 So, welcome to the second chat where I'm watching the talk for today. And the beginning of the talk is Darren from both Census and For The Do. Awesome. Thank you so much. Hello, everyone. Can you all hear me okay in the back? Does this work? So, my name is Darren Frankel. I work at Enterprise Blockchain. What that means is I work to partner and consult with large enterprises on developing blockchain-based solutions to supplement their businesses. I work with governments. I work with regulators. I work with private entities. And so what I want to talk to you today is a little bit about kind of what I do in this space. But the biggest thing I want to actually talk about today is the need for talent and why I want people to start thinking beyond cryptocurrencies. And so, when people think of blockchain, what do most people think of? So, most people, of course, will think of Bitcoin, will think of cryptocurrencies. Now, this isn't surprising. In fact, this is very important as part of the blockchain ecosystem. But when you actually think about blockchain, you shouldn't think beyond them. A lot of people think about the markets. They'll think about trading. They'll think about how they can buy the dips, sell up the highs. They'll think about ICOs, how to launch their own token, bring in funds, raise money for their own projects. They'll think about bubbles. They'll think about the environment that we're in, the surplus of funding and the discrepancy between projects and money flowing into the ecosystem. And of course, some people still talk about hackers, how Bitcoin, how cryptocurrencies and how blockchain are the tools of the illicit. So, what I want people to start thinking about more and more, and what I talk about with my clients is thinking beyond that. What should you be thinking about with blockchain? And what I think about is this. I think about development teams, hard at work, designers, teams looking to actually build the future of our infrastructure. It's very important that we start to think more about how we take this technology and build on top of it, instead of just how we leverage the financial aspects of the system. To me, blockchain is more about communities, it's about community building, bringing people into your ecosystem, helping them to, helping adoption with the projects that you're building helps solve their problems and build on top. It's about late nights at the office. It's about working on projects that you feel drive a significant impact in the community around you, working with your team to build some really amazing tools. It's about open-source platforms, open-source software, how many commits you have on your project, how many developers are engaged, how many people are watching your projects. Finally, it's about building something new and connecting the world around us. When I look at blockchain, I really think about us living in a new era of open platforms and open innovation. Over time, what we've seen is actually the development of open innovation within and around corporate development. In my world, I come from the background of technology consulting. It used to be in order to build technology, in order to build our business, everything has to be done and invented here. And as we progressed, a great example is General Electric. Jack Welsh, one of the first things that he did when he came into General Electric was, he said, or he eliminated what is called NIH or not invented here syndrome. They started to open up to the idea that I can actually leverage the tools and technologies that are developed by the community and my ecosystem and bring it into my environment. We're seeing the next phase of that where individuals and small teams can actually start to innovate and build platforms, build these open networks and platforms, and leverage their own communities as well. So what I want to say is, everyone knows how to hold them. Everyone knows how to buy and hold cryptocurrencies. But what's really, really difficult, not everyone knows how to build them. Not everyone knows how to build platforms that actually drive impact, that actually do something with this technology. And this is how we create value. So that's what I want you to keep in mind as I'm going through this, and as you're listening to the talks the rest of the day, is not about how you come in, you trade, how you make money off of cryptocurrency, but how you build something of value, how you contribute to this ecosystem. So why does blockchain matter? Why does decentralization matter? So where it all began is, of course, in 2008, 2009, with the collapse of the financial system. So Lehman Brothers is the famous example, a company with over 600 billion dollars in assets disappeared overnight. This is in large part due to the risky behavior of these large corporate entities, these centralized systems. They essentially acted more like hedge funds than they did like banks. They were taking very, very risky bets with consumer money in order to meet their own needs. And eventually this caused the collapse of the existing financial system, leading to bailouts, leading to a lot of regulatory action. I think what's important to know about these types of experiences is it's not just, you know, it's not just, oh, you know what, I want to feel like I have more control. I have more value over my own life. It's actually having that control. Thousands of millions and millions of people lost their homes, lost their jobs as a result of