 Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening all. We'll get started in a couple of minutes. If you can please say hello in the chat, let us know where you're dialing in from. I'd love to see that. Tamash, my live stream is just hanging. Okay. You want to make me a host and I can see if I can do it. Good morning, good afternoon and good evening everyone. We'll get started in a little bit, a couple of minutes. As we start the live stream, thank you for joining us today. Please say hello in the chat. Let us know where you're calling in from. Good morning, good afternoon and good evening to everyone. We're gonna give everyone a couple more minutes to join us today. If you are on the Zoom already, please let us know where you're calling from. Let's see here. Hi, Alfonso from Mexico. Always good to see you here. We got some folks from Brussels, Matias, Shane of course and Robbie. And India. Good morning or good evening. And New York City, well, New York. Good to see everyone this morning. Once again, if you can just get started, we'll get started in a couple of minutes. Tamash, let me know. Yeah, mine is also hanging. Just trying to see if I can put it on YouTube. Thank you. Good morning, good afternoon and good evening to everyone. We are just trying to get the live stream going. If you can give us one more minute, we'll go ahead and get started. Thank you for joining us. If you have just joined, say hello in the chat. A couple of us let you know we're here from Mexico and Brussels and New York, India and New York as well. So say hello. Let us know where you're zooming in from this morning this afternoon or this evening. Hey, Jim, good to see you. Remain. Tamash, should I go and, oh, Tamash just left. All right, we're just having a little bit of trouble with the live stream. Tamash is gonna log back in and see if he can get that going. You want to try that again, Tamash? Yes, could you give me a host again just to see if I can bet? Okay, we're trying a new live stream service. Hello, everyone. Once again, we all get started in one minute. Thank you for joining us today for the Hyperledger member in-depth deploying and hosting FC nodes based on Hyperledger base. So I'm really excited about the session today. We're just looking to see if we can start the live stream. We are having some technical issues. Meanwhile, if you have not already said hello on the webinar chat, let us know where you're zooming in from we got folks from Brussels and we have folks from New York and San Francisco where I am, India, Mexico. It's a great crowd this morning. So good morning, good afternoon, and good evening to all. Tamash, should we just go ahead and... Yes, I think we should just go ahead and then we'll post the YouTube recording later on. I'll see if I can try to get it working in the meantime. Okay, great. If you can make me a co-host as well so I can have access to you. Yeah, of course. You're good. All right. Excellent. Let me go ahead and turn on my video. Good morning, everyone. Good afternoon and good evening. My name is Daniela Barbosa. I am the Executive Director of the Hyperledger Foundation and I'm so pleased to be hosting this morning's member in-depth webinar with the House University of Applied Sciences. Today's session is called Deploying and Hosting FC Nodes based on Hyperledger Bezu. But before we get started, I want to just do a couple of house cleaning items as we all know all are welcome in the Hyperledger community and we really aim to have a safe and welcoming community for all to participate in. We encourage you to use the chat to ask questions and ask comments. We encourage you to use the Q and A buttons as well but please be respectful of one another and do reference the Hyperledger Code of Conduct if you have any questions. A couple other housekeeping rules, all Linux Foundation meetings that involve participation by industry competitors are held under the Linux Foundation antitrust policy. So we thank you in advance for meeting those requirements. All of our sessions are always recording and this session is recorded and will be available in our webinar library as well as our YouTube library where you can see the recordings from previous sessions as well. And the slides will be available from downloads as well in the video description of the webinar. Please, this is about you getting the most out of it and you understanding what we're doing. So please feel free to raise your hand at the end. We'll have time for some, if we have time, some questions we'll let you do a voice question, you can always ask questions in the Q&A button on your Zoom meeting. Click on the Q&A button, ask your question. We'll either answer them live or via type in the Q&A box as well. And of course, talk and comment. And once again, if you just joined us, good morning, good evening, and good afternoon, everyone. Let us know where you're all dialing in from. It is a pleasure to see everybody here today. I, as I said, I'm D'Angelo Barbosa. I'm the executive director of the Hyperledger Foundation and I really have the honor of leading our global ecosystem and community worldwide that is using Hyperledger technologies to build efficiencies in markets, to bring financial inclusions to markets and to really make our digital world an easier, safer place to be. And today's session around deploying and hosting