation project, use the code, modify it, redistribute it, become a part of the developer community, become all the way to a core maintainer without paying a dime. But these are the companies that believe enough in the vision of what we've built, including companies like Huawei, like Red Hat, like Intel, and obviously like IBM who believe in what we're doing. What we're also informed by is this vision, and I think this separates us from a lot of the current communities building blockchain technology, in that we don't believe there's only going to be one global chain, right? Many of the cryptocurrency advocates believe well everything will be about this particular chain, and there might be side chains that plug in and out, but there's just one core, and they compare it to TCP IP. And the comparison for me is a bit strained with TCP IP, and in fact, if we said that that was the model, I would worry because it's taken 20 years to move from TCP IP version four to version six, and we're only about a third of the way through that migration. So it's not exactly the best model if you want to talk about this really thriving active community. HTTP might be a better example, but even here we're talking about a space where every few months there's such a dramatic shift in the thinking and the technology, and I won't even go into talk about the DAO hack and other things, things that have caused this community to really grow up and harden and learn about resiliency. But fundamentally, I think we believe in the project that there'll be always be some number of public blockchains that people plug into, and many of those would be currency-driven, but there also will be millions of private chains, basically distributed databases that are designed for a particular marketplace or for a particular application. To give an example, there's a company called Everledger that is working with DeBeers and others in the diamond industry to build a diamond tracking blockchain, and this is a database that every company that plays a role in diamonds, whether it's from pulling it out of the ground to selling it like one distributor to another, to getting it into the retail stores, everybody there will write to this blockchain whenever a diamond changes hands, right? And with a tracking number specific to that diamond. And it turns out diamonds, if you hold them in light a certain way, actually create a unique pattern that you can use as an ID, not quite a QR code, but pretty close. And so using that to track diamonds to the system, you can try to keep blood diamonds from entering the market, and that's the whole point of making it a chain. It actually echoes a paper-based process that that industry uses now called the Kimberley process, but it's, again, paper-based, it involves fax machines, it involves when you want to query and see where has this diamond been or where did it come from that can take weeks to get an answer to that. Ideally, with a chain, if they set it up right, you'd be able to query that and see instantaneously the provenance of where that diamond came from. And that's really cool. And that's something that doesn't have to depend upon the price of a Bitcoin or whether the Ethereum network is up or splits or something like that. This is something that that industry and all the participants could set up, it might even be a public chain, but something that can trace that flow of diamonds is really essential and really needed. And there's use cases all over the map as well, not only in financial services, but in healthcare and supply chain, other supply chain things, like the ethical seafood movement, for example. If you could trace where this fish and this package that you see at the supermarket, where it comes from, where it was caught, in a way that you had high guarantees, where it's actually accurate at each step, that would change how that industry works and drive a lot more of the fish catch towards ethical practices. So that's kind of the idealistic hope of many people who operate in this chain, in the blockchain space and something we're trying to tap into with Hyperledger. The other important point to make though, I think, is that this is like 1994 in the web, the technologies are still really young. In 1994, if you told a bank that it could use a website to communicate with its account holders, most of them would say what is the web still in 94, that was still not quite at the zeitgeist, not quite on David Letterman or whatever. But people were starting to find out about it, but those who had would very credibly state, well, there's no encryption for the connection between a browser and a server yet. There's some proposals here and there and some experiments, but anybody listening on the wire would be able to sniff a bank account, and they would be accurate. And it wasn't until end of 95, beginning of 96, when Netscape and a few others first published the SSL specification that you could credibly say, no, we have a decent level of encryption between client and server. Blockchain technologies have some of the answers here, especially when it comes to confidentiality of what's being written to a common chain, but there's still some big challenges there. So at Hyperledger, we're trying to build basically these building blocks as independent communities, as projects, very much in the line of the Apache Software Foundation mode of a team of volunteer developers, building code in the open publicly, managing their own roadmap and release schedule, responsible for following Hyperledger policies and requirements about where the code comes from and that sort of thing, but also very significantly, these projects need to be encouraged to look at the other projects and think about common ways to work together, right? Ways to reduce duplication of effort, ways to build to each other's interfaces. So in contrast to an Apache Software Foundation project, here we actually expect the projects to think of it as being one step curated, right? We're not going to solve this with a top-down architecture or say there's one true way to build a blockchain, but from a bottoms up perspective, we can get there. If there's a cultural mandate for the projects to look at what the others are doing. Across all of the projects, there is a common license, the Apache Software License, and I might be bigoted about it because I helped write it, but it was actually chosen before I joined the project as the standard license. And the reason why a single standard license is important in this community is if we have these projects that in some ways compete, in some ways explore different aspects of solving this technology, we need to be able to share code between them because a project might thrive, it might find its footing and have a huge developer following, it might also just kind of sit there and have a few users and you want to be able to bring what works about that technology into another project without it feeling like there was a winner and a loser, right? And so this is about kind of the social dynamics of this space, you kind of want some Darwinian competition where there's some actual energy there, but you want people to not feel like they've lost something if their project gets merged into another one, right? So common software license