this type of, this collapse. And this is all due to centralized parties abusing their power, abusing their positions. Facebook is a more recent one. Facebook currently, when I log onto the Facebook platform, I'm not, it's not my Facebook page. Everything that goes onto Facebook belongs to Facebook. My information, my friends, my pictures, my birth date, all that information is on Facebook's platform. When I talk to my friend, I'm actually sending a message to Facebook who then routes that message to my friend on my behalf. It's all still Facebook's data, Facebook's information, Facebook's platform. And what we've seen most recently with Cambridge Analytica is what happens when a central party with this amount of power, this amount of information actually abuses their position and then uses that data to help malicious actors actually gain control over society. In the case of Cambridge Analytica, they helped by collecting 50 million user, excuse me, 50 million users' data using that to actually create politically targeted ads and influence elections. Now this, again, is another example of these large parties taking seemingly small positions with the information and the centralized power they have but greatly impacting people's lives. The last one that I want to talk about is actually something that maybe some of you are aware of when Star Wars, excuse me, when the Star Wars franchise was bought by Disney. So Star Wars is a huge phenomenon, a huge cult following, which is amazing. I love Star Wars and I'm sure many of you here do too. Many people invest their very livelihoods in the characters and the stories they create, their games, their movies, their comic books, their novels all based around Star Wars. When Disney came in and bought the Star Wars franchise, what they actually did was bought the rights to the entire series. So your lives that were dedicated to this entire storyline to the characters that you followed for your entire life that maybe you contributed to, now became under the control of Disney, who then kicked all that information out and decided, this is core canon, these storylines we see as part of the Star Wars universe, these guys, not so much. People who invested their entire lives in what they loved on these stories just had them simply thrown away. So to me, decentralization means taking power back over our own lives. And so this means things like, so what are we building to actually take our power back? So with the company I work with, we are working on a product called U-Port. U-Port is a self sovereign digital identity. It's a way for you to actually own the information about your own life. It's a way for you to actually own your digital self as you move about in the real world. This is what we're doing with U-Port is looking at how you can actually own your own medical record, rather than having to go from a doctor to an insurance provider to another facility, actually creating a digital record that I possess, that I control, that I disclose information to each one of those parties and maintain as whole. If I walk to a border crossing, if I'm trying to enter a new country, disclosing elements of my passport, the ability to prove that I have a right to come into this country, my visa is valid, without disclosing elements of private data. Maybe I don't need to reveal my birth date. Maybe I don't need to reveal my social security number if I have other services I'm accessing. Akasha is a very interesting project, creating a decentralized social network to take on Facebook, to take on LinkedIn, to take on Twitter. These networks that rely on central storage and monetization of data at the expense of consumers, working to actually give consumers their own data back so they can then create their own networks and create their own value. And probably one of my favorite projects is this project called Solarius and why bring up Star Wars. Solarius is creating what is called a trans-media franchise owned by the creators, owned by each and every one of you. If you invest your lives in a story, if you invest your lives in a character, whether it's creation or adaptation or producing brand new content, you can contribute that content to the Solarius universe. You can then build on top, you can own a piece of that character, you can own rights to it. And those characters will live on forever, just like the platform underneath. So these are all great cases for individuals, but that's not the only thing that Blockchain is great for. Blockchain is also great for enterprises, and this is what I do on a daily basis. So how I got into this space was through supply chain. It's incredibly important through our supply chains today to know where our food comes from. And it's not so much because it feels good knowing, oh, this food is organic, this food is GMO free. It's not about feeling good. It's about on the other end of the supply chain giving people the basic human rights that they deserve. Why, when I go to the store, does this pound of shrimp cost $2 less than that pound? What is the reason for that? What happens in the background? So what a team working on a project called Viant is doing is actually creating the basic structure to create an immutable record of supply chain provenance. So when a piece of shrimp is fished out of an ocean or fished out of a farm, I can track that as it moves to the supply chain and I can know where it was caught. I can know that it was produced in sustainable conditions. I