Epstein modes based on Hyperledger Basu is certainly one of them. And one of the things I'm most excited about as Hyperledger Foundation, we're just celebrating our eighth year anniversary this year, is really about the breadth of blockchain projects that we have at the Hyperledger Foundation. And very importantly, the breadth of blockchain projects that implementations, whether it's companies in a retail space and financial services space or governments like we're gonna learn about today are really adopting really the spectrum of blockchains for today's. And then the Hyperledger Foundation and our Umbrella projects today, we have 13 different projects. We're really addressing a lot of these needs and that it's not one size fits all. We have permissioned and permissionless blockchain projects within our community addressing both public and private. And these hybrid models of having basically a public layer one with permissioned governance on it as well. And I'm very excited about the opportunities that we see and that we've seen roll out throughout the world, specifically around public permission networks. And today we're gonna hear about EPC which is the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure. It started in 2018 with 29 different countries and the European Commission coming together and realizing that there was power to build a public utility blockchain for the European Union. We've seen other projects, for example, in Latin America and the Caribbean led by the Inter-American Development Bank with Lack Chain, LackNet, that are also building these public permission networks. So essentially layer one public blockchains that are utilities for governments, for businesses and for individuals in those regions as well. And the latest one is Red Blockchain Brazil which is obviously based out of Brazil and also with the goal of having public permissioned networks as a utility for Brazil. All these are very excitedly built on Hyperledger Basu which is one of our projects that has been in the foundation since 2019 and is being used both as a public Ethereum main net execution client. Today about 13% of main net actually runs Hyperledger Basu as an execution client and it's also being run as an Ethereum virtual machine permissioned blockchain on many, many blockchain platforms in the world especially around in financial services. But today we're gonna hear about EPC and essentially how to go about deploying and hosting EPC nodes based on Hyperledger Basu. So I'd like to welcome Shane DeConnick who's the Web3 lead at House University of Applied Sciences and Robbie Gottnick who's the security researcher and Web3 engineer at House University of Applied Sciences as well. It's been a pleasure to meet both of them in person at some of our member events and I'm very excited about today's session. So Shane, Robbie over to you. You can go ahead and turn on your video. Yes. Good afternoon. Thank you for joining us. Thank you. Okay. You can see the screen well, I guess. Looks great. Let's get started. All right. So thank you for joining the webinar that we're delivering. We just tried to get the slides going. So I'm Shane DeConnick. I'm the Web3 lead at House University of Applied Sciences and I will let Robbie introduce himself. Yeah, my name is Robbie and I'm an infrastructure and Web3 engineer at the House University, mainly technical stuff. I will just very briefly explain what the house is. So we are a University of Applied Sciences in Belgium. We have campuses in Brugge, in Kortrijk and in Odenarde. We offer a wide breadth of bachelor programs, social degrees and post-graduates. We're more and more also focusing on life-long learning and our research is applied. So we don't do fundamental research and I will tell later a bit more about the quadruple helix. And you have beautiful campuses. So if you're ever nearby or you want to visit, you're always welcome. More specifically, we are part of the CyberTreeLab team and we are connected to the educational program of Applied Computer Science. And what we want to do, we want to empower SMEs and citizens through cutting edge research and innovation in Web3, AI, cybersecurity and immersive technologies. And that's a very exciting environment to be in because it's often when you make the combinations that it really becomes interesting. What do we do? We nurture talent. I think it's a more beautiful way to describe education. Talent comes to us. We share what we know and they leave richer. We also compose consortia for research projects. We build proof of concepts. We never make anything that runs in production that's up to the industry. And the big thing we do and that's also why we're here to share knowledge about EPC is to raise awareness about possibilities. And this quadruple helix, I think it's a great thing. So what we want to do, we bring together academia, government, industry and community. And I think we are in a great position as an independent organization. Our definition of Web3, I believe it's also important as there are many definitions. We keep it very broad for us it's addressing power imbalances and limitations that are inherent in Web2 technologies. So this is about DOTs but also we're looking at decentralized storage such as SOLID and decentralized identity and ownership. What we offer is we offer education, we offer bachelor