 My name is Beno, I'm a consultant to SORA Mitsu, more on the business side and today I will introduce you to Hyperledger Iroha, one of the first contributions to the Hyperledger Foundation in 2016. And Hyperledger Iroha, I will discuss a bit more how it enables central bank digital currencies and fintech use cases. I will start with an introduction about SORA Mitsu, followed by an introduction to Hyperledger Iroha, first version 1, which is out since 2017, and later we will also discuss version 2, which has been worked on since 2020. I will go a bit deeper into three of the use cases, there are multiple, but three main ones for me are the digital identity use case, Biyako, a digital currency, and Bakon, which is probably the most interesting one. This is not me, this is Makoto Takamiya, Dr. Takamiya is the CEO and the co-founder of the SORA Mitsu group. He's a naturalized Japanese and former research engineer. He also achieved a PhD in interdisciplinary information studies from the University of Tokyo. Unfortunately, he couldn't be here today because of the travel time and time differences and a lot of other obligations in the Asian region. A short introduction to SORA Mitsu. SORA Mitsu is a global technology company delivering blockchain-based solutions for mainly enterprises, universities and governments, from the creation of domestic and cross-border payment systems to the development of our own decentralized autonomous economy called SORA. Our projects and use cases represent the next generation of fintech. We are the initiators and one of the main contributors of Hyperledger Iroha, and SORA Mitsu was founded in 2016. In the meanwhile it exists seven years and there's around 150 people in seven countries officially, but in reality it's a lot more, mainly centered around Europe and Asia. Maybe let's start with why SORA Mitsu is contributing to the Hyperledger Foundation. So SORA Mitsu's mission is really to design a better world through decentralized technology. And to push forward this process of designing a better world, building open source products is part of our core values and drivers. And this way others can easily benefit from and also contribute to our work, bringing us closer to our goals faster. Of course the Linux Foundation is the gold standard for open source project management so it made a lot of sense to contribute to Hyperledger. And by working with the Hyperledger Foundation we can create a blockchain platform that is a lot bigger than SORA Mitsu and it can be sustained and developed by anyone basically even without us. As mentioned we were going over some projects and use cases today. Hyperledger Iroha is one of the first major projects that SORA Mitsu has been working on since this initiation in 2016. This has led to a collaboration with the National Bank of Cambodia where we implemented a payment system called BAKONG that is based on Hyperledger Iroha for the central bank and a regulator of the Kingdom of Cambodia. It is targeted at 80 million users and we currently are past 1 million users so that is already an amazing achievement. And as you will see later it is still growing fast. We also work together with the Asian Development Bank. As mentioned earlier the new economic system called SORA has also been live. This is not built with Hyperledger Iroha for now. It is built with Substrate. But as we will see later we do not exclude that the future of SORA lies with Hyperledger Iroha rather than Substrate or next to Substrate. And also together with VCA we worked on an implementation or we are currently still working on an implementation of digital self-suffer and identity rather. And something we are enormously proud of as well is that we have been chosen by the WebTree Foundation to create a C++ implementation of Polkadot hosts opening a lot of opportunities for builders on Polkadot besides the standard Rust and Substrates usage. What is Hyperledger Iroha? It is a blockchain platform and it aims to have Byzantine fall tolerance. Make common use cases very simple to implement with robust libraries for both mobile and web applications. I think the mobile applications focus from the start makes us stand out and has helped us a lot in the adoption as mentioned with Bakong with more than a million users. So there's two versions of Hyperledger Iroha. The first one is written in C++. It has no Turing complete smart contracts. It only has a library of predefined functions that cover most common use cases for financial applications. The version two that is currently already live and that is still being worked on is written in Rust. And it continues the version one concept of having a robust library of predefined functions called the Iroha Special Instructions. And also it has Turing complete smart contracts executable in WebAssembly or wasn't. And something that makes me very excited personally is the event triggers to enable event driven execution of smart contracts on which we will elaborate a bit further later. So first case study our digital on-chain identity built on Hyperledger Iroha eases the onboarding process for both new and existing BCA customers. It allows to share the data between the multiple BCA companies, customer documents, blacklisted people etc. So it provides the opportunity to audit any operation