 Hello. Good morning, good afternoon. Good evening, everyone. Welcome to Hyperligid Global Forum. And we are happy to be presenting a talk. And goal of this talk is to bring awareness that blockchain technology is at its early stage of adoption. And it is evolving just like it happened with the way internet revolutionized different industries or different market segments in the past. And this talk is going to briefly touch upon the connections like how it is evolving the blockchain technology within supply chain division, how it is able to digitize most of the processes which were earlier seemingly impossible. And we will also cover on how blockchain technology itself has accelerated the same digitization strategy across the industry and why it is important for us in some of the key learnings that we had over the time. And presenters for today will be Arun and Deepesh. And Deepesh, hey, we are from blockchain platform team at Walmart. And we are very happy to be able to present at this Hyperligid Global Forum 2021. So the role we would be discussing on the role of blockchain technology on digitizing the future of supply chain. And this talk will brief on how it has been playing a central role. And the blockchain technology as we know has accelerated the digitization strategy with a stability to master on your basis of doing business. There will be a paradigm shift in the way we are doing business due to the advent in technology. So welcome you all on this journey. And let's talk about the internet. So we know that internet has become a basic necessity for our lives. Our entire routine now involves around the internet. We are using e-commerce website for our trusty and other daily essential shopping, for the media and streaming devices for our internet and news. We do conferencing tools for our application for our collaboration with colleague online classes and all and medical consultation from the safety and comfort of our own home. The rise of pandemic in last two years has made this even more existential. So as the lockdown is imposed over most of the countries, we are using the internet now more than ever. In India, COVID application is being used to register for vaccine and also to get vaccination certificates. A survey by the United Nations conference on trade and development found that e-commerce share of global retail trade increased from 14% in 2019 to about 17% in 2020. In April 20, there was a 129% year-over-year growth in US and Canadian e-commerce orders from April 2019 to April 2020. A survey by Mackenzie revealed that in US, consumers' adaptation of the telehealth has increased from 11% in 2019 to 46% in 2020. But the internet as we know of today took almost three decades to come up to what we know as now. So let's have a look at the evolution of internet. So the internet was started in 1960s as a way for government researchers to share information. The Cold War in 20th century led to the formation of ARPANET. And that was the network which could finally evolve into the internet as we know today. The network was not open for public use. But the membership was limited to only certain academic and social organizations who had contracts with the Defense Department. In May 1974, Transfer Control Protocol or Inter-Network Protocol DCPIC was established. And this was a breakthrough moment because this enabled different kind of computers or different nodes to talk to each other. Prior to this, they did not have a common way of communicating or a standard way of communicating. In 1983, the ARPANET adopted DCPIC protocol. And this event is considered as the birth of internet. Later in 1989-90, the research at CERN in Switzerland by British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee resulted in the formation of World Wide Web, linking hypertext documents into an information system accessible from any node on the network. Since then, the internet has had a revolutionary impact on major aspects of civilization, be it culture, business, or technology. It led to the rise of real-time communication using e-mail, instant messengers, voice over IP, telephone calls, video calls. And it also gave birth to various online discussion forums, blogs, social networking services, and online shopping sites. Now, we have seen the evolution of internet. Let's talk about blockchain technology as we know today and this evolution and let's try to compare it with the early phases of internet. So, first of all, what is blockchain? Blockchain is a distributed and decentralized immutable laser which allows different business entities to securely interact with the same universal source of truth, which they all can trust. And why would they trust it? Because the laser is immutable, distributed, and which means not a single party can control the entire laser. So, first use of blockchain we saw when Satoshi Nakamoto conceptualized the very first application of blockchain in 2008, Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency. In a research paper in 2009, he provided the details of how the technology can be used to enhance the trust on the data. And thanks to its decentralizing aspect, which means that no single person would ever be able to control anything. But for such a revolutionary technology, this application should not be limited to just cryptocurrency. With that thought, Bitcoin was not utilizing the blockchain to its full potential in 2013, Ethereum emerged as a new public blockchain. And what it enabled was to use of smart contracts, which was logic on top of blockchain. This was a great breakthrough. As with the help of smart contracts, blockchain could be used as a platform to develop decentralized applications belonging to different domains. But the blockchain technology still this time had some concern with small blocking their enterprise adoption. These blockchains were permissionless, giving everyone access to the network. Also, the participants did not have to reveal their identity. Interprise network need much more regulated and trusted environment where any participant in the network is known and identifiable. With the vision to develop blockchain solution for enterprise adoption in 2015, the Linux Foundation started an Umbrella project of open source blockchain hyper ledger. It enables cross industry collaborative development of enterprise-grade open source blockchain. The new blockchain technologies developed at hyper ledger paved the way for permission enterprise-grade blockchain networks. Now the enterprise could verify any new participant before they onboard them to a private network. Now we have numerous blockchain technologies under hyper ledger and many are specialized for a particular nest use case. Any organization which wants to use an open source blockchain today has a number of options to choose from. With so many options