masterclasses, postgraduate degree. We do applied research, we offer services and we also organize events. So we host currently the Hyperledger Belgium Meetup. So also one recommendation to come. And every day, every year, sorry, we host a decentralized autonomous hackathon that's being run through smart contract. And then the last slide about the West and then you will shift to EPC. We are not part of the organizational team of EPC but we have been already very early involved within projects. So we implemented two early adopter projects in collaboration with KBC Bank, which is a Belgian bank. We are pioneering and issuing digital student cards through verifiable credentials. And together with BellNet, we are in the process of becoming a note operator within EPC. So it's through this experience that now we will shift to a slide tech that is mainly coming from EPC where we will explain what is EPC and then we will also go more technical. So the main challenge that actually with EPC, they are trying to solve and we are trying to solve is to combat fake products or fake information and to make the verification much easier and also in a more privacy preserving way. So as you can see in 2020, 9% of EU consumers were tricked into buying a fake product. 33% wondered if the product they bought was real or fake and about 6% of imports are attributed to counterfeit or pirated goods. Next to this, another example, there could be I think thousands of slides with examples is that nearly 60% of hiring managers reported fabrications on resumes because it's hard to verify. And if you need to replace an employee, it's also very costly. So these are just two examples to stress that verifying information, it's not a luxury problem, it's very important. And if you want to combat fake, you need to verify. So we have an example to make it more tangible. My colleague Robbie studied Applied Computer Science at HoVest, but at least he can claim that, but how can I verify it? First thing I could do, I could Google Robbie, go to his LinkedIn, and I could see that Robbie claims that he studied at HoVest. But I can also claim that I have a PhD from Harvard, which probably is not true. It's easy to add on LinkedIn. Next, if you want to be more sure, I could ask Robbie to scan his degree or the digital version and send it as a PDF. Then it will already be a bit harder to counterfeit. I have heard stories where they ask with a pencil, like if you have an embossed stamp to go over it a bit so that you can see the stamp, but that's being medieval within the digital, so that's not good. And also it's already slower to get it. You can also ask the paper diploma, but then you will have to go bring it, and still you will have to know what it really looks like. Or you could contact Robbie's University or Alma Mater, but then actually it will be really slow. So what within EPSI they achieve is that actually they want the highest trust of asking to HoVest to make it really fast in a privacy-preserving way. So that actually through a signed verifiable credential within a digital wallet, you can ask a presentation. You don't need to ask to HoVest and you can immediately verify or even automate to check if Robbie really owns this degree. And this is being done. We will go in much more detail about this, but this is being done also through a trusted list of issuers where the public keys and accreditation information can be queried from the blockchain so that you can verify the signature. And then here those familiar with SSI, there will be nothing new. For those who are new to SSI, and SSI stands for sales or an identity. There's, if you understand this picture, if you can wrap your minds around this then the rest will be very easy. So what you have also in traditional things, you have it, you have an issuer. For example, HoVest issues a credential that Robbie has a degree. And then the holder, Robbie has it, stores it in the digital wallet. This credential also is not on the blockchain. That's very important. The verifiable credential is sent by HoVest to Robbie and only Robbie holds it. Because often people think that all information is stored on the blockchain. And as we all know with privacy issues, you cannot erase anything from a blockchain. So it's not a good idea. And then what Robbie can do, for example, if I want to hire Robbie, I want to check if he really has this degree. Robbie can make a presentation and he doesn't need to even share all the information on his credential. He can just, the claims he wants to share, he can select them. And it's out of scope of this presentation but very shortly you can also do zero-knowledge proofs, which are even more exciting. If I want to present to someone that I earn more than a certain income level to apply for a loan, I can just prove yes. And they don't need to know if I earn $1 more or a thousand or whatever. And so where does the blockchain come in? As I said before, it's here at the bottom. So you have public keys of the issuers, which in blockchain always comes back. So you have public-private key. The issuers signs with their private key. And when you know the public key, you can verify that indeed this was signed by that private key. Also, there's a register of issuers. That's where the public permission comes in why this is so important and powerful here. The Ministry of Education in