 Alright, welcome guys. Thanks that you joined this session today. I'm glad to see a lot of people here that look at responsible metaverse and that are interested in this topic. I will talk about some guidance principles about responsible metaverse and how it pertains to tokenization, NFTs, and speak a little bit about some of the elements to evaluate and see on our journey to the metaverse going forward on the thinking that we have at Accenture. So I said my name is Björn Obermeier. I'm from Accenture, Germany. I think my blockchain journey started 2014 when it was still with Hewlett Packard. Somebody came to me saying, have you heard about this Bitcoin blockchain stuff? I said, well, not really. I looked into it, got really intrigued. Eight years later, I'm still here. So it's a really interesting technology and I'm very fortunate to be with Accenture to drive blockchain and as it pertains to the metaverse going forward what we can do there. Before going into the topic, I would like to ask two questions to this audience. So how much do you trust the Internet today to be private, secure, safe, inclusive, and accessible? So for those who think it is private, safe, secure, and accessible, please raise your hands. Okay, as expected. I would like to ask another question. Will the metaverse be less trust worthy than the Internet today? Those who think it will be less trust worthy, raise your hands. Well, as expected, a couple maybe, right? And I was interested to understand because, you know, you are here for a reason. I mean, you have experience in the industry. You have experience with blockchain. I think on a journey that probably most of you have done here, you solved so many challenges already, you know, on blockchain, on one building block for the metaverse, right? And I think the people here in this room are the ones to save, you know, some of the challenges we see going forward towards the metaverse, right? Insolving these challenges. Your global community metaverse is a global thing and I think it's a perfect match, right? Going forward in order to apply these responsible guiding principles for responsible metaverse, right? And it's like as expected. I think if you meet somebody saying, well, yeah, I know exactly what the metaverse is going to be. I doubt it. I think it's still in the make. And I think we have to talk about the metaverse right away. If we look at the evolution of the metaverse, right? And I think some of you might have seen a slide already by Tracy. It was presented and probably some other Accenture colleagues presented it before. But the journey of the internet, as we've had it like in the 90s, where there was the internet of data and there was sharing data and the sole purpose was to access that data from various locations, moved into the 2000s to the internet of people on social media, you know, connecting people together through various tools and channels. And in 2010, we had the internet of things, you know, IoT devices to connect all stuff together to have more connected, extended world, extended digital world. And in the 2000s now, 2020, sorry, we have the internet of place, where essentially we combine people together, you know, in a virtual and physical setting, select what we do right here. You are here, you know, for the same purpose as the people online virtually. And I think these virtual worlds have specific rules and sets that we need to go on forward, need to appreciate. I think a lot of people flew in here and on your journey, probably you've looked, you know, before you went, you looked, okay, what are the entry rules into our island? Do I need a visa? What is the currency? Is there anything specific I need to do? Right? If you flew in from the US, maybe you had to, I don't know, do different things as, you know, when you flew in from within the EU, like I did. And I think it's that principle that we see, you know, in many virtual worlds and like in physical worlds, these ground rules that we need to all, you know, zero in and apply on. It's going to be important to go on forward with a metaverse. I think we need to apply as well, you know, when we speak about place, about some general common rules like don't steal. I mean, I think that should be a pretty obvious reason. But in a digital world, I mean, we've seen, you know, very negative stuff as well that happened. I think these some of the ground rules for the virtual places as we go and enter into the metaverse that we need to look at. And the other dimension of the metaverse is the internet of ownership, right? Digital assets, verifiable credentials. And those are, you know, things that are owned by people, organizations, and interestingly as well, by things, right? And how do we combine the internet of place and internet of ownership, you know, as we go towards the metaverse in a responsible way? And that's something I would like to start with now, because I think we have to start, you know, when we think about responsible metaverse, this is something we have to, you know, apply from the start by design and not somewhere later and start with the tech first. So we have developed a view on responsible metaverse framework of what we think are good guiding principles. And I would like to go through them. And I think when specifically in the metaverse and technology and experience and humans all meet, you know, and if, you know, word intertwines, there's some dimensions that you want to look at, you know, when it comes to responsibility. I would like to, you know, elaborate a little bit on the trust dimensions, for instance, privacy. So as we, as we think about the metaverse and as we think about designing for metaverse, specifically on the technology side, it's like we want to create something trustworthy that is maybe an implement privacy by design, right? We want to communicate as well to the audience, whoever the audience is, what are we going to do with their data? We want to be transparent about that. We