 Hi everyone. Very good morning, good evening, good afternoon to all of you. A very warm welcome to Hyperledger India Chapter's Women in Blockchain Season 4. This is the fourth consecutive year that we are conducting this. I am Deepika Karanji, co-chair at the Hyperledger India Chapter. Thank you all so much for joining us for this event from across the globe. We have some amazing women leaders with us today as speakers. Some of the best in the industry. So I'm sure there are going to be some takeaways for each and every one of us. The Hyperledger India Chapter, you can move to the next slide, Kamlej. So the Hyperledger India Chapter conducts events like these throughout the year along with hackathons, technical workshops, meetups and more to really promote contributions to open source blockchain as well as Hyperledger projects and also improve technical awareness throughout India. It's a community that has been built over the past many years and we're standing here today on the solid foundation that is laid by all our leaders, community members and blockchain evangelists. And some of the folks who have been instrumental in bringing to all of you this particular event is Ritu Jain, Nidhi Singh, Kartikeya Kashyap, Ravi Pratap Singh, Pramod Humaal, Rajesh Krishnan, Vikram Sharma, Kamlesh Nagware and I'm going to just leave out the last link. Next slide please. And without further ado, let's meet our leadership. First, we have Daniella Barbosa. Hi, Daniella. It's lovely to be here and you shouldn't skip your name because Dipka, you've been not only organizing this but a great leader for our community in India and worldwide so I thank you for all your support as well. So always include yourself when you read through a list of people who are supporting our community. So thank you. Yeah, thank you so much. That was really sweet. So Daniella is the executive manager at Hyperledger and as always I'm super thrilled to have her here with us. The sense of this event becomes, you know, even more significant since she's one of the top and one of the leading ladies in the field of blockchain as the general manager of blockchain at the Linux Foundation. I had the pleasure of meeting her in Dublin last year at the Hyperledger Global Forum, and she has been incredibly supportive of all the events that the India chapter conduct so welcome Daniella and thanks again for joining us. Welcome to the next slide. We also have with us today Julian Gordon so you know, although Julian we haven't met in person yet, I can tell you that he is one of the most approachable folks that I've had the pleasure of knowing, and he is the VP Asia Pacific at the Hyperledger Foundation, and he works at the Linux Foundation. He has been our go to person for implementing any and all ideas and initiatives at the Hyperledger India chapter. So thank you so much for joining us Julian and accepting our invite and being here with us today it's, it's always nice to know that you have our back in that we have your support. Thank you. Thank you. All right. So now I invite Daniella to present her opening remarks. Excellent. Well, welcome. Well, welcome everyone. Good morning, good afternoon and good evening for those of you who are joining from around the world. As said, I am Daniella Barbosa I'm the executive director of the Hyperledger Foundation, and I've been with the Hyperledger Foundation since 2017, and have had the pleasure and the honor of seeing our global community grow worldwide. And there's nothing that I think is more spectacular and more indicative of where Hyperledger technologies are being used and where the market is accelerating. If you look at the India community and the developers and the ecosystem that over the years, you all have built into this ecosystem. And it really is a testament that this this is the fourth annual women in blockchain. The community started, you know, very early on, but during COVID, the community India and the rest of the world got together and really started highlighting the ways that we can work together virtually. There's nothing like what the India chapter has done. And if I think if you look at the number of participants, the number of events that so many of you have organized and really driven. It's really spectacular. So I want to thank everybody here on the call today. Those that are new welcome to the hyperledger community, all are welcomed and we want to have a place where everyone can participate. And it's just so amazing that I'm sure it was very hard to get a lot of the panelists and all the coordination, but the fact that we're able to get a full two days of content, multiple hours of women talking about blockchain and not talking about how it is to be a woman in the blockchain, but to be talking about the technology and how we're leading the ecosystem and the industry. So for that, when I think about myself as the executive director and as the leader, as you said, I am just like so blown away by the fact that it's not about me but about all of you and what we've actually created in the marketplace. So I want to thank everyone who over the last few weeks has put the work together to do this, this event. And more importantly, I want to actually thank all the women and all the men that are part of the India regional chapter who have supported women in our community. So over the many, many years that the chapter has been active as well. So once again, I'm very excited to be moderating a panel today. There's going to be some great technical technical presentation and a fireside chat as well. And it's just amazing. It's 1030 at night here in San Francisco on a Friday night. And I honestly and I'm not joking here. I wouldn't want to be doing anything else, but being here with all of you. So thank you. Deepka, you mentioned Julian's support of our community. I like to give Julian a little bit of time to talk to us about what he's been working on, and how he's been supporting our community before we get started with the panel. And then the technical discussions and fireside chat. Julian. Oh, you're muted. Thanks, Daniel. And I would like to reiterate this. There's nothing else I'd like to be doing. It's one o'clock here in Hong Kong. And this is just an amazing event. So just to say a few words in the four years I've worked with the Hyperledger India chapter. I'm consistently been in awe of the blockchain technology and expertise that exists in the community, and basically also amazing enthusiasm and innovation. And the wonderful way the chapter, its leaders and members share, educate and have supported the community. And the Hyperledger community is not just in India, but the Hyperledger communities around the world. And as I think you mentioned during COVID, I think that particularly was a great service to the global community. And this woman in blockchain webinar, I think is an inspiring example of all these traits. The knowledge and expertise that we'll see here today is truly remarkable and a real treat from across the region for everyone watching in this time zone. So it's not just India from people across the globe, he'll be watching us today. And finally, I'd like to say thank you to the Indian chapter for all the work that put into this event and to everyone who's presenting and participating. I'm looking forward to this sessions and the work as a whole kind of sessions over this, this today and also next week. And with that, I'd like to hand it back to to Pika, who has made this all happen to be going back to you. Thank you. Thanks Daniela. Thanks Julian for those really insightful remarks. I'd like to hold the panel any further we have all the panelists here with us. I'd like to now invite Daniela to begin the first very first panel discussion of women in blockchain 2023 blockchain, a catalyst for disruption and finance. Before I hand it over to you, Daniela one thing I request all the panelists to remain on camera and maybe the rest of us can go off camera because only the folks with the videos on will be streamed live on YouTube. All right. Thank you. Over to you Daniela. Thanks so much. Once again, it's an honor to be here today and I'm very excited about this discussion around blockchain as a catalyst of disruption in finance. This is a topic that more and more every single day. We're seeing not only in the news from a height perspective, but really financial services companies and individuals and consumers worldwide, really getting behind the technology. And it's fantastic and maybe if you can put in that slide again with the speaker so we can go through the speakers before that would be great. But I'd like to introduce the speakers that we have here today. I'm going to ask everybody to take about five minutes, three to five minutes to introduce yourselves, what your role is and what your company is. And one of the things is, prepare, why everybody else here on the phone today like what is the one thing that you want for them to take away from the audience. So I'd like to introduce, I don't know if the slide came back up. I can't see my screen. Let me see here. Maybe not. Okay. There you go. Thank you. Whoever did that. Thank you so much. So I'd like to introduce starting from the left and then we'll actually I'll introduce it in the order that we're going to go ahead and let everybody introduce themselves. So Mika Krashid, who is the CEO and the founder of Block X space. And she's joining from Germany where I think it's very early in the morning if I, if I do my calculations correctly so thank you for joining us. We also have Sheena from who's the CEO of the hybrid finance blockchain. We have Shahruh Siti, who's the CMO from the unique networks and Tanvi Rata, who's the founder and CEO of policy 4.0. And Padmarshi Suresh, who's the practice director of HCL technologies. If you all notice, all these women's have titles like CEOs, CMOs and founders and practice directors in our industry. There are so many absolutely wonderful women that are technologists and leaders in the space that it's great to have. So we'll go ahead and maybe Mika, if you can introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about yourself, what your role is, the company that you work for, and that one thing that you want the audience to take away from today's panel. Thank you, Daniela. I'm very happy to be part of today's panel. And I would call myself actually, not only the CEO of Block X space, but I call myself an entrepreneur in the blockchain and no code space. So I'm building up several businesses. Block X space is actually focused on the consulting part, blockchain consulting. I'm also building up a Sanji, which is a no code platform where you can create applications, APIs, websites just with drag and drop, no coding skills needed. And the third one, it's called transaction hub, where we showed that we actually can scale a blockchain, especially a proof of work, public proof of work blockchain where we meet records. In the scalability. In general, my focus is the real life application of blockchain technology. So we are not involved in any pump and dump schemes where the, I think the greatest part or the greatest focus is on the in general of the industry. But I think with the technology, not only blockchain technology, but in combination with further technologies like smart contracts, regarding contracts and so forth. We can make industries much more effective, efficient and secure. And this is for me, the most important part of the when when using technology, it should improve everyone's life. And this is, you know, our focus of our work. Man, you know, so many of us are on top in yours, whether we work for smaller big companies, when we're working in the blockchain space, because a lot of the innovation does happen in smaller groups or different divisions. So we look forward to your feedback. What's that what's that one thing you want everybody to take away from today's panel that blockchain is not only crypto. And that blockchain technology, how how blockchain technology can also be applied, especially now in this panel in the financial sector. I think we can convince them all of that for sure. Excellent. Sheena Marora, would you like to introduce yourself tell us a little bit about who you are and Hi guys, good morning. Thank you so much for inviting me for the panel. So I've been actually working in this industry. So initially, my journey began with cybersecurity, I've been working in cybersecurity since the beginning of my career. And in the 2012 I was introduced to Bitcoin during one of the cases that I was solving for the law officials. So that was very interesting. I was like, what is this Bitcoin and then when I started researching about it and I realized that Bitcoin is just one of the small application of the technology blockchain is vast and it's humongously big. And that just intrigued my interest and I started researching on it. And in 2016 I set up a company called Prime Chain and we were working with a lot of banks all around the world, figuring out what is the solution lowest hanging through to experiment with blockchain. And in 2020, after doing enough research and experimenting trying all the different blockchain fabrics, we've started something called a hybrid finance blockchain. So utilizing the advantages of centralized and decentralized financial sector. We've recently got permission from the regulators as the world's first regulated blockchain. It's called Hi-Fi. So I've been working on that for now five years now. Fantastic. So, you know, I think many of us started with our fascination with Bitcoin and what was going on, and then applying you know figuring out I think to Mika's point right that you know Bitcoin is an application. It's one of the most known application of blockchain but how do you go about doing that. So congratulations on the launch of Hi-Fi and being one of the first. What's the key thing that you want everybody to take away from this panel today. I realized that, you know, we've been working on blockchain for quite some time now, but there are still small hurdles and you know loopholes that we are still trying to figure out. I, you know, I'm looking at all the panelists if we can get some information and try to move beyond the hurdles and we can cross over and then, you know, we'll see a lot of applications which are working in real instead of like we are talking about how a blockchain is going to disrupt it. I want to see actual disruption happening so like let us the key takeaways I would want to take from the session today. That's amazing. All right, let's get to that soon enough. Sharu, over to you. Hi, thanks Daniela and thank you to the Hyper Leisure Foundation for organizing this and inviting me. I am at present ahead of marketing for Unique Network. It is an NFT infrastructure company. Right now we are focused on creating enterprise applications for around NFTs with a special focus on loyalty and customer experience. At the same time, I am also an ambassador for Polkadot and I drive evidence and events for them as well in the region. I've been in this space for almost two and a half years and before this I was at IBM. Back in 2016, I had the opportunity to be the IBM Asia Pacific marketing leader for blockchain. And that was the first time I was working with the Hyper Leisure Foundation and like this sort of couple circles are really, really excited to be here. And I've seen an interesting evolution from how we were trying to help banks. Ashina, as you mentioned, identify early use cases and DOCs back then to a wave of disruption that we are hoping will enable through newer technologies. And one of the things I would like for everyone listening in to takeaway is that the space is still new and especially for the women tuning in. I would encourage everyone irrespective of their skillset. You don't necessarily have to be a very technical person. I am not. And to join the space and identify your place, align to your skillset here. There's room for everyone to make an impact. Excellent. Thank you. I think marketing is also so key to us getting this message out to blockchain and what blockchain can enable. And also the NFT market, the amount of people that it's brought into the market and educated them or at least got them aware of the industry has been fantastic. So we're looking forward to your feedback there as well. Excellent. Tanvi, would you like to go next? Sure. Hi, Daniela. Hi, everyone. Thanks for inviting me here. So I'm from a very niche space of the entire crypto blockchain industry, which is regulations. So I am the founder of Policy 4.0, which is a policy innovation lab and we work very closely with governments around the world on emerging tech regulation. So I've been in this space for quite some time. I used to be a blockchain leader at Ernst & Young in India. And I have sort of had some fortune in working on a variety of policy issues in the space starting from cluster development things that a lot of state governments, a lot of people trying to build innovation clusters focus on. So now also an advisor to a state sandbox that we've set up in India on Web 3. And starting from there to financial regulation, which is somewhere the bread and butter of all debates on regulation today on crypto. So I had some got to work on those issues across over 11 countries or so in our own organization, you know, our research and our work is with over 40 governments or so, which are working like closely on this. We also right now working on the G20 side where there's, you know, a lot of celebration going on on the global framework. And apart from that also had exposure on the standard side so one of India's delegates to the ISO where we are working on blockchain standards. I do some amount of the web as well so my work is day in and day out on those policy questions which I think those are the big questions that blockchain sort of needs to address. And yeah, so I think in my background, I am an engineer. I was an engineer very long ago when I was a Georgia Tech and I moved to policy. I've been in that space for a while. I worked with the Indian Prime Minister, I worked with many decision makers around the world. So it's, I have a fairly, I would say a niche sort of view on this but I think it's also very big picture view. So in terms of what question I think people should take away I think it's now sort of a very fundamental time in the industries journey. I think, yeah, this is a time where a lot of big questions need to be answered right about the real world implications about the real world applications about how this will be sort of the secure financial infrastructure of the future. And how we build a better right so dammit, I find it very interesting that you think it's a niche part of the industry because it's probably one of the ones that is the hottest discussion point right now worldwide is about regulation so we look forward to your, your feedback on that. And to the last panelist Padmarshi, over to you. Good morning, good afternoon, everyone. So, I'm Padmarshi Suresh, I come, I belong to Headshill Technologies, been a practice leader here. So I've been into the mobile space for the last 12 years, but I'm into this blockchain and Metaverse application development maybe from 2020 when COVID hit and then there is a lot of transformation which is needed in terms of, you know, how do we virtually collaborate the employees? How do we bring things to this? That is the time I was actually building a new capability within Headshill that is called as Metaverse. And when we started Metaverse, it also had to go hand in hand in terms of how do we handle certain digital transactions inside the Metaverse. And that's where we have a framework within HCL called as Oble Tokenization Framework and we try to integrate that into the Metaverse application wherein we've brought in a lot of new set of applications in terms of employee onboarding and training and all these things we were giving out as NFTs to the employees as well as fungible tokens so they can use them for redeeming it to some other physical assets. So that is how my journey blockchain started and now we ask how it could be extended to other applications. So now we are seeing how this could really be extended to other applications in the Metaverse and one thing I understood in the entire journey is we always think Metaverse with Bitcoin and other currents, it's more like a digital currency that we wanted to use but in Metaverse kind of an application where you draw a parallel with the real world, there is a lot more of things that blockchain is going to play a very vital role because in this virtual world you're collecting a lot of information about the users, you're simulating them in real data and maybe you're also doing a digital twin of the data inside the Metaverse. So it becomes very important that blockchain plays an important role in the data collections and play a vital role in the security of the data because users are giving more amount of their personal PID data into this world. And it becomes very important at collection of data from the various sources, how do you authenticate, how do you secure these data using a blockchain. And of course in terms of how you are using them for doing the transactions of this. This is one of the key thing which I've been focusing in the last two years I would say. And the key takeaway to me is that in the financial segment I feel the blockchain is actually, like I said, it's not only for digital currencies and other aspects but it's got much more to do in terms of handling the sensitive data which we will be using because Metaverse is really as per the reports of Gartner's and other analysts it's like going to pick up another five to six years as a mainstream application. And in this virtual world, this blockchain and the NFTs are going to play a key role. So we need to see how we have to look from a different dimensions altogether. Absolutely. Yeah, and I think, you know, just the critical aspects of, you know, a digital ownership and the, you know, interoperability of those assets in between different virtual worlds I think, you know, the technologies that the ecosystem has been building out is going to definitely drive that. But I agree with you it's going to be a couple more years there's a lot of great experimentation but there's a lot of work to do and I love that the concept of responsible Metaverse as well and how do we go about building something that long term, we all here in the room can feel proud that we built together for our children and their children as well. So, you know, Pan Martia, I'll start off with you, you know, I think at HCL you have a very diverse customer base, and I am sure you and your colleagues here this question over and over again. So we'll start with the big question that certainly in the last few months, many of us have been getting around blockchain right in the blockchain space. You know, since 14 years ago right the they just celebrated the buying of the pizza with the Bitcoin, but you know 14 years ago the Bitcoin paper came out. That was in 2008. And blockchain has really been about innovation technology innovation and market innovation and you know consumer innovation to get to consumer innovation as a part. So crypto currencies and other digital assets have become more and more part of our financial systems on a day and day out basis, since then. And one of the things is how do you balance the requirement that Bitcoin because it's our blockchain is so early on still right, we need to continue to allow innovation. So how do you balance innovation with the need for having regulatory oversight and stability in the market specifically. How do you answer that question when your customers ask you that question. So today, I fully agree because one of the concerns which most of our financial customers are coming in and they come to it they ask in terms of the security become compliance or the regulatory stuff that is there into it. So, see today, there are some dollars being created and we make sure that these organizations are helping up to come up with the standards and making sure that we are able to address some of the critical aspects. And second thing is, we are also trying to come with a lot more security see one of the biggest concerns in the in this segment is the security aspect. So we try to bring in in terms of saying how we will be bringing in a lot more security aspects in terms of the asymmetrical encryption or hash functions to ensure the security of the data is maintained within it, and how it is actually easy for them to interface with different kinds of valid some exchanges because that's one aspect, but as you rightly said today some of them are in the experimenting phase when it comes into financial transactions from our end at this point of time. Yeah, and maybe others have comments on that you know, how do you how do you allow for innovation while while also, you know, having some regulatory oversight over that. Any other comments. One of the observations and it's not an example in within the blocking space but the the NPCI example in India the whole payments system in India. The that infrastructure