Belgium, they can actually accredit that HoVest is university, or they can even put the organization in between and say that that organization can then claim which are universities, so that there's not a random HoVest, a copy of HoVest also coming and that you need to check is it really HoVest or not. And then also they are working on revocation mechanisms in case there was a fraud or anything and the credential is no longer valid. That also this can be checked. All right. So EPC has established a multi-domain trust infrastructure. So they provide services that everyone can trust. They contribute to data spaces, but then Europe or European Union, this is a very important thing on the agenda that actually they want to combat data monopolies. And the last one but also important because this is organized through a governmental body as European Union, it's in line with the values and regulations. So it's a lot easier for local governments or companies to actually start adopting. They don't need to go through all the checks if charitically if it's okay or not. Because verifiable credentials are so flexible, they can be used almost in every sector. You, me as an issuer, I put claims, I sign it and I give it and whatever is in this claim it can be very broad. And currently there are lots of use cases because having a great ID is one thing, but to get the adoption going and also to learn to gather which services there should be, which credential formators should be, that's where actually all these current projects come in. And as you can see by the whole west, we are here at this small one, but there's plenty of projects. Here are some of the projects that are going. So between Greece and Switzerland, there's a project where the formal accreditation is done through verifiable credentials. So that's much easier if a Greek student goes to Switzerland or vice versa to approve this. Then also my academic ID, that's more about the student ID that also this is more easily verified. It's between Spain, Romania and Ireland. There are more, like these are all about education, actually consortia, doing things to make it easier. And then I can give some more examples. So next to education, there are public services where they here in Spain, they are trying to get a lot of the administrative processes between governments, which I think many of us will have experienced within their life, can be very, very hard to bring papers from one service to the other to make that more streamlined. This is about IP and actually information sharing between supply chain. Here there's a wallet for students. This project's ESS pass is about social rights. So yeah, you can see our social security, you can see there's a wide breadth of projects and there's even many more pilots going on. So what does FCM compass? So it's not only the IDs where you can or decentralized identifiers where you can ask for the public key, there's more involved as I already explained a bit. So there's the framework of how should verifiable credentials be exchanged and the wallets that are being made need to actually be compliant with that method. There's the trust models. So for issuers and for verifiers, there's a replication framework. Then there are interoperable wallets. So there's no such thing as the FC wallets. It's open to the markets, to the industry to develop wallets that are compliant. But also that are interoperable and that's a big thing. And then here you have decentralized infrastructure for trusted registries. The last one I will present before I give the words to Robbie. So here at the bottom, actually you can see what FC provides. They provide a ledger and they provide APIs. So all these independent nodes. So every member country within the consortium of FC provides all nodes. So in that sense, in Europe, it's being decentralized across countries. And then there's APIs that are provided. So that make it easier to query them. Then here, together with the markets, with the users, the verifiable credentials profile is developed based on the W3C standards. And then when you go a layer more above, there is where the market comes in. So wallets are being developed independently. If you are in the markets, you can also develop one. They have online tools so that you can actually check if it's being compliant. And then if it's compliant, it can be on the market. And then here you see use cases, such as education, social security, et cetera. And within each of these use cases, then you have issuer, holder, verifier, and towel. Okay. All right, thank you, Shane. I think you skipped a slide. Yeah, I'm sorry. I messed up. It's a bit slow. All right, so the philosophy of EPC is a project about decentralization. It's because we try, well, I say we, but it's the EPC program. We're just adopters of it, but we're trying to add value for our users being the citizens in the EU economic area. For that reason, EPC is using a decentralized network because so far the distributed ledger technologies have had a key role and are the best technology to implement trusted registries that can be reused as trusted lists. Blockchain is only used where it makes sense due to the strengths of its immutability, time per evidence, and decentralization. As Shane already mentioned, we don't put the actual personal data on chain. Nice, next slide. We want to make the adoption as