in the BCA companies or group using Iroha or our blockchain. And it has mobile applications both on Android and iOS for the customers and a web application that facilitates the operators in the BCA companies. So very much simplified but this is also a very simplified solution is once that the user has been verified he is able to pass KYC automatically. So once he is verified he is verified for all the companies in the BCA group and a digital stamp of the approval for the customer is shared with all the companies. A second case study is BIACO, a local digital currency for which Sora Mitsu is working with the University of Aizu to create a campus currency. It's being used by students, they can use it on campus in store, in the cafeteria and it's completely based on mobile applications. So in March a test of the digital currency was conducted and early next year the system will go live all over campus. Then our main case study for today is called BACO. It's in collaboration with the National Bank of Cambodia and built with Iroha. It's the world's first retail payment system run by a central bank using blockchain technology. So we're all very excited that we were the first and that we see now globally similar initiatives are launching and almost every central bank is looking into their digital or digitalizing their local currency. And so the idea is that we had to make it as simple as possible for the users, especially in a country where a lot of people are unbanked, but more people have actually a mobile phone. So the focus lies on a mobile solution for the user where anyone with a Cambodian phone number can download the application and has access to the mobile currency. Money can be sent to any other person that is recorded or that has the application himself and the transaction is recorded on Iroha on the central bank's ledger. So this is what the mobile app looks like. It's kept very simple. You can send money to any registered user. You can display a QR code to receive payments or to receive other transactions. You can scan a QR code to pay at any merchant that is participating and any bank which is almost all banks in Cambodia are participating and you can deposit money to an existing bank account. This is what the desktop application for the commercial bank looks like. Back home uses a two-tier architecture. The central bank provides on one side the interbank ledger of all transactions and each commercial bank on its side provides access to transact on the platform to their users. So the ground truth about the balances of money in the economy is at the central bank's ledger and this is built with Hyperledger Iroha. This is what it looks like. The interconnectability between the central bank, the payment gateways and the mobile applications for the users. So why did we chose to do a project back home? As mentioned only 22% of Cambodians over 15 years old have bank accounts and that is of course a huge gap and a large unbanked population. Large remittance markets in Cambodia. So domestic money transfers are common yet still very costly. A lot of people or the whole economy is missing out on a lot of internet commerce because very few people have a bank account so very few people have actually a credit card which is the most common way to pay for internet commerce. So the aim is to work away these gaps and besides the numbers of course this is what you do with you. You bank a lot of unbanked people. You have a huge impact on the individual and also on the national economy. So why use blockchain? You can simplify payments architecture by having both a core banking system and an RTGS on the same platform. So you increase basically the efficiency of payment systems by creating a protocol for digital money and you create a trust minimized system. You give users also mathematically provable property ownership which is crucial in countries with a lot of unbanked people where also not everyone has all the required documentation. So you can really... Bakong really helps a lot of people to bring them into the official economic system. A little bit an overview of Bakong in the news. So in 2017 it was announced that the National Bank of Cambodia signed the blockchain agreement with Soramitsu. And by the end of 2019 it was promised to deliver this payment system on Hyperledger Iroha which was done. So indeed the most surprising thing about it is that it was immediately a large scale development with 10 banks participating all over the country and the central bank and not just a small proof of concept which was really incredible. These are some pictures from what it looks like. So this is a shop in Cambodia where it shows that you can pay here with your QR code or you can pay by scanning the QR code of the merchant. And more good news. So on the left we see the official launch of Bakong with the National Bank of Cambodia. And two months ago Soramitsu started a proof of concept to do the same in Laos, a neighboring country. And as we will see this offers a lot of opportunities for the whole region. Bakong received many rewards, fintech rewards, banking rewards in Asia. And these are the current numbers. So we started at the end of 2019 and we have achieved an aggregate volume of more than 10 billion USD in the meanwhile. And as you can see