 Again, very good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, everyone. Very warm welcome to Hyperledger India Chapters, Women in Blockchain season four. It's the fourth consecutive year that we are doing this. I am Deethika Karanji, co-chair at the Hyperledger India Chapter, and I just want to thank you all for joining us for this event. From across the globe, for those of you who are watching it on YouTube Live, we have some amazing women leaders who are going to be joining us as speakers today, and they are some of the best in the industry, so I'm sure there are going to be some takeaways for everyone of us today. A little bit about the chapter is we conduct events like this and more throughout the year, along with hackathons, workshops, meetups, and so on. So if there's someone out there who has some ideas or wants to present or talk about a particular topic, please feel free to reach out to us on LinkedIn or Discord channels who are always available and we'll get back to you. One more thing that I always like to mention before any event is that the community that we are in today is something that has been built over the past many years and the popularity that we enjoy today is because of the solid foundations that have been laid by all our previous co-chairs, leaders, community members, and blockchain evangelists. So thanks to all of them. We can move to the next slide maybe, and the next. Yeah, so I want to take a moment to thank all the folks who have been instrumental in bringing this event together. We have Ritu Jain, Nidhi Singh, Katika Kasha, Ravi Pratap Singh, Pramod Dhumal, Rajesh Krishnan, Vikram Sharma, Kamlesh Nagware, and myself. So thank you all so much for all your hard work and support. Without further ado, I'd now like to introduce our leadership. We have with us today, okay, Daniela wasn't able to join us today, but she was with us last time and she is the general manager of Blockchain and Identity and Hyperledger Executive Director at Linux Foundation. We've always had her support, and I'm sure even though she's not here with us right now, she's probably gonna watch it later and cheer us on. We can move to the next slide. Yeah, so we have with us today, Julian Gordon. Julian is the VP of the Hyperledger APAC at the Linux Foundation. And as always, has been our go-to person for implementing all ideas at the Hyperledger India chapter. Thanks so much, Julian, for joining us today. And as always, it's lovely to know that we have your support. I'd like to now invite you to present your opening remarks to the Women in Blockchain. Okay, thank you. Thank you, Deepika, for that introduction. It's great to be here for the second session of this Women in Blockchain. And I can say the depth of business, technical and open source expertise last week was incredible. And I think people can re-see that if you wanna have a look at it, it's all on YouTube. The sessions were inspiring, educational, and I think with many things with the Indian chapter were fun too. So that was great. And I can see from today's lineup that we are in for another great mix of panels, technical presentations, business talks, insights and sharing. So I'm really looking forward to today and thank you again, everybody. So you've asked me to have a quick look at this bright. It's gonna show me the slide here. Yeah, so I've been asked to briefly speak to this slide, which is definitely a pleasure because the real strength of the Hyperledger Foundation, our community, is our diversity. Our code of conduct emphasizes that everyone treat each other with respect, professionalism, fairness and sensitivity to our many differences and strengths, which is what makes Hyperledger so successful, so innovative and such a joy to be part of. So if you'd like more information on this important code of conduct and the way that we do things. The other thing that says that everyone is welcome. All are welcome here. Please do have a look on our website. So I'd also like to just add again to say thank you to the Hyperledger India chapter for all the work that put into this event and to everyone presenting on participating today. And I'm really looking forward to these sessions today. And now I'm gonna hand over to Ritu, who is the Events and Engagement Lead for the Indian Chapter. So I'll hand over to you. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Judy. And that was very insightful all the time. I mean, the kind of approachability you have and the support you give, it's always incredible. Thank you so much. I will start with a dialogue from a Spider-Man movie. With great power comes great responsibility. And what do you think in a Web3 world, this responsibility lies with? You guessed it, right? Today we are going to talk about paving the way for regulatory and compliance in the world of Web3. Hi, my name is Ritu. As you can already said, I represent the Events and Engagement at Hyperledger India. Web3, as we say in its most decentralized architecture and transformative technology like blockchain. It represents a lot of opportunities and innovation. And so the governance and the protection of stakeholder is so paramount to the world of Web3. I welcome all of you for this session, paving the way for regulatory compliance in the world of Web3. So we today gather for this very important topic and we'll see how the regulations and the compliance measures can shape the future of this emerging digital landscape. With me, I have our esteemed speakers and panelists. They will share their insights and experiences in this evolving field. And I'll give a quick introduction to all of them. Before that, I encourage all of you who are on the listening side viewing us. Please, I encourage all of you to actively participate, ask questions in the chat box and we'll take them all at the end of this panel discussion. So thank you very much. First of all, all the panelists, I'll start with Pragya. So Pragya Goyal is a professional lawyer with the experience on the intellectual property, labor legislation and other company laws. And she has been aiding the startups and early stage businesses with corporate compliance. In addition, she also supported incubators and accelerators in their operations to obtain a throughout understanding of their structures and their functions. So welcome Pragya, happy to have you here. Next, we will go with Yamini. Yamini Khurana, she's also a corporate lawyer who specializes in giving the strategic legal and business advisory to startups and military companies. With over a decade of experience in corporate law, Yamini has a deep and very deep understanding of the legal regulatory challenges and the problems which startup pays as they grow and as they develop. Thank you, happy to have you, Yamini here. Third, we have Anusuya Innocent. She is the founder and director of Bini World Innovations Private Limited. That's a budding startup with a motto that innovations for the future. And that's very impressive. She has a hardcore, she's a hardcore academician. She has passionate on teaching, holding around 20 years of teaching and research experience with a repeated private universities in India, inclusive of VIT, that's Valor University. And she did her PhD in computer science and engineering on securing computation protocol, optimization and developed a secure blockchain framework. Happy to have you, Anusuya. Really looking forward to what perspective you have. Last but not the least, Sneha Vijayan. She is a Web3 builder, or should I say, a bidler. She is a researcher, a legal consultant who is on the mission to make dispute resolution quite affordable and accessible to all. And she is a co-founder at Resolutionio. That's a platform that leverages AI and blockchain for decentralized dispute resolution. She also is a co-founder at Degen Law Academy, where she fosters progress of legal tech innovation. Sneha is a very active contributor in Web3 communities. And I personally know her because she is a part of Phoenix Guild and also WWC blockchain. She's very instrumental. She was very, very instrumental. And I know for the fact that she has been working for the Fatima Shirin RK versus state of Kerala, where the rights to access the internet was declared as a fundamental right in India. So happy to have all of you here. It's a privilege to host this along. So before I start, I want to just lay down the foundation. So not many of us actually understand the risk and the compliance, the regulatory part of this blockchain. So maybe why don't we talk about what this is all about, the basic understanding of it? And why there is so much of a push for this regulations in Web3? Is it, if I can give some citations regarding the FDA collapse, maybe that's the catalyst or maybe the way U.S. crackdown is happening currently for quite many months now. So what do you guys think in terms of why there is a push and just to lay down the basic understanding of risk and compliance? Anybody can chime in. Maybe Sneha, you wanna talk about that, Anusuya? Sure. I can go first. Thank you so much, Lito, for that wonderful introduction. To talk about what, let's start with understanding what risk and compliance is first. So risk basically means, or risk management basically means taking those actions which could lead to the successful operation of your blockchain platform. So preventing actions such as cybersecurity vulnerabilities or bugs in your smart contract which could eventually create problems. And compliance on the other hand refers to adherence of laws and regulations. So why do we need laws? It's because without laws, there's absolute chaos. You don't know what to do and what not to do. So just consider a world without laws. You don't even know if murder is allowed. So you go around murdering people. So compliance or rather the need for regulation is to ensure that people know what they should and they should not do. So starting with builders or developers or even entrepreneurs, you know what you have the confidence to innovate. So let's look at the tornado cash incident where the lead developer was put in jail because the product eventually resorted in people using it for money laundering, right? When or multiple instances of how SEC has gone, has created issues for companies within the US and outside because people really don't know what the law is. And this really affects the confidence of builders to innovate. So regulation or like clarity with respect to regulation gives you the confidence to build. On the other hand, it also lets enforcement agencies know what they can and cannot do. So without laws, there might be instances where they abuse their power. But with laws, they know exactly what their boundaries are and within which boundaries they're supposed to work. And another added advantage is consumers also are protected in this process, right? So as builders, sometimes we might not know what may or may not be good for consumers. So there might be some builders who want to abuse consumers because of their lack of knowledge. But when there are steady regulations in place, whether it be security-based regulations or data protection regulations, you as a builder, innovator are forced to incorporate those practices which protect consumers. Yeah, I think very, very insightful there. And I always think that an analogy called, you know, the way the traffic works. If there are no traffic signals, what will happen? So that kind of a regulation is so very important, right? And how about Anusuya, what do you think? You want to chime in here, talk about something? Yeah, absolutely. Actually, thanks for the wonderful introduction and I am so happy to be part of my pleasure forum. Actually, I will go in a little different perspective. See, we have come along a long way from the static web pages of web 1.0, the dynamic and social, the currently used web 2.0, and which is mostly the link technologies. And we are moving towards the web 3.0, a decentralized and distributed era of web, the future of web. And it is based on the deep tech, CLA, AI, VR, AI, IOT, ubiquitous and edge computing, mainly the blockchain technology at the base. Here, we work on the linked data being controlled by the platforms. We are not controlled by the platform. The linked data is being controlled. The other way is not happening around just like in web 2.0. But there are like, we can tell the distributor ledger technology, that is our peer-to-peer value transfer framework. And especially using the Bicentine false tolerance for the distributed database. And which is updated with the consensus mechanisms. So like, you can be a backbone for many emerging platforms or applications. And like, we can tell like, blockchain, it is a special case of DLT, right? See, till now, till today, like when we get up there, I directly tell blockchain, but I will make sure I am not talking about Bitcoin. I am talking about blockchain technology. There is a stigma till now, right? But why? We have to teach people, right? We have to make it very clear. Blockchain is the technology. And like cryptocurrency and if you see the NFTs, all these things are major applications of blockchain technology, which is being showing off as a flow. But like blockchain has to make a lot more. It is a transparent, mutable, irreversible. These are major like the anonymities that are only in the public blockchain. So I will kind of, I have a little bit biased words. Permission, public change. Not the typical private change, permission, public change, okay? So we can tell the key components of the point of the cryptocurrency as well. And the piece, of course, you have widely used applications. And like we are telling that the transparency is there, the invulnerability is there. So whether it is, please, I can, of course not, any new technology, it will come along with its own, then it has been practically implemented. Implemented. So we are telling regulations are that 3.0. It directly points towards the regulations of blockchain technology. So like, and blockchain technology, it can transform like almost all the businesses that is human-centric to consensus-based applications. So the regulatory risk, that is a major risk we can tell. And along with the consensus protocol risk, market risk, and whatnot, if you list it out, like at least, around 15 to 20 risks has been listed to my knowledge. But the list will keep going on. And we are yet to find out how we are going to, like, this is not just for India, just for Europe. Blockchain, they're trying to create our global stuff. So it is beyond the jurisdictions. And finally, across the globe, there is clearly uncertainty around the regulatory requirements for blockchain applications. Okay, there are 10 to 15 countries, they are actively participating and they are creating, but they too are still working on how to actively take it for the cross-border transactions, everything. So inside, if you take Dubai, like the blockchain city, many countries, like inside their country, inside their city, it is clearly done inside the jurisdiction. But how we are going for beyond that, okay? And what is the type of, like, blockchain used, public or like, permission, that how we are going for in between, some equilibrium. And we should, as Cheha mentioned, we should protect the interest of the investor as well as consumers. So like... So rightly, rightly said, and thank you for that. So I would like to ask you... To make the 3.0 practically available, we need regulations. Absolutely. I completely totally agree with whatever you said. So I have a thought just because the time when you were speaking. So I woke up to one day to a news on the Cambridge Atlantica case, right? Quite old, but it was very shocking, right? Where so many number of people's information data has been used, right? And then what do you think in terms of the, in terms of user data on blockchain, how can we protect that in terms of the networks as per compliance? And another question associated with this is how regulators can check the compliance in user data protection. Maybe you wanna talk about that very quickly. Can I interview you? Yeah, sure. The user data, like, see one thing, when we are going for public chains, better don't expose anything. And what you are going to store in blockchain make it minimalized. And of course, you have to use better inclusion technologies. More than that, like it is very much related with my research area. Second computation protocols are there. You don't expose your private data at all. You work on a framework in such a way and also private data is being, you are not working directly on the private data, right? Like, you are computing on the private data without exposing your private data. Go for the developer, technology is like, it is still under development, right? Because optimization is still an issue. Second computation protocols, but it is not that the thing like it cannot be done. It can be done. So like framework, come out, protect your data and the users, whoever has are willing to share the data, get a consent from them and educate them how it will be used, which are all the data will be made public or which one and all will be used. Have a kind of another one smart contract. Okay, one more thing, run it. So like human interaction is not needed at all, but make the system in such a way that all the regulatory and talking as such, the regulatory consensus or everything is available. So the system is designed in such a way, all the regulatory compliances are inbuilt. So it will automatically provide a trust to the system. So people can freely come and use it and blockchain will become like just like how we, how encryption has become a day-to-day activity without as even experiencing that. Like that blockchain will also become a day-to-day application. All right, great, great, wonderful. So another point