can know it was produced ethically and legally. And these are very, very important things for deciding what we as consumers do with our money. JP Morgan is working on a platform called Quorum, a fork of the Ethereum platform. This is all open source and free to use. They're actually using this to create better financial infrastructure to lower the risk of financial institutions as they go through their daily business. One of the prime motivations in this space is something called, excuse me, is real-time settlement. Why real-time settlement is important because it lowers risk. The reason why your credit card costs a couple percent is because of the risk associated the credit cards are taking by fronting the money on your behalf. What this does, what real-time settlement does is it ensures that assets once processed are settled immediately, lowering that risk and allowing financial institutions to provide you services at much lower rates. And one of the projects here in Singapore is with the Monetary Authority, which is really setting an example for central banks globally. They're actually looking at taking a very powerful existing system, the RTGS system here in Singapore and creating a system where banks can settle directly with each other, real-time gross settlement with each other, with the Monetary Authority taking a passive stance on allowing them to interact but not taking an active stance on having to process each one of these payments. They're lowering the cost of their own services. They're lowering the reliance on a single party in order to create a more efficient financial system here for Singapore and beyond. I think blockchain has really spurred a lot of things, but one of the greatest aspects of blockchain is the amount of collaboration we are seeing in industry. So the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, which this is a fraction of the members part of that alliance today, has over 200 members. It's a mix of startups, it's a mix of corporates, it's a mix of governments, all working together to establish the standards for using blockchain technology and enterprise. We are working specifically with a few of these companies on developing standards for supply chains, establishing standards for lending. Because of this technology, we're seeing just a new approach to business. These are my boundaries, this is my business. How are we as an industry going to come together and actually change the way we do business with each other on our and our consumers' behalf? And lastly, the Brooklyn Project is working to actually establish responsible token standards so that the tokens that enter the marketplace are done so responsibly to protect both investors, consumers alike. So this is a group of companies looking to basically reinvent the token launch and ICO process that is an act of self-regulation before being regulated. So why should you get started building on blockchain? Perhaps it's because you see a massive talent shortage. Perhaps you are looking for a way to jump into industry, you're looking for a new edge. There are hundreds if not thousands of companies looking for blockchain experts ready to hire people who know these skills, know how to code on blockchain and develop blockchain applications. Maybe it's because it's an open frontier, there's a lot of opportunity in front of you. There's so much infrastructure, there's so many products that still need to be built and that there's little there that's preventing you from actually being a leader in the space. Or maybe you want to create something entirely new, create something that has impact. So how do you start building? So this is one way. I highly recommend downloading Truffle. Truffle is a development framework that will allow you to very, very quickly spin up a test environment and start building the blockchain apps. It will take a lot of the complexities of the Ethereum network and move it behind the scenes so that you're able to start coding apps very, very quickly. Then I recommend that you dive into their Ethereum overview and their Pet Shop tutorial or any of the tutorials on their web page. This will give you a first insight into how this technology works, what makes it different and actually a real-life example of implementing it yourself. Next, create a wallet, download MetaMask, buy a small amount of cryptocurrency, transfer it, test with it, play with it, understand how it works, why it's important, why security matters, why these things matter in the blockchain ecosystem. Participate in a hackathon. Come to events like these. Meet people. Work on interesting projects with them. Try your skills. Improve. And finally, keep learning and keep exploring. Although things like Truffle are great ways to get started, it's not everything. You need to understand more of what goes on under the hood and there's a vibrant community out there online that can help you understand more of what's going on in this ecosystem. Steam it, Reddit, Stack Overflow and GitHub are all great places to get into some of these projects and learn what other teams are building. And finally, find a team and start building yourselves. This is a team of my buddies who have actually gone together and started to build a real estate blockchain solution. So go out there as you are meeting people, as you're testing your skills, as you're participating online, find your future colleagues, start a project and change the world. Thank you very much and happy building.