 Hello, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, wherever you are. Welcome to Hyperledger Global Forum 2021. Boy, what a year it has been. We have three really exciting days of content lined up for you. Oh, I'm Brian Bellendorf. I'm Executive Director of Hyperledger. We have an amazing crew that's helped put this together, an amazing set of speakers lined up for you. Before we begin, I'd like to thank all of our sponsors with a special thank you to our Diamond sponsors, Accenture and IBM, as well as to our Platinum sponsors, the Valcoin Foundation, Hitachi Siemens, and Zulig Pharmaceutical. I'd also like to make a quick reminder about our event Code of Conduct. While we are virtual, everyone will have numerous opportunities to collaborate and engage with other attendees throughout the event. Please ensure that you have read and abide by our Code of Conduct, which in short states that all attendees should feel safe, should feel welcome, and should feel included at the event. If anyone has any issues or witnesses anything during the event that violates our Code of Conduct, please message our event staff right away. We have an amazing set of content lined up for us and opportunities to get to meet the community, to really dive in and understand. But I wanted to set a bit of context first for the period of time since the last time we were able to get together. If we can bring up the deck. So if anyone remembers and or was there with us in Phoenix, Arizona in March of 2020, March 4th, 5th, and 6th to be exact, because I remember that because I remember flying home that night, I think I even said to a friend, I think I'm gonna go home and basically not leave the house for a year. I had an intuition that something was going to be strange. Maybe it was the fact that we had our evening event at the Corona Ranch, which is what this is a photo of. But I don't think any of us could have predicted the next 12 months, the next 15 months really since we last met. It's been a tumultuous time. And, you know, we'd forged there at the last Hyperledger Global Forum. And obviously what we forged over the last five years here at Hyperledger has been a really strong community that lasted even as things got kind of dark, even when we had to shift from the face to face events, not just events like Global Forum, but all of our meetups, all of the different other open source events or other blockchain conferences or the like, or even just the way that we used to engage with our coworkers and with our customers and getting together for coffee or hacking at a hackathon or something like that. All of that got really hard really quickly. And we started to realize the depth of the challenge that we were in, I think. And, you know, the open source community started to respond, the Hyperledger community responded. I think people in the enterprise blockchain industry realized that this was a moment that called for us to think creatively about how we might apply these technologies. There's a bunch of examples and you'll hear about some of them over the next few days where the Hyperledger community did respond to this call out for creative solutions to things like supply chain traceability at a time when PPEs were hard to procure and there were a lot of new companies offering face masks and protective equipment without any histories. Well, it was really cool to have a source called Trust Your Supplier to be able to track the provenance of where these goods are being created. When there was a lot of concern about how data was being shared between organizations, it was really good to have the use of some of the blockchain systems out there to be able to look up data sets and respond to them. We also have started to see digital identity tools that come from Hyperledger used in answering questions about, you know, can we prove the status of somebody's vaccination status? Can we prove the integrity of somebody's test result? And you have an interoperable system for showing these kinds of proofs of status internationally using self-sovereign identity pioneered by the Hyperledger, Indy and Aries communities. We started to see these solutions emerge and that I think allowed us to be part of what has actually been a reopening of society in some ways, but also a reopening of the IT industry and kind of, I think we're all at a much better spot than many of us thought we would be back in May or June, 2020. And in fact, towards the end of 2020, it looked quite a bit like the enterprise blockchain sector was going to be just fine. At the end of 2020, PWC released a report where they said enterprise blockchain technology was still on track to deliver in their estimate with almost $2 trillion of value to the global economy by 2030. And they said most businesses will be using blockchain technology by 2025, right? At a time when it might've felt like blockchain winter out there, it was really good to have some reassurance based on their analysis, based on surveys of industry leaders, of companies in this space that all of that was still moving forward in a really big way. And they weren't alone. Deloitte also did a survey, an update of a survey it's done over the last three years since 2018, 2019 and then in 2020 asking executives, do you still plan to adopt blockchain technology? Is it a strategic priority? Is it integral to how you think about innovation? And they found that, just as 2019 improved upon 2018, 2020 improved upon 2019 and the confidence of C-Suite that they were going to be adopting these technologies that they were looking at these technologies they felt had played a major role that it was in their top five strategy. And most of them could see through the hype. Most of them, while conceiving that hype even in 2020 was higher than it might have been in other places, they also said, there is something real here and something we need to be paying attention to. And I really think that's in due large part to the proof points that we've