makes that easier to do, right? It would be much harder if there were different licenses that either made that relationship one way or even incompatible. You need a common IP framework as well and like most Linux Foundation projects, all of them perhaps, we use the developer certificate of origin as a way to make sure that the developers actually wrote the code that they're submitting. Common collaboration framework, promotion and branding. I mean, these are the kinds of things the Linux Foundation knows how to do and is bringing to this effort. And eventually it'll be, we'll have common security practices as well for reporting security holes that you want to try to push out to the public. So the two flagship projects we have today at Hyperledger are Fabric, which is based on this consensus mechanism called Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance. This is again, one of those ideas that goes back to the 1980s about how if you have a circle of 10 or 20 participants in your blockchain, how do you decide which is the next link in the chain? And that's a consensus, a quorum-driven kind of method. But we're looking at making that pluggable so that other consensus mechanisms can come in as well. That was originally developed by IBM, written in Go, the programming language. And since it was contributed, we've had other active developers on the project from DTCC, London Stock Exchange, Digital Asset Holdings, and a long tail of other open source contributors. Sawtooth Lake is a different project. It's based on a different principle called Proof of Elapsed Time. You could think of it like Proof of Work, except you don't actually burn the CPU power. You have a core, yeah, it's kind of interesting. You have a core or something called the SGX extensions to the Intel chips that basically make an attestation that a certain amount of elapsed time has happened in that CPU, and you use that as a way to drive the process to decide who gets to anoint the next link in the chain. I'm doing a horrible job explaining it. Much more information is available at that project. There's some more that we've added as well, kind of add-on projects. We've also started to open the door to conversations with other communities, other projects about coming in, and these are projects that are either complimentary too, or actually perhaps even competitive with Fabric and Sawtooth Lake, but that's okay. Again, a little Darwin, never killed anyone. I guess it did, but let's stoke some of that up, right? So we're interested in stuff that is about un-permission chains, the big public currency-based ones. There's a lot of interesting work going on there. Portable identities, especially those that might cross these different chains that we see emerging. Smart contract engines, there's a lot of hard work going on there because everyone has their favorite language. You have a lot of questions about how general should a smart contract language be. If it's too general and too flexible, you run a much higher risk of a future compromise event like we saw with the DAO, but sometimes you really need that flexibility to do creative things. Lots of interesting stuff going on in the world of homomorphic encryption and secure multi-party computing. These are basically ways of being able to say, I can write encrypted entries into the chain and somebody else can analyze those encrypted records and make an interesting statement about them, such as it's a system of accounts, I've added this, I've subtracted this. You can't see the underlying details, but you could see the net by performing some mathematical operations on it. This is still fairly sci-fi, fairly advanced, but if we can help boil those algorithms down to something that becomes a library, becomes production quality, I think we'd make a real contribution out there. And then finally, there's all these interesting efforts around medical records, supply chains, the energy markets. I don't see us doing end user applications, that's still something we depend upon developers and partners to build, but if there's something we can do in this space that raises the floor on common technology, we're interested. Why do we even exist? I think I've tried to answer that in some of the last few slides, but as you all know, because all of you are developers, and I'm sure all of you have contributed to open source projects, collaboration is hard. I mean, it sounds like a pithy kind of thing, but getting the social dynamics right, getting the licensing right, getting the community dynamics right is something that isn't as easy as just starting a GitHub repo, right? And the world has way too many projects that are one company projects, one developer projects, and this space has a lot of those as well. And I think that's holding it back. It's certainly holding it back when it comes to adoption by the banks, by large companies who are thinking about this as a core part of how they reinvent their markets, right? And I think that's something that we can provide in the same way that the Linux Foundation helped make the Linux technology stack, something that even the most conservative companies could go, okay, I understand this, let me bring this in, and can get comfortable with it, right? And if we have competing licenses, competing brands, competing user bases, that kind of collaboration gets even harder. And we know if this community is fragile, then getting user confidence is a really big challenge. There's one final thought I wanna give, which is especially how we might relate to the other organizations out there in the blockchain and cryptocurrency space. So I've been at this for a while, and I'm sure many of you have as well, and we've kind of seen that the way that internet technologies tend to get developed is through a partnership between three different kinds of organizations, maybe two and a half, because sometimes the third isn't always needed, but the three that I see are the standards bodies, like the IETF, the W3C, and ISO, the implementers, like whether it's a vendor, or it's somebody like the ASF, or the Linux Foundation, and firmly I see Hyperledger there, or it's the global governance organizations, like ICANN, IANA, that sort of thing. And what you see happening in the cryptocurrency community today is a lot of work at the standards level and at the global governance level when it comes to responding to a hack or figuring out how to evolve the technology underlying Bitcoin or underlying Ethereum, and with the implementation kind of being left as an afterthought. And if there's a way for us to work with these communities, it's as being a home for the implementation. You'll never see a hypercoin, never see us push a particular token, because I think that does tend to change the dynamics of a community pretty tremendously, but you could use this R software to set up a coin, you could use at least the software that I would love to see us become a home for to set up a coin, to set up these kinds of interesting applications, and I think there's a nice clean division between those two. That's it. There's a lot more about blockchain technology to tell you about at some point. I encourage you today to dive into the project and if you have any interest in this and help us out. Thank you very much.