I think which comes out from this is maybe, Pragya you wanna take that up on the regulatory requirements for the blockchain-based applications. What do you think what are some of the very key regulatory requirements we have for the blockchain-based systems? And also if you can tell us some differences from, you know, Anasuya touched upon public and private, maybe you can give a flavor and tell us what differences do you see in both the kind of networks? See we talked about blockchain in Indian context. So it is still a very gray area in terms of regulatory frameworks. We're still not able to get a very clear guidelines, very clear regulatory principles in this blockchain area. But and again, blockchain is a technology as Anasuya already make it clear that blockchain is a technology and cryptocurrencies and other digital assets are the applications. Most of the people get confused and make it same, but actually they are different and we have different regulatory guidelines for each applications. It's like if it is a cryptocurrency then we have a different regulations. If it is a digital asset or virtual asset, then we have a different regulations. And if it is, you know, non-fungible tokens then we have a different regulations. For each and every application we have a different regulation and blockchain is a technology which is used as a base for all these applications. So right now in India, the blockchain technology is most used in education system. And as far as cryptocurrencies, our Indian system does not able to accept that as we have already seen in 2020, our way already put a ban by issuing CV, but although it is like get aside by Supreme Court of India, but it is still not very favorably accepted by our government. And there are still lots of debate is going on over the securities, over the definitions, over the taxation policies. When it comes to regulations, yes, of course blockchain is like any other network is, you know, had a setback of data breach. And as we all know that blockchain system is works on majority consensus for the verification. It's like if 50% of your sources get verified then all the data can be verified. Like 100% data can be verified by the hacker. So if anyone who is, you know, it's like private and public networks on blockchain. So if anyone use hacks, the private key of some any other person, then he or she can breach the data. And it can be done by just 50% by, you know, just getting 50% of the access. The 100% of the data get verified and it can be breached. So we still need a very good regulations and very good technologies or maybe some other solutions to stop this thing. And in terms of regulations, we have regulations in information technology in 2002 and money laundering, yes, anti-money laundering regulations, some of the guidelines by Reserve Bank of India and some of the advertisement guidelines by central advertisement authorities in order to secure the consumer interest almost. And yes, and the second question is like what is private and public blockchain networks you are talking about? So in case of public blockchain, it is available to everyone when it comes to public blockchain. The data is available to everyone and when it comes to private, then person needs or user needs a private key to access the information. This is the only difference between private and public blockchains. And in terms of the regulations, for both of the blockchains, there will be a same kind of regulations, but in case of public, the data is already very disclosed. You can take it as like an internet. Like internet, we have two types of data available. One is very much open to all and one is like we need a password to secure them like our private accounts and all. So in order to secure all these things, like an internet, we have policies, we have regulations and we have some authority to check over that private data is also not something which can breach the privacy or security of Indian data is something like that. In the same way in blockchain technology, we need some kind of regulations like that. So, yeah. All right, wonderful. I think a lot of things coming out from the discussion. So how do you think the organizations in general, and we spoke about India's stance, RBI's stance, but if we have to talk about organizations in general, what do you think, how do they keep abreast with the emerging regulatory considerations which are there, right? And maybe talk about the latest trends which are currently in the blockchain security, maybe risk compliance. I was reading through one of the very new papers coming in from Micah on the European Union, you wanna touch something on those, maybe Pragya. Yeah, so in case, just as you are asking, like how the organization can keep themselves abreast. So, of course, there is nothing to do unique about even this technology, blockchain is unique, but the procedure to adopt is not that unique. It's like the way any technology can be adopted in the same way it has to be accepted. It has to be integrated in the system. In the same way, the users or the organizations which are going to be the potential users of this technology need to be, participate in the government discussions, be with the government policy, be very, very come up friendly and participate in policy decision-makings when it comes to lots of confusion, create these kinds of education, what we can say, educational webinars like this to educate more and more people that this is a technology and you can use them in a very different way. For example, there are lots of organization, even in current period in India, they are using blockchain technology in their education system. There is a ban in crypto side, but the other things are very clear, like government has an intention to support this black blockchain technology. Against blockchain technology, government is against the crypto system because it is very uncertain, there are so many reasons, like crypto is not backed with any kind of security, its prices are determined by demand and supply and there are so many lots of loop holes in crypto, we all know that. So government is not able to accept this un-up-friendly, but government is in huge support of this blockchain technology. So for the organizations who are working in this or who are going to be the potential users, they have to be participative, they have to be very open to this thing. Like we, they have to take this responsibility and they have to launch a campaigns and maybe they have to work with the government to make people understand. Like this is a technology and we can use, for example, like in case of digital payment system. Earlier it was not easily acceptable, but with the time of corona, everyone started using okay phone, pay, pay-tm, everyone started using, even my grandfather started using pay-tm. So it is like, it is something which is beyond the imagination for anyone. Someday he will start believing that okay, if I'm not keeping notes in my pocket, I can still transit. Exactly. That's how this technology can adopted by the people, otherwise there is no way because it is very hard to make people understand about the digital payment system. And this blockchain technology is ahead of this. So it is difficult, but it will work someday. I'm very hopeful. Yeah, I am. And you brought me an incident a month back or so, one of the OGs of the world for blockchain and I am a huge fan of the guy. He's from Finland, has been working on so many books and he came to India and he made a video short and he shot that saying that even a Rikshawala or a Panwala has UPI enabled. I mean, we are quite ahead in the game, right? At least in the digital payment side. So one of the things I really want to ask you in the flow itself is, most of the time the retail investor is the one who loses, right? Talk about crypto especially, right? So what do you think? Is there any way to protect the retail investor and any, you know, the hype or the kind of crypto prices going up and down? Maybe is there any specific protection layer which can be done for the retail investors and is, you know, since Savy is there, so any Savy like kind of a body or a regulation is formed currently or are they working any of those in those directions, you know? Well, talking about cryptocurrencies, I'm not a huge fan of cryptocurrencies at this point of time because, you know, this is a currency which is not backed by anything. It is the prices of the cryptocurrencies controlled by demand and supply. It has no face value. It's like you cannot, like, okay, I have a Bitcoin and can I exchange it with $1? No, you cannot do that because there is no organization which is working behind it or it is not backed by anything. If your Bitcoin has a demand, then only you can convert it into, like, you can get a value for it, but you cannot just trade it, for example, in case of securities, if your share is rupees 10, if your share price is rupees 10, it's like face value. You will get 10 rupees at least in no matter what will be the share price in market. But if it has a, you know, if it's face value is rupees 10, you will get it for rupees 10. But in case of cryptocurrencies, you don't have that mechanism. It's the demand and supply that control all the prices. So of course, cryptocurrencies are not the securities. They are termed as, and it is very unclear. That is, we have no definition in any law what does the cryptocurrency means. We cannot define cryptocurrencies still. So for some people, it is like a digital asset, virtual asset, and as per the definition, like Supreme Court judgment says that it can come under the definition of digital assets or it can become under the definition of money. So in, they have like the cryptocurrency satisfy all the requirements of like, it can be defined as money as well, it can be defined as digital asset as well. But the implications of this is very different. If it is considered as money, then it has a different implications in terms of law and it has a asset, digital asset, then it has a very different implications. So somewhere income tax department or we can say tax department clarify this and they defined it as under the digital assets, intangible, intangible digital assets category and put 30% tax in its, in particular circumstances, not every time when you convert it into your fiat currencies like in rupees or some dollar or maybe something, then it will be imposed with a 30% of tax and there is no set up. This is the law we have and we have nothing available for cryptocurrencies as far as for definition point of view and its prices are literally based on demand and supply. So at present I don't think we have any mechanism to control that. If you have a demand for the currency, it will like rise and if you don't have a demand for the currency, it will look like it's all the market mechanism. It is all go with market sentiments and for the organization like Sabi, no. Cryptocurrencies has no, you know, cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, Ethereum, it has no holders, right. There is nobody, no institution can claim that we are the issuers of this currency. It comes from somewhere and it's start used by the users and again, it's price rise, no, it's, there is nobody who is the generator of the currency. There is no inception of this currency. So we have no, at this point, we have no regulatory authority for these price control mechanism. And if you talked about what could be done in this field like how can we get over this problem? So I believe a few times back, I was reading one report and which the suggestion was imposed like issuing of block points, which has some face value and which is backed by some kind of fiat currencies. Like if I, so it is like issuing like a share in the form of digital assets. For me, it is like, so it could be a better alternative for cryptocurrencies, but... More like a stable coin, you mean? Yeah, it is more stable coin and it is more stable because it has a face value, like a gold. If you buy this particular gram of gold and you have to, you pay some kind of fiat, it can be exchanged by fiat currencies. Like maybe it's dollar, it may be rupees, but in case of crypto, you have no value per se. Or just like, suppose it's a block, it's a, I will say it's a Bitcoin, it has in a way no value until it has a demand. But if it is a block coins, then it will has backing with an asset. Like it may be of some rupees or maybe of any assets underlying assets with it. So it can be exchanged. So I think this could be the solution for the retailers who could suffer. Yeah, wonderful, wonderfully explained, by the way. So I'll come to the next one and maybe Yamini, we'll open up perspective from you. If you can help us know about some of the countries where some case studies about the countries which have crypto already or maybe the digital currency regulations already in place, you wanna take that up? Hey, Shorya. And thank you Pragya, Sneha and Anusia for setting such good platform for me to contribute here. Some very good points have come out from all through your view. Talking about countries where the cryptos, there are certain countries where cryptos have been totally banned. We have China here as a leader, for example, who have totally banned it. But then we have countries like ourselves who are unregulated. Then we have countries which are totally regulated today. And one of the very leading economies which I would want to take as an example, other than EU, I'll come to you later. But let's, for example, let's look at Singapore. Singapore is one of the most rising hub for all kind of innovation, businesses, et cetera, despite being size, even smaller than Delhi and having population, even one-tenth of it maybe. But look at the kind of global exposure that the country has and kind of it welcomes innovation. So there is a Payment Services Act similar to us. We like to have Payment Settlement Act. They have a Payment Services Act wherein they have clearly defined, as Pragya highlighted, right, that there is no distinction between what is e-money and what is an asset-backed money and what is purely a utility token, et cetera. So Singapore has been one of the countries which has clearly defined what is an e-money and how are you supposed to regulate it? What is a digital payment token which is pegged to a currency? And what is a digital payment token which is in the nature of purely a utility or a governance token, as we talk about on various protocols? So since the clarity on the definitions of these three different type of assets or different type of crypto or tokens, you would want to call them here, it is very easy for any, let's say, a token issuer if they have to decide, you know, that which is the appropriate jurisdiction which I should go to to issue my tokens because I want to be on the right side of law. Which is always a correct approach. I could do my token issuance in India today because there are no regulations here. I could take benefit of that, but what if the regulations come tomorrow and the entire model that I started on with kind of collapses. So might as well go to a country where there are laws defined and if you look at the Singapore laws, they have clearly told if you are a digital payment service provider, which for example, I can say, if you're an exchange. So what are the kind of licenses you need to take from the monetary authority of Singapore over there to the business of acting as a crypto exchange there. So when laws and licenses, and those licenses are also backed by a lot of compliances to the level of what the shareholding pattern of the company, which is acting as a crypto platform or a crypto exchange to the extent of how those money that is coming in, in what accounts they have to be kept are the escrow accounts, et cetera. All disclosures, everything is very clearly defined in that law, which not only gives a boost to innovation, because of course those people who are trying to adopt the blockchain through the use of let's say crypto assets or just digital tokens, et cetera, because it's not necessary, right? That you always have to have a payment token. It can only be a digital token which is minted on the blockchain. Like we have loyalty points. Some people would want to mint their loyalty points on the blockchain so that to, to have automated distribution of those points and to have those voting mechanisms on chain, et cetera. So since the regulations are so well-defined today, not only those people who want to use the blockchain technology are looking at Singapore, but also the retail investors or the holders of these tokens of these assets are more comfortable in holding from a company or from an exchange, which is backed by some kind of regulations. Similarly, we have EU now and just this morning somebody told me and I haven't read it so far that even Hong Kong as a country has brought out some paper. It's a huge paper and it's just come out on the 1st of June. So I haven't had a chance to look at it, but even they are trying to identify, what are the kind of licenses when you are kind of issuing your token, how are you determining whether it is a security token or a utility token? Because the difference between security and utility is the biggest issue across borders. We've seen how SEC is after every other token issuer and as for SEC's own share person, he himself has made a statement that he himself personally feels that other than Bitcoin, every other token which is there in the market is a security token. So this is exactly what happens when there are no regulations. So that an enforcement agency today is deciding cases based on its own understanding of the law, not backed by what is written in the letter of law, which is why regulations become very important. Now we have here, like EU has been a leader by bringing out its