want to as well share how data is collected from an individual and how it's going to be used. And maybe you want to have the appropriate technologies in order to make sure an individual can trust what was agreed on. We want to enable as well employees to have educated consent of what happened with that data. I think that's going to be more and more important. The more data that there is out, the more synthetic data that is out, you know, to trust and then have the means to understand is this something that I can verify is that some information I can use in action. As well, I think we need to collaborate with the various stakeholders as we define these systems. Being at organizations, being at employees, being at citizens, I think there's a multitude of stakeholders that need to come together in order to agree on the core principles for privacy and how data is used in the metaverse. When it comes to resilience, I think we have to prioritize resilience because it's going to be a fundamental enabler to offer a seamless experience as we enter these virtual worlds and as we experience these and as we have persistency in these worlds. Think as well, not about or think about, you know, when you scale these systems, not only about systems that we have already, but as well systems that probably we have in the future, you know, advanced networking, edge computing. Appreciate that there might be something else coming in going forward, you know, as we enter the metaverse, there's so many devices and things that will play in the future and we want to have this in a resilient way that we can assure scalability and interoperability so we have the right experience. Then I would like to speak about security briefly. So we want to design for obviously security for now and appreciate future threats. It's all emerging technology that comes together that is posing new attack measures. So it's going to be interesting as well to provide a lot of training of what these technologies can do to the employers and whoever is using that technology. Right? I think the gentleman from a bank yesterday said there was still a lot of miscommunication or people were not trained up to understand what it really is. I think that's just proving the point that still education is king, probably the same education as somebody referred to yesterday on the energy consumption of Bitcoin. I think we way past that but still it pops up. So I think education again on security, how to use it, what not to do is very much important going forward when designing a responsible metaverse system specifically for enterprise usage. Then there's IPR protection, so intellectual property that we supposedly specifically on digital assets want to retain. I think we need to empower employees to navigate all this complex IPR landscape. It's going to be very complicated to understand specific ownership relationships as we move through the metaverse, who's owning what specifically, when, where, what, which device. That's going to be probably pretty complex and that's probably going to require some lawyers to understand maybe the ins and outs and your restriction and what not to do and maybe there are still missing standards that will have to be developed. But I think it's imperative to understand how do you navigate, how do you make sure that you do not willingly, unwillingly infringe any patents or any, any IP. And at best probably you want to do it in a controlled way to have the right means in place to understand who's using what's maybe having actions for recourse in place as well that you can, you know, if you discovered something that you can actually recourse that. And then what's interesting I think is the, are the human dimensions to the metaverse, right? I mean it should be kind of, you know, people centric build around us and our needs and not necessarily around, you know, what is the technology and what can it do for us. But there is these double human dimensions that we want to appreciate. For instance the safe interactions so we want to create an environment where employees feel trust and safety, right? Where the company code and the ethics that we all agree on is built in, right? Like as I referred to before, stealing is probably a bad idea. I think that's a general concept on the planet that this is not cool. And that can of course in the digital world, you know, pan out to how do you protect digital assets, how do you secure IP, how do you secure documents, how do you secure personal data, biometric data maybe as you go into the metaverse. As your avatars may represent you in a biometric fashion that somebody could steal your biometrics, all things to probably think about as you design these worlds. Sustainability, I think this presentation and the principles would not be complete if we haven't spoken about sustainability. And I not only want to talk about energy consumption, Bitcoin and all that, I think we understand. I'm pretty much looking forward to what's happening on Thursday with the merge. I think that's one of the platforms going into the right direction and reducing energy consumption. But when I speak about sustainability in this concept, I think we can leverage the innovation that we see from other technologies in the metaverse. Think about the XR world and the immersive learning and how you can apply all these innovations and technologies to reduce our energy consumption and carbon footprint by using the right technologies at the right time. So there's so much cool stuff out there that we haven't had a couple of years back, so we can use it in order to be more sustainable and mindful of how we use the technologies and how we use the energy that we have. Then well-being. So we want to center around the employees or people's well-being when we create these worlds. In a world where you can be anonymous, or known, unknown, I think sometimes it's a platform for being bullied. So we want to design environments where people feel