 When I entered the cryptocurrency space and I really started thinking deeply about what was the point? What's the overall purpose of building cryptocurrencies or deploying these systems where you don't intrinsically trust people and you're trying to kill centralization? It wasn't about can we just create a competing money to the US dollar or to the Euro or can we kill all the banks and somehow create some way of doing lending that's better. I mean these are interesting things and they're intriguing academic concepts and certainly competition and monetary policy is an interesting thing, but the reality is that whether you like the system or dislike the system the Western world has, there's a lot of people who live in very bad systems. About three billion people are unbanked and as a consequence of not having good identity infrastructure, good financial infrastructure, they don't have the ability to climb out of poverty without a considerable amount of assistance or leaving their country which creates brain drain. So the very first thing I thought about when I entered the cryptocurrency space was how could we use this technology to actually resolve the problems of the developing world and not resolve them in showing up and saying oh well I know everything I know all your problems I'm going to tell you what to do and just listen to my brilliance and somehow this will solve everything that's been tried for a long time and it's a miserable failure. Instead it's about saying this technology has no owner, this technology has no central point of failure, this technology has no one in control. Instead it's infrastructure, global infrastructure that no matter how rich you are or how poor you are you use the same infrastructure. It's almost like the subways of New York. You have one of the richest men in the world Bloomberg on it and then you have homeless people on it. They're using the same infrastructure. So this is basically the same concept when you're talking about cryptocurrencies. So about four years ago I gave a TED talk in Vermuda and the goal of the talk was to try to elaborate why I felt cryptocurrencies were interesting. They're not just root Goldberg machines for ICOs, they're not just these things that are fun to go talk about at expensive conferences in New York. These are things that if you have the patience, if you have the desire and also the appetite for failure and experimentation and you're willing to have a bit of courage and go into the developing world within an arc of time several years, three years, five years, a decade, you can actually teach people how to use this technology and make it theirs and then they can solve all of their local problems. So that was the hypothesis that I had four years ago and when we formed IOHK Jeremy and I always wanted to do something within the developing world but it took us several years to build up enough momentum and revenue and build up enough infrastructure within our own company and also build Cardano to a point where we felt that we actually had a fighting chance to be able to enter these markets correctly. So we started with Argentina and then we moved on to Barbados and now we're one of the most popular countries in Africa, Ethiopia and this is our entry point into the African continent. So why Ethiopia? What makes Ethiopia special? Well Ethiopia is a very ancient country and it has a lot of amazing connections throughout its geopolitical pole. It has the African unions here, UNICEF is here, it's a country that has wonderful trading relationships, it's a country that has a very continental view. There are some countries that tend to be a bit isolated and there's other countries that tend to take a leadership role into the destiny of the land they're in. So if you wish to do business in Africa, places like South Africa and places like Ethiopia are places you have to visit, places that you have to have a pole run. So we decided that this would make sense to start and build a beachhead and build up a great network of entrepreneurs, developers and projects that we feel could really showcase the value proposition of our technology. Another reason why we chose Ethiopia is Ethiopia still has a lot of impoverished people. About a quarter of the country lives in extreme poverty or near extreme poverty. There's still significant infrastructure problems, there's still a very sizable proportion of people who are unbanked. It's a big humanitarian crisis in a certain respect. Ethiopia is also suffering from the problems of extreme growth. In just a century, they've gone from about 10 million people to 100 million people. As a consequence, about 90% of the biodiversity that was here in the turn of the 19th to 20th century has been lost. This is a country that literally has the lion as its national symbol and there's only a thousand of them left in the wild, about a thousand giraffes left in the wild. So it's a country that's having a bit of a difficulty dealing with sustainable growth. It's a country that's having a bit of difficult dealing with the consequences of globalism. And so we felt it would be a tremendously good target to be able to implement our technology. So how do we do that? Well, the first step is you assume nothing, you assume no knowledge. You start with the beginner's mind and you just say, let's find some good people, good people to work with. So you partner with the university, with the ministries of science and technology and then you say, give me your best students. Then I can take my best people from Cambridge and Oxford and from great universities like University of Edinburgh and say, go teach these people how our technology works. Teach them how to program in Haskell. Teach them how blockchain technology works and so forth. And then once they have the knowledge, then you can sit down and say, what are the problems that you face on a daily basis? For example, Ethiopia is one of the largest coffee producers in the world. And the agri-tech business here is really what sustains the country. And despite the fact that coffee is a huge cash crop for the country, it's a really dreary state of affairs. Most farms are a hectare or so in length. There's about a million and a half people who grow coffee. And they get inconsistent quality. There's all kinds of problems on the supply chain. There's unsustainable practices in coffee growing. For example, a lot of trees that should be stumped aren't. And as a consequence, people just barely get by. And if there's any bad growing season, it causes a huge amount of problems. So it would be wonderful to be able to say, boy, could we insert a blockchain for supply chain management? Can we create better systems to create cooperatives of farmers and allow them to get proper identities so they can use that for credit and they can use that for insurance? And also for prepayments to stumped trees, for example. These small changes, in some cases, could increase yields by 200% to 300%. And also allow them to get more consistent, less volatile pricing on coffee. For most people say, well, that's a little bit more money. But for people here, that's the difference between starvation and the difference between not only being able to survive, but also thrive and be able, generation by generation, to get better educated and to build actual wealth and climb out of poverty. So we feel that the tech we build has the best shot of being able to be part of that story. There's certainly other technology like IoT and AI and a lot of embedded devices. And you have to figure out how to solve intermittency issues in both the power grid as well as the internet connections. And that's certainly fun and exciting to think about it. It's something we're definitely going to participate in. But the core of all of it is trust and coordination. How do we deal with the fact that people have incentives that sometimes are contrary to each other? The buyer always tries to defraud the seller. The seller always tries to defraud the buyer. And business relationships are predatory or on the short term. If you can build better structures, better governance, that does not require centralized coordination, you resolve those issues, you build stronger, better marketplaces. And as a consequence, the people overall are in a better position and a more resilient position. Furthermore, once you have this infrastructure in place, you can have more of all conversations about conservation and sustainability and ecologically sustainability so that we don't have to continue to destroy our environment. We don't have to continue to watch species after species go extinct. The great part is also that if it works here, it'll work pretty much everywhere else in Africa and pretty much everywhere else in the world. So it's a tremendous challenge. It's a social problem. It's a game theoretic problem. It's a market problem. It's a technological problem. Getting money that lives in the internet that's always on, always digital, to work on a cell phone that doesn't always have an internet connection, that's challenging. And it's certainly gonna tax our researchers and our engineers. But at the end of the day, it's not what you do for people who have the most that will define you, but it's what you do for the people who have the least. That's kind of our mantra and how we feel we should approach business. So we're incredibly excited to be here in Ethiopia. It's a very long arc. It's gonna take years for us to see real fruits of the labor is in the jurisdiction. It's not the only country we're going to soon. We'll head to Rwanda and other places, but it's one that's very exciting. And we think we can over a long arc of time have the biggest impact in places like Ethiopia and especially in the agritic business and so forth.