we have a semester on semester growth in adoption, in usage and in volume. Which is great to see and as mentioned it's targeted at 18 million retail users. We have currently passed the 1 million users. So we still have a lot to accomplish and to look forward to. One of the aspects is the KHQR. It's a standardized QR code that is used throughout Cambodia. And all the disparate payment systems are connected by Bakong. So you simply scan the QR code. It sends money instantly no matter what payment provider is used by the merchant or no matter which bank lies behind it. So very user friendly and simplified in the front end. So what are the effects on the monetary policy? It's very positive for the monetary policy. So it offers a lot of new opportunities to do targeted monetary policy. It has no negative effects because retail users can have a limit on how much they have in their wallet. So there's no real competition with bank deposits. And our system is merely a replacement for carrying around small amounts of cash in your wallet. Potential for cross-border transfers and especially now that we started the proof of concept with the central bank of Laos. So Bakong system allows for retail users to send and receive money using their mobile device. If two commercial banks or central banks, in this case as I just mentioned, link their settlement to the system. This can allow retail users across borders to send and receive money very fast and super cheap compared to the current situation. So forex operations can be provided by an intermediary with large reserves or a two-tier currency could allow for conversion between currencies with little friction. And what is great is that the digital currency can be tracked from vintage to the current transaction of course. Typical for blockchain transactions in order to reduce the risk of money laundering and illegal activity. And as mentioned, a proof of concept with the central bank of the Laos Democratic Republic has started. And we are currently leading feasibility on digital currencies in Oceania. So imagine that this passes as well. We can create a very strong cross-border payment system all over the Asian or Southeast Asian region. So those were the use cases that are currently live or some of the use cases currently live on version one of Hiroha. Since 2020, Soramitsu has embarked on Hyperledger Hiroha versus version two development, which is a complete rewrite of version one in the Rust programming language. So as you remember, coming from C++. So the main features of Hiroha V2 are the Wazen-based Turing complete smart contracts, a world-first event-driven smart contract execution engine, completely on-chain using event triggers. Probably my favorite phrase in the whole presentation, so I'll say it again, a world-first event-driven smart contract execution engine, completely on-chain using event triggers. And a block explorer and wallet support will also be available from the first full release. A little bit an overview of the architecture, so it has a simple object model. It contains primitives you can work with, like domains, accounts, and assets. If anyone has more technical questions, I would be happy to refer you to someone a bit more technical than me. So feel free to reach out later. So a wide variety of information can be stored directly on-chain in the data model. Also new here, and a big upgrade I would say, is that we can store metadata in on-chain. And this is an example of the Genesis block. One of the features of Hiroha is its special instructions, which are a library of built-in instructions to execute common on-chain logic. Wasm, of course, you can... the advantage for Hiroha 2 is that you can write in any code or in any language rather. That compiles to Wasm and run it on-chain. And as mentioned earlier, you can attach triggers that are executed on events in Hiroha 2. So another framework that uses Rust is Substrates. So both are being worked on by Sora Mitsu. One is more on the Sora network, which is in the Polkadot ecosystem. And then the other one is for Hiroha for the central banks for digital identity and other use cases that we just mentioned. So what are some of the pros of Hiroha V2? Not V1, but V2 is the built-in object model versus Substrate. Its event triggers its ability to add metadata and higher TPS. On the other side, Substrate has advantages as well. It's focused more on multi-chain and parachains. It has more than a thousand contributors in different ecosystems, mainly Polkadot, but also Cosmos and NIR. So the development of it is growing fast. Both have their advantages and that's why we like to work with both of them. So something I'm personally very excited about is the near future of Hiroha V2 and what we can do with some of our also mainly built and contributed by Sora Mitsu, DeFi applications. Like for example Polkaswap, which is a DEX currently running on the Sora network Substrate. And with the event trigger feature of Hiroha V2 and the on-chain metadata, it makes it very interesting to what we're currently doing, look into the options to have this run on Hiroha 2. You can find the documentation here and if you have any further questions you can talk to me directly now or you can always send an email to Group CEO Makoto Takamio. Thank you very much.