safe, trusted, where people can thrive personally and professionally and have the right tools and the right information so that they can actually use them. Nobody probably will use a system where you can trust what you see, where people are offensive because there's no means and there's no protection and guardrails in place that prohibit bad behavior. On the flip side, maybe it might make sense to incentivize good behavior once you enter these worlds to set a president so people follow that good behavior and example. And then I think inclusion, diversity and accessibility is very important as well. So we want to employ design methodologies that caters for inclusion that you can access and be authentically yourself when you enter metaverse. And I think in a digital form to be authentic requires a lot of technology to make that happen. But I think a very important point as well is the collaboration goes forward and as we collaborate way more going forward. So I think these are thinking about the eight core principles of how to build a sustainable metaverse and what I found interesting as well throughout the week when you listen to the conversations here during Hyperledger, just the language alone. I've heard so many times, are you somebody from the private world or from the enterprise world? So there's already a couple of worlds, right? And I mean, I think there's evidence that we all will move into the metaverse and again, I think this group is really geared up to change it or build it in a way that is really responsible. And I've heard as well, there's a lot of mentions about interoperability. How do you connect different ledgers? How do you keep things on one network and transport it to another? How do you combine that? And I think this alone is evidence enough that all of us here will play a crucial role in the metaverse and hence I think responsibility, how to build it responsible is something where we have probably an obligation to do that and we have a chance to make it right from now with all that we've already learned and know. I would like to switch gears a little bit to put it in perspective. So I wanted to use an example to elaborate a little bit. So I wanted to talk about tokenization. Right now I guess we're tokenizing everything, right? There's so many things that are tokenized here and there and essentially tokenization is the art of representing an asset in a digital form most of the time on a ledger in the form of a token, right? And what are the core elements of tokenization? So there's the digital representation. Then I'll just talk about it. Then it acts as a bearer instrument. So meaning that the owner of the token, which is marked in that token, controls the ownership and can transfer the token where they want it to be. Then there's an authoritative source of truth because you can kind of backtrack and understand the ownership on the ledger smart contract, which is very, very important to understand if somebody claims something to verify that claim. And then there is the programmability. Meaning that you can apply business code and business rules into that token. We see this all across the board and we hear terms of right now NFTs, right? I think that's really hot currently. I think as well we need to differentiate and we need to be really mindful of what we mean when we think about NFTs, whether it being the ones that are with social investments, two dimensional already NFTs, brand NFTs. I think we have NFTs ever since the dawn of Ethereum in 2014. I mean it's essentially smart contracts, right? Recently I think NFTs were really hyped for these use cases. But there's fungible tokens as well. It's just two classes. I think it might make sense if you just talked about, we refer to that as token economies and understand what we want to do with that token and what are the properties and possibilities. It might be a fungible token. It might be a non-fungible token. I think it's an nuanced discussion sometimes of what makes sense and what doesn't make sense. But I think I just want to use that example of how can we use these core principles to build enterprise systems if NFT is an answer. I'm not saying NFT is the answer, right? But how can we use these core principles to make sure if we use an NFT that it is trustworthy, there is privacy versus anonymity. I mean there's a lot of trade-offs that we maybe want to look at, but you want to look at them from the start. What are the client expectations that we do see in token economies and they may apply for NFTs and fungible tokens? Essentially there's a lot of value in there to develop completely new offerings, new products, new services, new partnerships, stuff that you couldn't do before that you may be able to do now. You can create new forms of value. So there's social capital in entertainment. I think that's very big right now in sports. I think NBA Top Shots is probably the example of using NFTs for customer and fan interaction and going completely new forms. But yeah, it's interesting. IP access to information, controlling who sees what when how, especially when you have content creators, you can people get content created, but share that content and get a new monetary system in place or to get the benefits later as you send them around. And you can embed the rights to view, own, send, receive. So there's a lot of things, rights and obligations that you can embed. You can improve customer relationships. As said, with NBA, you have direct customer interaction and engagement, things you haven't had before. And it drives long-term value as well. I think that's evident that we see that because you have a way closer customer interaction and you really tap into value pools that you haven't tapped in before because you have this direct access. So what I would like to maybe ask or reflect about is, I thought a lot about, you know, are NFTs good? Do we need NFTs? This is the best I could come up with. You might have seen in my initial slides, I