easy as possible and have good integration with applications. So the program that we're well aware that not everyone speaks the language of blockchain, not everyone speaks the RPCs of Bezu. So all interaction with the ledger happens to deploy business domain governments, to onboard issuers or attestation providers, verifiers and relying parties to register information for verification and obtain information to verify digital credentials. All of this happens through the use of APIs. This is very similar to what most programs already know. If you want to play around with these APIs, they actually offer a open set of it. The link that you see in the screenshot is no longer active because that's from the pilot. If you want to get an updated one, there's plenty of documentation online if you look up EPC. So this is because they don't finish and drafting those specifications and providing the HTP APIs, but also to allow for everyone to mess around with it, basically. So why do we use ledgers and not just the trusted list trademark? Yeah, short answer is no, but we'll go a little bit more in depth here. So the situation today is that the government is using a distributed static XML file. So these are XML files that were defined in 2015 and they currently have an implementation of trusted lists. Each EU member has a copy of it, basically. If we want to find a hybrid approach, we're gonna go towards a distributed database. Business requirements and security properties can be added to enhance the model, such as synchronization, replication, traceability and accountability. Ultimately, when we push forward, we end up with distributed ledger technologies, such as the case is with EPC. The current existing XML files, they provide integrity, authenticity, proof of existence. That's the current implementation. The hybrid approach with a distributed database adds onto that the distribution and replication of these documents, the resilience of a distributed database network and the high performance, low latency. When we look at distributed ledger technologies, what we see also here is the accountability. Like, if you know blockchain, you know that every transaction gets recorded. If someone changes something, you know when the keys rotate, et cetera. It also is a chronological set of data records and access management is provided in an accountable way and incorporated to the protocol. Information cannot be deleted. It can only be appended. So you cannot even, you can alter it, but only through appending. This provides some integrity and tamper proof protection, as well as a decentralization aspect because there's no single node. So... I'm sorry. Sorry. The collective truth, yeah. The new information is agreed upon by consensus between the nodes, which decentralizes the truth and everyone has a way of accessing it. All these nodes, as you all know, they all share the same ledger. As mentioned before, there are no rewrites and the data is added chronologically. This is appended only to its innate cryptographic properties. All blocks reference previous blocks. And there's a resilience to bad faith actors. So even if one of those node operators, they go rogue, the collective truth still persists. Blockchain prevents lies from taking hold because there's no single point of failure. The infrastructure is resilient and resistant to cyber attacks. We've mentioned trusted list a couple of times now. When we mentioned a tau, this is a trusted accreditation organization. Every member state has infrastructure for education, for banks, for the real estate sector, let's say. And each of these fields, they can have a tau within a member organization. These trusted accreditation organizations can issue a verifiable accreditation to a trusted issuer, the TI on the left side. The trusted issuer has a DID, which is registered on the EPC blockchain. These, from this DID, there are a couple of sets of DID keys which can be rolled or revoked if necessary. These signatures or e-seals ensure authenticity, integrity, and non-repudiation. Timestamps ensure the proof of existence, but importantly, let's just provide immutability. It ensures that the information cannot be removed or modified. Let's just provide a chronological sequence that ensures verification of data in the past. The PKI, distributed PKI, implies that if a key is compromised, issuers minimize the impact as less verifiable credentials will be signed with the same key. The key rotation still links back to the same DID, a decentralized identifier, in case that is not clear for everyone. So we're gonna talk a little bit about the onboarding process now. It consists of five major steps, which we will go into each of them now. So the first step is to get endorsement from a European blockchain project representative. I'm not sure about the acronym, but... Yeah, I think it's partnership. So first of all, you wanna have a security endorsement before you go to your EBP representative. This means that you have to have, if you want to run a node in pre-production or production, you need to supply a ISO 27001 certificate, or something similar like NIST will also do, for example. The EBP representative will verify it and endorse it. Of course, they are a little bit flexible. If you cannot obtain a certificate before deploying a node, you can also go ahead with the node installation