to choose from and so many different blockchain network running, there will be need to have interoperability between such networks. And we have been hearing interoperability a lot today. We heard that in keynote and that's the previous session. But when we talk about interoperability, we might have different interpretation of what interoperability actually is. So let's try to understand that in detail. So in current landscape of blockchain networks as Deepesh was talking, you see multiple networks. You see a network which is being built for foot traceability aspect. And you see another network which is aimed at solving a trade settlement or cross border trade settlement. It could be for making sure that there are no conflicts happening in the supply chain process or it could be for identity related use case. So there you see multiple island networks being formed everywhere. And is this a good approach or is this a good design is the question at hand. So if you compared the early days of internet where we had multiple smaller networks which connected universities or different research entities or even the different government bodies across like across continents and that the invent of TCP IP and the Invent of like how we spoke about in the initial slides, a way to connect a way to standardize and connect them together. It revolutionized it really did brought together something which we know as worldwide web right where we have a text document exchanged. So is it something that we can adopt or is it the model that we see in blockchain. Maybe there is no definite answer for that but at least we can model it around that in this diagram you see a wide various of challenges that are being portrayed over here. Let's let's just look at the circles which are being dropped drawn on the left side right if you see those circles. You can see a blockchain protocols are the different ledgers which we call they fall into core of interoperability problem statement. When we look at blockchain technology we have let's say within hyper ledger we have a number of protocols right we have basu. We have fabric we have sort of theta and and in the in what not we have such a wide range of protocols. So when we talk about interoperability that question at hand is not just how do I connect fabric with sawtooth and how do I make decentralized applications at that layer but probably it's much more than that. When we talk about interoperability it will vary and around it's just like how we peel on onion we get multiple layers. The interoperability question is also multi layered one we we solve one and then another problem comes up at the different aspect. So this diagram kind of depicts the green ones are a technology related problem statements and as we move towards blue it's more of business process and business standard related problem statements. And when we talk about interoperability we need to make sure that our technology base is strong we have enough research and done or that interoperability here. We have my base of connecting different ledgers and in the decentralized fashion and in scalable fashion and moving around that trying to reuse as much as that we have built for specific use cases. I have built a specific smart contract or like I have built an application use case for supply chain, let's say for traceability. I should be able to use it across in another protocol moving forward. And is that all that we need. No, probably not because as unless we talk in same standards and this we talk same language. There is no point in having interoperability that's where data standards to come into picture. And when we talk about these processes like the supply chain industry. We are talking about thousands and hundreds if not thousands of companies coming together and doing a task and business process at each of those companies will be different. And the scale at which they operate will be different digitizing all these is what we will what will lead us to have a better future in terms of digitizing and blockchain using blockchain. Technology. And within hyper ledger space and I'm sure that you might have heard a lot about interoperability projects just in even in the keynote section earlier today. There is project characters and then there is project transact which is providing smart contract interoperability and then there is project. There are projects and labs like we were and and you we which has recently proposed. So now let's look at a use case. Walmart Magnum accessibility you're seeing 2016. What is the need of traceability. So suppose in case of any foodborne illness and an outbreak or break of a foodborne disease happens. It can take days if not weeks to find the source. Better traceability could help sale lives by allowing companies to act faster and protect their livelihood of farmers by only discarding those products. Which came from the affected farms in such a scenario it becomes very important to be able to implicate sacred. Also we could reduce food fraud. We can increase regulatory requirements. We can enhance our freshness and food reduce the food base and we can have a transparency end to end for the end user or customer which will help us and gain more trust. Now let's look at a life cycle of a particular item. An item and produce on its journey to an in consumer from farm to table touches a variety of ecosystem and goes through a lot of events. For example in case of mangoes starts with a farmer harvesting them and then sending to a supplier. The supplier saws that filters them and creates different lots of batches. We can call it commission even. The patches then gets combined into a larger container of pallets for subsequent aggregation event. These pallets or containers then get handed over to a carrier for transportation. Once the carrier reaches to a grocery distribution center, the containers are this aggregated into pallets. Let's go through a standard setup quality check and then get accepted if they pass those checks. Now these mangoes then get processed into final packet which could be available for customers to purchase. These packets are then saved to different Walmart stores where they are served to be sold. A customer who visits a Walmart store, they can choose the packet of their liking, add to cart and finally check out at the store counter. Now for the mango PUC from Guinness, former vice president of Food Safety at Walmart started by creating a benchmark. He bought a packet of sliced mangoes at a nearby Walmart store and went to his team and asked them to identify which exact farm these mangoes came from as fast as possible. As you saw that in the previous slide, even a single product like sliced mango goes through a complex supply chain process that's in a lot of ecosystem undergoing a lot of events. All this data is usually available