works works really well and it's very seamless very the technology behind it is very very standardized and with regulation like zero mdr. How do the merchants and technology providers still make money. What they do is that they have enabled I mean they do have very tight regulation but it is sort of proportionate to the impact that these payment service providers make. They keep the innovation open they they allow smaller companies and payment companies to keep innovating till they start to become bigger and if they start to pose a threat to any of the underlying regulatory principles that when the regulations start to be imposed but they are innovating and then there will be some regulation that comes in to check them and eventually as they grow bigger than they fall in the purview of strict regulations that is aligned to all industry standard based on which the current entity is working. So I guess if we if we replicate that model to open the door for innovation have the regulations clarified for larger established institutions and then channel those two smaller startups as and when needed. It's a very complex task it's a it's a huge design challenge it's a it's a huge operational challenge but I think the industry definitely needs regulatory clarity but also at the same time open that to to innovate till till they can without making a negative impact. Absolutely. Any other comments on that on that point. I think innovation is happening right now but the thing is that everybody is very everybody is trying different things but because there's no regulation. First of all I think the regulation comes we did not do not need to be scared of regulation they're coming to protect the actually end user customers and if regulation comes I think it will show us a direction. Initially when Internet came I think everybody was going in different direction people were trying to figure out you know how to use it in the best possible way what to do exactly as in when we had the standards and regulations I think everybody got a direction. So I think to steering the direction we need to have regulation and unless and until regulation comes I think the actual use case will not get implication because government and regulators are there to protect they don't really know understand they need to understand what's happening. Have a standard format to protect the end user. So I think it's very important to have you know regulations and everybody on board so that we can actually steer it in a perfect direction and we can actually go for the future of financial disruption and everything that we've been talking about. So, you know, technology and regulation side by side working together, but also having clear right having clear rules and at least, you know, views on the how the technology is being used I think helps the industry further innovate. Tanvi, I'll ask you because I think you deal with this. You know, very often right. And it's a topic that's very, you know, on this topic of regulation and how do you continue with innovation is and this is on the top of mind of everyone's about the ethical considerations around the use of blockchain specifically in the financial sector, right. With issues like privacy and security transparency, you know, when you're thinking about, you know, opportunities and blockchain like central bank digital occurrences, the topics always can, you know, go into the privacy security and transparency of consumers and of different aspects of it. So, tell us a little bit about what you see, where are the the gotchas kind of from a technology perspective that all here on on the on this webinar should be thinking about as they're planning, you know, their their development and their products and services. Yeah, thanks Daniela I think the topic of regulation is just so vast that I don't feel like I can do justice to it and one answer but I think I would like to start off from your previous question right where you were saying, how do you balance innovation regulation Yes, that is sort of the existential question. And I think it's very easy in the tech space that people just kind of say like, Oh, there must be regulations, or there must be clarity, but I think they don't they kind of underestimate just what are to get there because they are and regulators are used to the school of stable regulations right where you don't come in. You don't actually touch and break stuff until things get too big. Right. So you don't actually you allow you allow innovation to keep happening and that's how it happened for decades. And you don't come in until things are too big right because you can come and distort the market so it's too big a force to sort of come in and start changing the rules right. And I think regulators for decades have been very conscious of that. But now it's just that the pace of innovations become so fast that if you don't do things then the tech gets very entangled with society way fast rate. And this is always been a dilemma called the pacing up right the pacing up is where the regulator can't really keep up with the pace of innovation and they'll always lag the pace of innovation so I think balancing regulation innovation this is a very high stakes challenge right it's like really you're really walking a tightrope between stifling progress, which is a very big risk for governments, and ensuring safety which is like a very big responsibility for governments right. So I think, you know, if I if I bring it back to your subsequent question of, you know, specific issues and privacy security transparency I mean, that's a lot of them on each, I would say but if you look at privacy for example right at the simple dilemma between privacy and accountability right so if you take like the case of cell pro for that's an old enough case that everyone knows about it. There was privacy right but there was no accountability like there was a lot going on like under the radar there was a lot going on that was essentially criminal activity right. So how do you, where's the line for that right like how do you, how do you find the line for that in our inner space that's constantly moving. That is always a challenge right and I think. In terms of solutions to that we of course had the FAT of guidelines that came in 2019 and a lot of countries have acted on that. But you know there's a lot of debate about whether it's too intrusive or not great. There's no security and privacy I think we've seen you've seen enough cases on transparency also I mean the whole FTX debacle is an example of that. Where you didn't really know that the money is getting shared between these two entities and having relations but we know you know trading desk and an exchange is very unethical and traditional financial systems and this is happening like without even customers knowing necessarily these kind of things are going up a lot of unprecedented challenges right. So I won't ramble on and on on this I would say that you know that there are solutions starting to come up. I think the most recent we saw were the IOS for principles I think they've come out like a week or so ago where you know I also has been looking like closely at the C5 side of crypto right in terms of what what principles can come in there and I think we're still sort of drawing way heavily from old school principles and regulation right. We're still drawing way heavily from how traditional finance was regulated and we're still not really grappling with what decentralization really means right for society for finance. I think until we get there to where we're building sort of new frameworks. We still have like a long road ahead and regulations. Yeah, I think it's an excellent point if you think about you know the core concepts of decentralization and things like DeFi for example and NFTs, the way that it helps you know the the the friction should be if we get your usability right the friction should be really lower to get individuals into the financial systems. So I actually ask you, Sheena, to add to that because I think you know if you think about decentralized finance and creating those type of new interactions with consumers. How how does the technology enable that. And what do you what are you seeing in regards to like adoption. And primarily in like people understanding that decentralized technologies can give them the, you know, the access to the financial systems that you know in the past, they had to go through very traditional through a bank right they had to go and open up an account, they had to be approved to open up an account and nowadays, you know, you can actually do that without having any formal approval from everybody. So maybe your thoughts on that based on you know a practitioner. So see I think the blockchain the main trust factor in decentralized finance the problem comes with the trust factor you don't know who you're dealing with blockchain addresses being pseudo anonymous you don't know who you're dealing with but you know what's happening in that account. So with a couple of people you know that also as an issue for example if I've shared an address with you, you don't you know that you know I've shared my address now you know what's happening with my account transaction so the privacy the transparency is there. But people would like to have some privacy also in that statement so that is I think the one of the reasons that we are not able to see it being part of the financial day to day transactions. Now the advantage comes with removal of intermediaries, a lot of places in banking transactions or if you look at international remittances and other places also there's a lot of intermediaries involved. So blockchain works wonder when we have to remove the intermediaries. That's why we see a lot of good use case when it comes to peer to peer lending, wealth and financial management and mobile payments. But I don't think blockchain can replace the traditional financial systems because of the simple reason of security. We are still looking at couple of smart contracts and codes and loopholes that which are left by human beings right which is not tried and trusted technology. So when it comes to opening a bank account yes it can be easy just you know by sitting at home and everything is fine but I still could trust the traditional financial systems. When it comes to security of my bank account and you know the finance systems is still we are very prone to hacking and dows being attacked because there was a loophole. And then when very good question comes with blockchain is the blockchain governance. We say that it's decentralized nobody's controlling it but another question comes is how many people are running the node and you know sometimes the decision that they have to take in majority stakeholders in past have taken a decision you know taking a rolling back of a blockchain which actually sometimes question us about the governance and the decentralized part also. So I think we need a balance between the traditional system and blockchain which will go hand in hand. So that's why I'm coming back to the point of having regulators a set of rules because single one of the things will not survive you know otherwise we'll have the support of the other one. Excellent. Well I think you know also you know the how blockchains both public and permissioned and permissioned public chains right so hybrid use cases as well. And some you know technologies really addressing or starting to address those privacy first privacy preserving first initiatives. I think is something that you know it's, is it moving faster than the regulation or will the regulation move faster than the technology itself and those aspects is the question but I do think there's there's a lot to add there. But Pedmar sheet maybe you can add a bit as well to that topic. Around the good. Yeah, so see why definitely on the security aspect now from a technology perspective. There are many aspects that has been getting added right. So like, in terms of most of the solutions even what we are developing. We know that we have a KYC requirement. That is actually protecting the customer data's and also the customer data is maintained with an integrity, but apart from that also in the technology specifically if you look from it. We make sure that there are other aspects of this ring signature bringing secure multi party, multi party, computations to validated transactions right, because without the you do the validations without making the underlying sensitive known to others. So these are something definitely which is bringing in value in the transaction part. And of course, what I'm trying to see is that many of the customers are looking from a permissioned blockchain because it is in one way or the other actually restricting them to participate and participate in the network and also you have some amount of access restriction and this because you know the you know who are there in the network and you are able to get this so it depends on when we do these kind of a transaction how critical is how much of a information is needed. I think it needs to be like we bring in more kind of a security measures by bringing in all these technologies over there. And of course we should be able to strike a balance between this privacy and the transparency part also because sometimes this because we say we want to maintain so much of privacy and transparency right so this optimization and pseudo-nomity practice is sometime of restricting the personal identity but of course there is going to be a risk. So I would say that we need to strike a balance between this two factors based on the sensitivity of the information that we are handling and that's how I mean there is no one solution to it in my opinion. It's actually like the sensitivity of the data the complexity of the solution that is being dealt with and the amount of impact it will create. So I think we need to strike a balance between what security aspect that we want to give what is the level of transparency that we want to maintain in it and how do we bring value. That's how I think we should consider while developing any kind of first solution because I'm telling from a practical implementation of the solution that we consider when we develop solutions to the customer because some of it. See the question comes even in terms of when we go to customer is so do you want to have a permission blockchain or you want to go for permission less or so. Did we lose her. I think we lost her. Oh did you lose. Hello. There you go now you're back go ahead. I think I mean did you hear me. Yeah yeah I think you know there is not one solution to that fits all right I mean that's the primary and I think a lot of times we you know the industry you know you know whether it's mainstream media or consumers or even you know very large companies they get kind of the stuck in this it's one solution that needs to fit them all. And when you think about you know issues for example you know on privacy and security we do get caught up on things that it's not about that technology the technology has lots of different options and you can approach in different ways. You know just I think you were talking about you know making a decision whether you need a permissioned or a permissionless blockchain what is most effective is hybrid an option and why you know these print you know why the technology needs to be used in the same and we do get caught up and kind of a lot of that and I think especially when issues of privacy and security. We don't we forget to see the value of the technology itself right so let's get back a little bit to because we could talk for hours about kind of these these very thorny what I consider very thorny issues but let's get back to the basics on you know some of the key benefits of this technology itself like why are we sitting around why you know has the hyperledger foundation for you know the last you know seven years been focusing on building the best technology projects and kind of lots of different ways and different approaches. Why what are the benefits of this technology you know how can blockchain enhance efficiencies and transparencies and trust in all the areas that we've been talking about. Nikki if you can take that question. Sure. Thank you. There you are. First of all, for me a blockchain the most important property is that it prevents double spend and thinking about the financial sector at the current state when we give money to the bank. I said let's say hundred dollars. What does the bank do. It makes thousands several thousands of dollars of it. So it actually double spends the money. And what we saw a few weeks ago that when there's a bank run people want to withdraw money. Suddenly the bank says oh you don't have the money. And blockchain is actually there to prevent this prevent this kind of double spend that you can see. Oh there is my coin there is my value that I put on the blockchain. And this cannot be simply double spent. It is unique. And you can always have the transparency to some extent. And also it has a certain ownership connected with certain values and properties on the blockchain. So the transparency and also that you don't have these middleman. For example when we do a financial transaction we can do this now with the blockchain peer to peer from person to person without a bank as a middleman saying okay you can use the money that you have deposited on your bank account. You have now a wallet and you can always decide okay I want to make this transaction from peer to peer. And without the need to ask for the permission of a central authority to use that. And without having a middleman. It reduces the associated costs to make such a transaction. And it gives the opportunity for many people in the world who don't have access to the usual banking system to make transactions financial transactions, or also not only the value I mean we are speaking now around the financial sector, but we can secure data. So anything associated with data and value can secure this on this decentralized data ledger, and we don't let's say no central authority can simply manipulate anything on that ledger. Anybody like to add to that. One more point is definitely with the blockchain, I would say. Everything is in terms of no transactions across different countries, right becomes it, it's becomes because otherwise through the banking system there's a lot of regulation so cross border transaction is one of the other value it I would say because of blockchain coming into picture. That's another aspect I would just like to bring in and also if you look at it in terms of crowdfunding platforms, because many of the crowdfunding platforms are trying to use blockchain because of its transparency and also the security that it is bringing for the donors. These are other value adds that we could see in terms of blockchain bringing in the financial segments. I think I could add in that I think there's already so much soul searching like going on in traditional finance right you've seen the collapses of SVB of signature, you know all these banks and that's it's triggered just so much. I would say rethink or you know that everybody realizes that there's need for a fundamental rethink and like so much of the architecture was a financial system. I think they're you know for so long with crypto and blockchain like there's been this overhang like a reputational overhang which is why it's not yet been. I think given the space that it could occupy, but there's just so much amazing innovation like I mean, for me, the most interesting space in all of blockchain has always been defy and I think the kinds of things that come up there with, you know, with defy primitives with this money Legos concept of like just how much you can kind of stack services in a single contract I mean that is really. That's that is really innovation right to degree we've not seen for four decades I think in finance but I think you know and now I think the regulatory debate has finally begun seriously on on those issues right and I think if we see a world of like regulated defy. That will really be a very transformative change right I think that will just change the relationship that people have with money that people have with institutions. But it is a very scary world as well because for a lot of institutions, especially because you know what is the role right like what is the how how do institutions exist in a in a world like that right so. I think it's a long road and I think when you throw into that mix CBD sees and you know so I actually work quite a bit on CBD sees that was one of the core things I think tank. Originally started on and you know now in just building it's digital rupee. I mean, India's actually building it there's a lot of countries experimenting thinking of building it. The US has started already their states banning it like Florida and stuff are like already banning a CVC even before one was made. But I think all these things of like CVDCs tokenized deposits are regulated stable points that that's going to be a very different era of finance and I just I just don't think we have many past templates to look at for that. For what that looks like. No. Yeah. So, um, based on what you said, I have been associated with financial services through my job at IBM as well and over the decades that we've seen various cycles of transformation. We've mainly seen in a nutshell digitization of existing systems digitization of existing ledger based systems and existing systems are mainly they operate in a way with sort of bad relay of information. When, when you know the previous information you process the next one, right so all those efforts over the decades have just focused on digitization of existing infrastructure. While the whole influx of token the creator economy the cryptocurrencies. They are challenging not just regulatory systems existing regulatory systems but also infrastructure like payments risk risk models, treasury fraud, all of these models are challenged because these these have addressed like almost 100 year old banking system. So, all of these pillars are forced to rethink how they work for ages because the concept of tokenization is is very new and does not go along with the existing infrastructure so it's really a bigger change beyond regulatory and compliance which of course is very critical for us to keep operating and growing but I guess it's a much bigger shift. Yeah, I think you know the other topic is around you know tokenization of real world assets as well. So another topic that you know lately a lot of people have been talking about and it's like, what kind of opportunities. It's happening to the regular people right to you know people who, you know, perhaps in the past have been unable to purchase real estate, right, to be able to, you know, own a piece. I think there was an article that Sheena, you posted, I think, a couple of days ago around the playbook for tokenization of aviation assets and I think I saw it on LinkedIn, and how, you know, obviously, we all dream of being able to own a plane, some of us right right but the reality is the majority of us will never get to that point but you know and there's also not only do I not want to own a plane, because I can't afford one. There's also so many hassles of owning something like that right there's maintenance and storage and compliance and you know I have to have licenses and all that. So I wanted to be able to invest right in a tokenized part of a plane right of physical assets. So maybe, you know, maybe talk a little bit about you know what you know as we as we close off the panel today. What other opportunities do we see in that is really driving the financial markets for the individual for for the person that I think many of us, you know, got into blockchain many years ago to be able to open up opportunities and increase financial inclusion and really democratize the access to financial services of people in underserved communities and it's underserved communities around the world I happen to live in the US and I'll tell you there's a lot of people in the US who are unbanked or definitely underbanked, and they have access to financial services in their lifetime so let's close off and then I know there's a couple of questions maybe in the Q&A and so comments on that on that specific about financial inclusion and how these technologies democratize access to services and then we can go to one or two QA questions. So at high five this is the first thing that we're working on is tokenization because what happens is as of right now, I mean, looking at me I genuinely like I agree with you Daniela that I can't really own an airplane and a lot of people own it and along with that. But they have served plus charges also you know to parking to maintenance and everything now as an individual or a middle class person I have a dream of investing in a plane or see real estate is also one of the use cases but the real estate the problem is coming is because of real estate being like specifically in India. We can't take it to global market because there are rules and regulations that who can invest in real estate or who