and then later get the certification before you can connect to the network. So once you have the certification ready, you can go ahead and create a new node request ticket. They provide a simple JIRA service desk website for this, where you can fill out a form, which will create a new ticket for the EPC support office. They're a big part of this whole process. And you have to upload your endorsement and if available, the security endorsement. You'll be asked to sign a relevant legal package regarding SLA's and once validated, you will be granted access to the node documentation and community for it. And maybe someone, well, very important when you're going in depth, you have to meet or exceed the hardware requirements set out in the minimal. So you can either host the node in the cloud or on-prem. It is recommended though, that you stay within your member state. So we as Hoest, we are located in Belgium. We will be hosting our node within the territory of Belgium. There is one dedicated virtual machine per environment and they have a certain set of requirements. So in order to maintain a healthy network, it is crucial to follow some network requirements. And that means we have to have one public IPv4 address per environment. So if you're running both pre-production and production, you have to have a separate IPv4 address for those environments. If you're running multiple production nodes, then you also need multiple IPv4 addresses for those. The nodes have to have unrestricted outbound connections to the internet. And there's a couple of inbound rules that you have to allow 4.4.3 for the APIs. And then some TCP and UDP port for the Bezu peer-to-peer protocol. Very important as part of the security requirement is that you have a web application firewall. This adds another layer to the security of our node to help us protect it against distributed and out of service attacks, but also SQL or other XSS attacks, which are very common actually on public interfaces. We can choose whichever WAF we can want or whichever is available. The rules that we should have in place, the slide here is a little bit outdated. Recently it was decided that it is recommended to have a whitelist of requests. So it's getting stricter and stricter as we are approaching production launch. The software itself, the node itself will be supplied to you by the support office in an environment. There are a couple of formats like KVM, VHD, VMDK, VMware, so you can run it on almost any environment that you can think of. And there's, of course, a couple of steps involved. You have to download it and then mount the image. The support office will provide you with a login, which is a username and password, which you are forced to change, obviously. And then to configure it, you will run a script which will ask a couple of questions like DNS, domain name, whether SSL is enabled, et cetera. The documentation that provided by EPC will clear up any details. As mentioned, the SSL certificate, also here you have a lot of choice. You can either use a let's encrypt automated certificate which is bundled in the node itself. We can request a certificate from a registrar or we can actually manage it through reverse proxy, also either by let's encrypt or a purchased certificate. Once you completed the installation, you will inform the support office and they will run a couple of verification steps to check if you meet the minimum specifications, whether your node is connected and has access to the other nodes and whether all the containers within the instances are installed and behaving as expected. Once you're fully installed, you can now start contacting the support office and they will add your node to the whitelist. The whitelist is distributed between all nodes so they know they can contact you and you can start syncing your blockchain. It will see that it needs to perform the sync and once it is completed, you are now fully up and running. The node onboarding is complete. The onboarding may be complete, but after you've completed the onboarding and the installation, you have to actually monitor the node itself. This is because the node itself, it contains a couple of containers which will push metrics to the support office and you've signed an SLA to join the network so you have to have a maximum time to resolve TTR, to resolve any issues like downtime, et cetera. You will also be provided with a login to the Grafana dashboards by the support office so it's recommended that you actually monitor these actively. Under the hood, well, you may already know it, it's Bezu, but we'll go a little bit more in depth here. So when you have your distributed applications or wallets, they can connect either directly to a node. As you can see on the left without a load balancer, they can use private load balancers that connect to a couple of nodes, but there is also a public load balancer hosted by the European Council and all of these, yeah, are connected. Inside the node, so well, not inside the node yet, each node operator hosts their node in a data center on Hypervisor. You have to provide the firewall yourself and preferably it's recommended to have a reverse proxy in between your firewall and with web application firewall as well to the VM of the EPC image. On the EPC image, in the next slide, you will see that there's a couple of containers running, such