own regulations here. We have Singapore, we have Switzerland, we have Dubai now and there are various other countries which have brought about. But what will lead to a global adoption, right? So these are very country specific laws. Now presuming I do some token issuance from Singapore, but the holders that I have of my tokens are spread globally. How do I ensure that I'm doing all my compliances for those global users? Now this is a topic which has arisen in various other law fields. And for example, I'll take trademarks and copyrights. When we started discussing about the extra territorial protection of my trademarks. So right now, whatever trademark I have is only within my country. Now how do I ensure that there was an extra territorial protection of my trademarks? Is when the Madrid protocol came in and all the countries who were signatories, they kind of identified that at a global level, if a company wants to protect its brand, at a global level they can file an application and across all the countries who are signatories to those protocols will give a protection. So similarly here, we've had so many conventions and protocols in the past where there have been multiple cross-border signatories to it. We need to have a protocol or a convention like this written down where those basic laws will be applied and followed by all countries irrespective of where they are, whoever is a signatory to them. And then based on that model, they can build their local laws to ensure that globally all the laws are mapped to a certain protocol. Which is when there'll be a uniform adoption of all the blockchain technology and the assets and only then will interoperability between countries and enforcement agencies, et cetera, will be at the same level and at a level which the global audience really wants today. Exactly and while you were speaking, I also recollect that when this FTX collapse happened, FTX Japan was the only one which no retailers lost anything in that. So the decisions were extremely beautiful out there. So we should definitely look at how they have built. And again, I'm a very strong believer that something has to be needed on a global level and then adopt that charter into your personal laws depending on what are your local requirements are. But the base needs to be same only then will global adoption happen. I think that's a wonderful take, Yamini. And I'll also go back to Anasuya. You wanna bring in some different perspective or what do you think on this case studies, especially on the point which we are discussing on the global scenario, how countries are adopting what should be the plan of action? What do you think? As you mentioned, when that exchange collapse happened, Japan was not affected. Why? In 2017 itself, the country has recognized cryptocurrency and they have the financial service agency, they are FSA. That sees all the regulations and exchanges in Japan. So they are kind of a little ahead of the world. That's the reason they have the regulations. They have a proper set of controls, measures and AML is properly maintained over there and to money laundering obligations. So this is the major reason the investors from there were saved. And then again, we have Malta. She has progressed, sorry, Yamini has clearly told about so the social plans also like Singapore and Dubai also, she has mentioned that it. Malta, like we call it as a blockchain island. They have the Malta Digital Innovation Authority. And there are like three different bills passed in 2018 itself, the Virtual Financial Assets Act, we have been there and Innovation Technology Arrangement Services and another one is the Malta Digital Innovation Authority Act. And even in Singapore, we have the Mass Monetary Authority of Singapore. And actually it sees through all the activities and the Payment Services Act. They have a separate act. And if you see South Korea, they have the information security, management and certifications. They provide the certifications and they have a proper system for accession of cryptocurrencies. And this is different countries. I want to go back to our own India, right? See here, my team, our Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, it is working along with other institutions, academic institutions as well as other government institutions. And mostly like they are planning to create a national blockchain framework, NBF, okay? Especially for like focusing on three types of participants. User of technology, the application users and the providers, like the infrastructure service providers, the blockchain as a service provider or like directly the industries and whoever is going to provide the IP stack. So focusing on all these three, they are, it's a very good plan. I couldn't get the second part from our NVIDIA youth. The first part I have read it and it is also mentioning about some case studies. Other than cryptocurrency, we are working a lot in India. And our Indian government, again, it is considering with the RBI the... That... CBDC. So not just India, many countries are working towards that. So when that is accepted, of course, when all the countries see the only thing inside, what they feel is one US dollar and one Indian rupee, it will become equal. Because when you're going to work with CBDC, like we tell that our rate money and our digital currency is same, right? One rupee means one coin, right? When we have such a system or else again like this and transfers, yeah, you have to go for 100 euros like that. We don't want that system again. We will come to our socialism, right? So there are work going on. And like, if you see the separate states in India, we have Tamil Nadu, we have Telangana, they have all like Tamil Nadu in 2019 itself, they have a proper regulations, sorry, not regulations, the plan built on, but they are still working on. But as such, none of the states are going towards the currency but applications. And Karnataka is working on e-attestation, okay? Along with the central government institutions. So we have the Nitya Ayuk is there, Maiti is there, Siddharth is there. I hear these are working on, and especially with what do you say, machine learning and how to include that and how to optimize for different type of networks. And like in the banking sector, like with RBA and the one thing, the S-Tang, Access-Tang, they are like, already they have introduced a little bit of blockchain applications, even a few more banks are in line. But the thing is, we need a centralized, what do you say, instead of authority, a mutual party. See, I will make it sure, this is purely my own ideation, what I am going to tell now, because you shouldn't like the, you play on somebody else. If suppose, see, we have the hyper ledger board, right? It's the open source community. See, if hyper ledger can work with different leaders from different countries, right? If we have some projects on project and we develop beautiful framework, we have a unique system for programming, correct? We have slowly, all the countries, we have accepted that and we have updated the coding languages. Likewise, if we could go on for, there will be a lot of advocate with the going on because it shouldn't be like private blockchain, it shouldn't be fully public. There should be some intermediary, like, as I mentioned, permission public chains. And if you take this even hyper ledger, we are working on scalability. So if scalability can be obtained in the permission block chains, so like, and if like, forum like hyper ledger with a lot of platforms, depending on the applications, because if you want day to day activities, IOT has to come. There, the scalability is there. Even like we are working on that, like increasing the scalability, especially with permissioned public chains. So like, we have even put a project for collaborative learning. That is why we have put it as an open source. So it should be open for everybody. Anyone who wants to use it should be with block, sorry, hyper ledger should be able to come across and work. That should be the neutrality equilibrium we have to find out. I hope it will happen very soon. All right. All right. Wonderful. I think we just have five minutes, but I can't close this discussion without talking about the challenges, which, you know, the blockchain based projects face in terms of the regulatory conflances. I would like to understand very quickly from Yamini and then we will take up some questions. Yeah. So on the part of challenges, the major challenge which we have seen in the past is based on security. And this is not a new challenge. This is something that we've seen in the Web 2 world also. And this is continuing to be in the Web 3 world. Now, if you look at the way our governments, you know, kind of reacted to this challenge in the Web 2 world, they brought in data privacy laws. And this is some place, you know, where India is lagging far behind. We still don't have a law. There was a bill that came. It got removed now. The ministry is kind of confirming that by October we may have another bill which is passed by the parliament. It's only time we'll tell how that unfolds. But more than the government and the regulators, there is a very important institution which I feel all of us have missed out in this discussion is the standard setting organizations. So even when we look at our whatever limited data privacy laws we have right now, the sensitive information protection, the guidelines. They clearly say that, you know, every agency has to be compliant with ISO 27001. That's the standard that's been set. So we today need a standard setting organization who kinds of builds, writes that down that what are the way to secure your codes and not just coding, you know, from an environment perspective also. They need to be clear indicators of what is sustainability, what are the key ingredients that they need to code well so that the environment is not impacted by the use of blockchain technology which is a totally different area of discussion altogether. So we need these organizations like we have SOC 2, SOC 3, ISO 27001. Similar to these, we should have an agency who sets out these standards which everybody needs to comply to and then auditing happens accordingly. Like we have it today do in the Web 2 world. So something like that needs to be done and once these standards are set it's very easy then for governments to say that everybody has to comply to this standard. The government cannot be setting out these standards. We can make a policy around something but we can't build those standards. So once those standards are kind of built then it's very easy for the government to say that anybody who's using blockchain technology whether it's for crypto or for any use case that blockchain has you need to comply with this technology and then we can have an authority like cert in that we already have right now which kinds of, you know, ensures the response time to any kind of cyber attacks or civil attacks or what we have in the crypto world the history revision attack so on and so forth which you know the proof of stake protocols generally have. So these are the, this is the biggest challenge on the point of security. There are challenges on the point of investor protection but I feel our Indian government is doing pretty okay when it comes to investor protection because we have the ASCI which is the advertising standard council of India which has already, you know, told what kind of disclaimers etc need to be put up but any ad which is, which talks about cryptos or NFTs etc so those disclaimers etc have come in anti money laundering protection has come in then on the tax side also there is clear, you know, disclosures that you know what is the taxability of it though I personally feel that you are kind of draining people from converting their cryptos into Indian currency because of this and you're kind of encouraging them to, you know, be more involved in the crypto space rather than taking that investment putting them back into your bank account and using them in your real life but on the investor side what more can be done the challenge that is coming in is on the white paper part if you look at the white paper of so many tokens there is no standard that has to be met some white paper only talks about the technology which is being built some white paper goes on to tell the entire use case of that token but there is no standard or there is no clarity as to what is it that you should disclose in your white paper so and this is where the retail investor gets affected because the retail investor, this is not an IPO document which you can read everything and then you can decide you know whether you want to buy these shares or not this white paper is totally dependent on the issuer that what I want to disclose what I don't want to disclose and then it's also on the exchange whether they want to tell me to add more disclosures on my white paper or not so for investor protection what is needed is that you need to set out what the white paper should kind of highlight so that you know we as lawyers are also able to kind of advise people on the retail side also and on the corporate side also that how should you really go out in the market and communicate about your tokens so this is a bridge you know which the regulators have to travel and you know bring out that clarity so these are a few issues which I feel that you know the government or not alone but along with the standard setting organization should work on wonderful I think some great insights I just want to add one more point it's like I'm very much agreed with Yamini as she shares as she already mentioned that the advertisement the advertisement guidelines we have and they are so okay they are clear but they are so unregulated that they are even self regulatory guidelines if it is advisable to follow them but it is not you know compulsory to follow them so the law is still in a very grey area that is why it is not clear and it is not safe to use it for retail investors wonderful I think that's absolutely and all right I think we are up time now the questions which are already on the chat please feel free to answer your last comments if you want to just quickly give a line or two most welcome Sneha Pragya, Yamini Anasuya any last quick thoughts we'll just quickly do a round and we'll start with you Neha thank you it was actually very insightful conversation that we had and I just wanted to reiterate what Yamini had said about having a common framework so there have been instances where internationally there have been model laws whether it be for arbitration or e-commerce where they set a global standard and allowed independent countries to sort of adopt them as per their regional requirements and that has been enormously successful generally does it provide regulatory certainty even with respect to understanding laws of like foreign jurisdictions it provides more clarity and another final point I wanted to add is just like how regulatory clarity is important for blockchain, blockchain too can be used for regulatory compliance so whether it be for dispute resolution or contract enforcement or issuance of bill of trading etc blockchain is a great technology which can be leveraged for compliance so thank you so much for having me it was great to be part of this conversation thank you any last one two liners from any of you and then we'll just quickly wrap it up I would like to add on to one thing we need a collaborative effort for generating the regulations from all the stakeholders industries governments, policy makers the standards organizations everyone to make this regulations in a standardized way so that the please is going to be practically available in the near future oh wonderful I think very very well summarized Yamini you want to go next my just one concluding line to the government of India for globalist bring out regulations if you want to ban it please ban it but don't keep us unregulated so see I am not like a total advocate of having crypto but I am not even against innovation and I am totally for any innovation so there has to be a balance and I leave this job to the government we are all here as consultants to help them in this role but bring out a clarity so that people who genuinely want to work in this field they are able to make a roadmap of where are they going to so those who are there will always be certain people who would want to make some misuse of this gap but I genuinely personally know people who want to use this technology use this space and make something beautiful out of it so help these people you know to have a clear roadmap of where are they going to go so just I would want to conclude on that thank you wonderful Pragya your last points you want to go yeah I just want to say on the same lines as Yamini said we are not against this crypto assets or cryptocurrency but there should be some clarity in the guidelines and framework so that we can use it with certainty and this technology blockchain is actually a great technology it should be used in a way because it is doing wonders in education field and it is great for protecting someone from data breach and all but there should be some clarity in the frameworks that's all I want from the government wonderful I think this was such an amazing session thank you so very much all of you taking time you know helping us out I'm sure a lot of people will reflect back on the points which you have made and that's what I always say the best discussions are they actually kick in to think more right I think a lot of points to take in from thank you very much and I would like to actually now give this mic and the stage to Nidhi Nidhi you there hi so I had already been working with Nidhi because we are definitely from the same chapter Hyperledger India Nidhi the most approachable always