 Good morning, everyone. Good afternoon. If you're in Iceland, I guess. Good evening. If you're in Europe or further points east. Welcome to Hyperledger Global Forum 2021. We have an amazing set of content, an amazing set of couple of days here to be able to gather and talk about all the different parts of the Hyperledger community, both the technology side, the deployments that are happening out there in the real world, the things that are possible. We have an amazing lineup of speakers as well. Before we dive into all of that, I'd like to thank our sponsors with a special thank you to the Diamond sponsors Accenture and IBM, as well as our Platinum sponsors, the Falcoyne Foundation, Hitachi Siemens, and Zulig Pharma. All of these companies have come together to help deliver the content, deliver this amazing event for all of you, and thank you to all of you for showing up for carving time out of your day and for joining in this conversation. It's been quite a year since we last met. It's been about 15 months, actually. I can get to my first slide, please. It's hard to remember because it feels like a decade ago, but in March of 2020, early March of 2020, we gathered at the Corona Ranch for Hyperledger Global Forum 2020 to celebrate, just like here, three days of content about our community to get to meet each other, to share tacos and drink margaritas under a starry sky. In that time, a lot has changed. That very week, I remember stepping on the plane home, actually, telling a friend that, you know, I think I'm going to head home and not leave the house for about a year. And I thought I was joking, but I might have been more right than I realized. And we went through a period there, and many of us are still there, in fact, here on Zoom, where suddenly we found our world collapsed to really staring and engaging with each other through Zoom calls, through the same kind of tools that open source communities have always used, which is a good thing, but not having the opportunity to share tacos and beer under a sky. But really, though, our community persisted. Our community, you know, with the bonds that we had built were solid enough that when we came together and realized that there was a major crisis at hand, many of us realized that the technologies we had been working together to build for the last four years might actually suddenly have some relevancy in the fight against this brand new threat against the pandemic. So many of you worked together and worked to create something called the Truster Supplier Network, which started to provide traceability in the delivery of personal protective equipment and help new buyers and new sellers build reputations to be able to trust each other and start work. Others built data sharing networks like the Mipasa Network that was built to share data about the spread of COVID and genetic information about it, and other things to help organize those efforts, even all the way up to the US government and other national levels. Others started to ask, could we use these technologies to build traceability mechanisms in the pharmaceutical supply chain or even in the deployment of verifiable credentials, you know, which our community has long pioneered to help reopen borders through the use of portable proof of vaccination status. And you'll hear a lot more about all those different topics at the rest of the event today. There's so many ways in which our community responded, and I'm so proud of all the work that many of you have done and others to go and respond to these immense challenges. And the good news is that coming out of this crisis from the last year, not only has the economy started to recover and in some cases it's booming back and we see even supply chain shortages elsewhere, it's pretty clear that the enterprise software industry as a whole is also healthy, and in particular the need for enterprise blockchain continues to be strong. Pricewaterhouse Cooper's released a report at the end of last year based on surveys conducted during 2020 where they asked executive CEOs, you know, how much do you plan to deploy this, how important is this to you? And by their estimates we will still see by 2030, enterprise blockchain technology have an impact of the level of $2 trillion and added value to the global economy. Hard to tell what's going to happen sometimes next week, let alone next month, but the trend lines that they see, the sentiment that they pick up on is still completely solid on this front, which is great to see. They even predict by 2025, most businesses will be using blockchain technology. And this doesn't surprise me because every business has a supply chain, every business has payments that flow in or out of that business. Every business deals with identity of itself or its customers, so not a surprise at all to see those kinds of numbers. Deloitte back to that up as well in the continuation of this survey they've done now for three years, talking to the C-sweets about, you know, how confident are you in this technology? Where does it sit in your list of organizational priorities? Is there too much hype in this sector, which they certainly agreed even in 2020 there is more hype than in previous years, but all of them saw increasing confidence that this is an important technology, they're going to continue to build on it. It's transitioning from R&D to pilot to now something ready in production. And we know that we're starting to see industries where by mandate you'll have to start to be on these networks in order to do regulatory reporting, in order to participate in the traceability, some traceability mechanism. And in fact, key to meeting so many of the SDGs I believe is the use of distributed ledger technology and it looks like quite a few people are humming along with that as well. It was nice to see PricewaterhouseCoopers also identify the three key areas where we've seen our own community deploy real production systems. I'd love to go into more depth on these, you'll hear a lot more about these through the rest of the week, but just to give the highlights in central bank digital currencies, a hot headline center place, you'll hear a presentation from Accenture later today, I believe, on central bank digital currencies and the work they're doing. We heard last segment actually earlier this morning from Her Excellency Siree Che, who's the head of the Assistant Governor for the National Bank of Cambodia on Project Back Hong, which they've deployed. But we've seen similar projects in Thailand, in the Caribbean, also using hyper technologies, two different ones actually, Beizu and Fabric, lots of other initiatives out there touching the space. Stay tuned, this is really hot. But in other domains of financial services as well, blockchain technology partners deployed a core system for the Tel Aviv stock exchange, for the exchange of securities on that platform, on top of hyper ledger sawtooth, bondy value with bond exchange markets. We know that there's a lot of activity going on here. The second main area is in provenance tracking, generally speaking, which includes supply chain, but also includes things like intellectual property, right? There's a supply chain of intellectual property, whether it's patents or copyright, knowing where the stuff came from is important. And there, of course, we see companies companies like