as the traffic, which is also a reverse proxy within the node itself. That has a couple of APIs, such as the Leger APIs and of course the Hyperlegger Bezu node or container anyway. They come as an all-in-one. Application, so all of this, you don't have to configure, this is part of the virtual image that is being supplied by the support office and all of the connections to the container logs, orchestrator, EC monitoring, with the Grafana dashboard, so as we mentioned before, all of this is part of the package and to sync it, it will use the port 48733 to connect to other nodes through the allow list. So I think that was about it. Of course, this is still very high level. If you or people in the chat have more questions for us, you can always reach out, you can ask it in the chat. Our emails and names are displayed here, but you can also find us on LinkedIn and I'm sure that people from Hyperlegger will also be happy to direct you to our contacts if necessary. Yes, and I've already seen a lot of great questions in the chat. However, I don't know the answer to all of it. We are involved in EPC for those who joined later as university, we are involved in deploying use cases and also in hosting a node. So I'm not up to date about the number of nodes or the number of, how should I say, the number of nodes or the number of projects. I can however say that EPC, the organization is going through a next phase where it's renamed to Europium, where I think there's eight to nine countries in the consortium now, but there's still nodes still in many countries. If you have been contacted EPC to host a node and you didn't get an answer, I can, yeah, I can also try to see in my network with them to bump your message. However, I think within this public permission system I don't think that maybe Robbie knows more about it. I don't think the ambition is to have many people or individuals or whatever hosting nodes, it's quite a careful process. Yeah, this is why we have the onboarding process with the ISO certification. You have to go through EPP representative, et cetera. So they don't just allow, that's why it's a permission network and they provide the permissions through these means as well. They want to verify who you are before you can just up and run a node. The case is as such that you as a user or a citizen or a developer of decentralized applications, you can still access those APIs, but you will not be running your own node. Yeah, and to get in touch with the EPC team or to find more information, as Daniela just shared the address, it's hub.epc.eu and there you can actually find the overview how to get in touch with them. All right, I'm going through the questions a little bit. So we had the question like, what are the distributed databases used for off-chain data? The distributed databases, they're like an intermediary step. So we were coming from the static XML files where a list of universities or real estate or visual systems are registered. The hybrid database is, the distributed database is a hybrid approach that which is a step towards the distributed ledger technology of EPC. I hope that answers one question. Is there a working relationship between EPC and the DID-COM hyperlegger stack? This is also one that I don't know exactly. Zero knowledge proofs are currently not yet used if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, I don't know. I answered all the questions. I know the answer. I'm going through them because I didn't see them as I was doing my part of the presentation. The censorship power, it's a good question. Like we mentioned that there is an allow list. So if you as a node operator would go rogue between quotes, you can be a move from that allow list. But this is because this is a very sensitive governmental top-down project. So you have to find a little bit of balance between trusting your government, et cetera. It's definitely not a fully decentralized permissionless blockchain as we see in the public space. How many nodes are there now in EPC production? EPC production net is launching very soon. It's currently not yet up and running. We're preparing to go to launch it. I think it was April. There will be a first wave of 20 node operators throughout the consortium. But there is a second phase in which more will join by November. And I think after that, it will become more and more open to the public for private organizations to also join the consortium. I'm just trying to move the ones that we answered off of the list. Thank you. No problem. Of course, I'm not sure about all of them. So the zero knowledge proofs, we don't really know at this point. Are there also images to run in Kubernetes? That's a very good question. I love Kubernetes. I wish they would have it, but I don't think they have it at the moment. But I think if enough questions come, then they will also maybe develop this. I cannot promise this. I don't want to speak for them. But I would also love this. Robbie, did you answer the Bezu version question? The Bezu version. I don't know the exact version number that we're using. I think it is in the EPC Hub documentation, though. I'm trying to find the page. So if you go to the EPC Hub documentation, the requirements are listed there. Can any app to connect to an EPC node and are the nodes public to ping? The firewall is such that it only allows, well, you