helpful anytime we require her thank you Nidhi I'll just quickly introduce you so that everybody knows who you are so Nidhi works as senior solution engineer building blockchain solutions at scale she is with the Walmart Global Tech India she has about 7 years of experience working on the blockchain and backend technologies prior to Walmart she was working with geo platforms as a senior engineer and she was solving one of the problems of UCC spam prevention that was using blockchain very very I also personally know of this it has got a big influence within the blockchain domain solving for a billion users and people she has been actively working in the technology space conducting a lot of conferences being a part of hackathons herself and she has been also nominated as Hyperledger Labs program early this year she is actually the developer advocate at Hyperledger India chapter and also has mentored in the mentorship program last year 2022 so over to you Nidhi thank you so much thank you Ritu the session was really insightful I could get from it one hour was not sufficient for it like having these many amazing and passionate ladies and then they are speaking their minds out so one hour was definitely not doing justice for them but yeah then this is what we had for today so thank you to return all the panelists so now we will get started with the first technical presentation for the day yeah so I will quickly share my screen yes so I am sure like if you are working in a blockchain space you might have worked or heard about smart contracts so to just set some context smart contracts are like the mind for any blockchain network so they contain the business logic that needs to be run on the network and there are often cases when we want to deal with smart contracts that needs to be executed concurrently so today we will learn about efficient, concurrent execution of smart contracts on blockchains using object based transactional memory and the topic is led by Shweta Kumari so Shweta is a research scientist at Hawaii Technologies India and her areas of research are blockchain nested transactions parallel and distributed computing and file system she has done her PhD from department of computer science and engineering from IIT Hyderabad she has also published multiple research papers at various international conferences and journals and she has also reviewed like various conferences and journals at computing general and IEEE access and her research work is recognized across the industry and she has received a lot of appreciations on that so without any further ado I will hand over to Shweta Shweta Thank you so much Nidhi for introducing me and presentation thanks everyone for joining the talk let me just share my screen is my screen visible to you not yet yeah now we can see perfect thanks folks for joining my talk so the panel discussion was quite interesting and it was like how blockchain can help till now we have a technical talk in which will come to know how the blockchain can run efficiently by using the concurrent execution of smart contracts so the title of today's talk is like efficient concurrent execution of smart contracts in blockchain using object based transactional memory so basically here we have developed I along with couple of other researchers and my postdoc advisor we have developed a framework to execute the concurrent transactions in the smart contract of the blockchain so the outline of today's talk is going to be I will start with the introduction of the blockchain that I feel like everybody knows but still I will just go briefly about it and then I will just discuss what are bottlenecks in the existing blockchain design and then like to the concurrent execution of the smart contract like what are the challenges we have faced so in this section I will cover like challenges in the execution of smart contract transactions concurrently and basically here we have proposed like multi-threaded minor and multi-threaded validator so that I will discuss in the proposed methodology and then I will show some experimental evaluation to represent the gain through the proposed algorithm as compared to the state of the art one and like most of the attendees and panel member knows like what are the real world applications of the blockchain that briefly I will cover over here and then I will conclude my presentation followed by some research opportunity like what are the opportunities this research is giving us so let's discuss the introduction so as we and everyone please feel free to interact me if you have any questions so I would be happy to take the question in between as well so like blockchain as we know blockchain is a distributed decentralized database or it is having lesser of records in which like each block consists of couple of transactions hash of its previous block and like hash of like so that it would be immutable so that's what like for the sake of simplicity I have included the two blocks in the blockchain and the couple of more it can be so a block consists of the list of transactions so these are the list of transactions so here basically two main entities are there like one is minor and the another one is validator so minor adds block to the blockchain and validators validate each block added to the blockchain stating that the minor has proposed a block like which is correct or not if it's correct then everybody will add it otherwise it will reject it based on the consensus so the popular blockchains are like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Hyper Leisure etc so in this talk I will more focus towards the Ethereum blockchain like till now like we know like there are two types of research that can be done in the blockchain basically one is the security concern and the another one is the concurrent execution or like how efficiently we can execute the blockchains like smart contracts transactions in the blockchain so my talk is going to be more focused on the concurrent execution or the efficient execution of the blockchain so here like we will discuss first like what is the Ethereum high level design so as we know like Ethereum nodes form a peer to peer system so it would be again clear with the example like here a client is there which is external to the system and who wants to execute the smart contracts it needs to contact with the peer of the system so here for the sake of simplicity I have considered four peers in the system like peer one two three and four and there are three clients client one two and three and these clients wants to execute the transaction T1, T2 and T3 respectively and I have assumed like all the peers is having the synchronous view of the blockchain which consists of three blocks block B1, B2 and B3 so now what will happen like client sends these transactions to the miner just assume like here peer P4 is acting as a miner so what will happen like what miner is doing first so miner is executing these transactions sequentially in the current scenario the miner is executing these transactions sequentially and then it's evaluating the final state and it's also calculating the hash of its previous block and after calculating all these things the miner is proposing a new block which is set like B4 like block B4 has been proposed by peer P4 and like what will happen after that after proposing the block B4 the miner the peer P4 is acting as a miner over here so that's why I'm using the word miner and peer P4 interchangeably so here what peer P4 will do after evaluating the block before it will broadcast the block B4 to the network to validate by the other peers in the system so what other peer will do other peers will also execute these transactions sequentially one after another and it will compute the current state corresponding to each data item accessed by these transactions and then what will happen like after calculating these things each peer peer 1, 2, 3 is acting as a validator over here so what they'll do they'll just calculate the current state corresponding to each transaction and then they'll check it whether the current state evaluated by the the validator and the final state given by the miner whether both are same or not if both are same and consensus has been reached consensus as in like more than 50% of the the peers should get agree into the proposed block B4 if that has been reached then the respective block will get agreed to the blockchain otherwise the peer will reject the block so here was for the sake of simplicity I have assumed like the peer gets agree to the block B4 and after that block B4 has been added to the blockchain so here one can see that the synchronous view of the blockchain is like now B1, B2, B3 followed by B4 so one can observe that here what will happen what has happened like in the case of miner also as well validator also both the miner and validator execute these transactions sequence one after another so what will happen like like what is the research outcome coming coming from here like that I'm going to discuss in the upcoming slides so before going to the research like I just brief about the smart contract like what exactly the smart contract is like modern blocks and interposes an additional software layer between the client and the blockchain known as smart contract so a smart contract basically we can say that like it's a piece of code that is deployed in the blockchain node so one can assume that like the transfer function like banking as we all of know like a banking example so the transfer function like transferring the amount from sender to the receiver so here transfer function can act as a smart contract so here like the client requests are directed to the smart contract and the smart contracts examples are like coin contract ballot contract simple option etc so it would be again clear with the example like I have considered one transfer function of the smart contract which is like here the transfer function has taking the three arguments which is sender ID receiver ID and the amount sender wants to transfer from sender to the receiver so it will first check whether the amount that wants to transfer is greater than the balance that sender is having if it's greater than then it will throw an exception because sender is not having sufficient balance to to send that amount so that's why it will throw the exception otherwise the respective amount will be debited from the sender account and it will credited to the receiver account so this is the transfer function of the smart contract coin smart contract so now we are going to discuss like what is the bottleneck in the existing blockchain so as we know like till now we have covered like serial execution of the transactions by miners and validators trail to harness the power of multi-core processor so as we know like these days when we are buying even our smart phones, laptops all are multi-core all are having the multi-core processor quad core octa core etc so the question is like why can't we explore these codes properly and increase the throughput so we are saying like serial execution of the transactions by miners and validators fail to harness the power of multi-core ubiquitous multi-core processor and thus degrades the throughput again this would be clear with the example here for the sake of simplicity like I have considered two transactions which is showing the serial execution of the transactions so transaction 1 and transaction 2 so transaction 1 wants to transfer 10 dollar from account A to account B whereas transaction T2 wants to transfer 20 dollar from account C to D and here C stands for commit this C1 and C2 stands for commit of transaction T1 and T2 respectively so one can observe that here easily like all the B accounts like account A, B, C and D all are independent they are not overlapping at all still in the current scenario what the execution is happening like these execution are happening sequentially so the research is like why can't we execute those transactions concurrently and get the better throughput so idea is to execute those these transactions concurrently and get the better output so in the picture B it's showing the concurrent execution in which the transaction T1 and T2 both are executing concurrently and giving the better throughput so here like by leveraging the multiple threads to execute the transactions we can achieve better efficiency and higher throughput but the concurrent execution pauses several challenges that we know like whenever we are executing the transactions concurrently we need to come up with equivalent serial schedule to get the to say like this execution the concurrent execution is correct so that's why the first like we have faced couple of challenges among them I will just list two challenges which are very important so first one is concurrent execution while accessing the conflicting data item so just assume like there are two threads T1 and T2 and both wants to access the same data item which is K so when the two transactions are accessing the same data item and at least one of them are doing the right on that data item then we are saying that these two threads are conflicting to each other so this is the picture of showing the conflicting access to the shared data item K so when the transactions or threads are executing the conflicting transactions then identifying the conflicts at runtime is not straightforward that is very challenging to identify the conflicts at runtime and the second one is let's say one of the simplest solution to handle the conflicts is acquire the lock like whoever thread will go first to execute the data item just acquire the lock on the data item first and let them other threads to just wait so but the acquiring lock is not so simple so it will also lead to the deadlock, livelock, priority, inversion etc so improper use of lock may leads to deadlock and as I said like whenever we are executing the transactions concurrently we need to come up with equivalent serial schedule to say that this current concurrent execution is correct so discovering an equivalent serial schedule of the concurrent execution of SCT, SCT stands for smart concurrent transactions over here is difficult so identifying the equivalent serial schedule is difficult so the solution we are proposing over here is like software transactional memory to solve these challenges so here we have used the software transactional memory system as a black box to execute the transactions concurrently so I will discuss more in the upcoming slides like how the STNs is helping to run the execution concurrently but the second challenge we have faced is like validator may incorrectly reject a valid block proposed by the miner that we should not tolerate sorry so we can we call such error as a false block rejection error so again this would be clear with the example just assume there are two threads T1 and T2 like that wants to transfer the amount $10 from account A to B and thread 2 wants to transfer the $20 from account B to A now what will happen with the concurrent execution what are the issues can occur that I will cover in this slide like let's say like the miner has executed these transactions concurrently with the equivalent serial schedule T1 followed by T2 so what will happen like I just prepare a table to understand it in a better way like there are two accounts account A and B and just assume like initial balance both the accounts are having this like $10 $10 now what will happen if the transaction T1 will get executed so the transaction like account A wants to transfer $10 from account A to B so after executing the transaction T1 the account B will have $20 whereas account A will have $0 balance because $10 has been transferred from account A to B so it would be $0 in account A and $20 balance would be in account B after executing the transaction T1 now the transaction T2 will execute so transaction T2 wants to transfer the $20 from account B to A so what will happen like after execution of this transaction the amount will be in the account B would be $0 and $20 would be in account A so the final state corresponding to the each account would be $20 in account A and $0 in account B this would be the concurrent execution of the smart contract by minor with the equivalent CL schedule T1 followed by T2 now just assume like validator is also there well now it's time to validate the concurrent execution by the minor and assume like validator executed these transactions concurrently but in just opposite manner opposite manner as in like instead of T1 followed by T2 validator execute these transactions T2 followed by T1 then what will happen just see over here like the transaction T2 wants to transfer $20 from account B to A but the initial balance in account A and B having $10 $10 only so transaction T2 will not get succeeded and because of insufficient balance in account B so it will return a bot and this transaction will not get executed but after that if T1 will get executed then the balance would be in account A it would be 0 and account B will have $20 after the execution of transaction T1 so here one can see that the final state executed by the minor and the final state calculated by the validator both are not same so here the minor says like $20 in account A and $0 in account B whereas the validator executed $0 in account A and $20 in account B which are different so now validator will reject this block stating that like no no minor is not correct so minor this block is not correct but no this have the minor is correct but this happened due to the different equivalent serial schedule execution by the minor so here we are calling such error as a false block rejection error so we should identify false block rejection error and validator should not reject such blocks so we are giving the solution of such error by by appending like here