accomplished here at the Hyperledger, through Hyperledger through the community we've built here. And I wanted to walk through some of these areas because Price, Waterhouse Coopers in their report identified three main areas which are the same areas that I think we've talked about a lot as some of the first real proving grounds for this technology. The first of those are in payments and financial instruments in digital assets in the use of these technologies for settlement for all sorts of use cases that have to do with moving money around the world at the blink of an eye. One of the headlines on that has been the Bank of Cambodia's Project Bakong. We'll hear much more about that very soon in another part of this keynote here which was recognized by PWC as the second global retail central bank digital currency deployed ever. We actually did a case study on that. Also, the Bank of Thailand launched a project called Inthanon Lion Rock, which is based on Hyperledger Bezu for its pilot CBDC. The Eastern Caribbean Central Bank launched a CBDC pilot called DeCache on top of Hyperledger Fabric, but it wasn't limited to CBDC. So we're gonna hear a lot more about that. That is a real headline kind of use of these technologies. But also for bond markets has been another example for trade finance. In fact, in bond markets, blockchain technology partners led an implementation for the Tel Aviv stock exchange of a trading network for contracts and for all sorts of financial instruments on through the Tel Aviv stock exchange. And then bonde value, which is a bond exchange that both of which we've also written about and provided webinars and case studies on. And this technology is becoming normalized. This is becoming something that if you're building financial infrastructure, especially if it's crossing a border somewhere, you're likely thinking about how to use distributed ledger at the heart of that new kind of technology. Oh, sorry, I forgot to advance the slide there. Another key area where we're seeing it used is in the application of provenance. In supply chain traceability, in ensuring the safety of supply chains and ensuring that fraud is countered. People can't put fraudulent product into supply chains. This is now perhaps more commonly known by the term NFT where the whole NFT world is really about provenance. It's really about where did this either digital or physical product come from and who was involved in creating it? What was the path that it took to get to me? But provenance has been something we've been in this space that hyperledger has been in this space for a long time, whether it's the we trade, trade finance and supply chain project, whether it's the Walmart system that for traceable food, sorry, food trust and traceable food supplies and many of the networks they've set up actually, whether it's ledger domain who have implemented a system for traceability in the pharmaceutical sector. This is core, so core to how we build society. In fact, if anything today, this resurgence, the economic recovery is straining global supply chains and having tools like distributed ledger as a way to rationalize them, to understand where products are, where they're flowing and where they came from is becoming even more important. The third use case and one that we've long talked about and is obviously core to the product portfolio at Hyperledger is digital identity. You've seen case studies from Hyperledger focusing on its use for something called MemberPass from Bonifi, which is a digital identity ecosystem for credit unions and their members. Secure Keys launched a platform called verify.me on top of Hyperledger Fabric, which is also in the self sovereign identity space. Of course, our friends in British Columbia continue to have successes as they grow the org book, which is the self sovereign identity system for business owners and for businesses out of there. This is a sector that's growing very quickly. The technology is being adopted and rationalized very quickly. And what's cool is that it's proving itself out and we're going to see its application very soon in the field of vaccination status and being able to reopen businesses that are very health sensitive. There's some big movements there and you'll hear a lot about this during the keynotes this week. All of these really feed up to what is the landscape of different users out there, different organizations that is best mapped by the Forbes blockchain 50, which is a survey now in its third year, I believe, that looks over the 50 largest companies out there using enterprise blockchain technology and covering a few that are dabbling here in Bitcoin and the like, but the vast majority of those over 60%, I believe, so 30 out of those 50 use a Hyperledger technology somewhere in their infrastructure. Some of them obviously very deep at their core and it really helps establish the community of different platforms that we've built here as the reference point in this industry. So something we're incredibly proud of. So here at Hyperledger Global Forum, as you know, we are splitting ourselves into two different segments to make sure that we're truly covering the globe as conveniently as we can to really speak to a global audience, but also hear from a global audience. So we have this segment, segment one taking place at hours that we hope are appropriate and convenient for people in Asia Pacific and early in Europe. There'll be a segment two starting at 11 a.m. Eastern time. And across all of these segments, we have over a hundred hours of panels, demos and other sessions. We have six sessions that are in Chinese. So thank you to the Chinese community for submitting those talks. We have over 214 talks that were submitted. So an incredible amount of content across our community. And we also have a pretty interesting diversity when it comes to speakers and attendees. More than half come from outside of North America of both speakers and attendees. About 20% of both speakers and