can always tell me it's a public port. But we are only allowing 443 and HTTPS, in other words, as well as the Bezu peer-to-peer protocol on port 48733. But any app that's compliant, that speaks the language, is able to connect to it. Of course, if you try to send requests that don't get validated by the WAF, the web application firewall, these will also be disconnected, the connections. Will that be possible to run read-only nodes to validate trusted issues that are going through a third-party site? As of now, I don't notice, but I would like to see that as well so that it can download a copy of the blockchain without actually being a validator node. Okay, there were some questions around workload and transactions. Did you say that was not... you didn't have those data points? No, I don't have those data points. I think... Well, I think current block time on the test net, on the pilot net, is a couple of seconds. But transaction latency range... I don't know, sorry. I think the number of transactions per second is also answered by that. Every couple of seconds we have a block. The number of transactions itself will not be that big, actually. Because we don't want to store any data on-chain, it's mostly just a registry. So we registered the issuers, we registered the trusted verifiers, but this itself does not change that frequently that you have a load of transactions every block. I think we've gone through most of them. I do have a question. Have either of you gone to the FC Experience Center in Belgium? No, I'm really hoping that we can do this very shortly with the entire team so they can also experience it. Yeah, it looks like a great place. I think that's great about this project. It's really also inspiring member states in Europe about what blockchain can be because there are so many misconceptions about blockchain. So I think having this experience center explaining what's so powerful working with verifiable credentials instead of having always the phone home, having all these silos across countries, I think that's also powerful. That's why in this presentation it's not that technical this presentation but I think it's like design patterns are discovered for some contexts that it can be powerful. And as Daniela said, the world is multi-chain so I see a question about privacy and developing a new consensus protocol. I don't fully understand the question but I think here FC is really, as Robbie said, about trade-offs that it's not permissionless, you cannot just run your own note yourself and there's more trust involved. Excellent. And we'll take a look through the questions and post them as well in the webinar library when we finish those up. Shane, Robbie, thank you so much for the session today, very helpful. And I think as FC continues to have more adoptions and use cases, we'll have more of these sessions because people want to understand how it works, want to understand how they can get involved and really understand as these things go into production the value that it's bringing to the European Union. So thank you as always for leading the way and presenting the session today. So thank you so much. And Shane and Robbie can be contacted to be a LinkedIn, I believe, if you are interested in reaching out, please do reach out to them as well. And they would be happy to answer your questions. Just as a reminder, we have these ongoing in-depth webinars with our member community, as well as many, many other events, either in person or via virtual channels that you can learn about the Hyperledger Foundation. You can learn about the projects and the code projects within the foundation. And obviously you can learn about the use cases worldwide as well. So we encourage you to check out our events page for upcoming events that we are either in person or virtual, bringing to the ecosystem. Just a couple of things that are upcoming that I thought would be great. Coming up right after the session, so it starts in one minute, is via the Meetup community, the impact of MECA and data regulations on blockchain networks. So that is on our Meetup page. And if you go to our website, you can jump on that session. We'll hopefully, if the live stream is working for the 9 a.m. session as well. So the impact of MECA is coming up. We also have our newest project, Web 3J, Hyperledger Web 3J. We have a hands-on workshop coming up on March 28th. And that is going to, once again, be a multi-hour workshop hands-on for our newest project, Hyperledger Web 3J. March is Women's Month and the Hyperledger India chapter will be having women in blockchain series, which are great opportunities to really learn about women who are leading the blockchain industry worldwide and engineering talent that is really bringing next-level development into the marketplace. And last but not least, a very popular subject on zero knowledge proof. So we'll be having a ZK programming blockchain application development workshop as well. And that will happen in April. All of those are available, once again, via our events website and on the wiki as well. Keep in mind, we have many other content that we produce from our community. We just launched our second version of our central bank digital currency e-book, which has a lot of new applications in the CBDC space. Please join our Discord. 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