minor appends the block graph in the false block to avoid the false block rejection error so feel free to interrupt me if anybody is having any questions now I am going to cover the proposed methodology which is like here we have proposed the multithreaded minor and multithreaded validator so basically we have proposed the the framework which is developed like we have an efficient framework for the concurrent execution of smart contract transactions by minor using the optimistic object based software transactional memory system so here like we are using the OSTM like object based STM as a black box to execute the transactions concurrently so let's just give me a brief about what is STM so STM stands for software memory system which are a convenient programming paradigm for a programmer to access the shared memory using the multiple threads so the STM leads to the developer like the helping to the programmer to execute their program sequential program to run concurrently so here a programmer need not to worry about the any consistency issues or a programmer need not to know about like how the concurrent program can be done so the programmer only needs to know like their sequential program and the APIs of the library developed by us so in order to do that like the programmer can run their sequential program to execute concurrently and efficiently so here the traditional STM works on the read write STM, read write primitives like it's like read and write operations it's working on read write operations which we are referring to the read write STM but in this work we are using the object based STM which is higher level of the objects rather than primitive read write operation which act upon the memory location and due to that it's giving the better throughput or better results than the read write STM as well so we are concluding through the literature like using the object based STM provide better concurrency than read write STM so that's why we have used the black box as the object based STM basically object based STM works on the data structure like hash table link list etc so it will act upon the higher level operations such as insert, delete, lookup and all so using the STM it invokes the following six methods like STM begin, STM insert, delete, lookup, try commit and abort in which like STM begins gives the unique identity to the each transaction such as like transaction P1 P1 is a unique identity to the particular transaction and insert, STM insert is something like how to insert the value in the particular key using the STM insert operation similarly STM delete and STM lookup is to delete and lookup the value from the hash table and STM try commit is acting as an optimistic operation over here which is like all the operations like insert, delete, lookup will happen locally and in the STM try commit it will check like whether all the operation done by the this transaction whether it's correct or not so it's a validation operation so that's why it's giving the better throughput all we are calling it as a optimistic operation so if everything has been correct like all the operations done by the particular transactions are correct then STM will return the STM commit otherwise it will return to the operation STM abort so this is the high level design of the hash table OSTM based operations so this is the same function same transfer function that we have discussed like transferring the amount from the sender to the receiver now this is the the transfer function using STM operation so here like as I said in the beginning like each transaction will get the unique timestamp using the STM begin so in this line number 8 it's getting the unique timestamp to the transactions and similarly for checking the balance it's doing the STM lookup and if the balance is sufficient not sufficient then it will throw an exception if it will suffice the sender is having sufficient balance then STM delete will perform the operation to deduct the amount from the sender and STM insert will often perform to to credit the amount to the receiver and later on like STM try commit will happen like if all the operation will get succeeded then it will return commit if not then it will again start from the line number 8 onwards so this is the transfer function using the STM software transaction memory systems so here as I said to address the false block rejection error the minor appends the block graph to the blockchain right so here like minor maintains the block graph in the form of adjacency list where the vertices corresponds to the only committed transactions and as is represents the block graph dependency of the conflicts given by the OSTM so as is our dependency and the nodes are nodes of the block graph are each transactions so here the conflicting operations are like STM look up with try commit delete with try commit and so on so one can assume like with the read write operation only read read is not the conflicting operation and rest of the read write read and write write are the conflicting operation so similarly similarly here also in this manner only the conflicting operations are been identified so here we have proposed the multi traded minor which uses basically two functions add vertex and add as method to the block graph and later the validators re-execute the same as it is concurrently and deterministically relying on the block graph given by the minor so that like validator should not reject the valid block blocks incorrectly so that's why validator we are restricting validator to execute the transactions concurrently in the same manner the minor has executed so two cities that do not have path can execute concurrently so absolutely there are like if two transactions are not having any conflicts then they can run concurrently in any manner so here we have proposed like validator which we are calling it as a smart multi traded validator which uses basically two functions like search global and decrement in count function from the block graph so this is the data structure which we have used like here we have used the vertex or list of list in which like vertex list is in vertical list and the as list in corresponds to the each vertex so this is the block graph which consist of three transactions t1, t2 and t3 so transaction t2 depends on transaction t1 so here we are maintaining in t2 in the as list of t1 and it's also having the reference to the vertex list of t2 so that it could be quickly exist so here for the data structure of the block graph we have used list of list for the quicker access and the efficient access of the block graph, post tm have fewer conflicts than the read write stm which in terms allowed validators to execute more sq concurrently and gives the better output in terms of the throughput this also reduces the size of the block graph leading to the smaller communication cost than the rwsdm so as we know if the dependency would be less then the block graph will have less number of access and it would have the better like communication cost so in the literature or from the literature we came to know like multi version ostm like instead of maintaining the single version just maintain the multi version and it gives the better throughput so that's why like multi version ostm maintains the multiple version correspond to the each shared data item accessed by the transactions and provide greater concurrency to the single version ostm so we have also implemented the multi version ostm and multi version based ostm block graph has fewer edges as compared to the single version ostm and that further reduces the size of the block graph leading to the smaller communication cost which is quite good in our case and which is our requirement like in the network already we have lot of communication things so when we are using the block graph it should be lighter enough to communicate from one node to the another node so that's why the block graph should be light enough and that is being given by the mv ostm now this is just briefly about the experimental evaluation that we are getting so for the sake of proving the results like here we have used the ethereum blockchain and which wrote the smart contract in the solidity language and which runs on the ethereal virtual machine but ethereum does not support the multi threading so till now we have studied like how multi threading can work with the blockchain but ethereum unfortunately ethereum does not supports the multi threading so that's why to do the experiments we have converted these smart contracts from the ethereum from solidity language to the c++ language for the multi threaded execution and we considered basically 4 benchmark contract like coin contract ballot contract simple auction contract and mixed contract also which is like more realistic contract which is the combination of each all 3 contracts in the equal proportion like coin, ballot and simple auction contract and we made it as a mixed contract and see the performance using the proposed algorithm so coin contract as we know like it's a simple cryptocurrency contract ballot contract is a electronic voting contract and like a simple auction contract is an online auction contract and the mixed contract as I said like it's a equal proportion from all these other 3 contracts and to see the performance gain we ran our experiment on Intel Xeon with the 56 hardware core threads which was having the 32 GB RAM and we considered 2 workloads basically 1 is like workload 1 is varying the number of transactions from 50 to 300 and threads we have it and shared data item we assumed as a 500 and for the workload 2 we fixed the number of transaction as 100 and varies the threads from 10 to 60 and fixed the number of shared data item as a 500 so like here picture 1 figure A and B of figure 10 is showing the minor execution on the workload w1 for the mixed contract and for workload w2 for the mixed contract here XSS represents the number of transactions or smart contract transactions and the YXS represents the speed up over the serial minor so here the baseline black one represents the serial execution whereas these are the state of the art execution and the bold one is our proposed minor execution so one can see that like the R proposed one like the SBO STM minor and MBO STM minor is performing far better than the serial one and even the better one better than the state of the art STM this is because of the concurrent execution of the smart contract this results is coming so and as we are increasing the number of transactions so it's increasing the contention on the shared data item so as we are increasing the number of transactions the speed up is also getting reduced so this is the output for the figure A and for figure B like it shows the performance on the workload 2 in which like we are varying the number of threads on the X axis and this Y axis represents the same like speed up over the serial minor so here also like a black line represents the baseline and one can see like as the number of threads increases till 50 the speed up gets increases but as the sudden increases 50 to 60 number of threads the slight decrement in the results is showing this is why so because it's limited to the hardware threads so we were as I said like we were having the hardware threads as a 56 so that's why the performance slightly degraded from 50 to 60 so this is the results for the minor so here we can take take away as like MBO STM and SBO STM minor performs the 3.91 times and 3.41 times better than the serial minor and even better than the state of the art execution of the minors as well with this much of 1.98, 1.5 and so on speed up so this was with the minor speed up similarly for the validator also we have executed the transactions and see like how the validators are getting improved so here lots of improvement has been shown has been addressed by the proposed algorithm like we can see like it's minor validator is giving the 48 times better performance than the serial one so why this is happening because it's been executed based on the the block graph given by the minor so that's why here the the validator need not to do anything it just needs to calculate the the execution based on the block graph given by the minor so that's why it's getting the huge performance gain as compared to the serial validator and as we know through the the before discussion like what are the real world applications of the blockchains so as we know this this work can also be helpful for the any real world application of the blockchain where we want to add the concurrency into that like automatic and securing this securely storing the user records land sell documents, recall record insolence record in all these areas like we can apply this resource and even like I have proposed during the Huawei I have proposed the blockchain based audit log so that got the silver medal through the Huawei for this idea and it got very much appreciated like blockchain based audit log and this idea could be very much helpful for the all supply chain management things where we can apply the concurrency when we are talking about the blockchains execution and this would also be helpful for the health record, decentralized execution system all these are the real world applications of the blockchain where this research could make some improvement into the blockchain execution while executing the transactions concurrently in order to conclude the talk like in the entire talk we have discussed like we developed an efficient framework for the concurrent execution of smart contract transactions by multi-threaded minor using two protocols basically like single version object based STNs and multi-version object based STNs of the optimistic STNs and to avoid the false block rejection error the multi-threaded minor captures the dependencies among the cities in the form of block graph and address the false block rejection issue and the proposed in the conclusion through the result section we can say like the proposed approach achieves a significant performance gain over the state of the art STTs execution framework as compared to the state of the art one so now just briefly discuss like what are the research opportunities that this research is given as we know like minor connect as a malicious as well so how can we handle the malicious minor so me along with my resource team has also proposed some of the idea to handle the malicious minor but like here this could be also a good research work like a malicious minor can intentionally append a block graph in the block which adds access to the delay the other minors but as we know the delay in the blockchain can't be tolerated because all are fighting for the reward points so this delay should not be tolerated so preventing such a malicious minor would be an immediate future work that could be and how to handle the double spending problem if the minor is malicious like how to identify the malicious minor this this can be a research opportunity and here as I said like minor is appending the block graph so block graph consumes some space and consuming the space is not so so good because it's already consuming space by the all the nodes so why to freeze the space using the block graph so if one can come up with the solution of concurrent execution without the block graph then it would be a great thing so block graph consumes space so constructing store is optimal block graph is an interesting challenge implementing our proposed algorithm like here we have proposed it for the Ethereum blockchain so implementing these algorithm for the other blockchain such as bitcoin, hyper leather POSIO that could be an exciting exercise and as I said like EVM does not support the multi-threading so another research direction could be how to design a multi-threaded EVM so that could be a very interesting avenue thank you so much that's it from Maya that was really insightful like the talk was too technical already like the part how you conducted the talk you started with basics then you went into the technicalities of it and then at the end you concluded with the research opportunities and the real world applications so it was very informative and I hope it's informative for the audience as well thank you for joining us today and like educating us about the concurrent execution of smart contracts thanks a lot thank you so much for giving me the opportunity I will hand it over to Ritu to take the show forward sure thank you it was I have no words the kind of line up we have the kind of discussions and knowledge sharing happening which is just amazing and I would now like to introduce all of you to Deepika I would definitely say she is one of the most enthusiastic person on our team she is always bubbling with ideas and I of course know her but for everybody I just quickly do a quick intro of her she is co-chair at Hype Pleasure in the India chapter and she works as a blockchain developer at the Walmart her fascination as far as what I know of is she started with the hackathon especially on the super supply chain use case and after then like many of us she also literally hooked to the technology and she has also presented her work at Hype Pleasure Global Forum in Dublin last year 2022 and her blogs on blockchain for starters have very well been received and she actually gives the credit to her need to explain the technology in a way even a 5 year old can understand Thank you so much Deepika for taking out time and I am so looking forward to this fire chat Thank you Thanks Arithu for that lovely introduction Heather do we have you with us Hi How are you? Good how are you? I am good too it is lovely to see you here I just want to take a moment for everyone in the audience to introduce Heather Heather is the CEO of Indie Tech software development firm specializing in decentralized identity products