can buy it, but when it comes to aviation, the market is global, we're also going to tokenization of art. The only one, what do you call it thing that we require here is a custodian because the blockchain being decentralized and everything they're talking about is blockchain does spend double spending also we agree. But along with that there are so many different blockchains and platforms and marketplaces were working in silos. So the problem happens is the same marketplace you'll see a one project on different marketplaces trying to rate funds for the same thing. Now at that time there is nobody monitoring it or controlling it so that's why we need to have you know body of custodians from two perspectives one is to check whether the same projects or same planes or maybe artwork is being tokenized on different marketplaces in terms of NFTs or and the second part is to actually evaluate you know I put in a project let's say in a plane. A good point is that yes I can raise liquidity and anybody can invest and you know take the returns in terms of profit and plus in terms of added advantages maybe I can use the plane also in a yearly basis. But another thing comes is that we need to have somebody being taken care of the part so along with blockchain being we say that it removes the third party and you know but we do need third party. We do need third party in terms of protecting the end user investments plus interoperability I think is another concern that we have because there are so many different blockchains also working in silos. That's when the problem comes for international remittance or we talk about CBDC as of right now if you know governments start to go on different blockchains now the problem comes is how the transfer will happen from one blockchain to another they need to start talking about you know bridges are already there but I think that you know innovation needs to happen in that particular area also. So along with the advantages blockchain by removing the double spending and intermediary we need them on board also. So and tokenization I feel is the future from the perspective of it opens up a global market. And along with that you know it has added advantages of everybody can dream of investing in different parts and take profits from something which sitting in Pune I can do it. So I think that's the future of financial inclusion for blockchain. I think we all we all agree would like to see that. I know we need to wrap up so there was actually a question from our saying around how do you start learning so someone new to the blockchain ecosystem how do they start learning so it's a great. Last question we'll go around we'll start with Mickey around you know what is one thing that you've learned and where have you learned it about specific about the topic of blockchain that everybody in the room should jot down and go do some research on. I mean, one thing that I learned was that there are so many different blockchain technologies that have different characteristics. And for me it's important to use one where the transaction costs are so low that I can, for example, send a penny around the globe within a second for a fraction of a cent. This is for me the future and I mean this also comes with experience to actually use different blockchains and and to find it out. Okay, what is actually usable, what is not usable. And this will actually pave also the way for the upcoming web three and also in how you can use blockchain in something called metaverse. So it's not one thing it's many things and lots of technologies lots of options, lots of ways to learn. Sheenam. So along with blockchain I think the one thing that I love along with like I agree with my key in terms of the transaction speed it's been so fast and it gives me a global access that's one important thing. But in terms of learning I think for blockchain we need to unlearn something in terms of the crypto part of it everybody start talking about blockchain as if it's a negative word. So you know most of the time instead of using a blockchain I use distributed ledger, or I actually call it Internet of Value because it's an advantage use case of collaboration, you know you can transfer value from one place to another. I think that that's the most important thing to learn about blockchain it's transfer of value using collaboration and cryptography and some smart codes. But that's where it ends but people try to put it in so much of negative words so that's why usually I stick to the word distributed ledger. Fantastic. Sharma. Yeah, I would just, I would actually like to highlight two things. One is to get started easy. It's, it's, it may be a good idea to identify one use case in the field of your interest, if you are interested in, in financial services that sent you a free application CBDC is one or as an example if you're interested in fashion and consumer goods. There are leading examples like Nike and so once you identify an area of interest go down the rabbit hole on how they use the blockchain and or the whole concept of Web 3, but beyond blockchain and technical details. I think it's very important to understand this concept of Web 3 around the concept of communities and the token incentives that power community co creation and community collaboration because those are the big picture shifts that are changing the way businesses will will operate or bring in new revenue models. So I think beyond the technology it's also important to understand the community shifts and the way people are working around Web 3. I love that advice do something that you're very interested in passionate about I'd love it. Tanvi. Yeah, I think the quickest way to learn blockchain is to set up a wallet and send money to your friend. That'll teach you like a lot more than you know reading like days of theory on you know how it is what works and immediately introduce you to you know just how the system contracts, all of those things right and as Charu was saying you know join a community, join a community discord join a DAO join an NFT community, spend like a week like seeing how they are making decisions and communities and I think that will just teach you everything I think it's literally baptism by fire. When you're joining this industry it's like, you have to just do it, you have to get your hands dirty to learn. Yeah, and it's unique thing in the industry that it's very possible for everyone to do so as well. So fantastic, fantastic advice as well. And Padmarshi. I think most of them have told how to go with it one more is in terms of even visualizing what are all the, see when somebody is very new they need to also in terms of understand what kind of use cases and where exactly is blockchain really making a difference. So I would say, while we do all the learning part trying it out hands on or getting into the community, where exactly does blockchain fit what are the things that we should be using it, and how it is really bringing a difference, I mean a fundamental understanding of what it is and how it is makes a is a very good perspective. So I would say learning on the fundamentals through these will really be giving a big picture on which one they want to focus because blockchain is just not only writing the contracts writing the applications but it's also in terms of beyond that in terms of what are the because security itself is one big aspect in blockchain. So should I focus on the security aspect of it should I focus on the compliance aspect of it or what regulations. So it's not one. So I would say to first get an entire breath and then your area of interest then you can go into specific topics. Absolutely. And of course, I'll end off saying, you know, becoming as part of the Hyperledger Foundation, there's a lot of resources for people to get involved and to learn training resources, events like this and the many webinars and meetups that we do where we show people from their businesses, we know from a technology perspective but also the value on the technology spaces so, you know, continue to be involved in things like our India regional chapter, as well as our other Hyperledger Foundation trainings, meetups, webinars, events that we do globally and we look forward to seeing everyone in our community so I want to thank the panelists once again. I want to thank the India regional chapter for inviting the panelists and really talking about how we do all believe and we're all working towards having blockchain disrupt the financial system so thank you all the panelists and really appreciate your time and your thoughts here very, very wonderful to hear from everybody. I would like to go ahead and if the panelists can go off camera, and we can have our next speaker who's going to introduce our next speaker, Nidhi Xing, who is a senior software engineer and she is building blockchain solutions at Walmart Global Tech India. She also just recently became one of our Hyperledger foundation stores for our labs, our Hyperledger labs and it's been great to see some of her work and feedback already as part of the labs process as well. So Nidhi, if you want to introduce yourself and then go ahead and introduce our next speaker that would be fantastic and thank you all once again. Thanks, Danila. The session that you took was really insightful. It's always a pleasure to hear from all the business entrepreneurs out there and thank you so much. Thank you. So let's get started with the first technical presentation for the day. Okay, so the first presentation revolves around NFT and all of you might have heard about NFT due to the hype it created in the last few years. And this talk is, this will make you think in a different direction just to set some context for the people who are new in the blockchain space. So NFT helps content creators be artists, singers, photographers to claim the ownership of the content that they created. And let me put up a fact there. In 2021, the NFT were traded for $17 billion, which was like 21,000% rise from the previous year. So we know that the NFT are already in a boom. Due to that, there are a lot of NFT scams which are happening out there and these scams will make you lose the worth of your NFT or you will end up buying NFTs that will disappear even before you make a profit on top of it. So out there in today's world, there are different sort of scams. So today we'll talk about one of the most popular scams, which is Rockpools. So today's presenter is Trishi and the Rockpools scam is like a developer creates a hype around the NFT and then they essentially pull out the money after an investor has raised some significant amount of money. So today Trishi will be covering the behavioral analysis of fraudulent NFT creators and that's something that you all need to be aware about. So Trishi is a PhD student at IIT Kanpur and her research involves around blockchain, mainly focusing on NFT and its security aspects. She is passionate about enhancing the privacy and security of NFTs and she is currently exploring applications around it. Trishi is a hand over the stage to you. Trishi, you're on mute. Hi, thank you so much for introducing me and I'm here with I'm firstly very glad to be a part of such an event and among such influential women in working in blockchain and I'm very happy to be a part of this event. Mostly I, in this talk, this has already introduced about NFTs and Rockpools. This makes a very, this is a very minute yet very critical part of NFTs based basically on the security aspect. So, I'll just start with my presentation. I hope, can you please confirm if my screen is visible. Thank you so much. So this talk is about understanding Rockpools. I have, we have worked on Rockpools on basically I started by focusing on NFT attacks, all the attacks which are there in the NFT ecosystem and but while exploring them, I could not find much of, you know, information on Rockpools. I was compared with Ponzi scams Ponzi schemes and pump and dumps teams and all, but I couldn't find it how it is actually different from and how the things go on in Rockpools and how can we, you know, create a, because based on being from a security background, I think we mostly focus on creating detection and prediction models for the same. So I could not find exact details on that so I thought that it could be. So I started looking at the transactions with respect to the criminal behavior of the creators which are actually attempting these Rockpools. So that is what my talk is about. I'll be starting although there's already a brief given on NFTs I'll just start giving another summary, I'll just summarize on NFTs and the attacks on that. And then I'll move on to the things that I have done in my research and what all findings we could, you know, I could gather and then also a small summary on the research opportunities which is starting with a general introduction so I'll bring it from blockchain to NFTs so blockchain everybody has already discussed and everybody knows here about it. So it stores basically a state of object on the internet. So in just not a typical definition but just a bit of it. And object here is like anything which anything with some value and with ownership so we are talking about ownership of anything, and then ownership, we are exchanging this ownership from one person to another when we are transacting from for example from here so there is an ownership exchange over there and there is some value associated with it. This ownership exchange is done using smart contract which is a in which we write some set of codes with some methods and all in which we define what exactly is going to happen when this smart contract will be deployed. Once that is done, this transfer of ownership when the rules in the smart contract are met, when we talk about this ownership of a traded asset, when the traded asset comes into picture, we represent it using by saying that with the help of tokens. So these tokens represent the exact ownership of a traded asset and when we talk about digital assets, then there are fungible tokens, there are semi fungible tokens, non fungible tokens, so different types of tokens are coming to picture so one example of that is NFT and non fungible tokens. So this is a pictorial representation of the same in which we can compare, we can see the comparison between fungible and non fungible tokens. So fungible are those in which we can, there is a value which is important here as compared to non fungible tokens in which there is a specific, a unique value for each and every token, for example fungible token. So I can exchange one ether and another one ether, so they have the value, they have the same value, but I cannot exchange one cryptocity with another cryptocity, so that is the difference which is out here. And similarly, a combination of taking some of the functionalities of fungibility and non fungibility, we have some semi fungible tokens which are, for example, the movie tickets or event tickets or coupon vouchers, so they are exchangeable with each other, however, one coupon cannot be used everywhere in every store, so that is what a semi fungible token is. Now, focusing on NFTs basically, I am focusing on security aspect of NFTs on drug pools which are there in NFT platforms and by platforms, I mean both NFT marketplaces as well as the other, you know, there are certain contracting agencies which develop NFT markets or NFT spaces for specific users. So similar to that, so in that context, we have this NFT ecosystem and I have taken this from a research paper, this nice diagram which shows flow of NFTs in a marketplace and how, you know, you can directly see the points of attacks here or points of vulnerabilities here. So there is a, NFTs are very much famous for, you know, popular mainly for trading of art for images, videos and all. So once this art is created, the creator lists it on the website, marketplace or anything, that NFT is linked to a smart contract. And once the NFT is minted, all the details related to that is sent over the blockchain per record. And once there is a buyer who wants to buy that particular NFT, that buyer is going to either bid or maybe purchase it directly using some cryptocurrencies. And once that transaction happens, the transaction happens, the details again of the details, the new details of the new owner of that NFT and how these all transaction, how the token is transferred and how all this entire transaction took place. This is again stored, this is again recorded on blockchain and the buyer can finally list a look at the NFT as it gets transferred to his or her wallet. Now we have certain main entities here, for example, users, the marketplaces and the external entities. So users are buyers, sellers, content creators, marketplaces are these which I've already discussed and then there are external entities, for example, hosting services. So hosting services are those in which the users are with the help of marketplaces, NFTs metadata, information about the NFTs or the actual image video, anything that is related, anything, any art which is being traded for or being linked with that NFT, that is stored. So it can be centralized server, it can be cloud server, it can be decentralized or this peer to peer distribution system. So we have multiple means of doing that. So these are the main entities which are mostly vulnerable or which cause these attacks. So either a seller can exploit the system, a buyer can exploit the system. There can be some attacks on the hosting service providers. There can be some attacks on the marketplaces or there can be, there are multiple instances which are already present, which are already been done and exploiting any of these entities. So one of that is what I'm going to discuss about. Now, this was about NFTs and how some of these applications were also discussed by the panelists. So some of them, for example, Starbucks starting their NFT based loyalty program and Nike NFT platform for digital sneakers. There is a concept of physical, physical assets in which there is a combination of physical and digital assets. So NFT sellers, these creators, they are also indulging in, in metaverse in digital assets and so on. So any application, there are multiple things in which these creators are exploring and various applications of that. Similarly, apart from trading, we also have other applications of NFTs. And I'm listing a very few of them, very main of them. There are multiple applications of NFTs. So apart from not just concentrating on trading, we have other good sides of NFTs as well. For example, we can attach NFT with each and every item. It has a very good purpose in hospital items related to supply chain. So we can trace the entire shipment of any one item. So we can track and trace a pharmaceutical supply chain using NFTs. We can use it for construction payment automation or for certificates for preserving property rights, although this is a little bit controversial topic, but not controversial, but it has a lot of conflicts with respect to property rights and NFTs. But still, its applications are all over there. So I'll start with the NFT attacks. And mostly, most generally, there are multiple, but I've covered the most famous one, most common one, which you might have heard of. Like fishing, there is malware, there are repulsed, there is a stealing of wallet credentials, there are fake NFTs, fake air drops, fake giveaways, hacking and whatnot. So I am focusing particularly on Ruckus, which is a type of exit scam where the NFT creators, some malicious NFT creators, simply pull out the cash or pull out the funds out of that, out of their project. They will create a project, they will create hype around it and then eventually after collecting some certain amount of certain money, they will eventually abandon the project and they will take the investors funds and simply vanish. So that is NFTs in case of, that is Ruckus in case of NFTs. There are Ruckus in exchanges as well. By that, I mean, in Uniswab, there has been studies on Ruckus in decentralized exchanges. There are tokens which have been Ruckus, but my focus is on NFTs. So this is a typical scenario, how NFTs, how Ruckus, I'm sorry. So this is a typical scenario of how a Ruckus takes place and there are multiple ways of attempting Ruckus. This is just one way of it. So creating an NFT project and optionally to show the roadmap, share the roadmap and the total supply, how many number of NFTs are going in the circulation. Roadmap consists of a timeline of events, what all the creators are trying to do or they are planning to do. For example, they're going to mint these tokens in this batch and then they are going to execute an online event or they're going to meet the users, they're going to meet the buyers and so on. And then they create hype around their project, they generate popularity on that project. So they make use of, you know, since they are malicious actors. So they make use of certain illegal activities of example, artificial inflation, shilling. So these are the ways in which they gain popularity, artificial, not legal popularity around their project. Then they mint, they put that NFT, those NFTs on that NFT collection on sale and gradually with increase in hype, with increase in popularity, there is increase in market capital and automatically there is increase in the demand of that NFT. Once that amount is accumulated by the creators, they will cash out. By cash out, it means they will withdraw all the funds from that token contract from that NFT project and they will either trade it in exchanges or they will send it to mixers like Turner to cash in, or maybe they will fund other creators to create, to, you know, attempt to help them attempt Ruckus or they will just, you know, take it out or convert it into anything like there are multiple possibilities and then they will be no further, no further discussions on social media accounts or anything. So they will be entirely, they will entirely vanish from site. Then this is just a comparison of, you know, the number of Ruckus and scams. So scams consist of like other scams like phishing, hacking, spamming, etc. So comparing Ruckus with scam, you can see there is a lot of, you know, a lot of increase in, a lot of increase in number of cases of Ruckus in January 2022. And this is something that we have, you know, also observed in, that I have also observed in my study, in my analysis. So I can, I'll just share it quickly. This is what I found on 10 different NFT platforms, seven different NFT platforms. So you can see the OpenSea has highest number of Ruckus. There can be multiple reasons. It's not just that it is only one who is there with lots of scams, but there are possible reasons that most number of active wallets, most number of active users are there on OpenSea. The OpenSea is the highest, most popular NFT marketplace as compared to the other ones. And this is a scenario between June 2021 to December 2022. So there, now the cases, now the things are scenario is different. So in that point of time, these were, these were the, these were the stats. Now what we analyzed here is that we came up with certain behavioral patterns, which were most commonly seen. Among that, the transactions of the creators. So we focused on creators' transactions, only the creators of those Ruckus. And we observed these set of, you know, patterns, which were prominently found in, in, in the Ruckus cases. So starting with, for example, you know, VA. So VA here stands for Vast Virtual Asset Service Provider. So these are, these are entities who are dealing with, these are, who are dealing with or providing these virtual asset services. And like exchanges, mixers, swap services, wallet services, and so on. So one, we have labeled it like one, two, three, four. So one, by one, we denote the incoming source of funds. So we saw that either the source of funds to these creators are coming from Vast or they're coming from illicit addresses. So these are the two income sources. And then either it is coming in the creator account directly, or it is coming through a set of related accounts, wallets of the creator. So this is the incoming source, study of the incoming source. Once the funds are, you know, gathered or received by the creators, they are creating an FD collection and then they're withdrawing the funds, funds from that project. And eventually, at the end, they are spending it either to the exchanges, or they are accumulating in some wallets to be used in future, or they are funding other creators or they are funding other illicit addresses. So these are the, this is one example of other among other patterns. And similarly, we have other patterns in which there is a slight difference of the way in which funds are being transferred and the way in which funds flow through their accounts. Now you might have heard of a term called PLC. So that is to, you know, to launder money through multiple accounts. So this T here, I have labeled them as temporary accounts, which are accounts related to the creators. So just like the temporary variable that we use sometimes in coding. So I use the same concept. And so this based on this based on these