was doing solutioning and IT architecture. My default answer is it depends. It's probably when we talk about NFTs or token economies, I think it's a yes, no, maybe question. I think it really depends on what is it that we want to do? What are requirements like institutional custody? Do we need that? Can we use well-governed networks or less-governed networks? I think it's a broad spectrum of questions that we have to ask. When thinking about token economies, when thinking about fungible, non-fungible tokens, I would love to have a definite answer on using NFTs or not. But I think there's so many dimensions in there, specifically for an enterprise use, to make it responsible, that we need to ask ourselves, do we actually need an NFT? If an NFT is poorly designed, isn't that contradicting a responsible metaverse? So you really need to think about how you go about your NFT strategy and how you build NFT for enterprise. So as guidance, I think those are some of the elements when customers are asking us, hey, I want to have an NFT, when we see others, how can I build an enterprise marketplace? How can I build primary, secondary, whatever? There's a lot of questions, and I think there's a lot of guidance that can be provided. Some of the things are probably not new for you guys here because there are questions that are probably in your day-to-day business. But still think about the security implications of decentralized platforms, that power that is the underpinning technology layer of NFTs. Think about governed and less governed platforms. I think that's very important going forward. To be cognizant of what's the governance level of the underlying DOT blockchain platform and is this something that fits my needs or is it defeating the purpose? So be very mindful of that. Difference in consensus mechanisms, yeah. If you have options, you could choose. I think identity, very broad topic. I think we cannot go in detail. But legal identity, how do you manage verifiable credentials? How do you store them? Who is actually attesting that a verifiable credential or that the identity is actually saying you are you and who's doing that? How do you manage that? How can you someone else let know that is you? There's tools out there. There's a lot of projects. There's a lot of focus. I think we heard it this morning from the identity woman and from others. The EU has a lot of stuff right now. A lot of tender work is in progress. But I think in the internet of ownership and with fintetic data that is there, I think understanding what data you can trust, what is integer and what is actionable, I think it's going to be paramount or requires a lot of understanding so you can actually use that data. And it's going to be only more and more and more data. Privacy, I think there's a trade-off looking at privacy versus anonymity, pseudonymity depending on the use case, you may want to have an answer on that. And depending on what industry you're in, maybe you have requirements that are against or sorry that do not allow decent levels of privacy because you need to report for instance. Biometric user data, the more sophisticated 3D avatars get in the metaverse. Be aware that they may represent properties, features that are now in the metaverse and people can maybe steal your identity through that. So maybe just be aware of that. And I think custody of information and digital assets is something that receives a lot of focus, right? I think Dave talked about it. Dave treats in the keynote about, you know, a wallet holding digital currency, objects and verifiable credentials. I think this is something that we need in order to have this persistent experience to move between and move safely between these virtual worlds. Custody will have different levels. There will be a need for institutional custody. There will be maybe self-custody. So there's a lot of options out there. And I think it's a very interesting point that needs to be addressed early and needs to receive the right attention. Social engineering attacks, I think, you know, everything around that, people trying to steal, you know, your passphrase, your wallet, I think that's traditional security concerns that you probably can solve with education. But still I guess you see that every day in the news people's wallets get hacked, leaked, whatever. So the right level of security for these wallets might be opportune. Insurance of digital assets, I think that's an interesting point. How do you ensure, you know, something gets stolen if you do it maybe in a less governed network? Who would you actually sue? It's an interesting question. Maybe, you know, that requires some lawyers to talk through of, you know, what's possible and what's not possible. But as we enter all these, you know, multiple worlds and dimensions, I think you have to understand where could your digital assets travel? Who do you business with? Who's your stakeholders? Can you press charges to someone in case something happens? I think that's an interesting dimension. Digital identity, I think I touched on this already. How do you prove someone is who you say he is? How do you prevent identity theft that may go back to the institutional custody? Even things like how can you make sure you can share identities in case you need that? How can you back up? What happens if you lose your phone? How can you make sure you get your stuff back? Not easy. How can you share a credential with your wife, for instance, in case you want it? That may be hard as well, depending on the technology used. And I think I touched on the intellectual property. Privacy, plug-itism, the brand of digital assets and what's contained, the infringement. I mean copying a JPEG or copying something digital, nothing prevents you from doing that. So if somebody says, I have an NFT, I own the NFT, there's digital art in there, nobody can copy it. Well, everybody can copy it. It's easier than ever before. It's just that ownership that you can