networks and hosting services. Priorly Heather was the executive director of Sovereign Network a non-profit and early adopter of decentralized identity she has an MBA from John Hopkins University an MSC from Columbia and is a widely recognized thought leader in online privacy and security issues advising governments and global NGOs Heather is also on the governing board at Hyperledger foundation and she served as a keynote speaker at the Hyperledger global forum where I heard her speak for the very first time so again Heather thank you so much for joining us I said this to Sophia Lopez last time she was on the call and I'm going to say to you again now I know it's pretty late in the evening for you but you ladies looks really really great I look nothing like you guys you know later late in the night but yeah thanks again for taking a kickstart this session you know for our audience something really interesting about Heather is I found I found it fascinating actually I was just going through Heather's LinkedIn profile and I realized that her early formal education is very unexpected you know she's the CEO of this decentralized identity management company and you know most people today believe that they need to have some kind of degree in engineering or some coding background at least to get involved in the web three space right but yet Heather has degrees in journalism and political science and that was fascinating to me so Heather tell us your story how did you go from journalism to blockchain and starting your own company right and in fact when I went into journalism that was shocking to myself as well because in college I avoided the newspaper and anything to do with journalism where I actually spent quite a long career in broadcast journalism and the majority of that time was spent covering Washington DC or the European Union out of Brussels and during that time I was very much focused on how does how do concepts and ideas ultimately become legislation and then how does legislation actually become law and these are highly complex ecosystems and there's also an interesting overlay that's also in web three and it's this idea of where does control and power reside within these ecosystems and the architecture of our society and so when you look at political science and then you look into journalism journalism is really about the storytelling and the explanation of these complex architectures in which humans live and conduct our lives on many different levels and in journalism I gravitated towards broadcast journalism because I really enjoy working with the team and I found when I was writing for newspaper that to me that was very isolating although you work with editors you really are on your own with journalism you're working with producers and you're working with directors and cameras and audio and there are so many parts and pieces control rooms, deadlines there's just constant movement and you know most of my career I had seven deadlines a day and so I was constantly writing under pressure but I was also in broadcasting at a time when technology was transforming and we can all face at least in the US newsrooms we didn't handle the digital transformation very well and I was sitting in newsrooms and we were worried about this thing that we quite didn't understand and that was Twitter and I also was working in newsrooms where the top leadership said oh those websites that's just marketing that has nothing to do with us as journalists and I really felt that there was something more there and as my leadership continued to evolve I knew that I needed to learn more about technology and how it was impacting my industry and when you talk about this concept of how do you find where you want to go and what you want to do sometimes you don't know exactly what it is you just have a feeling that in the newsrooms you're able to figure it out and how I got into technology and made that transition was I was in a museum talking with a volunteer tour guide about this interest and she said well my husband works for this technology company let me get your email and have you contact him and that's how I moved into this I started I was doing research on threat intelligence solutions at the time and they needed someone who could go in do research and explain things and that is how I made the transition to technology it's actually how I started working on decentralized identity 13 years ago in some of the earliest projects that you now know in hyper ledger and it was all because I was constantly communicating talking and sharing where I was going and the first thing I knew I was in a technology company I loved it I took to it I should also say both of my parents were in technology themselves so it was very familiar to me and I just moved in and started training myself you're always learning and I always say every day you have the right to get smarter and that's what I did by moving into technology that's very a lot of sense doesn't it but one thing I found quite ironic was you moved into technology which is so modern through a museum contact so that's like a pretty ironic incident cool so I mean one thing you spoke about right now was the willingness to learn and earlier we had a panel discussion about regulatory compliance policies and so on in the world of Web 3 so I mean we know that regulations in this space is still kind of a gray area it's still evolving there aren't any hard and fast rules in place so how does one stay abreast of these policies in the context of say verifiable credentials I think that's where having the background in journalism has been so good for me because when you're a journalist you often work shifts and you're always expected to start your shift actually an hour early and so when I'm a reporter for a day and I'm assigned to work the day shift I always have to come in an hour early to read and so that's just ingrained in me I start my work day an hour early and all I do is read I read news sites I read emails I read newsletters I read the mainstream coverage I read international papers I read particular technology sites I just read in one of those areas I focus on is I'm constantly reading about how a regulation is changing around the world and there are certain areas I'm really watching but what that does is every day it gives me a grounding in where policy is and where it's going and the second part about being a reporter that's become really important to this technology is you're constantly working your sources and it's a journalist working your sources means you're having conversations that may not deal directly with the story you're working on today but you're constantly learning about what your future story is going to be and so I'm also talking not only in my daily conversations with customers or future hopefully future customers I'm also reaching out and just talking to folks who are in this world who are experts who are either watching the regulators are regulators or if I'm at conferences or events I'm catching up and introducing myself and meeting regulators so I'm constantly out talking and putting my feelers out and that has helped me get a sense of where things are going what I need to watch what applies not only to my business but to the technology but then I can also share areas that we are learning back to the regulators the projects I'm working on right now the most significant ones we are constantly talking with government authorities as an FYI hey we just did this we want to share with you our learnings and because this is Web 3 is such a new space they are interested in learning especially if you're out there deploying especially if you can show them and demonstrate they're going to learn and ask questions and I think that's going to help inform future regulations yeah definitely and I think one point that you brought about on the line support you just mentioned was also something I read in your white paper which largely talks about interoperability but I think there were seven aspects of interop that were mentioned there and one of the points in that was compatible governance or trust with digital credentials so could you talk a little bit more about that? what we know just you look at the entire world and there's not one governance structure that fits this entire world each region each country has its own governance structure that's unique and when you go back to my story and I start as a political science major that's been so informative to what I do now as far as how do you bring together the human political traditional governance in which we run our societies and have for thousands of years along with the technical governance and how can technical governance mirror that and one of the areas that we look at is there's not going to be one technical governance because it is a mirror of our society and in our society we know there's not one style of governance and so we're constantly looking at how do we create compatibility one of the areas in DCO that we've worked on and this is also a project in the decentralized identity foundation is called DGov or decentralized governance is how do you allow individuals, entities, organizations and ultimately local regional and federal governments to make their own decisions in real time and we do that through what we call the main readable governance file that is built in through these systems of the verifying agents when they make the decisions on what to do with the data that is being digested and so what we're looking at is how can we build the technology to help support and mirror what's going on now but also create the ability to change and evolve as society evolves and I think as much as we've spent time we don't think about regional organizations like the UN or the OECD or the EU or any of these global organizations that deal with I'll call it human policy we oftentimes don't think of that as that's interoperability at a human trust level and so we as technologists have to create that interoperability of trust in the technology as well. Right, one thing that you mentioned was machine readable governance could you elaborate a little bit more about that? Machine readable governance allows a human who represents themselves or an organization to establish criteria in order to make decisions about the data that they are either going to receive whether to accept in the case of the work that I do whether to accept a verifiable credential from a holder and then what information they need from that and then the criteria of yes no does this information provide the data necessary in order to make an affirmative or negative decision and it's coded machine readable governance file if then that's and that's kind of the way the machine readable governance is but it sits at every single verifier agent when we were working on this technology it was in the earliest days of COVID and we can all remember the science was changing I think it felt like by the minute it was pretty close to that and so you had governments who needed to make the decisions around whether to accept COVID test information by the hour by the minute and they needed to change that criteria on the fly they couldn't rely on a third party's SDK that maybe they could put in a ticket and get it to change they couldn't rely on a centralized group because they needed to have direct authority as a government to make immediate changes and so that's really where this concept of machine readable governance files came from so it allowed governments that we were working with to make the decisions immediately got it okay that does make a lot of sense I mean when you give the example of COVID right we need things on the fly so it's not something you can do manually just needs to happen so I think at NDCO you worked on several use cases like COVID and I think one of the use cases that I as a traveler myself want to know more about is verifiable credentials in reference to traveling so yeah I think that is a bit about that Right, CEDA S-I-T-A they're a global technology provider 90% of the world's air travel goes through CEDA technology they were formed after World War II to connect governments and airports and airlines together because someone had the idea that wouldn't it be great if we knew when a plane was arriving and that is why CEDA was formed between all the airlines we started in NDCO working with CEDA in the earliest days of the pandemic and that was March of 2020 and they realize that all of a sudden they were in a situation where they needed to have access to health data for travel in a way that they've never had before and they also felt this concept of decentralized identity may be able to provide that without having to directly integrate into all kinds of health care providers and so the first start we first started when I said was to how do you handle health records in a decentralized way with HIPAA health care compliance in order to facilitate travel and border crossing and what we were able to do with CEDA and the government of Aruba and the New York Health Information Exchange was worked with the Bronx Rio and they were able to issue a traveler their medical record in this case it was proof of vaccination or COVID test and provide that directly to the traveler the traveler requested that record from the health information exchange and then the traveler received that as the form of verifiable credential and the traveler connected to the government of Aruba directly and shared their medical record directly using a selected disclosure because the government didn't need to know everything on that medical record they really only cared about your COVID results and the government was able using machine readable governance to make that decision whether you met their criteria at the time was it the right test was it within the right number of hours but the result we remember all of that and while that was really important for that period of time we always have a larger vision is can we facilitate seamless travel and the sense of can you clear a border before you even leave your house to get on the plane and that is what we deployed and implemented and proved just last March two weeks ago and in this case I from my I was one of the travelers that went through this implementation and this trial was from my kitchen I took out my passport and I used my Aruba happy one pass app in order to go to Aruba you have to fill out an online ed card there's no way around it if you're a non-resident you have to do and it's a website or an app and so I use the app and it requested that I took a photo of the page of my passport and what that is doing is picking up MRZ code which are all the numbers at the very bottom page it then asked me to place my phone on my passport and with that MRZ code in the phone it unlocked the chip in my passport and it requested all of the data in my chip it then asked with my consent to verify that with the IKO which is a global governing body that sets up the determination of what a passport is to authenticate that was a legitimate passport I consented to that and it it confirmed I had a valid legitimate US passport and at that point of confirmation it formed a verifiable credential and that was my really for all intents and purposes my passport sitting in my phone it wasn't in a third party it wasn't like an DCO silo database it wasn't in another party it was in my phone and then I was asked if I was willing to share that with Government of Aruba and absolutely I was I passed that entire DTC to the Government of Aruba along with some additional information when was I arriving, my airline the Government ingested that into their existing into their existing Radix immigration system and came using machine readable governance came to the determination I met the criteria and they passed back a trusted traveler credential which was my receipt of border crossing I did all of this in my kitchen and I had at that point the proof of border crossing so when I checked in it removes the liability from the airline because they know I'm going to cross the border when I landed in Aruba I didn't even have to take the passport on my purse because it was all connected with the biometrics to the e-gates and I was able to exit immediately I mean if you had told me even three years ago I guess even a year ago let alone five or ten years ago when I went down this journey that one day I would legally cross the border using blockchain in a verifiable credential to me that was always like oh that's like 10, 15, 20 years from now that I'll be able to do that and I did it in March and I have photographs because it was just such a moment for me personally of all these years of work and we did it and it wasn't just me or other travelers from Canada the Netherlands and the US and so I think that's a great great example of when you work with teams and partners and this the last three years to get to that point we often described as we were crossing the finish line over shards of glass this was probably one of the most difficult things I've ever had to do in my career the past three years to get to that moment but we did it and we proved it out and we met the compliance, we met the regulations we met the government's expectations, we met the requirements of DTC type 1 which was the technicality we used in a non cred we used did com, we used hyper ledger Aries, Indy hyper ledger and non creds and it all came together deployed and worked and that's only the beginning because this work continues on more coming from the government of Aruba but also more coming from other governments and airports as well that's a lovely story I mean I think one of the questions that I had planned to ask you was really how useful is verifiable credentials on blockchain making our lives and I think this use case that you just told us about really shows