labeling and based on analyzing the flow of transactions we've got these behavioral patterns of transfers. And since this study is specifically on the nature of creators, the behavior of creators, we've found, we've emphasized on direct and indirect transactions. So direct transactions in this figure, you can see there are a lot of structures, different type of structures which are, you know, formed by the direct fund transfers between different creators. So there is chain like structure, there are star like patterns, there are, you know, tree like structures and a mesh type of structure. So there are different type of structures in which we see that, you know, funds are being transferred from one creator to multiple creators and those creators are going to, these creators are again, those who are involved in records. So you can see that how they are funding each other in order to carry on the those in order to, you know, gather more and more capital from the different investors. And the second scenario is where we focused on why only the direct transfers why not the indirect ones in which to any two creators are connected to each other so we focused we looked for illicit accounts if they're getting funding from the same illicit accounts that means there is some similarity, there is some some relation sort of relation between the creators. And then again the concept of P and change here that sharing a common temporary account to or more creators are sharing common temporary account to move funds from, maybe from the creator account to exchanges or to turn it to cash or anything, any other entity like that. Other than VASPs, the contracts of VASP we have not considered them other than other than those, any other smart contract is being created by these creators, and they are frequently, you know, interacting with these smart contracts so we have taken these into as indirect transactions. Based on direct and indirect transactions we created groups of, you know, drug pool creators. We identified who is governing the entire, you know, drug pool or who is behind these repeated drug pools and executing this entire plan so we formed different creative groups based on these type of interactions and we found one group which is commonly known as drug pool mafia. It is the group which has, which has, you know, attempted maximum number of drug pools, most number of drug pools in the entire type of system and then there are certain, some people who are, who have some, who are facing charges already, like Logan, Paul, Jake, Paul, Vaskara, who are facing charges for, you know, for these attempting drug pools. And similarly we found 20 such groups which are, you know, which have some certain set of projects who they, these groups own. So all those projects are, you know, come under one particular group. So based on these transactions, these interactions we formed this, these creative groups, 20 creative groups. Then we again applied the same approach on these groups in order to find if there is any connection between these groups. And again we found these connections. So we found eight of these groups out of these 20, we found eight of these groups can connected to each other. So here the edge size of this edge, the width of this edge. The width of this edge shows that how many number of, you know, the amount of, the number of projects which are common between, which makes the connection between any two creators. The consistency of the mafia here is the node, which is mostly connected to every other node. And this shows the level of illicit activity being, you know, being there being present in the, in an NFT ecosystem and this is the level of, this is a very, very critical aspect here that we already have, we already have these, you know, numbers we already have these facts, but they're still going on. We do not have much of control on that and people are still being, you know, looted and their money is not safe. They're not not seeing a good side of, you know, NFTs over here. We also gave a comparison of where, you know, to understand the timeline of recollectivity. So we saw that we compare the creation of NFT project and when the funds were withdrawn or when the record was attended. So you can see here. Okay, so we can see here on the color bar, you can see that, you know, blue color represents a week or five days, right, a project that lasted for a week or five days. And here you can see that there are multiple blue dash lines and dots, even there are very small dots, multiple of them, many of them present here and there are some few of them which are in yellow or which are in orange. So this shows that there are very few projects which lasted over a month. But one point is there are so many projects, there were a number of projects, 68% of them were only lasted for a week, less than a week or maximum for a week. And others lasted for, you know, just for a month. So it shows that a project lasting, a project just has to, you know, be carried on for one month and these malicious actors are able to gain money. They're able to attack, they're able to, you know, give this, they're able to attack or they're able to accumulate all this money and they were able to attempt drug pools over there. So these were the findings, these were the things that we had that I've done in my research till now. And we saw that there are, we found 168 tokens so we collected information of around 758 tokens and now from them, there were 168 tokens simply linked to one group which is, which was Rockwell Mafia which is the largest group of creators behind Rockwells. And we also saw that there are, the Rockwells are similar in many ways with similar dynamics in terms of the behaviour patterns. They are created by the same individuals which are, which is why there are repeated Rockwells from the same creators. There is usage of temporary accounts to move funds from, you know, from one creator to exchanges or to mixers or to swabs and they are just using investors money for trading for their own benefit and how the initial sources of source of funds are helping them to do that. Then we found that cryptocurrency exchanges and royalties were the principal funding sources. The most of the, most of the sources came from these two entities. Now it is, it can be, you know, assumed that when we are using royalties as initial source of funds. For example, there is a creator account account transactions of a creator. And in that, in those transactions, the initial transactions were funds coming from royalties. Let's see, open C royalties. So if that is the case, royalties are actually what we get, where the creator gets after any every subsequent sale of his or her NFT. So that is what royalties come from. Now, creating a new account and getting royalties as, you know, as initial transactions as a initial income source. It shows that maybe there were some previous projects of that creator from which he is, he or she is receiving those funds, those funds in terms of royalties in the new account. So there is a possibility. Yes, there is a possibility that the previous projects were also records. So these are the major findings that we observed in our, in our research and and are my future work, my future prospect is to know. Till now I have not focused on detecting and predicting records, but I wanted to know more about how the creators are behaving and what, how we can, you know, observe, we can understand the creators intentions on the same. And based on these analogies on this analysis, we can create machine learning models which are capable of detecting group of creators or which are detecting records. And moreover, we can also explore, we can also expand it to other types of crypto crimes like, wash trading or money laundering, which is a very important concept, important crypto crime, and which is very famous actually. And so like this can be done. So this was all about my work, which I wanted to share and though very minute but yet critical and that's it. Thank you. Thank you Trishy. That was really insightful. Having the awareness of what's happening in the world is very essential. So thanks a lot. If you have any questions, please feel free to post in the Q&A section. So I see a question that is how do we prevent Ruffles. So we can prevent, there is not a sure shot answer to this because, you know, we cannot be sure that one project, this particular project is not going to end up as a Ruffles. So we do not have those insights but we can control it to some extent, like research on that creator, research on that NFT project, what their roadmap is telling and are they really following that roadmap. Are they, you know, legit creators, do we already know them or maybe not already know them but are they, you know, constantly up to the mark of, you know, the creators or on the roadmap or on the promises basically the promises that they have done that we are going to, you know, in one case, in one record case what happened, the creators said that they are going to, you know, give these funds to a charity organization and later on they tweeted that this charity is going to us. So what happened to the investors funds, they are all in vain, they went to those malicious actors. So the point is that we cannot say that this is something which we can do to prevent Ruffles. Yes, one thing that we can do is be aware of the NFT project and, you know, analyze the transactions, learn a bit about it. It's not a very, it's not a difficult thing. There are multiple blockchain explorers on which transactions are there and we can, you know, understand where the funds are moving. And apart from that, I think there is, we cannot prevent but we can, you know, the marketplaces can take certain set of certain actions in order to verify the identities of sellers. That is very important, I think, from what I have seen. So there is a very low level of, you know, verification of artwork verification, of the buyer verification, of seller verification. These are not taken care of a lot by marketplaces. They are taking it as optional but I think it should not be optional. So by, you know, adopting such steps, we can, yes, we can prevent Ruffles at a lot, you know, but more extent. So the order can be entirely on the marketplace provider to actually do this verification? We cannot actually completely rely on marketplaces but marketplaces also have to, you know, follow what is there, what the existing regulations are. So, for example, like, now there are many regulatory frameworks being, you know, proposed or being formed, you know, in the context of cryptocurrencies or in DeFi. So there is a lot of work being done. So the thing is it's not very easy but because there are centralized marketplaces, they can, I think, they can at least, you know, put out of some level of regulations and control on this. On how the transfers are being happening or who is coming to their, you know, on board and who is creating what, because there are a lot of counterfeit NFTs. There is, there are a lot of issues of copied work, stolen work and if there is a centralized marketplace who is, you know, who has the power to do something that they should, then they should. That is my opinion. I very, very resonate with that. The responsibility cannot be lied entirely on the marketplace. It's also the consumers or the content creators responsibility to be aware about what these fraudulent NFTs are, like how we can get rid of it. So it's all about the awareness. So yeah, thank you so much Rishi for taking your time out and educating us about such an interesting topic. Thanks a lot. Thank you so much. I'm sorry. You can stop sharing your screen. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah, so let's move on. So next we have an interesting fireside chat lined up and the moderator for this is Bipika. So as you all might be knowing, Bipika is the coach here for hyper leisure India chapter and she's also my colleague at Walmart. So her interest for blockchain began when she participated in the hackathon and since then she is fully involved in the blockchain space and she has also presented her work at the hyper leisure Dublin forum in 2022. And she's also, she also writes blogs on the blockchain fundamentals so that anybody who is new to the space can just check out her blogs and they would be really helpful. And for this fireside chat. We have Sophia with us. She is the founder and presenter of Kaleido. So the pickle hand over to you. Okay, I was on mute. Thanks for that introduction. Do we have Sophia with us. Yeah, come on. Hello. Hi Sophia. You've named yourself as deep a car engine on your zoom. I just use the link you sent me. Okay, okay. Let me try to edit it now hold on. It wasn't I didn't pay attention to that. No worries. I've renamed you Sophia. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, hi Sophia how are you doing. I mean for those of you who don't know I think it's in 330 something am for you right now. Amazing that you're here with us today and sincerely so thankful that you decided to show up nonetheless. I hope you have your cup of coffee handy you might need it. You look great by the way I don't look like this at 330 am just saying. So, I mean I just want to take a good amount of time to you know really introduce Sophia to everyone who is listening in on us. And she is the she's the founder at Colado. I met her I met her in Dublin and I remember having a very candid chat with her over some snacks and I was sincerely blown away by her, you know, against all odds kind of attitude. So, you know when we decided to kickstart this women in blockchain panel and event overall, and I was on the lookout for panelists she was the first person who came to my mind simply because how of how amazing her story is. So Sophia, I mean, I just also want to take a few minutes to give a little more background about her so she, like I said is the founder and president at Colado. It's an award winning Web three blockchain and digital assets platform. Sophia also helped launch the IBM blockchain platform which is a very popular blockchain platform, and she held the executive PNL responsibility for the blockchain product portfolio. She previously held a multi billion dollar PNL executive roles at IBM for enterprise software and hardware lines of business, and she currently serves on the Hyperledger Foundation governing board, and she has an engineering degree from Harvard University and an MBA from UNC Chapel Hill. Thanks again Sophia. So, like I said, you know your journey was something that really blew me away and I'd love for our audience who are listening in on us today to also be a part of that journey in some sense. That was about it how did you start your career and how and why did you start Collido tell us your whole story. Well first the Pika of thanks for inviting me and I'm very honored by your comments. So I appreciate that. Yeah, I think one interesting reflection I know this event is focused on women and blockchain. There are a lot of women I interact with day to day who are, you know, practitioners leading the business, using the technology, you know, being really innovative, you know, at large companies like fidelity and MasterCard and, you know, large banks. And often they're not the ones who are speaking at events because they're, they're the doers they're getting stuff done. And it's, it's great to see as we, you know, digitally transform and move to working in new ways that women are really at the forefront, driving that both from business responsibilities so their product or PNL owners making the decisions to move forward, or, or in the technology side. So, every time I'm speaking I think about all the other women who don't speak as much at events, but are also, you know, really getting a lot of significant things done in the space. And I appreciate what you're doing to elevate people's efforts and I try to do the same myself so I think that that's that's a good thing is when we could talk about what we're doing and our perspectives, but I also think it's helpful sometimes to talk about our Just, you know, I remember when I was younger in my career and I would listen to people who are sort of at the other side of a lot of accomplishments and I think I had a pretty different attitude or approach to things. You know, a lot of times, I mean, I feel you can't look and then say 1015 years later this is where I want to get to and it's just a linear path, like life can take you in pretty different directions. And it's really making the best decision you have for your next move. That's how I've sort of done things in my career. But yeah, just in terms to answer your question how I started my career. I grew up in New York City. I was born in a family of immigrants so we had no families in the relatives in the US and I actually went to a high school and Daniela who's on heard the story recently. They just started letting women in they had over like about 2500 students and a hanger with airplanes and I fixed airplanes as part of my high school. Education and then took a test for the Federal Aviation Administration for airframe power plant licenses to work in commercial jets. A lot of people from my high school didn't go to college they just went to work in the airlines, but I did want to study engineering and then I had to pay my way to college. So, I ended up working with a bunch of tech startups as part of that. It was the first employee and a couple companies, and three of them are still around, which is great, but back then they didn't get equity so this is why I'm still working. But get some of them did pretty well. But at that point I was thought you know at some point in my life I'd like to start a company. I was seeing I was so exciting being the first employee and just being on the ground and seeing what that looked like. I really enjoyed it a lot, all from like small team atmosphere and then just feeling like you're creating something from nothing you know and just you bring your ideas and and just really making things happen. So, I actually have four children. So I have lived in and out of the US in different places over the years. I went back as you mentioned I had MBA so I went back to get an MBA. And then after that, and my kids are already old a little bit older at this point. I have one in high school and then to another one, like to middle school and one in elementary when I started when I started business school. So, then I worked for IBM for about a decade. And that's where I just, I wanted to just really acquire more skills learn about different sides of the business so I initially came in through a case competition, which is what they did the business schools where you're in a challenge, you present that to the company's executives, and I got offered a job through that. And then it was on strategy side how to grow the middleware business in emerging markets which is really exciting projects at the time where IBM was looking to, you know, grow globally but do that through thinking locally in each of the local markets. And then I really wanted to, then I was working on the product marketing side and I really wanted to understand after the strategy role what I want to understand why customers bought from us. So I actually, for the first of my life was in sales role. And I did that I did their training for six months and I was in the role for about two years. I was a single point of contact for everything IBM sold across hardware software services so it's very expansive portfolio at the time IBM was about $100 billion in revenue and had very wide portfolio. So I think that experience just really talking to customers every day really finding out the problems and I think everyone on the call was like a technical background, you know we want to solve problems and find out what's really going on. And sometimes when you have too many people in between they're sorting the message and you don't find out what the real market needs are. So that was a very important experience and I think from, you know, when I was studying engineering and in working a more technical or business roles I never thought I would do a sales role, but the client exec role really prepared me very well when I moved into then owning P&L and like lines of business. And I saw that from my peers among my peers and IBM, almost none of them had a client facing role. You know they might have had some of them had it on the development side, where they were maybe a lab advocate, but not on the like, you know, sales side. And that's often because maybe sales is just viewed a little bit differently and people are really good at sales end up staying in sales often because you can make high salaries with commissions. But I was building things and building businesses. So it was fun to bring that knowledge back and you can help customers a lot through bringing innovation and product to the market, instead of just selling what's on the truck. Yeah, and for their rotated through various roles and IBM. And my last one before the blockchain business unit store part of the story was the mainframe business so I had hardware software services and all the growth areas and the mainframe, which is the multi billion dollar P&L around cloud analytics, mobile security, and, you know, AI is part of that. And I really looking at blockchain felt that blockchain was going to disrupt legacy processing, because here was an innovation that went all the way down to the system or record that companies are using. And a lot of the prior generations of innovation had been more on the glass, you know, the front office experience. So, essentially formed a joint venture with the cloud group in inside of IBM and it was an entrepreneurship type experience, where you see what it's like to launch a business within the constraints of working with, you know, finance teams and legal teams and existing products a company might have already, and then trying something new in that context. So, and then about two years into that role after launching IBM blockchain platform, which is a world first managed service, and two subsequent generations working with hundreds of clients really felt there. And there was, people would need a different way to build that where it's plug and play, you know, API hundreds of API is the full solution stack, not just running the blockchain node, and left with the person I was leading the blockchain business with to and we got an Ethereum, who's Joe Lubin a consensus. And we said, we want to run best agreed open source that enterprises want to use and we started with the theory and we run various flavors of that and works with people like JP Morgan, with quorum and their code base that you're best to in the early days getting that off the ground to bring enterprise requirements in there. What we run fabric fabric was our code base that we had donated from our lab to the Linux foundation and help create for hyper ledger in the early days on IBM side and then also run quarter because there are some enterprises who are interested in that had partnered with the company. And then more recently as the block chains are the types of chains. There's really more of a hybrid approach. It's not just public versus private. There's application specific chains. So we partnered with polygon last year with supernets and we just actually announced partnering with avalanche on subnets. So this lot happened it's chain layer and then there's a whole middleware layer, we ended up open sourcing IP around that layer. So that's hyper ledger firefly, which one of the fastest growing one three projects in Linux foundation, your hyper ledger foundation and offer other dedicated stack solutions as Clido so it's, it's been a great journey where it's our sixth year now and working with some really exciting clients and different we're horizontal platforms so different industries and use cases globally. So that's all I know that's a lot of information there. I was power packed but I hope folks on the call can now understand why, you know, when I met Sufi I was so blown away by her origin story like going back to college with four young kids and then having that mindset to keep drilling keep grinding and then growing an organization from ground up from scratch to six years now in the business and having worked with so many of the big names big companies in the blockchain industry today. I mean that takes a lot of grit and determination and I'm thrilled to have you here. So one thing that you did mention was you know a lot of these big names like JP Morgan and a lot of the others so having worked with all these companies, how do you think that you know the ship from web two to web three is happening how our companies and going ahead with that, what are the, you know, current trends what are the issues that people are facing people as in companies are facing. Yeah, great question. And I that really gets to the heart of our mission at Clida. So we're looking companies are really looking as I guess I alluded to earlier, looking to digitally transform. These business processes might be manual or paper based, especially when there's multi party type intermediary or systems. It's very inefficient, you know, legacy setups. And now even before, you know, before COVID people are already looking at digital transformation but COVID accelerated those road maps by about 10 years. And you see people, you know, digitally transforming moving to the cloud. And then they really, you know, industries are looking at, you know, they have to work together as an ecosystem to drive down costs. It's really impossible for one person to make changes that's going to affect the whole system. And as we're tackling bigger challenges like climate change and you look at just, you know, food food supply supply chains, you know, these, these are really can be bigger party issues. So people are looking at Web three technologies in the lens of this once in a generation shift in there's the way they do, you know, work and there's their back end systems. And really, they need to have, you know, restful APIs that application developers who are already in their companies know how to use. They've struggled if they're looking at Web three tech to find the skills in the marketplace. When you're just looking at like, you know, the raw PC calls are just getting into the low level aspects of the programming. A lot of times people make comparisons on the early days of the Internet. And then just being able to really build that the user experience on top of that so you could get the mass adoption. So companies are seeing business needs to move to Web three. And they're very excited about a lot of the innovation, you know, I think we initially started the blockchain layer when you look at the token construct token standards. And you, you know, you look at, I mentioned sustainability ESG, you know, carbon credits and representing those with global uniqueness with token types. And now you have paper performance programs and that could be the World Bank and or other incentives. You can have a way to prevent double counting double spending and then these credits can really have, you know, global relevance with the standard where you're just counting them once and people can use them once. So token standards, you know, tokens are being used, not just in collectibles, but in enterprise settings enterprise NFTs. I know the prior talk was more about the collectible space and more as a speculative asset. But we see a lot more of NFTs being used in areas like digital twins for supply chain, or, you know, loyalty programs or credentialing ed tech, you know, certification employee awards and safety certifications, you know, those types of areas are very, very popular. And that can be just a company internally using that themselves. It doesn't require setting up a multi-party network. So there's different aspects of innovation if it's coming out that gets pulled into enterprises and gets used, but they do need an easy button to adopt the technologies. Similar to how, you know, AI has been around for three or four decades and it's not till now that it's really easy to use that people are, you know, we see this boom in innovation because people can now get to the higher levels of business value with it. Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think when AI came out, people were very dismissive of it and now that we have large language models like chat GPT, everything is at the tip of our fingers, right? So I think it's going to take some time. Yeah. You were saying? I just agree with you. Definitely. Yeah. So I think it's going to take some time to, you know, view things like digital asset organization NFTs and stuff beyond collectibles and actually move them into real world use cases and I believe that's something collider is working on as well, right? Yeah. Yeah. And when you mentioned digital asset tokenization, I mean now in the last six months, we hear people really looking to tokenize everything tokenization of everything and so it's not just financial services but definitely financial services are leading all from, you know, exchanges to banks, to other financial market institutions. You know, we've been very involved. It's one example of that with central bank digital currencies. So we worked with Swift and 18 central banks and global transformation banks last year. They were, because they were able to stand up the infrastructure and it's, you know, fully compliant and regulated, they could get to the business value and the use cases very quickly. So they spent over four months just doing thousands of transactions and really being able to interoperate and Swift, and we work with other CBDC projects as well. And the Swift one, we modeled a couple different ecosystems using different protocols. So one was Ethereum based, one was Corda, and then they had to interoperate. They had a real-time growth settlement system as well. So people were modeling out, you know, how do these different ecosystems when they set up their own CBDC, how are they going to be able to exchange information? And Swift had the messaging role today between the banks. So what could Swift's role be as a connector in the future? And that was the CBDC connector piece that we ran. And we ran the full stack of that tech. It was interesting. We met with all the banks every two weeks and initially and had office hours. So we thought to be a lot of questions in the technology. But all the questions were about the business side of what they were trying to do, which is great because we want people to get to the business outcomes. And something like CBDCs, I mean, there needs to be a lot of coordination between the countries. And it's also, you know, Swift is a non-profit, it's a collaborative association of the banks. So they're, you know, in a good position to try to bring people together. We're actually moving into the next phase that was discussed, which has 30 banks. So Mix the Central Banks and Private Banks. And then we're also working with, you know, other country ecosystems, sort of on the other end of that where Swift is the connector. And then they're working on their own ecosystems like in Australia, for example, we've done work with wholesale CBDCs and syndicated lending. And now there's currently 15 different projects going on across wholesale and retail. And then there's a couple others that aren't public yet. But it's exciting to be able to just, you know, really just see the look in people's faces when they're asking for help. And they realize in a matter of like, you know, a couple sprints, they could be fully up and running and they could be onboarding participants and actually just moving forward with their projects. I think there was a Gen 1 approach, which was back to, you know, back to when we were initially at IBM. And a lot of people in the industry still got sort of stuck in that Gen 1 approach where it could take, you know, three to five years and 30 to $50 million to build something. And then it's impossible to get to the ROI if you spend so much money upfront. And it's very hard to get to the ROI. I wouldn't say it's impossible. But, and there were some notable enterprise projects like, you know, Straying Stock Exchange actually spent seven years on one use case and $250 million right off. And they, you know, very heavy consulting lead is on-prem just trying to build everything from scratch. And you get into issues with scalability performance, hardening the code. If you're just building it for like one custom use case with that sort of deployment with hundreds of people involved. Yeah, so we really believe in open source led projects. That's where a big fan of Hyperledger and where it's, you know, code that's used by a lot of companies and it's being hardened. It's very performant and scalable. It has an active community that's driving the roadmap. And I think that's, you know, a big accelerant, like starting with that open source. And then obviously it's Clido, we believe, you know, offering those through, you know, 500 APIs, just plug and play, software as a service. We offer other delivery models all the way to software as well. So there's different deployment models, but someone, even the smallest startup, you can get started on a free tier. We've had people raise $5 million in our free tier for their projects because they're able to build the prototype, show it to investors and people get it. The blockchain and Web 3 and tokens fit into this. Right. Then you're on a team tier with, you know, you could just swipe a credit card, it's like $100 a month for Node and then you can move up to a business tier. This, you know, so this allows people to pay for what you use and in the early phases of projects, you're not making huge investments. You're able to just get the right amount of technology you need for the job. So I mean, a lot of what you said ties in very closely with your article which I read on the World Economic Forum about four ways to promote financial inclusion in CBDCs. Right. And I think one of the points that you that kind of stood out to me was value interoperability. I think that was the term that you mentioned. So as you pointed out, you know, rightly there are a lot of geopolitical as well as economic implications with interoperability beyond just interoperating between blockchain protocols like beyond the tech level. There's also the political aspect of it. And I don't that you just mentioned now which I think I mean I want more clarity about was syndicated blending. Did I get that right. Yeah, that was the project actually did a number of years ago with helping support the Reserve Bank of Australia. I would say that's one of many, many use cases, I mean a lot of the use cases there's like wholesale where it's really between the banks themselves the central banks. And there's a lot of friction with just cross border payments, you know, which is surprising you think we're so advanced today, but it's just from like post you know that the settlement time and cost and friction of just trying to exchange from one currency to another between the central banks is it's onerous so there it's you know that's one area of excitement and there's a lot of you know there's over 100 different companies doing CBDC work and explorations and they're using techniques and blockchain like you know atomic swaps. You're really removing a lot of risk from counterparties when you're able to use techniques like that. So there's a wholesale side and then there's a retail and retail experiments are really you know looking at things like financial inclusion. How does this really disseminate to the whole population are there new ways you can remove risk are there ways you could just help from a credit perspective give you know access to funds and investment lending to small and medium businesses for example like there was one recently in Brazil that focused on that with a credit card company who was doing some some work there with small and medium businesses. So really, in a period of exploration where there's dozens of these types of use cases that are being explored and banks are different levels, globally, of sort of comfort of jumping in, you know, some are a little more early stage and waiting to be and others are being much more proactive. I think in the emerging markets, you know we've worked with in the Philippines with Union Bank for over five years now on financial inclusion on a blockchain based network, and that you know they have over 400 rural banks that aren't connected to Swift and something like even a domestic payment in the Philippines can get very expensive because you're going from island to island. And sometimes, you know, the only way to do that is with a boat. So, they are they had set up a blockchain based network called project I to I, you know, five years ago now that's been in production all this time, and that's island to island individuals individual institution institution. And yeah, and then we asked the chairman of the board of one of the main banks involved, you know how much money are people saving now using the blockchain based system, and he start doing the math in front of me and he's like you know they save a week to two of food with the cost lower the cost of sending these remittances and if you look at you know countries like the Philippine often it's the mother in the family who might work abroad and maybe she's in the Middle East and she doesn't get to see your family and much and she's sending money back and just to think that you're able to affect a family in such a positive way that now you know they get more disposable income available like the kids which is you know the whole point of what the parents are sacrificing for. So, yeah, new, you know emerging markets sometimes countries can really leapfrog and take advantage of new technologies because they haven't invested as much into, you know, some of the current systems, which are now rapidly becoming legacy systems just with new technologies coming out. Awesome, I mean that was a very great real world example just in the previous panel people were talking about how blocked the word blockchain has this very negative connotation to it and which is why people try to stick to terms like distributed ledger technology and things like that. Like this yeah like stories like this which are very real world use cases which have actually solved real problems I mean that that just goes to show how much potential blockchain as a technology cancer in the very near future. So we have about two to three minutes left so I just want to kind of wrap this up Sophia. I want you to tell us and the audience, anything that you believe is very important it doesn't need to be just blockchain, it could be potentially relating to the grid and determination that you're kind of sure to pursue your career paths because I know a lot of people who are on this call are blockchain beginners, they're all trying to gather resources to kind of enter into this web three space because that appears to be the next big thing after the whole AI revolution. So, any key takeaways that you want, you know people to register in their minds and keep it with them for their life forward. Go ahead. Yeah, I actually maybe, maybe a little bit surprising in what I'm going to focus on in the answer. I mean I think you have people at different stages of life, and especially if you're younger in your career but really at any stage. I think one important learning, and I bring this to our team and building a company is really know yourself. So in business school I did a lot of an engineering we didn't do this, but when I was in business school organizational behavior and these sort of assessments where you like there's all from, there's one called Myers-Briggs which is more of a traditional one, but one I really like a lot the Gallup Foundation puts out called Strengths Finder, like 20 million people have taken it, it's online. You can just, you know, do the assessment 25 minutes and find out like what are your talent multipliers, you know what are your top 10 strengths, and this is just like the air you breathe like anytime you walk into a room. This is what you're leveraging to interact with other people to solve problems, process information, and when you get to know yourself, then you evaluate different ways you can contribute, make an impact in the space. So we're all passionate about Web 3, but how can everyone uniquely really help drive change and have those oversized impacts and then also understand who you're going to team with the best. Because maybe someone is like very high on the strategy and input learning and they're really comfortable with like influencing others. So they could be like a great evangelist and they can help chart a course in an ambiguous space, but you know maybe they're lower on execution side of things. So, or getting things done one on one through people. So they might want to run some of the ideas by someone who's really good at like putting together the project plan and thinking about, you know, how would we get from step A to step, you know, Z. Because sometimes people can have like big visions, but then they have trouble executing. So really understanding yourself and understanding others that you work with and then if you're putting together a team and maybe some people on the call will want to start their own business one day. You know, thinking about who to partner with, because I think we do want to deploy the technology and we want that to be used to have a real impact, and we're going to go further together. If we do that and have a bigger impact together than if we're trying to do that by ourselves and you know really starts with knowing ourselves as like the first step of that. All right, that that was pretty insightful. Yeah, thank you so much Sophia for joining us I hope everyone got some good takeaways from this. As usual, you continue to be an inspiration. Thank you for all your great work, and have a good night. Good morning. Thanks again for inviting me to Pika and I hope, you know, exciting to see this I look forward to seeing some of the recordings I know there's another engineer for my team was on the panel in a little while as well. Anastasia will be on in a while. Yeah. All right, awesome. Bye. Nidhi, over to you. You're on mute. Okay, yeah, thanks to Pika and thank you Sophia that was really inspirational more power to you and all the women out there. So moving on next we have our technical presentation. So, and Vishnu Priya would be giving this presentation. Give me a minute. I'll just pull up the slide just a minute. Yeah. Yeah, so when we open get started with blockchain applications, we just want to like get started and then get done with it. There are many things that we don't think about a lot. So one of the aspects that we open miss is related to the risk and compliance. It plays a very vital role when it comes to production applications. So, and one of as one of the panelists mentioned in the finance panel that it plays a very important role like it gives a standard for people to follow and then it kind of give direction to the business in a way. So, the topic that we have is related to risk and compliance for production readiness of blockchain applications and Vishnu Priya is a technology risk consultant with the digital trust practice and she has been working with KPMG since 2018 and her expertise is around IT attestation and assurance and blockchain risk assessment and her experience is not just limited to blockchain. She is also, she also has experience in assessing the cloud and women such as AWS and Azure. So over to you Vishnu Priya. Vishnu Priya. Can I share my screen? In the background. Yeah, sure. Shrita Kumari, could you please go and mute? Okay. I hope I'm audible and Yes, we can. Yes, thank you. Okay. So I'll try to cover all these areas in the next 40 minutes. The context has already been set by Nidhi, but I'll also add value to that. We'll talk about production readiness in blockchain context and risk vulnerabilities and controls in blockchain. I'm not going to just stick to audit areas. It's just assessment for now. But if you do have any specific questions for audit, please do take it into any section and I will look at that one site finish. Okay. So, I think the panel before in the chat, we have discussed about, you know, the security and risk aspects of blockchain. Just adding a little more context there. The numbers may vary depending on the source you look at, but it's estimated that 17.9 billion dollars will be spent on blockchain solutions by 2024, which is within the year. And about 1.76 trillion dollar boost would come from blockchain for GDP in 2030. Another reason why we need to focus on this can compliance is because the threats and vulnerabilities are going to constantly evolve and we'll have to keep catching up. There is no other way out. And the nature of blockchain itself, I think we do discuss about the negative connotation it has the anonymity and immutability does make a few of us skeptical about the use of blockchain. So, this although it's a disruptive technology does come with its own set of vulnerabilities. There are some unique risks in the blockchain space and regulations are playing catch up again. So, although some countries like the police have regulations in place, especially for crypto or specific implementations, largely we are still having very fragmented guidance or advice on what we should be doing. Although we will cover that in the next few slides. Last but not the least, we have a lot of frameworks and there's a lot of guidance on what we should be doing. But I don't think we have standards that have unified all this guidance yet. Some standards, some frameworks provide more detail and one of the topics by other frameworks might focus on more process oriented topics. So in the next 30 minutes or so we'll cover all of this on a very high level. Challenges in regulatory space. So this is just general challenges. Next slide we look at crypto specific challenges as well. So, this is a challenge that any application might have. So this is also true for a blockchain implementation. How do you secure the data on chain and off the chain and how do you try and keep this confidential or how do you adhere to any privacy specific regulations that are required. We might not have that many regulations yet from a privacy standpoint in India but there are geographies where this is a law and you have to adhere to it. So when you're catering to customers across the globe, how do you identify the boundaries of what regulations are applicable to your implementation. That's one challenge that you would face in case of specific industries like healthcare or financial services are heavily regulated. But you could have a different industry that has slightly less regulations. So in both cases, you still are responsible for identifying what is supposed to comply to that adds an additional layer of challenge when you set out to, you know, deploy your applications in production. The third is still slightly heavy even for us auditors. So when you have internal audits and external audits, the first step is to identify if the scope of applications are relevant and accurate. So in many cases, at least when we try and audit in India, we still are not sure if the implementation is, you know, ready to be scoped in, although it's in production. The number of transactions might be lesser and therefore not very material. So it does happen that, you know, you may not scope in the application in an external audit, but you should still independently assess the applications or implementation so that you get an idea on where you stand. Last point is you might have geography specific regulations that do not cover the points above but, you know, your geography requires certain regulations like, you know, your data should be stored in some manner. You should have a backup in the same region. You cannot have a backup in a different region. So these are of customer data in my region. So these things together would add a lot of challenges on how to, you know, assess the implementation itself. While it might not be necessary when you move directly into production down the line, you still have to identify if any of these categories are applicable for your use case. So this is just, you know, a representation of where we stand with regards to group regulation. So there are four categories. There are countries that prohibit crypto entirely. There are countries where the process of regulating it has not been initiated. There are countries where process is initiated and there are countries with regulations in place. The idea is not to nitpick on countries where you don't have regulations or processes not get initiated. So the point I'm trying to make here is that all of this will eventually move to the green bubble where you will have more and more regulations. So it will have to, you know, try and find out if there is a unified way of addressing all of these regulations because any global use case requires understanding of, you know, the scope of regulation that you would be required to comply. So with respect to just crypto, there are four, sorry, five challenges on regulatory bodies side. So it's not just we don't have regulations, regulatory bodies might also be dealing with these challenges. And this is from, you know, a World Bank blog, you can Google it online. So the first one is different countries, you know, quantify crypto assets differently. They are not valued equally. So the, you know, the way they would treat it legally would depend on their interpretation and therefore the rules or regulations that they enforce also would vary. The second point is tracking and recovery. In many cases, it is possible that the anonymity or the anonymous nature of the technology itself may be manipulated, not for, you know, goodwill. So this, in those cases, you have challenges in tracking and recovering the assets. The third case we've seen is lack of investor protection mechanisms. So multiple exchanges have declared bankruptcy in the past and you would be aware that there is no clear visibility on what happens to the investors or how would the payout happen once the bankruptcy is declared. That also brings us to the next point of