prove or claim that you own that specific private keys, actually. The enforcement of smart contracts, I think that's an oldie but goldie. Should they execute business logic or not? Should they only facilitate business logic? Should there be a safeguard of whatever you wanted to do? And I think it will. You need to be cognizant of the new levels of fraud that may happen going forward. So you got to know your customer, know your transactions. I think it's an interesting one to understand what happens to have the means of investigating actually to do analysis and maybe as well you might need to do recourse, which depending on the platform you may have or may not have. And then what I think personally is really interesting with the advancements in deepfakes. How do you trust an interaction in a matter worse? Have you digital representation? Deepfakes got so good. Sometimes it's really hard to tell. How do you navigate? What are your sources of trust? Is it a verifiable credential? Is it a tested identity? If somebody, if an avatar is giving you information, can you trust it or not? And how does it as well pertain to fake news? So these are some elements I think that are worth to consider when designing or when entering the journey into the matter worse, when entering into an enterprise marketplace if you need that. So there's a couple of considerations probably that you want to look at. And actually I wanted to close up with some thoughtful questions, maybe some trust in ethical trade-offs. So what's your answer on the organization? How will you meet the expectations about data privacy and security as well as deriving the appropriate business value? So what is the trade-off? What is your answer? How would you design a responsible data and tokenization strategy that balances again privacy and security needs? And as well, how do you robustly authenticate digital identity while preserving probably the ease and use of access? I cannot provide answers to these questions for everyone here. I think everybody needs to think about themselves, how your organization is doing it. But I would like just to keep that in mind as you think about the session as you go out. And I think we have five minutes for questions and answers if there's any. There's a question? Is there anything in Metaverse that got anything in development in moving it forward? Well, the simple and very honest answer is yes, of course. We have a couple of our Metaverse leaders actually in that room. I think the question is for me. Well, maybe Melanie, if you wanted to answer that. How does immersive work and immersive shopping and all of this which is so interesting, right? All of this blockchain capability powers it, right? This group is so just bringing together collaborative business ideas and now we have a way to experience collaborative business ideas together. Something that I'd like to offer suggesting I think you guys have a perfect team. Is that a hyper wizard plan in that? Correct, yes. You'll see in the next few months. There's more than a dozen of us here in the room, in the building that helps just from a scale of a very small percentage of our team already being on site. But we're getting engagement. I would say for those at Metaverse the number of skills in our business group is larger than the aspirations of our two girlfriends. It's early days yet, right? We, as an example we built we use Metaverse virtual places for onboarding our employees. We're on track for 150,000 people who will spend the first day in what we call one of the center part of our Metaverse onboarding. XR only, right? But the things we want to do is why we lean in to try to activate the XR system here. I'll just give a simple example. Many of our employees have XBoxes, right, owned by Microsoft, and they buy virtual skins including under XBoxes. We use the Microsoft mesh platform on which we built our onboarding experience also owned by Microsoft. But they can't wear the skin they bought under XBox into work. And so that identity even within just a wall of Microsoft we try to do is get value from the technology where it is today but then advocate, right, for these standards, for the portability for these solutions that just the Microsoft could benefit from but then you look outside of the walls of that and you can sort of see how the investments, the capabilities that Hyperledger has built and needs to build will be things going to be so essential to bringing us forward to kind of enable the next set of experiences for work but also for consumer. I still have Sunday member summit on my mind of like a lot of the questions we're doing more getting more input from the group I wonder is there interest in a special interest group of Hyperledger just on the Metaverse combination topics like would that be a well like that might be interesting I know that I'm I'm a care of the city but that's a if we if we did the SIG then throughout the year it matures as an ecosystem then it gets national to put it on display next year's form but it just kind of creates the community, the individual community I'll maybe share one other that I'll talk a little bit about So we've brought a partner this year the idea of bringing together your vendors, your partners, supply chain, to make decisions to triage the supply chain issue kind of in an immersive space. So the idea, bring your own data, make decisions together. So they use cases to span quite large in terms of how they really want, much of what these groups work on, to be successful, because that enables us to actually work differently and make decisions differently, which is I think where the next part of my expression of con will be to cloud, but as data moves to the cloud, when you have the ability to choose what you share, when you bring with others, now how do you get together and act differently, work differently, make decisions differently, I think it will be a very big deal for you. Nice pluck. All right, thank you, guys.