us how simple life can be going forward if we choose to you know if governments come together iron out all the regulations and the policies and the compliance and all of that and just start seeing the technology for the immense amount of potential it has in terms of simplifying our lives so that's a really cool story and congrats again I mean fruits of hard work are always very sweet so congrats on that are there any other you know really we're nearing time so are there any other interesting use cases that Indy has worked on that you want to share that's made a real-world impact similar to the previous two case studies that you spoke about right one of the other areas is around financial services and bank accounting KYC and while I guess in one way this helps in the sense of it helps eliminate all the questions you get when you do call into a bank call center or eliminate fraud is creating a verifiable credential around your account information that you can share within the same financial institution without having to redo the same processes but also be able to share a proof of your bank account or your your status within your bank account to other partners like insurance companies or those providing what we'll call elite benefits like special access to events and concerts and being able to do all of that without being tracked and without all those parties having to call home to a centralized authority so we're seeing more progress in the financial services industry trying to validate that you are one of their customers in a privacy preserving way so you can access all those benefits and what I love about that is if I have a bank and I want to receive all the extra benefits I don't want them to track what concert I went to on this week and what I did there and so when I'm really happy to see these institutions seen one they can bring out more partners then they can protect the privacy of their customers as well awesome yeah that's a pretty good use case too is there I mean last question for this fireside chat is there anything that you would like to leave our audience with your two sense of wisdom it doesn't have to be necessarily with verifiable credentials of blockchain anything else that you've you know gathered over experience in just blockchain plus prior to that as well anything you want to share would be good just keep building and build and build and build because you can always get your head caught up and well the regulation doesn't say that or the governance doesn't say that we haven't figured this out just focus on what is the next step that you can take one step at the time when it gets really hard what is the tiniest baby step you can take at that moment because we're never going to have a perfect scenario in which to build and feel a hundred percent confident that what we're building is actually going to work we make that confidence with every step that we take so my advice and why we start in DCO is build build build because when you build and you show success the regulation and the compliance and everything else that we worry about starts falling in line and I think that's just really important I just hope that you know even in my own work I can get in my head and then I come to a point where I just don't move forward just keep going keep going everyday get up and do it again and again yeah that's pretty inspiring and I think one more takeaway that I had from listening to you today in our short discussion was surround yourself with good people and a good team and don't be afraid to reach out and just put put feelers out as hold themselves back if they have a great idea they tend to keep it to themselves or they wonder if it's not good enough I think discussion is important from what I gathered from basis of what you said absolutely it's really I am someone exactly like that I would like to keep all my feelings myself I don't like to share weakness or when I don't know anything it is really hard to be completely exposed all the time and I have to force myself to say I need to expose this weakness I need to show where I'm struggling I need to ask for help it's really hard but it is so necessary in order to keep building and what you learn are the relationships of those people who come in and help support and you have that open honest communication can become the most important people in your life for the next 20 years and you start building those teams of success and it's because you're all very honest with each other definitely definitely Heather well one last thing is since you are the Guru of verifiable credentials and digital identity if you could leave some resources links to resources on the zoom chat I'm sure a lot of the participants and me and the other panelists here might find that useful as well so when this chat is done please feel free to share your resources with us and again thank you so much for all your insights today I know it was a short discussion not enough time to you know get all the knowledge that you have to the audience but again thanks a lot for joining and have a good evening. Thank you so much for having me today it was a real honor I'm really glad I was able to join everyone here so such always good to be with such a great group of bright smart ambitious women so thank you for having me today. Alright yeah thanks Heather thanks for inspiring see you. Bye. Ritu over to you Ritu do we have you with us yeah Nidhi will take it up okay sure sure my bad Nidhi over to you no worries no worries so moving on to the second technical presentation for the day so all of you might have heard about the blockchain Trilima so basically to set some context it means that any of the blockchain networks that are there they can support decentralization security or scalability and if you want to like optimize all three simultaneously then it can't be done either one of them needs to go down and today's talk it is very much relevant to the security and the scalability aspect so and it's related to blockchain proof of works so proof of work is a sort of consensus algorithm where the miners need to do some work and in return they get a reward so proof of work is like which is which was very much being used in the Ethereum blockchain space so today we have Ovia with us who would be presenting a talk on securing improving performance in proof of work blockchains using anchors and let me give you a brief about Ovia so Ovia is experienced researcher with over eight years of expertise in the blockchain field and she is currently working at point DCX and she is also holding a PhD in computer science and engineering from IIT Delhi her research is primarily on the topic that she will present today and she is actively involved in the community as the leader of the Phoenix Guild Chennai chapter which is a community that aims to empower women and non binary individuals in Tamil Nadu in the web3 space and she also enjoys participating in discussions on the future of technology particularly in the web3 domain and she likes to devote her free time to delivering technical talks and workshops and sharing her knowledge and passion with others like she will do today so Ovia I will hand over to you for the talk wonderful thanks a lot Nidhi let me just share my screen I hope you can see my screen yeah it's visible okay right you can see my slides right yes it's visible okay thanks a lot everyone good afternoon and thank you to the Hyperledger organization team for inviting me and giving me a chance to talk about my research I'm happy to share one of my earlier research works today on scaling proof of work chains I have to mention my supervisor Dr. Vinay from IIT Bombay and one of my colleagues Shadab Zappar without whom this work would not have been possible so without further ado let's get started okay so during the talk I want to cover a couple we'll start with the we'll start with the basics of permissionless proof of work chains and talk about why there's still worth a discussion today I'll define some issues around them and set some goals that one of our solutions achieves and I'll briefly talk about that solution as well so I'm sure everyone in this session would already know what a blockchain is but I find it a good place to start today so that we're all on the same page a blockchain is a popular data structure it stores data in the form of blocks that is cryptographically linked to the previous block forming a chain the first block in the chain is special because it doesn't have a parent it's called the Genesis block the data that is stored in each of these blocks is immutable and transparent that is everyone can see it so it can also be audited easily it is decentralized and distributed like I'm talking about permissionless blockchains and blocks on which there is consensus is basically maintained locally by every node that participates in the network so POW blockchains were the first kind of blockchains that were created POW is an acronym for proof of work proof of work enables trustless consensus in the network so this kind of blockchain is realized in the form of a P2P network of miners who transact and broadcast their transactions so you have transactions being regularly broadcast in the networks there are special nodes called miners who form the P2P network these miners will record the transactions and periodically they form something called a block which has these transactions and they solve a puzzle on this block so we call that a proof of work puzzle once they find a valid solution to this proof of work puzzle I'll explain what that puzzle could be in the next slide but once they find a solution they attach the solution and broadcast that block to the rest of the network other miners who were not successful in finding a solution would receive these valid solutions verify them check whether the proof of work puzzle is actually correct they'll verify the transactions inside the block and they will add them locally to their blockchain so they have maintained a tree of blocks and they will see which is the heaviest branch or the branch with the most number of blocks and they will continue extending that chain so that is how proof of work blockchain works in a nutshell what is this proof of work so proof of work is a puzzle that kind of brings consensus into the network it's like a leadership election protocol where everybody consensus can be of two types many all the people in the network regularly talk to each other in an iterative fashion to come to agree on something to agree on some kind of data to collectively elect one person to propose what the data should be so proof of work is the later part which is the election protocol so these puzzles are computationally very difficult to solve but they are easy to verify so the solutions cannot be pre-computed because the hash of the header of the parent block is used to create the solution of the next block on the blockchain so if you look at the target diagram over here the orange space represents a set of valid solutions that the proof of work could be and the blue sector set of solutions that the proof of work could be the blue sector represents a set of valid solutions so out of all the possible solutions we are looking for one of the solution here for the next block to be on the blockchain to elect the leader basically so the person who finds that solution will become the leader and the next proof of work blockchains this proof of work puzzle is generally of this format essentially the puzzle is of the format of the block header with the link to the parent form something called the challenge and the proof is just a nonce value like 1, 2, 3 with the challenge they attach a proof and they hash it and the hash string is checked for the validity of the puzzle so in hash piece proof of work if it is 0 then it is considered as the valid solution so this is the shout 256 set of all valid solution all the solutions that have the first 40 bits of 0 represents the blue sector so this process makes block generation a very random process because the nonce is found only by brute force we will see why that is a problem later on before we go ahead just a quick explanation on how a block structure is in proof of work chains you have a block basically has two parts to it a header and a body the header contains some metadata such as the hashed header of the previous block on the blockchain which is called the parent pointer the time stamp is when the block was created the nonce is what I just explained in the previous slide it is the solution to the proof of work and the merkle root is basically the link to the header and the body so every transaction in the body is hashed and it is put on the header called the merkle root there is a special transaction in the body called the coinbase the coinbase is basically to reward the person who created the block so the person who created the block their address would be stored in the coinbase and they would basically reward themselves a certain number of let's say bitcoins and if the block is valid and the network accepts the block that much money is just generated out of thin air and rewarded to the address so now we will look at some of the issues faced by proof of work blockchains and set our goals but before we do that I want to set some context on why we are still talking about proof of work blockchains when major protocols like ethereum have moved to other alternative consensus mechanisms to elect the leader called proof of stake or there are many more but one of the major issues is that proof of work blockchains have proven to be highly secured due to their immense computational power required to attack the network so they are very resilient 51% attack where the attacker has to gain control of more than 51% of the network mining power to actually defeat the consensus here another good reason is that proof of work blockchains have a long standing history of decentralization and distributed power among a large number of miners so this competitive nature of mining and the distribution of rewards encourages a diverse set of participants to contribute their computational resources preventing any kind of centralization and this decentralized nature aligns with the principle of the blockchain technology proof of work blockchains especially bitcoin have achieved a very significant network effect and widespread options they've established themselves as one of the most recognized and trusted blockchains in the industry and they also have billions of dollars in TBL which is total value locked in their ecosystem right and not to mention the vibrant ecosystem and the ongoing innovation and development that is happening right now in these blockchains we've all heard of the BRC 20 which is the standard for creating fungible tokens on bitcoin we knew that there was no kind of programming there's no smart contract development possible on bitcoin but still they've devised some possibilities where we can have non fungible and fungible token standards on bitcoin and the community support active participation innovation and resilience durability are some of the reasons why we should still focus on improving proof of work blockchains so let's talk about some of the issues so one of the major issues in proof of work chains is the concept of forks forks are an undecidable state of the system where there are two or more chains that are at the same length and miners cannot cannot come to a consensus on a single common chain so this becomes a window of opportunity for the adversary to execute attacks so let's just see the formation of a fork here so let's say we have a P2P network of miners as shown in the diagram here it's a very small network but let's go with it so let's say miner Alice here she is maintaining her own view of the blockchain and she has created a valid proof of work puzzle for the blue block here so she is all excited and she is sending the proof of work puzzle to the rest of the chain but before Alice's solution could reach Bharat, Bharat has also found a valid solution and he is also broadcasting his red block to the rest of the network so what happens here is that people are receiving two blocks that are forked from the same block and both of them are valid so the branches created by the new blocks have the same weight and the other miners are left in an ambiguous state regarding which chain to extend so blocks that store so this can happen because blocks store transactions and are very large in size and they also have a very high propagation time so in an honest network so there is no adversary at play here even in an honest network due to block delay forks can happen and this is called a natural fork so again so what has happened is the network is divided and people who saw Bharat's block chose Bharat's block first and people who saw Alice's block chose Alice's block to mine on but there are still two valid branches in the blockchain so what is the problem here a chain is said to be stable when all its miners are in consensus and united in extending a chain with a common prefix so stability of a blockchain system is its ability to quickly return to a stable state after a fork so it is important that any blockchain has steady growth that is the chain should keep growing to maintain this good stability because good stability translates to better security a rule of thumb that we follow is honest miners choose the block at the tip of the heaviest chain known to them and if it's not there are more than one chain that are at the heaviest weight they choose the miner that they choose the block that they saw first to eventually mine on until one of the chains become heavier and all the miners shift to that chain so let's say Chandru who was mining on Alice's block mined a purple block a valid purple block so now we can see that Alice's chain has