volatility. So there are not many regulations on how much or what payout would happen from the time insolvency is declared to the time payout happens because of the nature of cryptocurrency because it's so volatile. For example, Bitcoin value kept, you know, rising so much in the last two years, but it also fell. So the drastic rise and fall makes it difficult to, you know, identify at what point would the payout happen. And finally this complexity of multiple jurisdictions. So all of this together puts a challenge on regulatory bodies also to come up with a unified approach, each country obviously will have their own regulation in place. Moving to production readiness in the blockchain context. So these six parameters do not cover all the parameters that you need to check before your application is ready for production, but these are important ones. So the first one is improbability, because your application is not going to work in silos, you have to ensure that your application is compatible with existing systems to reuse any existing functionality that you already have. And that your application or implementation follows the existing consistent approach that you already have. So the point is you don't have to reinvent all processes just for the application. Try and fit in into your existing design and architecture. Security, we cannot stress this enough. Blockchain might have their own set of unique risks, but the inherent risks that already exist in all applications or technology implementations will continue in blockchain as well. So we will cover those topics in the future. So one of the points that we like to identify is it's not just technology security, you also have to consider people and process just because the technology is relatively new. It's not enough if you just have an independent audit, it's not enough if you just have access control in place, you might require a combination of all these controls and periodic monitoring to understand that your application is secure. We'll come to documentation and training at the end. Moving to governance processes. This is where we talk about more process than technology, although your implementation may be strong in technical controls, that is not enough, because you need to know who has access to your application, who has accountability for your application and who will be responsible in case of a change. Even a simple change like changing your consensus mechanism protocol or you want to add additional functionality or features to your application, who decides the process that needs to be followed and how would that be initiated. So these governance processes that you generally have in any implementation will be applicable in blockchain as well. And this is not new to us, so we have to continue looking at it from the same lens that we have been doing before. Compliance, it's not just regulatory compliance, in many cases it could also be contractual obligations that you have with your customers. If they require you to provide proof of assessments that your implementation is secure and meets certain standards, you might have to do that. So you'll have to identify that before you can go ahead with the assessment. One of the most important features is the resilience. A lot of times teams or developers may have tested really well in a sandbox environment, but when they come, move to production, the system may not be resilient enough to withstand attacks or at least attempts at that attacks. So in such cases, maybe you have to look at checking the resilience of the environment surrounding the application, not just your blockchain application. So we are looking at any connectivity to existing systems, is that validated and are you aware of any vulnerabilities that exist in the environment of the application. Finally, documentation and training, you cannot have all of these running perfectly but miss out on your training. Users must be aware of how to use the application. There must be a process and who gets to access the application and is that even necessary? In most cases, you would have to worry about privilege escalation that we generally worry about in normal implementations as well in a blockchain in production as well. Moving on to the risk areas. The first one is the untested code. The challenge we have is not just code review, it also has to be tested along with the existing code. So you cannot test pieces of code to check that it's working fine. You have to consider the application security in the environment itself. Next is basically denial of service attack. So is it possible for multiple nodes to fail at the same time? Is it possible to have natural system disruptions? Do you have controls in place to have your system back online with minimal disruption? We've talked about regulatory components and we'll cover that in the next few slides as well. A very important aspect of blockchain and where we do have some challenges in testing is the strength of encryption protocols. So what you generally have in why you're storing data and any other implementation is applicable here as well. How strong are your encryption protocols? In case of cryptocurrency, this is especially important. You would have multiple touch points with cryptography and you are responsible for ensuring that the identity and access management is well tested. Interoperability, again, your APIs are secure. You are able to ensure that the data integrity is not lost when you move data from and to your blockchain implementation. Privacy is a small area of challenge in blockchain. So there is a perception that once on blockchain, it's always there. And if you take back consent, is it possible to delete or erase your data if you choose not to share it anymore? And how do you erase data once the consent has expired? So you have given consent only for a year or only for a particular purpose. What happens to the data then? So this is one of the specific areas where you sit down with your team and see how that can be worked out. And the next two systems, next to this we cover in a little bit more detail is consensus mechanism and the design of smart contracts. For those who are new, consensus mechanism is how you decide whether the block can be added or not. So Bitcoin has proof of work. It's an example that you may all be familiar with. So similarly, you might have multiple consensus mechanisms. So one of the aspects you'll have to test is, is it possible to bypass your consensus mechanism? If that is possible, that means your implementation can fail very quickly because attackers are very, very persistent in their attempts. The next point we'll discuss in a minute's time as well is how are your smart contracts designed? A smart contract is basically a logic or a function that decides whether a transaction is added or not. So your simple transactions, they're like legal contracts working on code. So that will decide whether a transaction takes place or doesn't take place. So in this case, if your code does not check for all the possible logic that is available in the functionality of your system, then it's very easy to take over the entire application of the system and we'll see one or two examples of that. Moving on. There are some frameworks as I mentioned earlier, which talk about what to do or where you can start if you're trying to do a risk assessment framework. So accredited standards committee provided this framework on risk assessment for blockchain and it comes with five pillars. So it talks about design and architectural governance and operation trust and resilience system integration and smart contracts. So smart contracts is a very big part of testing when we do blockchain implementation testing because it's also easily targeted by attackers. We'll also link back controls that are applicable in these five pillars in the next year. So what are your typical vulnerabilities when it comes to blockchain implementation? So I mentioned that you have existing vulnerabilities and you have new vulnerabilities. The new world vulnerabilities while the logic is not new but the area is new is the consensus mechanism and smart contracts. Also a little bit of cryptography is involved. But the existing vulnerabilities like access and permission management are not having your application tested, you've not done source code review. You've not stored your data securely. You are trying to comply with too many regulations, but you are not really testing whether your implementation is taking care of the basics. So these kind of issues will come up. We'll talk about a few vulnerabilities as well. So in smart contract vulnerabilities, because this is a big area, we'll talk about this. So one could be a re-entrance here at that. So what happens in this case is imagine you're trying to withdraw amount or a set in your wallet and transfer it to somebody else. If the system allows you to perform this withdrawal action before the previous withdrawal action finishes. That means it allows a re-entrance vulnerability which can be exploited. And this has happened in the past. This vulnerability has been exploited in the past. Now we want to access controls. So in case of access control, you could probably gain access to a lower privilege. But if the system does not check once you gain access and allows you to escalate your privilege, then you would have a smart contract vulnerability. You could probably escalate your privilege enough to gain complete control of the network. Third is arithmetic vulnerability. So this seems very trivial or basic. But if your system does not check for the negative error, so you're trying to transfer funds, but you don't have sufficient funds. Then your system obviously should check for the balance that you already have. This is obviously a very simple example. But arithmetic vulnerability can be manipulated very easily, especially in crypto context. It may not be applicable in all other contexts. So that is one thing that you have to check. The next one is the unchecked return value. So similar to the negative value, you're also responsible for checking the return value of your functions. Any smart contract that you write, you'll have to check what is the return value. If someone can manipulate the return value or bypass it entirely, then obviously you have a vulnerability in code and you would be responsible for the repercussions. Next one is the denial of service. This we are familiar with. What if you could stop a node from accessing the system and use that node to enter the network and control the network? And this has happened in the past. And moving to the last point, bad randomness. For example, you are considering an application which announces lucky draw winners, you know, randomly select 10 people who are eligible for a price. Now, if your randomness in smart contract is based on some secret value or a code that is embedded in the smart contract, then you are not actually having a random number generator. So the best thing in this case would be to have a random number generator outside your smart contract or outside your blockchain itself. Have an oracle outside that generates random value and use that random value in your smart contract. I hope it is not too fast. Moving to the next system level vulnerabilities. So we spoke about smart contract vulnerabilities. We are going to talk about hacks where these were actually used. So the first one is the use vulnerability. So this is an open source smart contract platform, which parses smart contracts and tells you, you know, smart contracts can be manipulated. Now the problem in this case was that while parsing, it could allow the attacker to gain remote access of the network. So it could control the entire, the smart contract to be manipulated to control the entire network. Moving on to the word hacks. So this was a combination of three different things. So you might be able to put consensus mechanism, which is used in Bitcoin. So in this case, they were using proof of work as a consensus mechanism. They were very flexible in their time stamps, which means they accepted blocks in the last two hours. It's not just, you know, seconds or minutes. And the difficulty was done based on dark, active wave, which adjusts the difficulty of proof of work. So what the attacker did was slowed down the generation of blocks. So he didn't actually slow down the generation. He made it seem like the time stamp was within the last one hour. The system was receiving lesser number of blocks. So the difficulty level was being reduced drastically. So at one point it was very easy to generate blocks. And then he could just very easily do a 51% attack on the system. So in this case, it's not that they did not have control templates. It's just that the combination of controls could be manipulated very easily. For example, they could be having two hours of, you know, flexible time stamp was a little too much. Also, they had a strong difficulty generator, but then they, because they allow for two hours, that could be manipulated very easily. Next is the GBP hack. So in this case, it was actually pretty simple. They just move funds from, you know, the exchange or the hot wallet to an unidentified wallet. So this allowed very easy access to, you know, move funds from the hot wallet to their unidentified wallet, which means that action should not have been allowed. And moving to the last one, the very fast smart contract. So in this case, it allowed a re-enconcelerator, which means an attacker could run the smart contract repeatedly before the state of the object has changed. Which means it showed as if their balance had not changed, but they were doing multiple, you know, transactions with the same balance. Moving to general control areas that we would have. So similar to the risk areas, we'll have controls as well in each of those areas. For example, consensus mechanisms, there are multiple options in consensus. When you have chosen your consensus mechanism to look at any vulnerabilities or any exploits that are possible to be performed by attackers, test for those consensus mechanisms. Don't just test for one or two scenarios. That is true for smart contract review as well. Test for all possible scenarios that we may have. And check if the application is functioning as intended and that you cannot escalate privilege to get access to any other function other than what is intended. The third one is access management. So this is something that you would have across technology as long as we try to gain access to a system or need access to a system. There must be a process to identify how this access is provided and whether there is a review in place to determine if it's appropriate or not. The fourth one is preferably you do have a lot of reliance on photography and blockchain implementations. So you identify how you would store values. For example, is hot wallet the implementation that is necessary for your use case? Would you rather have a full wallet? Would you need HSTMs to store data separately? So this kind of decisions should have been done during the design of your application itself. But once you decide to move to production, at least at that point, you have to think of these elements. Next is the impropriability. When you're having your application work along with multiple other existing applications, how does the data transfer happen? Do you have controls or do you have reporting mechanisms to find out or monitoring mechanisms to find out and report to you that there is an issue? Because of attention, you may not even be aware that there are challenges unless you monitor and report back. This API management is a continuation that more governance would say you have strong controls in how the nodes can be accessed and if you monitor what's happening in those nodes, you can pretty much prevent denial of service attack but a persistent attack or might still find a way. And last is the industry specific or region specific compliance. So you'll have to think about how to comply with your industry. For example, if you are supposed to comply with PCI-DS, irrespective of how your application is implemented, you still have to go through this control checklist. Similarly, if you are in healthcare, you have to comply with HITDA. So those things are not optional. Just because you're on blockchain or the implementation is new, you still have to find a way to comply in all of these regulations that are applicable to you. So we had seen a few risk assessment areas as pillars in the ASU framework. So the pillars are there at the bottom, right? These are the domains they have provided as part of these pillars, which will tell you what to do or what kind of questions you should be asking if you're considering this assessment. So some of them don't seem like questions, but this is available online. You can download it and go through the framework. If you tell you how to think of risk in, say for example, what are the algorithms in use? How is the infrastructure secure? Do you have a business continuity plan? What happens in case of identity management? It also talks about the design and architecture of the system itself. Do you have open source elements? What kind of languages do you use? Do your programming languages have known vulnerabilities? Do you address those vulnerabilities? Are you aware of what you should be doing when you're using certain programming languages? Do you have proprietary systems? They also insist on smart contracts and AP assessments on a large basis. So you could go through it and decide how you want the execution of smart contracts to happen. So some typical controls in these areas are given here. I'll also touch upon how you might have to scope in other layers in your testing or assessment as well. So most of these use cases may rely on posting in a cloud environment. So all the controls that are applicable for cloud security also become applicable for your implementation of blockchain. So you will have to look at those aspects as well. So if you're using native services provided by AWS, GCP or Azure, do you have controls around who can access those services? What can you do with those services? Because it's not just the application layer that you have to be concerned about. You also have to worry about the cloud or the infrastructure and you are responsible for implementing controls in those areas. A lot of times we do give this answer of shared responsibility and misconceptions from what is the responsibility of the customer and what is the responsibility of the cloud service provider itself. So those boundaries should be very clear. So some of these examples are periodic code reviews. So this could be one of the controls that you can test. And vetting your consensus protocol before moving into production, having evidence of smart contract security assessment being done either by an independent team in your organization or a completely independent third party organization. Also checking for any risk management processes. That's not restricted to just access. It also talks about business rules or functionality that is allowed in your application. It's good to have these assessments either done independently by an internal team, but independent to your development team or a third party who would help you identify these issues. So this talks about some of the smart contract audit rules that are available. Some of them are open source, which will analyze your smart contract, pass it and give you a very high level view on where you stand from the point of view of security. Some of them are, you know, for your use case, it's not enough to just go through these tools. Also, you should know what to do with the results. To implement it and you can constantly monitor your implementation, not just once. At the start of moving to production, you have to do it on a regular or periodic basis so that any changes to your smart contracts are still secure. That brings me to the end of my presentation. Just a few key takeaways before I end. Identify what are applicable to you. So before you narrow your scope of search to blockchain, identify if your industry requires you to comply with any set of regulations. That's the first thing. Then you have to identify region-specific regulations that you have for existing use cases as well, existing applications as well. Just move that in the lens of blockchain and see if you can show compliance in all the controls that are necessary to be applied. Next is the blockchain-specific vulnerability. So you look at smart contracts and consensus mechanism. You do have other areas, but predominantly do look at your smart contracts to see if there is any blockchain-specific vulnerability that you have or you can identify and fix before you know the production. Third, this is not just monitoring as in to see if it's up and running. First, monitor to analyze any patterns. Are there any attempts at exploiting vulnerabilities so that you can prepare better, have stronger controls and block if necessary. And finally, this is more from any production readiness application. Your users must be aware of what they are doing with the application, especially the challenges we have faced is the developer team is very strong in their technical controls, but may not understand or appreciate processes as much as the governance team. Similarly, governance team might talk a lot about processes, but not really appreciate technical challenges in implementing these controls. It's important that both teams sit down together and understand why they need to have controls in place in your applications. And I've heard to these samples, your users should know what they should be doing and what is appropriate use. So this requires training, maybe at the start of use of application or any time you modify any functionalities for the application. While documentation for this exists, a lot of times people may not be aware that they are required to do this at all. So this is one aspect maybe people can focus on as well. That's it from my side. I will take any questions that you may have. Thank you everyone for joining on a Saturday afternoon and some other times as well. Let's see any questions. Thank you Vishnu Priya. I have one question like you mentioned a lot of the smart contract audit tools. So what should be the criteria one should look at when they want to select a particular tool? It will depend on the use case. That's why I have not mentioned on guidance as such because it would really depend on your use case and what you're trying to identify while all of them would audit and give you a set of results. Are you trying to identify vulnerabilities? Are you trying to identify? Some of them are better for our football vulnerability. Some of them might be more general implementation. It would really depend on your use case. Right. And all of the tools that you have mentioned are these open sourced or like? Some of them are open sourced and others you would need a license. You got it. Okay. Anybody who is having a question? Yeah. Vishnu Priya, so these I mean got a good insight on the security and the regulatory part. How are you making sure the performance aspect is taken care because we have nodes in multiple places and right. I mean, do you have some kind of a simulation to do it or you measure it in a real environment itself, the performance? So I'm not the right person to answer that question. I'm sorry about that because the performance testing will do it in simulation before doing it in real world to anticipate the performance issues. But we look at more from addressing performance issues as control. So I'm not sure if that would answer your question correctly. That's fine. So or even in terms of the smart contracts, whatever you're building and executing, do you individually verify them separately to ensure that the contract. Yes, we do individually verify validate all smart contracts that are critical. We do go through the entire code and identify issues that we think the organization should work on. Any validity in all of the smart contracts we do do a review. Okay. And last question is the one thing is we are having distributed nodes in multiple phases, right. How do we really carry out these kind of just things because we need to ensure that maybe consensus come from everybody and then only we are allowing it to process. Right. So do you how do you We don't start off with any risk assessment. We generally do a pilot assessment before we move the scope to the entire implementation. We wouldn't start off with covering all regions and all functionalities at once because that would be a challenge even for organization stepping into a risk assessment for the first time. So we try and perform this assessment on a pilot basis on maybe one or two functionalities when that is ready, we try and involve multiple other teams. So it wouldn't start off with a risk assessment with multiple people. That's not how we would do. Thank you. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you everyone for the opportunity. Thank you for taking out time and like briefing us about what areas we should look at. I really like the part where you went in depth about the smart contract vulnerabilities and the system level vulnerabilities. So we as developers know like which areas we should be looking at if we are planning for a production application. Thank you so much. Thank you. Let's move on. So I would request the developer panels to turn on their video. Nikita, Akansha, Shweta, Anastasia. Yeah. Please turn on your videos. Yeah, perfect. So this brings us to the session that I'm most passionate about, which is like very close to my heart because I'm a developer myself and it's a pleasure to have all these amazing women out there. So I'll start with the introduction in no particular order. So Anastasia is a full-time engineer at Philido and she's an undergraduate from UNC Chapel Hill and a graduate from University of Virginia where she has done computer interaction research in haptics and accessibility. Next we have Diana. She might not be able to join us due to some technical glitch. Let's wait for her if she's able to join us. And then we have Akansha Dixit. She's a final year doctoral candidate at City University of London and she's specializing in blockchain, IoT and digital identity. She is serving as a principal technology advisor at the information commissioner's office in London and she's like a live example like an example for somebody who has gone through the hyper ledger internship program for 2022 where she has gained experience while working on hyper ledger cactus and its applications and cross chain transactions. So I would highly recommend you guys to get involved in such initiatives where you can gain a lot of experience by doing real hands on. So yeah. And then we have Mekita. She's a skilled developer who is blockchain developer who is working at Snapper Future Tech and she is really passionate about training. So she's also a technical trainer at IBI where she has delivered multiple programs for multiple institutes and she has worked in blockchain applications like this NFT marketplace, insurance, web3 wallet and other blockchain platforms. Then we have Shweta Kumari. She's a blockchain lead at HCL and she's having experience of around 12 years and she has been in blockchain space for around 4 years now. She has worked on technology such as hyper ledger fabric Goharam, Indi and Arthrikoda and she has worked on use cases such as tokenization, identity and traceability. So it's wonderful to have you all here so the first, the ice breaker that I have for all of you is since many of you are like experienced individuals so what sparked your interest in the blockchain technology and what inspired you to become a developer in this domain? I would like to know your thoughts. Mekita, Shweta, anybody wants to go in first? Okay. So let me share my initial interest and like why I am here a blockchain developer. Like initially I have started to work with blockchain technology with HCL Tech Blockchains U18 since last 4 years ago and I started to work from like POC and pilot project and now I am doing the implementation for production based project. So during this journey like I have found there are so many factors that like motivates me to work with this innovative blockchain technology. The first one like we all know like the blockchain started from the very popular Bitcoin cryptocurrency. So like what means Bitcoin itself as a like number of potential improvement for the like financial and technical terms. So in result what happened there are many enterprises and like organizations recognize this potential and what impact this is the cryptocurrency that started working on various project related to digital currencies and now we have a number of digital currencies in the market. So like this is the first reason the blockchain is actually exploring to the enterprise and organization. And the second thing like governments and central banks like they are exploring the CDBC. So many blockchain start-up companies are working on Duffy platform and NFTs and like like a traceability and the big companies like IBM or Microsoft Amazon they are invested in blockchain technology and now we have the great feature of like blockchain decentralization and trust like which create actually a transparent system without relying on central authority. So we have a lot of in current example like global financial financial crisis and we can see like banks are default and all like this these types of like problem blockchain can solve the problem. So why this is the most important technology for me like it is innovation like which introduces in a technical terms like distributed consensus mechanism and like concept of crypto cryptographic algorithm and the new concept like smart contracts. So these technical challenges and innovation like attracts me and like I enjoy working with this cutting-edge technologies so the excellent feature and the challenge of blockchain motivates me to work here as a blockchain developer. That sounds awesome Shweta. I go with that any station I want to go next? Yeah, so my journey with blockchain starts with actually the same as Shweta where I got introduced to it through all the crypto currencies that were booming back then but I didn't do anything with it until later on when I joined Kaleido as a front-end engineer and that's where I actually learned a lot more about blockchain. I've transitioned now to a full stack engineering role so I've been able to see through client projects basically what Shweta said the benefits of blockchain being used in enterprise use cases there's so much going on in the field right now so there's always new things to learn and it's honestly a little bit intimidating because it seems really hard sometimes it just looks intimidating but to be honest the benefits of it is really worth it and I just get excited learning about the new things and the impact that it could make to society honestly so yeah, that's how I got started Good blockchain. Thanks for bringing that up like you guys so open about your thoughts Yeah Nikita, Kancha Yeah, so like everybody has something like through hackathon or something like that I didn't start it that way I remember like I was looking for internship to complete my masters and there were so many technologies, those were booming and I remember it was like COVID period and it was difficult to get through that and everything and while looking at different technologies like from data science, data analytics machine learning and everything I came across blockchain which I think apart from the word I don't know, I didn't know a thing about it but thankfully I got in my internship at snap up and from there I learned a lot of things and of course definitely most of the credit goes to my mentors and seniors Kamlesh Nagware sir from hyper ledger being one of them so yeah like I learned from it while doing this learning I saw like what it brings to the table like Shweta suggested like how it gives the freedom the transparency not only to the like the users but also as a developer it is a community based and how people work together to make it more efficient and more scalable definitely it's a niche maybe a decade back or something it was a niche technology but people are adapting to it and bringing a good efficiency in the framework and everything definitely motivates to learn and explore and keep growing in this technology so yeah right it's really good like really fortunate to have started a journey like from an internship level directly into the field of blockchain like I have had a different path like I transitioned to blockchain after having certain years of experience really fortunate in that way yeah over to Yakancha hi everyone it's so nice to meet you all here virtually and I met some of you at the hyper ledger global forum really good to be here so as some of you I also started on a different path I'm still very early in my career I believe in terms of learning the blockchain curve but I started it started when I was working as a research assistant in Indian statistical institute in Kolkata and I had this professor I was working with who was like the blockchain guru at that time and even now so I started working from there and then my like going from hardware engineer I completely switch my field to security and I landed here and I'm doing my PhD now I'm in my final year and I'm also working with the information commissioners office here so I've started looking at the blockchain and the whole distributed ledger technologies from a regulatory perspective also which gives me a lot to think about in terms of what are the different challenges when it comes to real world applications and standardizations and all those things so yeah that's about me that's pretty cool journey like you have done a drastic change in the domain itself from hardware to this it's really inspiring so like like we all know like all of us are developers and then we are the one who stay very close to the work that is being done so in your opinion what are some of the most groundbreaking developments that has been done in the blockchain technology and how do you think it has influenced the industry as a whole any thoughts I'll go first so I think it comes in all the domains like it is growing rapidly in all the domains right from the finance in the healthcare and everywhere but what I see in majority office is finance definitely like people know where their money is going and everything that blockchain brings to the table but specifically if we talk about in DeFi also I think insurance sector is where it is more prominent like I came across this one use case where you know you book a plane ticket and it refunds you it's an insurance refund depending upon how much your flight delay is going to be there and everybody knows we travel we don't want to be in that queue and everything smart contact brings that into the table like depending upon how much your flight is on delay and what was its departure time and it automatically is going to refund you so I think that was the best really much impressed by that use case and it's not just about that overall like if we see at the insurance part of it there is so much paperwork is going on and there are too many to end for and it's manual work that is there like being on the blockchain smart contracts coming to the picture that is something like it is become very efficient for everybody and so yeah I think that is something breakthrough for me talking about another is like when we talk about enterprise level I think supply chain because like I have few of the friends who are working in supply chain the management guys and I see them like every day they have to give the live update for each and every supply chain task that is going on and I have worked on one of such product so I know how it works so it's definitely bringing something that the tedious job that manually has to be done is done by automatically through smart contracts through the supply chain softwares or web applications so I think that's the best the supply chain doesn't end there we all have heard about tokenization the supply chain again moves to the tokenization tokenization is something like now like when we talk about blockchain we talk about tokenization or rather we would say it's not about it's about blockchain we know tokenization process since decade irrespective of blockchain we all have used all these brands have their own points their membership points so this is some part of tokenization definitely the blockchain tokenization is definitely a bit different like it comes with NFTs and ICOs and everything but people are familiar with tokenization so yeah I think in finance the insurance part the supply chain in enterprise blockchains when we talk about all of these do bring another one that I can think of is like in healthcare where documents are already uploaded onto the blockchain and we don't have to take that whole bunch of papers in our hand and roam from one doctor to another for our consultancy and just on a click of it we can see all the things so yeah that's what like I think those are like breakthroughs and making efficiency to the framework as well as the use cases that's for me very well put together Nikita should I wonder I agree with Nikita like she told like lots of industry impact this blockchain technology and see you describe about the use cases like let me describe here with the development perspective like what the blockchain development makes a revolution in this industry actually like blockchain started from the Bitcoin and this Bitcoin would give you peer to peer digital currency and now this increase in the market like the development of there are lots of startup companies are working on this cryptocurrency and the cryptocurrency is demanded in the market but after Bitcoin what happened like Ethereum driven from the like Bitcoin technology and they have developed a smart contract based blockchain project like they introduce the concept of smart contract and that execute the business logic into the programmer code so what happened with the help of smart contract we can develop like distributed application and can execute like a complex transaction so here like what we are creating here we are creating a decentralized finance or decentralized like autonomous organization like we have a example of like the blockchain framework those who are using the smart contract like Ethereum Polka. Even hyper laser fabric using the smart contract and there is one is like Chanlink so these are the examples those blockchain framework which are using the smart contract and they are actually very popular that is that is development wise and third in the blockchain is what like we have interoperability and scalability solution like blockchain now we have a production based blockchain lots of production based blockchain project in the market now what we require we require like interoperability and scalability is required I think Polka. and Cosmos and hyper laser cacti they are like addressing these challenges and they are working on this interoperability part and I think the development of this interoperability and scalability will solve lots of problem of the blockchain here and the third thing is like adoption of blockchain from the enterprises like we are making from the blockchain we are making secured efficient and secured system like in supply chain management health care or in finance and like companies like IBM Microsoft that developed the blockchain private blockchain network so they are providing here the solution to meet the need of business actually so in this way like blockchain development impact the like impact the industry yeah very true similar to Kooyang we have this other alternative in open source which is under the hyper laser with the hyper laser so the framework that the audience can explore and you really touched upon like the trillium of blockchain decentralization, security and scalability you covered it pretty much well so moving on I'm sure like you would have found multiple blockchain projects or initiatives that might sound cool and interesting to you but I would like to know a couple of them which are really impressive to you and I would like to also know the reason why they stand out to you like for the quorum actually quorum blockchain we are using for our sub logistic client so quorum is actually driven from Ethereum, Ethereum is public blockchain but quorum you have private blockchain and this is for the enterprise solution and one of the blockchain like we are using hyper laser indie that is provided that is providing the identity based resolution based on like DID distributed identity hyper laser indie so these types of blockchain and even we have I think we have a DML that is going to DML is a smart contract that is going to deploy into the hyper laser fabric hyper laser fabric network and like we have a polka dot so they have actually they are providing a blockchain framework where we can create our blockchain network and deploy our smart contract as a parachain so these types of examples are here yeah, Akancha your thoughts on the initiatives that you find pretty cool yeah so when I attended the blockchain hyper laser global forum I was aware of some of the projects that hyper laser community was working on and I had myself worked with fabric and indie because that's my area of work I work in digital identity and data spaces so I so these were the projects that were I mean they were providing base for a lot of other projects so for example Khalidio which we were talking about they were using hyper laser firefly I think and it was a very interesting project I attended the demonstration apart from then there was a project called Peru network which works on payment providing payment capabilities using blockchain network and smart contracts hyper laser cactus which I was working on as part of an intern at the hyper laser program it was very important before that I did not understand the importance of such a project but I understood after working on this that hyper laser cactus kind of provides an interoperability capability then we see so many blockchain projects developing in silos with their own application some are working with payment some are working with identity so there might be a time when you want these blockchains to talk to each other so cactus is working in that area and of course in terms of data governance point of view I am also aware of some projects that are being worked upon in EU like there is a project called GAICS there is a project called international data spaces in which different organizations and industries are coming together to kind of create a data marketplace for data trading and these are I think very interesting projects there are other projects in terms of identity like transmute is working on providing verifiable credentials for supply chain it is one of them and there is this matter which is working on again verifiable credentials and zero knowledge based verifiable potential for digital identity space so and as I said a lot of them emerge from what the open source work is happening in the hyper legit community so these are some projects that I really like yeah well long list for that like a long list for defined to be exciting now moving on since we already were discussing about the scalability aspect of blockchain and that is something that has been researched a lot in the blockchain space and so how do you think the emerging technologies that are there like the layer do solution how they are essential for blockchains to scale it's for me you want anybody can anybody can go in yeah let others speak I've spoken on Nikita what do you like and if Tisha would you like to take this out yeah like if you talk about blockchain it mostly covers in three trial emas and in those three trial emas I think the third one is always like a bit challenged so like and that's mostly the scalability that we talk about and when the market and transaction grow that is where like everything comes down to like scalability so even like in the recently like in Ethereum because of the scalability the Ethereum 2.0 merge came into picture where they had to like change the consensus mechanism so like scalability and to make it more efficient in the terms of scalability and efficiency the first thing that we take into picture is the consensus mechanism definitely proof of work is where it is not very scalable so we came up with proof of stake then it layer to solutions like for Ethereum like we have polygon or for Bitcoin we have light networking so even in polygon also recently they are coming with zero knowledge which again is going to make a major impact with the scalability the transactions are going to happen within a fraction of seconds and then again there are something called as like off-chain computation that happens like the transactions computation that has to be happened is off-chain and then it is put into the on-chain so yeah these are the few solutions that we have but like I see like the off-chain and even sharding for that matter as well as the layer to solutions which I think make it more efficient and make it more scalable for the blockchains to emerge and make the applications work much faster so yeah yeah anybody wants to add anything over here okay for the off-chain part like I've seen it's multiple places like what we do is we basically process the data of the chain and then it's used for like there's a huge amount of data and then we just store a hash of that data on the blockchains just to maintain the integrity of the data so yeah that's about it and so now we have seen like many there are many platforms that are offering blockchains as a service or like node as a service and it's becoming a trend nowadays so in such platforms how do you think the data is kept secure yeah so is that's for me I suppose yeah I understand go ahead yeah so if you're using a blockchain as a service platform or node as a service platform you are putting trust in the provider so there are a couple things that you know you need to take into account when evaluating your choices so it's definitely important to look into the security measures implemented by the provider for example just for basics do they have certificates or documentation to show that they are compliant with security standards you can also look into how they architecture their design do they have a proper architectural design in place so do they have a high availability infrastructure how do they handle how do they recover during disasters do they do disaster recovery how do they back up their data how they isolate it and do they use up-to-date cloud infrastructure and best practices amongst amongst other things right so how secure our data is on these blockchains run on BAS or NAS platforms I think it's definitely variable with each platform you can't say you can't generalize it I think and there are steps we can take to make sure our data is more secure right when we're choosing these platforms to work with just by conducting proper evaluation of the different providers available and just for reference since I work at Kaleido which is a BAS provider we've been running thousands of chains for over five and a half years with over 99% availability and we support multi-region environments and tenancy models that increase resiliency and we're also SOC2 and ISO2701 certified and there's robust documentation on our architecture security and maintenance practices available publicly accessible on our website so these are some of the things that you can expect or you should expect to see when you're working with a BAS or NAS provider and I feel like that's how you can ensure that your data is as much as possible like there's no guarantees but as much as possible as being handled securely by these companies that sums it up just to add on it's not just about data getting stored I feel it's also about data that is in motion so the data that is in transit needs to be secure as well and blockchain as we all know there are different components so we as customer we are somebody who are using this BAS we should ensure that the communication between different components is like TLS enabled so in a way the data that is being sent across the chain is still encrypted good line of speech right there awesome so I want to know some of the most notable code contributions that you have done in the blockchain sector and how do you think that has impacted the industry overall like all of us write codes every day but part of code you feel is the most impactful to the industry I would like all of you to answer this so you can go one by one round the table okay I can start sorry to jump in I'm not a open source developer as of yet I would like to be one day but I think when I participated in the hyper ledger program at that time I did try to learn how to work on a large open source project and I was trying to solve some of the open problems that were there so it's a good way to get started I would say there was a lot of help from my mentors at that point of time but most part of me as working as a developer on the blockchain platform has been during my research that I have implemented my prototypes or protocols on blockchain platforms and I tried to keep them open source so anyone can learn from them and I have published my results in peer reviewed papers so just to make sure that whatever I am working on is available there and even if it is of small help it can help people get started and built on top of that so there's one project that I worked on which was using hyper ledger fabric I built an open source data market places for IOC data trading there were a lot of things to think about there like how will you make sure that the participants are trusted how you will make sure the identity verification is taking place giving a trust score to each of the participant in the network and then ensuring a reliable and fair exchange of data so this is I think one of the I don't know if notable but important project that I did using blockchain platform that's pretty interesting and I like the mindset that you had like giving back to the community that sort of mindset that we need for the open source community to grow absolutely yeah