attendees are female, which is not high enough, but is better than par for the blockchain industry. And we will continue to do better, but I think that's the number to be actually pretty happy about. And there's some really compelling talks mixed in there. And of our speakers, about 21% of them are non-white in ethnicity. And I think that's super important as well to make sure that we're really representing a global audience. And sincere thanks to the program committee. I'll be telling you more about them tomorrow. And I'm sorry, on the third day and who they are and how they made their decisions as we made our way through this. You'll hear presentations from lots of different organizations here. From major organizations, large organizations both on the keynote stage, as well as making presentations. But it's also the startups in this space that really give it the vitality, that give it the creativity and the innovation and carry a tremendous amount of the implementation work on their shoulders. And so the community is really a hybrid of large and small, of old world and new world, global community, we're really happy. Let me give you just a preview of the keynotes coming up. We're about to hear after Arnold speaks from a Tava keynote panel on central bank digital currencies with Saree Chae from the National Bank of Cambodia, as well as Subnendu Mohanty from the Monetary Authority of Singapore. Just after me, you'll hear from Arnold Ahur, who is the Technical Steering Committee chair, as well as a senior technical staff member at IBM. And then in segment two, we'll be repeating a little bit of this content, Arnold will also be speaking in segment two to make sure that we really cover the globe with the update on what's going on in the hyperledger technical community, which is a key part of why we're here and why this conference is here. But we'll also be hearing in segment two from the perspective of a major regulator in the United States. Frank Giannis, who is the deputy commissioner of the US Food and Food Policy and Response for the FDA, he's been a pioneer in the use of blockchain technology for supply chains in the food sector. And so I'm ecstatic to have him here. And I hope all of you are able to stay up late or get up early, whatever time zone you're in, then able to follow those keynotes in segment two. We also have entirely different sessions between session and one and two. So hopefully you'll be able to join and attend us there. Just a few other reminders before we move on. There is a virtual hallway track this year in a fun little community tool called Gather Town. We have a link to it in Hopin. Feel free to join it. Think of this as the virtual hallway track, the place you can drop in, wander around, find people you wanna talk with, lean in, listen in on their conversation. It's a really fun tool. I'll be there as much as I can and invite all the speakers and other attendees to come by in between sessions or if you find yourself with free time. It's something we hope people really try. There's another networking tool available in Hopin, just simply called Networking, which is something we hope you use during the breaks and it's a chance to meet randomly with another person from the hyperledger community, another attendee here at Hyperledger Global Forum. And so please take advantage of that. It's as close as we can get to two people waiting in line at the buffet at a physical event and getting to know each other even when they didn't have any reason to start talking. Be sure and claim your Kiva credit. Kiva is a partner this year. They are making available to everybody a $25 credit at Kiva. That is capacity limited, so be sure and claim it before those run out. But that is a Kiva, as you know, is building has built a self-sovereign identity system for the government of Sierra Leone using hyperledger technology, something they call the Kiva protocol. So we're really happy to have them again as a partner here and look, it's free money, go for it. On Wednesday before segment two, there is a BOF from something called the Crypto Open Patent Alliance. This is separate from the rest of the sessions, but it's listed in the calendar. All of you are able to attend. And it's an interesting effort to build a patent or a kind of conclave around core technologies related to blockchain technology. So as a way to help preserve the openness of the implementations built upon that and any essential patents that might be required. So come to that, another site event I wanna draw your attention to on Friday. There will be an event hosted by Kaleido, which is a company that has developed a platform called Firefly that is now in as a lab under hyperledger labs, really cool technology. They're hosting an entire day of content related to that. So feel free to go and register. We'll be sending some information about this in a follow-up email as well to all attendees. Links to everything are in hop in. So please join us there. I know I'm way over my time but I just wanna make one final reminder. All are welcome in the hyperledger community. If you ever feel uncomfortable about anything presented, please let us know. That's the link to the code of conduct. We are sincere in wanting to make sure that we can grow this community to be as large as we possibly can than is inclusive of everybody who is a stakeholder and is interested in playing a role in advancing hyperledger technologies and solving problems with them. So with that, I'd like to pass the mic over to Arno Leors. Arno is, as I mentioned, the chair of our technical steering committee and is with IBM, but wears his hat as head of the TSC every week on our TSC call where we talk about the state of the technology under the hyperledger greenhouse. And so he's here to tell us about what we've seen in the last 15 months in terms of development in the community and the technical community. This is the heart really of why we're here. So with that, let me transition to Arno.