Walmart, reinventing how their own supply chains work through the use of this technology through food trust and other networks they've set up startups like we dot trade that are connecting those kinds of supply chain information to trade finance networks to make the flow of goods and finance in both directions much more efficient, both of those organizations using hyper ledger fabric at the core of what they do companies like ledger domain looking at traceability in the pharmaceutical supply chain and also building on top of hyper ledger technologies. And we think this is a key part to reopening society to dealing with the supply chain crunch that we all have, but reintroducing trust into our markets. And then finally in the realm of digital identity, not to say finally, like these are the only three to be clear, but these are the three that have had I think the biggest collections of use cases underneath them. We continue to see organizations, both the bonafide, which is an organization serving the needs of credit unions in the United States, secure key with their verified me network. Obviously, our long standing friends in the government of British Columbia, who have deployed self sovereign ID network for businesses and business owners there. But all of these have been kind of flags in the ground for what really has been some interest in this domain from those looking to reopen borders through the use of proofs of test results and vaccination status. We'll hear a lot more about that from Marine mastery from I add a coming up tomorrow. So be sure and try to catch that or catch it on the replay. But really exciting things going on in this domain so core to reforming the way that the world works. And while there is no, as I've said before on the stage of hyperledgic global form, there is no coin market cap for us to track the deployments of all these different projects to 10 decimal points. There is the Forbes blockchain 50, which is an incredible resource for understanding how are the 50 largest companies who are using blockchain technology, how are they using it? What are they using? Turns out 30 of those 50 are using hyperledger technologies, lots of fabric, but lots of use of the other technologies within the hyperledger greenhouse as well. And it's really been great to watch that track over time. In fact, we'll have the Michael Del Castillo appearing tomorrow, tomorrow during the Asia segment, sorry on Thursday during the Asia segment with a number of the companies represented in the index talking about the work that they're doing. So be sure and come for that. For this conference, we've put together more than 100 hours of panels, demos, and other sessions across two different segments. You're joining us here for the second segment. Maybe you were there for segment one as well. And you saw these same slides. I'm giving the same opening in both segments to make sure we address the full global audience. Arno as well is talking to both, but we have unique content otherwise in all the different segments from the keynotes to the different sessions. So it might be late night, feel free to show up in your pajamas or, you know, over the dinner table, whatever time zone map, but we'd really love to have you attend as many of these sessions as you can. Because they came from all different places. We had six of them are actually in Chinese, which is a great way of kind of illustrating the global nature of what we're building. We also have a very diverse set of both speakers and attendees. It's never enough to say we've got 20 percent female participants and speakers. It's like what Ruth Bader Ginsburg said when she asked how many women there should be on the Supreme Court. She said all of them. But we sincerely work hard to make sure that this reflects the full diversity, not only of our community, but of the society that we are serving. So thank you to the program committee for helping make this an amazing collection of content. Just to give you a little bit of a preview, you'll hear from so many of these global brands on stage, but it's also the startups that are in our community that really have a huge impact on the adoption of our technology. During the last segment, we had a panel on CVDCs. Be sure and catch it on the replay. Today you're going to hear from Arno Layors, who will tell us more about the technicals, an update from the technical steering committee and what's going on in our community that's so intense and interesting. Then you'll hear from, actually I have these out of order slightly, sorry. Then you'll hear from David Treat. Sorry, did I skip over? You'll hear then from David Treat, from Accenture, who'll be telling us about the work that they're doing. And then finally from Frank Yanis, who is with the FDA. And I'll give them all the introductions when I get to their points, but my key message is stay tuned. There's a few last pointers I want to just mention before I break away to Arno. First, be sure and join the virtual hallway track in Gather Town. This is where the informal conversations that make these events so fun and so meaningful. We felt we needed to provide a vehicle for that, and that's what we have there at Gather Town. There's a link in Hoppin to be able to get to that. During the breaks, be sure and also check out the networking feature in Hoppin to get to know other people in the community. This is a chance for one-on-one connections to be made around different themes, around different ideas, or just feel free to stumble in and meet someone new. Be sure and claim your $25 Kiva credit that you get as an attendee. There's a limited number of those, so don't wait on that so that you can claim them all. And then just before tomorrow's Mornings segment two, there's a buff from the Crypto Open Patent Alliance, which is going to be really interesting. And so I'm looking forward to seeing many of you there. And finally, on Friday, there's a side event called the Firefly at Hyperledger Day, which all of you are invited to attend as well. Sorry for that plug. We just really wanted to make sure everyone knew about these things. The links to everything above are in Hoppin. And so I do also want to emphasize, all are welcome in the Hyperledger community. We mean that. We want to make sure that there's never a barrier to participation for reasons that are sometimes hard to see when you're in the middle of things in an open source project. We have a code of conduct that applies not only to our projects, but also to this event. We intend to make this inclusive if there's anything you see or anything we do inadvertently or another participant that you need somebody to pay some attention to. Please let us know. There's a link to the code of conduct on the website and throughout the event. So very happy to engage in that front. With that, I'd like to turn the microphone over to Arno Lehoors. Arno is a member of the Senior Technical Staff with IBM. He's also been the chair of the Technical Steering Committee for quite some time now. And he has a presence across the whole of the Hyperledger community, really helping make sure that our technology is solid, but really that the communities that are working together are both successfully working amongst themselves, but then across those project boundaries under the greenhouse as well. So with that, let me welcome Arno to the stage.