yeah you wanted to add it like as a blockchain developer actually I haven't contributed in the blockchain project but yes I know like who had actually contributed their code and that makes some like innovation and useful for enterprises like hyper ledger fabric we know like that is an open source project and developed under the Linux foundation and where lots of like organization and even individual are contributing like one of them I think IBM IBM is like their primary contributor in hyper ledger fabric and they have made significant changes in the architecture of hyper ledger fabric and that makes enterprise blockchain solution actually and one is like I am talking about like DML is developed by that digital asset that is a blockchain software company and that contributed into the hyper ledger fabric like what they will they have done they improved the usability of hyper ledger fabric smart contractor capabilities and in hyper ledger also I have worked so they are actually they have sovereign foundation and sovereign foundation is actually they are they are non profit organization so they play a vital role in deployment of indie network and advancements of hyper ledger indie and there is one more organization ever name for the hyper ledger indie so ever name is also ever name is actually providing self sovereign based identity solution so they contributed their code there and in corem I have worked for hyper corem blockchain network so there is an organization consensus they have also contributed to the corem and ethereum foundation helped to the corem blockchain networks so here like technology evolve because of these organizations yeah so true so true it's all about the intention that these organizations have to let the community grow along with them okay so what happens many times is like if somebody is like a new beginner and then they start working on a project they face certain kind of issues and sometimes they are not able to find solutions and then they give up they are like I am not able to find any help so like being a developer I myself have encountered such scenarios so Nikita would you like to describe any obstacles that you have encountered while working on any project and what was your approach to overcoming that scenario yeah so like even though I started my journey in the blockchain like my mentors and seniors were there at the starting but there on like I started exploring on my own and at times it it is challenging to explore and like blockchain itself is very in development wise as well it is very in early stage we can say so like you won't find many resource to it but what helped me is like I think whichever development you take on whichever platform I think their documentation that they have like I think they are pretty much thorough if we go it thoroughly you might find our solutions in those documentation itself most of the times what happens is that we have like we have that mindset that we have to complete it in this much time or we have other task lined up so we don't explore it as much as we must explore it so I think reading these documents thoroughly would definitely help then also there are pretty much many forums that are there like through on these forums I think the community is pretty much active please don't shy away by asking your problems even if those are minors you think it's stupid to ask please ask even if your solution is not helpful to you it might help others so these forums definitely help it helped me a lot with my challenges then we also have these discord channels where you can connect and it's like a part of forum only where you can do the solution also like you can also go through like as open source community there are so many projects available on github as well so you can go through them as well but I think like the solutions that we were looking for pretty much what helped me is like their documentation itself like going through it thoroughly and doing proper research is much like at times what happens with me as well that we go in the need of finding one solution but we go so deep that we forget like what we were looking for and it's a loop so like doing the proper research like environment and the problem is must and then research and going through these documentation would definitely help yeah yeah like I am agree with Nikita like if you are going to blockchain is actually innovative solution that is not a like when we are going to develop first we have to make document and then we have to research but like I am sharing also my experience with the blockchain as a blockchain developer what issues actually I am facing here the first one is like scalability issue like for the when I am working for blockchain corum network so here what for corum network actually what we have actually a logistic plan and what they they have like a million of transaction millions of transaction in a day so like and here what happened like scalability like it is a ability to handle a large volume of transaction like at high speed but here like in corum blockchain there is a some transaction size limit and blockchain is also like a thread save so like there is only one transaction can initiate at one time not a concurrent way so what for this problem like we have to handle it in some another way like we have limit the transaction data then send the request one by one to the corum client and this is the first problem we have faced with hyperlizard sorry corum blockchain and the second the most important challenge with blockchain is like interoperability interoperable issue like exchange of data to either blockchain network that are present on same or different blockchain protocol so we have a client like they are using lots of blockchain network and we have to actually exchange data there so what we have done here actually we don't have any framework we have tried with polka dot or cosmos and even hyperlizard cacti they are using actually they are in progress actually so what in logical way like we are exchanging the messages here and when more issue I have seen in the corum blockchain network like smart contract out of memory issue when smart contract is getting out of memory issue in that case what we have to do we don't have any solution we have to redeploy the smart contracts so these types of problems we are facing in the blockchain so this is my experience actually yeah I echo with some of the points like the points related to scalability in drop this is not something which is you this is something that the that we as community have been working to resolve it I think we are like almost there and yeah it's good to know that you are facing all these struggles and then still you managed to overcome it so it's good for beginners who are out there don't just give up if you are getting started if you are stuck reach out for help and then that's the only way to succeed so now we have talked about what challenges we have faced and how we overcame it but what are the things you think could be done from the blockchain community to keep up with the collaboration and innovation that is happening out there yeah I think within the blockchain development community it's really important to have events like these to get people together and start talking about their experiences with blockchain and where it might still be lacking and what progress could be made to make the experience even better yeah like Nikita said before this core communities I know there's already tons of them so I feel like if you're someone who's interested in blockchain development definitely look out for those communities because that's how you can learn from others that's how you can expose yourself to new opportunities in the space and yeah I mean organizations like hyper ledger we can do a lot too to help facilitate that for newcomers yeah I think that's it for me yeah that totally makes sense like we even have a discord channel for hyper level so anybody who's new and hasn't joined the channel feel free to join it and then we also have this mailing list where you can send your questions out and at hyper ledger India developer and advocate me we are part of that if anybody wants to get started with development feel free to reach us out and we will be able to guide you and we also have hyper ledger India weekly calls which is like happening on every Thursday at 3pm so that is another way you can get involved with the community and now I see this question in the chat like what advice would you give to these budding developers that want to move into the blockchain industry I can start and also it goes back to the last question that we were answering I think when I joined the so there was this instance in my first year of PhD I was working with hyper ledger India at that time and it was very new at that time and I remember trying to install a project on my laptop and it didn't work and then I was frustrated and I left it and then I moved to some other platforms I moved on to Ethereum at that point of time because it was stable at least I could get my smart contracts running testing etc and 3 years down the lane when I joined internship at the hyper ledger forum I learnt about this fantastic thing called discord channels there was a week at least about hyper ledger cactus where there were calls happening every evening and the mentors were there and I realised that it was not just me as an intern who could access these channels literally anybody could join these channels and ask the any questions like the beginner level question to even the most advanced or technical questions you might have because you're really interacting with the maintainers of the project so that's one thing and I think in terms of getting started my point of view will be to just start something choose one project and get started with it if it's fabric of course some of them are very use case based projects like indeed it's very identity based but pick a simple project probably hyper ledger fabric or Ethereum whatever you like and build something when you write code when you make mistakes you learn a lot and down the lane read papers and interact it really helps when you interact with the community and gives you really nice ideas on how to advance and definitely project building is the way to go yeah and that's really good a really good answer and to add to that I feel like when you pick a project to work on really understand it or at least understand the purpose of it so that you feel you feel driven to actually make contributions there and another thing I would advise is try to get an environment where you can actually test the project itself either locally or if they have a sandbox available where you can just access it to try it out that's a great way to start since it's an open source project it probably has bugs right so if you're trying it out and you are encountering issues where some things aren't clear just contributing a bug report that's big so don't think of any contributions as small even if it's just a typo fix you can start there because even when you're working in an open source environment submitting pull requests for just small fixes there's usually a lengthy process or there's a couple things that you need to prepare before you can merge something to the main branch of this code base that's probably being used by a lot of people so learning that process I think is really valuable as well you don't have to start contributing hundreds of lines of code you can start small and then slowly maybe you can look through the issues page on GitHub and look for labels usually there's labels like good first issue where it's supposed the issues are designed to be easily tackled by beginners and they're not too complicated and not too big so filter through those and then if you need help like everyone else said there's usually discord communities don't be afraid to reach out and ask if your fixes are looking good or what else needs to be done to get that into the main branch and yeah I think that's my advice just being able to test it report any bugs you see that's really valuable and then if you're tackling issues don't get intimidated and don't be sad if it doesn't get merged that's yeah you're making an impact when you're contributing to something that's being used by so many people and I'm seeing this as a hyper ledger firefly contributor as well hyper ledger firefly repo is you might want to look into it because it's just to give a quick overview for people who are not familiar firefly is a blockchain based project built to identify the integration of off-chain systems with blockchain technology and so often times when people are looking to build on blockchain they find out that the main problem isn't actually the blockchain part itself but the off-chain plumbing so things like being able to sequence events properly deliver events reliably tokenize assets and being able to keep an audit trail of all their movements and so firefly aims to take away this problem so that blockchain developers can not even blockchain developers I feel like this is a design for just even web 2 developers to work with blockchain so it's designed so that developers can focus on their business logic instead of trying to figure out all these complicated off-chain plumbing portions and so you can try the sandbox it's very easy to install that on your computer and you can try the sandbox to see how to see the capabilities of hyper-allerger firefly and from there you can expand to maybe use it in your own use case because it's very easy to get started with it and there are examples that you can look up online as well so if you ever want to contribute to that codebase we're more than happy to have you contribute and there's really friendly developer documentations and the hyper-allerger channel firefly channel on the hyper-allerger discord as well that you can look at and another thing that I would suggest is being familiarizing yourself with smart contract development obviously that could be pretty complicated but being able to understand how smart contracts work or be able to understand the solidity code I think that's a good first step to just you know being a blockchain developer and then you can move on to learn how to deploy that to different networks starting with test networks and yeah there's a lot of complicated pieces when it comes to robust smart contract development so you don't have to go there right away but just learning the basics of it I think is really valuable and there's a lot of resources online for that so yeah that's it for me that was really insightful so if you want to contribute to firefly you know home to contact to yeah moving on Shwetha would you like to add something I have some points like who wants to join the blockchain industry so like first if anybody comes for a blockchain so first they have to understand the blockchain concept directly no need to jump on the network setup and the smart contracted deployment first you understand the blockchain architecture the distributed lesser concept or consensus or smart contract then only you go for the development and because every blockchain have their own specific language so you should strong in programming language like hyperlaser fabric have like go zawa or not or ethereum have a solidity so like you must have a strong logical and programming skill and like when you are going to blockchain then first you have to decide which blockchain platform you have to use on first you check your use case and their developer community or the blockchain features they are providing and then determine which blockchain platform you are going to use and like blockchain is not only this application development here you have a infra as well as your application development skill both skill like for the infra you should you should aware of bash or sell a script you should have a knowledge of docker you should aware of a family with a linux command and like for a smart contract development either you should strong in java or go or node so and always stay updated with blockchain technology I think that pretty much some what Amreej Singh was asking like he was interested in also knowing like what skill should be developed he answered it very well so Kartikey would you like to add on something okay so yeah there are like it's not this limited to one skill set it is like you can work across different projects if you have like a different skill set so let's say if you talk about the hyperliger fabric that is written in Golan somebody who is expertise in Golan who wants to get started with Golan start looking at the fabric source code if you are a java developer then you can get started with hyperliger based on and if you're somebody who is interested in learning python or rust and you can get going with hyperliger sort of all these frameworks that are out there that are like written in different programming languages so that is the thing you can build like a versatile set of skill set to work across different blockchain framework okay so just to touch upon Shweta like you mentioned we need to like stay updated with what is happening in the technology so would you like to tell us like what are some of the blogs, medium or references that you want to follow to stay updated with the advancement that's happening in the blockchain space this would be like a special interest to the persons who want to stay on top of the technology okay so stay updated with the blockchain technology like first let me tell you about hyperliger fabric so hyperliger fabric they have actually awesome read talks like they explained very clear way with their advice if you are working for like hyperliger fabric project first go their read talks and if the hyperliger fabric community is releasing new version then they are updated into the read talks as well and like quorum they have a consensus ethereum they have their own community talks so first go through the community talks and one blog is like medium, medium we are using actually for any solution like medium is a platform like where like individual and organization share their knowledge like expert their post to their like how you can set up the network how you can deploy the smart contract these types of blogs you can find in the medium but for cryptocurrency like I can see when there is a coin desk there is like one of the blockchain and cryptocurrency news they are providing so it is widely used so you can use medium coin desk and read talks for the community Nikita would you like to add add on yeah so I think all these like whichever blockchain you want like you are an expert their official documents would definitely give you the insights but also like their ambassadors and as well as there are POCs like a point of contact and they nowadays also have influencers for that particular platform so definitely follow them on their social media so like they have linked in these people are also present on medium itself so you can subscribe to their newsletters I think that pretty much covers everything and these influencers and these ambassadors pretty much they have put in their work they put in their time to research and everything and give us like a pointers to this so I like what I do like I personally practices follow these people find them and follow these people on social media and I think that pretty much covers everything and if you want in-depth like I think most of the time it covers but if you still want in-depth this thing you can definitely go to their official the like links to that but to go there you need to know that something is coming up so the LinkedIn pretty much covers and even like nowadays Twitter space is quite active when we talk about blockchain so if you subscribe to these things if you put in the interest to these you would definitely get through these news and everything since I am an Indian Blockchain Institute trainer I know what content goes because some of the part I have contributed to so you can definitely subscribe to those channels on Instagram or LinkedIn on YouTube as well where we definitely put Delhi or not maybe not Delhi on weekly basis we put in the updates is whatever going on in the market of blockchain irrespective of which blockchain it is so yes you can subscribe to that channel and you will get all those updates and like we already have so many panelists here so like Anastasia is there for Firefly so if you are interested in those you can subscribe to her channel or follow her on LinkedIn and you would definitely get those news so yeah yeah just to add a little bit blog posts or blog pages on company websites that is also like blockchain company websites that is also really helpful because they are on the cutting edge they are actually building this stuff so they know the ins and outs of you know how these complicated things work and sometimes the insights that they share might be like the newest and greatest that you could find so yeah we have things like for example collido has a blog where we talk about not just like obviously we have to market ourselves as a company but we also share our knowledge about the different things that we are building that could be really useful just for you to know and to know like the direction of where things are going in the future and I am not just talking about collido it has really useful and interesting blogs blog posts that they release every now and then so keep an eye out for those as well I think that's really a nice source to learn from right I agree to that even hyper leisure is having its own blog so they post about different use cases that is being handled using the hyper leisure play words that is another means of getting information okay so Akansha I would like to know from you how do you stay updated with the technology yeah so I would like to add apart from what everybody has said great insight there I think what you would like to read will depend on which stage of understanding blockchain you are at if you are a beginner also it will depend on your area I mean in terms of whether you are looking from a technology perspective from a research perspective from a regulator perspective so that would vary there is this awesome website that I started following recently and they also have these fantastic podcasts called A16Z Crypto which is heavily working and funding web3 based companies so that's for web3 and if you are interested in CBDC stuff I have been reading some papers on BIS which is banned for international settlements they have some really good papers in terms of CBDC implementation on by different government and what they have achieved what are different analysis and outcomes that they have got some really good papers there apart from that everybody has already spoken and I concur with that in terms of medium blog posts follow people on LinkedIn I got help of my information from there follow relevant people you meet you hear them talking that I think is good enough right I think one of the things that the audience can also follow is if somebody wants to stay close to the domain then we have this special interest group in hyper leisure so we have this special interest group from climate to healthcare to supply chain and various other groups are there so if you want to know what is happening in that exact domain maybe you can subscribe to this mailing list and then you can even attend their meetings you can be part of their meetings you will know what is happening in that particular domain so that is another way for somebody who doesn't want to go into too much technicality of it but wants to remain more on the domain side so that is another way of staying up to date with the technology trend so yeah feel free to post any questions in the Q&A section we are out of time but if anybody is having a question we can take it up in the next 2 minutes if not it was wonderful connecting with you all Nikita, Shweta, Gansha Anastasia it was like a truly it was a session where which I was most excited about throughout this day and it was like a privilege to host you all and it is very nice of you to see all the kind of work that you are doing and how you are so passionate about contributing to the open source and then you want to give back to the community so yeah, thank you so much for joining us thanks a lot Nidhi thank you for hosting good to meet you guys and I would also like I would also like all of you to stay on the call because now we will be having a networking session so hi Vikram hi everyone it was great to listen to all the women no disturbances from us I hope so great to hear all of your views and get that understanding because you guys are all experienced developers we had some research to talk about very interesting topics on the behaviors of drug schools so it was great to listen to you and I think now is the time when we should get started with networking so I know that many of the people actually joined some of them of course but I guess there is a time when they get to connect with us as well we hear from them as well what are their thoughts let them ask their questions so with that in mind we can start our networking session and I don't suppose we have options to create