but in semi-distributed manner distributed in chunks with different parties. So it is very hard to aggregate all that data and link it properly so as to be able to trace it back to the origin and see the entire journey from a farm to field. Now the team started calling and emailing distributors and suppliers and eventually they had an answer almost seven days later. Although this was not bad for an item which has gone through so many stages before arriving to a store, there was a lot of scope of improvement. The data was already there but disconnected and distributed in fractions with different parties. What if there was a way for all these parties to securely share this data in a trusted fashion? With this thought in mind, the technology team at Walmart started working on their PUC. So the technology team at Walmart looked at their own process as well as the process of their suppliers to design the application, which would help them trace back an item to its source all the way from farm to the farm where it was grown. They created a hyper-lysis fabric blockchain-based food traceability system. It was used for two use cases. For Oak in China, it allowed uploading certificate of authenticity to the blockchain. As we know, blockchain is immutable, decent, light laser, the certificates which could be verified on blockchain, they would bring more trust to a system where that used to be a serious issue. And for the mangos in the US, the time to trace their provenance went from seven days to 2.2 seconds. And this was a big pin for a PUC. Now once the PUC was successful and they had an encouraging outcome at hand, Walmart wanted to expand it. They wanted to increase the number of items they can trace on blockchain. But the food system is always changing. And in the earlier days, the items we could have in store was limited, maybe because of the transportation and the limitation of internet connectivity. But now with the advent of internet supply chain ecosystem has evolved. It has grown and brought the world closer. Now we are able to consume produce which are, say, from different part of the world altogether and which has resulted in an endless shelf which is ever increasing. This complexity of current supply chain has made it very hard to be able to keep track of each and every item with the confidence and insights we would like to have. So in case of an outbreak, many questions need to be answered for different parties which are involved in the supply chain. A customer has a right to know if they are impacted. As you see it in a store, they need to know if the particular packet has been decalled. Is it impacted? The regulators will need to know who all people have been impacted by that outbreak. The supplier and the farmer would want to know if they are impacted or they have to discard their items. As we know, information alone is not much worth unless we drive inside from these and take some concrete actions. With into intressability information which is now available at speed of thought, Walmart would be able to answer all these questions. This will also help Walmart to gain more trust of different parties involved and be able to act in a timely fashion in case of any foodborne disease. There are other benefits which could be derived from all this information. For example, tracking freshness, meeting compliance. Walmart has since been increasing the number of food items which can be traced back to it. So why are we discussing all these things? Why are we discussing blockchain along with supply chain in this talk? Because we see there is intangible bond between these two processes. Let's compare and understand why there exists a bond between these. Whenever we talk about blockchain, we talk about multiple parties coming together in a trustless world where they have little trust with others and they want intermediaries to do any kind of transaction or interactions between them. It's the same thing in supply chain. Let's take a simple example which we'll discuss in the next slide which is about supply chain. It shows the number or the complexity that is involved in the supply chain process. Just not that multiple parties or the trust that is involved, but even the business processes. If you look at the way supply chain works, it moves from one state to another state. There is a definite process involved. There is always retailers or the dealers who will be signing a purchase order request and then there will be a big chain of events happening starting from generating a behavioral document and then going all the way until it is received at that store with a recipe advice. It's a process. It has its own states moving from one place to one state to another state. We also have shared value realisation through blockchain technology. It's not just that any one party is gaining benefit or reaping all the benefits in using blockchain technology. Using blockchain technology for traceability will give visibility to each and every party including the data which they are exchanging or the data they need in real time. Not just that, it would also help them in resolving any disputes and all these without having to have a third party presence in the network. So far, whatever we discussed is one use case. Since then Walmart has been expanding user blockchain into multiple arenas. If you just look at the complexity involved in any supply chain process and by the way, this is a screenshot from VCC Analytics you can see number of different parties involved on top chatting with retailers, exporters and the banks which are involved and their customs and then there are stores and all the way until a purchaser at a retail store receives their goods. So there are a number of parties who are involved and let's just take one example for instance in 2014, Marx did a survey of how is their produce of roses and avocados moving from some place in Africa to Netherlands. And when they tracked this, when they wanted to see what is the complexity that is involved they found that this entire process of supply chain took them 34 days. It's not just that 34 days, they saw that it involved over 100 people across 30 different entities. So we are talking about this for shipping avocados and roses from Kenya to Netherlands. They are saying this amount of involvement. It's not just that out of those 34 days they saw that then this was spent merely on resolving or getting signatures or maybe like processing some papers across different entities. So this is a considerable amount of time. So what if we can solve all these in a matter of seconds or in near real time using blockchain technology? So that's the value chain. That's the value that's how we are seeing benefit of blockchain in supply chain process. And in fact, blockchain can help in digitizing most of the processes which are like decades old if not centuries old within that industry. So as with any technology, technology adoption doesn't come as a ready solution. It does come with certain challenges. And for example, as with any new technology, it's very rare that you find expertise on that particular technology everywhere. So this leads to small, I mean, those people who are those organizations or entities who are just trying to enter into this domain. For them, it's very hard to invest in so much and then on a new technology where the value they see is after something is done, which is over a period of time rather it's not like immediately visible thing. And also there are multiple regulatory and data privacy laws coming across in every country, which needs to be adopted into technology itself. So there is there is some more work that needed to be done in collaboration in open source where all these tools are being built, which could meet these regulatory requirements and which could help small and medium scale industries for adoption. So once those small and medium scale industries start adopting this technology, then there is no stopping from there. It's because that's the breakthrough, the barrier. And so then of course there are like data digitization challenges where multiple standards are coming up and unifying how to represent certain things across organizations uniformly throughout the world. GS1 is, for example, one is providing that kind of service or that kind of standardization. And the biggest challenge with blockchain technology adoption is that this kind of thing was never seen before. Working with partners was fine, but working with partners and competes it together in the same space. This is something new for anybody who would like to get involved into blockchain space. Now, is it worth having said all these key challenges that we just discussed? Is it worth to use blockchain technology for anything? Yes, you will find some of the technical aspects of what worked well for using Fabric or maybe technical things on the slide. But from the process perspective, we should lead the business, define the project but not the technical team. Because what we are trying to solve at the end is trying to use the business process. So we should let the business people or we should let the business itself talk to us and try to innovate the processes, try to understand, involve more and more people from across industries and try to understand how they are solving what is their problem. And try to understand the value that they are going to get and explore a way of doing which is sound for both parties. And always start small with a POC and go big. And I believe the use case which we just discussed on mango traceability and how Walmart has been adding multiple food items onto that traceability portfolio just since then is an instrumental example for how to go about adopting blockchain technology. So if Walmart can do this at its scale then anybody can adopt blockchain technology to solve and augment blockchain technology in their digitization strategy. So with this, we will end our talk and we will open up for Q&A. I see a question. So I see a question when it comes to supply chain, we need to bring several organizations onto common reality. How is this to achieve decent implementation issues more cultural rather than technical? So this is a good question. Yes, we do face challenges and when we talk about multi-organization or multi-party setup, there would be preferences across. And so what works really well is to do a POC as we discussed just recently, right? So start with small, try to see if you have multiple options of whether should I go with ledger one, ledger two, ledger three or whatever it is. I mean, most of the time it is that your partners do also have preferences on what exact tools or technology they have to use. And then discussion goes around how easy it is for you to govern that network and how easy it is for you to govern the data in that network and how can you protect the privacy aspects. But apart from these technical evaluations which you can do, if you can do a POC and bring out the value that will expose you to kind of technical challenges as well as business challenges that you will face in adopting. And I hope that kind of answered your question. I see another question. Is it not speed and volume of transactions, a major challenge in blockchain compared to current technology, especially in financial transaction? So this is a good question. This is more of a technical question which I could, I wish I can answer. So yeah, sure. Let me try it this way. So yes, when we talk about problems at this scale, the volume of course is a concern and the speed is a concern. And in cases like these, what works well or what works best is you will, I mean, there are multiple technological aspects to it. How do you represent data and how do you want provenance to be proved onto blockchain? I mean, to what extent you can trust the data, you can follow some batching mechanisms before you put something onto blockchain and make sure you are distributing load evenly or maybe you are not throttling your blockchain network so that it breaks all of a sudden. There are certain considerations which would, which you can follow from technical aspects. But again, the key to those things is should be coming from your business. You should talk to those people who are involved and try to understand their use case based on their inputs. You will know if you can follow these strategies to overcome certain challenges and how easy it is for an early stage startup to implement blockchain to modernize supply chain. I mean, this is a good question and I believe this is kind of a question where you are, so when we talk about supply chain, it's a vast domain, right? It involves starting from traceability aspect, you go all the way until like resolving disputes in any supply chain process that is involved. And not just disputes, you can go further from there and make sure, like for example, Deepish called out the certification details are being shown to end users to know, to trust the food items and all. So it's a vast domain. It's not that you always surface into similar problem statements, but yes, for an early stage startup, probably it would be wise if market research is done properly. To know which exact areas to attack or tackle first and expand from there. And I hope that answers your question. So we have, I guess we ran out of time, right? Do we have time to answer more questions? So I guess since we are run out of time and I see a few more questions coming in, can you all, I mean, feel free to reach out to. And we are happy to answer them. Reach out to us on on rocket chart or LinkedIn or any other forum. We are available in the conference. So feel free to ping the fingers and chat with us.