grown a little bit heavier than Bharat's chain so all the miners including Bharat will shift to that chain and Bharat's block would be more powerful so we need blockchains to resolve for folks faster because that will give better chain stability we saw how natural folks are created but an adversity can take advantage of this he can intentionally create a fork and attack the blockchain so one such attack is called the double spend attack so here we have we set an appropriate number of confirmation time to protect the users against the double spend so we will see what double spend and confirmation time is so confirmation time is a time for a transaction to be accepted by a seller for him to release his goods and services so let's say I am going to a coffee shop and I want to pay in bitcoin I pay my waiter in bitcoin and the waiter has to wait for this transaction to be confirmed on the blockchain before giving me my cup of coffee it's the waiting time in terms of number of blocks that is recommended for the seller to ensure that the transaction is actually committed on the blockchain so when we have block intervals large we need larger block intervals because if we have smaller block intervals natural folks are more frequent so when the block intervals are large this confirmation time grows and the system cannot be used for fast payments so it's ridiculous for me to wait like one hour to get a cup of coffee but in a double spend attack this is what happens so let's say that the block confirmation time is 6 blocks so a transaction is happening here it enters a block at block B1 and at block B6 it is finally accepted and I can receive whatever it is that I paid for so what the attacker does is attacker is the one who is spending the bitcoins over here and he folks the chain before the transaction enters a block and secretly mines his own chain so when this transaction is accepted at block B6 and if the attacker's chain is longer at this point he releases it and offends this the block containing this transaction so that all the miners will switch to his chain and this transaction becomes off and he is free to he would have already received the goods or services at this point so he can just double spend the coins that he spent on this transaction so we want as this number grows we are accepting the transaction at block B6 if we accept it at a block BN which is much greater than 6 the chances of this double spend attack reduces drastically but so in one hand we want higher confirmation time such that double spend success is less also we want faster payment so we don't have to we don't want to wait for higher confirmation times so Satoshi in his initial bitcoin paper said that if the adversary is at maximum 10% we can and if we wait for a confirmation time of 6 blocks we can guarantee that the double spend attack will not happen with the probability of 0.99 so this is the threshold that we are aiming for another double spend attack is one form of a selfish mining attack there are many kinds of attacks that follow the same principle basically the adversary wants to create a private chain in order to get more rewards in some form or the other so whether it can be double spending some transactions or it can be like earning more block rewards or transaction fees so let's see how they do this in the double spend attack in the selfish mining attack so the green honest chain is represented by green and the red is the secret adversary chain so the adversary at any point of time just starts mining a secret chain and he waits for the honest chain to grow and it's just about to catch up he releases his private chain so all the miners will shift to his private chain and start mining on this and again he can keep doing this and keep gaining unfair rewards ideally we want his rewards if you own 10% of the network power then you should only be able to get 10% of the rewards but in this way he is fair share so we should also try to avoid such attacks and the most important metric to avoid these attacks is constant and steady chain growth the honest chain should continuously grow at a faster rate so that the adversary cannot catch up with his mining power so let's just summarize the issues of proof of work chains so although the target space controls the mean rate of solving proof of work puzzles in reality proof of work puzzles are found randomly so the blocks are appended to the chain in random wide intervals also blocks hold transactions and they are large in size therefore they have large propagation delays so this random arrival combined with the large delay results in some undecidable effects on the system like we just saw the chain does not grow in a uniform manner that a sudden increase in weight interspersed by long periods of time when the block remains of the same weight because the block arrival time is also quite large and because of all this you cannot resolve folks fast this loads chain stability and very high confirmation time so what has happened to tackle this problem in earlier work so there is always a tradeoff between performance and security so when performance is chosen that is we want to be able to make fast payments we want to be able to confirm blocks quickly this folks are a frequent phenomenon and this approach is taken so upon so when you have frequent blocks you basically are choosing small block interval so you have more frequent folks and at every fork when the focus result at least one branch is often and this should not be the case because every orphaned block you are wasting the proof of work power that was invested in it then securing the system so we don't want frequent folks if on the other hand if we choose security we choose a system with larger block levels so that means high confirmation times it makes it less practical it leads to high fork resolution times and even lower transaction throughput because the number of blocks in unit time is less and the transaction per block is fixed going out of the scale if we choose other works that have tried to solve this confirmation time problem they have gone for a completely new block chain structure so they have DAG based block chains so block may have more than one parent or hierarchies of block chains or even multiple parallel block chains these solutions like kind of lose the simple linear organization of blocks and cannot be an incremental solution to existing widely used block chains like bitcoin that have so much TVL locked in them so how do we scale how do we bring the best of security and performance when we talk about scaling there are two ways of scaling there is one is improving the transaction throughput that is you have more you can add more transactions in unit time to the blockchain and the second way of going about it is improving the confirmation time reducing the confirmation time of a single transaction or confirming more transactions in unit time so these are the two ways in which we can scale a blockchain and in this work we focus on the second way that is improving the confirmation time transaction throughput constant and without compromising on the security aspect so what do we mean by that so let's set some goals we want to reduce the confirmation time at a fixed transaction throughput we want to reduce the number of natural folks formed and at each each book we want to reduce the weight or friend we want to also if the in case of natural or adversity folks we want to remove them as quickly as possible to improve stain chain stability and we want to achieve all of this without with minor modifications to the existing architecture so that it benefits existing and even new proof of work block chains which may come in the future so intuitively we can see that the first and the third goal right in producing confirmation time and quickly resolving changed folks to improve chain stability if the honest chain grows at a fast steady and fast rate and this the second goal of reducing the number of folks can be improved if the propagation delays are improved and the weight or friend at each fork is lower so one of our solutions is called anchors and we'll see how they work so I want to introduce anchors here anchors are basically structures that are fast small and even compared to blocks they're essentially just block headers that are mined with less proof of work than blocks so what do I mean by that so again let's come back to our target diagram we have the set of all possible solutions here in this in this by chart the green sector represents all the valid solutions for blocks that is like I mentioned like first 40 bits of zero or sorry the blue sector represents the set of valid block solutions that is the set of first 40 bits of zeros the green sector represents the set of anchor solutions which are much easier to find than blocks so we can say that only the first 20 or first 10 should be zero or they shouldn't overlap so let's say the last 10 should be zeros so they are non overlapping set of solutions that are formed with the same puzzle but anchor solutions are much easier to find so they are more frequent than blocks so how they attach themselves to the blockchains are also fairly simple so this is a blockchain without anchors and the second represents a blockchain with anchors anchors are small structures as I just described and they attach themselves to each block on the blockchain and their mind that is their mind on top of an existing block anchors cannot be mined on themselves they cannot be formed their structure is very similar to the block structure they have a header and a body the header is pretty much same as what a block is but the body is void of any transactions except the coin based transaction which is used to identify the creator of the anchor but apart from that there are no transactions which make them significantly small in size so in bitcoin without the transactions which is the bulk of the block the anchor size would just be 264 bytes with the coin base transaction so since they are so small in size they are very fast to propagate across the network so let's see how anchors can help us achieve these goals because they are faster smaller and more frequent they are reusable solution and they cost no overheads and they cannot create books so how are anchors generated and used with the system let's take the example of minor Alice again minor Alice has a local view of the blockchain here and she is mining on the heaviest block known to her we notice that there are already some anchors on each of these blocks she's created a valid solution here and she wants to know if this solution is a valid solution she's created a block by collating all the transaction she wants to know if this is a valid solution so she's created the block like this and she's added the nonce value X here she checks whether she hashes this nonce header and checks whether it complies with the block target if it does not before moving on she checks the same nonce value for the anchor target and if it is a valid solution for the anchor target she can immediately publish add this structure as an anchor and broadcast it to the others in the network note that when she's broadcasting she will remove all the transactions here and the header will remain the same because that is what she has hashed to find the target and she will not change the values in the header so the proof of work difficulty would be for that of a block that she was trying to mine and the Merkel route would represent the hash with all the transactions in the body so in order for the receiver to verify that this header is indeed a valid for this solution she has to send the set of hashes also that will allow the receiver to verify this header so what has happened now is Alice can recalculate the weight of the blockchain so she has a set of blocks each block has a set of anchors so the weight of the blockchain would just be the weight some of the weight of all the blocks and some of the weight of all the anchors in each block so the weight of an anchor is basically alpha which is basically the inverse of the frequency in which we have anchors and blocks arrive for every block on average we set this puzzle such that anchors are 10 times easier to mine than blocks then its weight would be 10 times less of that of a block so now Barat has received Alice's entity and he doesn't know whether it is a valid solution or whether it is a block or an anchor so he would follow a similar procedure to find out whether it is a valid solution he can see the header and he will check if the nonce value X complies with the block target if not he would check the same nonce value if it complies with an anchor target and apart from this he also has to check whether this coin base belongs to this header so we have also received the transaction hash which is all the siblings of the Merkle tree that is there in the body so he would basically just combine the coin base and the transaction hash and hash it and check whether that value is the same as the Merkle root in the header and if it is it is a valid it is a valid anchor so now in addition if the addition of the new anchor creates a new heaviest chain in the tree of blocks that Barat has Barat would simply move to mining on top of the parent of the anchor which is the tip of the heaviest chain so I just briefly covered what anchors are so let's see why how anchors actually achieve the goals that we said earlier so to do that we built a reference implementation of bitcoin on a 210 node setup to benchmark the performance of bitcoin with anchors to bitcoin without anchors I'll briefly explain this network setup so we have about 36 virtual machines on our cloud and one machine is just for setup calculations logs and all of that the other 35 VMs have 6 bitcoin demons running in each VM so our experiments so we don't want to do proof of work because that is energy consuming and it's useless for experimentations so we have a script on each VM that will periodically generate at the set interval the required number of transactions to have healthy network flow and script to generate blocks and anchors also at the set interval every VM the path between every VM has a delay that is set to mimic some real world entities so how we do that is we took global ping statistics and for each VM we allotted a city to it all over across the globe so just a set of 20 is shown here but just for example so let's say that so each VM represents a city in the world and the network is created randomly by assigning every node to four to other nodes across VMs as its neighbors so this is how the internet functions so and we set the delays manually between each VM so let's say the delay between Sydney and London is set as 281.41 milliseconds so anchors being fixed small structures should have low broadcast latency so here's some maths to see why that is consider this delay model let's say the back let's take two nodes call them INJ the bandwidth between these nodes let's call it Cij and the speed of light delay between the nodes let's call it Dij so the total time required to transfer a message from a node i to a node j will be this expression shown here so in this model the first bit of the message will take will take about will take Dij time to travel across the network and the remaining chunk of the message will take the fraction by Cij to for it to reach the PRJ and then PRJ will validate it with KM so we'll assume that the verification time the validation time is proportional to the size of message so we've just put some proportionality constant here and M is the size of the message so if you see the total time is taken is directly proportional to the size of the message M right so now the total time to broadcast will be the sum of such delays on a pure level path from the origin to the destination till the last pure receives that message so due to the small size of anchors anchors will mainly consist of the speed of light delays and it will be much lower than what it is for blocks so we also experimentally verify this and to see size really matters we check the propagation times of blocks at different sizes and we can clearly see that block propagation time increases linearly as the block size increases so now let's add anchors to the system and see how propagation time is affected we see that with the inclusion of anchors the blue section represents the 95 percentile of the block propagation time and with the anchors we see that they take about half a second to propagate across the network till it reaches 95 percent of the nodes and the block propagation time with anchors is not significantly affected even with 10 anchors which is a really large number we see that it is block propagation time still is there within the range propagation time it would have had without anchors so we control that anchors well anchors work well with the system without creating significant bandwidth or latency overheads so let's come to resolving our goals let's go backwards this time so the goal 3 was to quickly resolve folks and improves change stability so now before we knew that we again come to the two views of the blockchains that we had earlier that is Alice and Bharath have their own views and people are divided in the network in choosing between Alice's and Bharath's chain so earlier we had to wait for Chandru to create the next block on the blockchain which could because of large block intervals could take a lot of time but now somebody if they just create an anchor on one of the chains there is this delta increase in the weight of one of the chains and immediately the network can move to one the heaviest chain so again explaining that same process so let's say there's a block B1 B0 and a fork has formed with block B1 and B2 so ideally to resolve this fork we would have had to wait for block B3 which comes at T0 plus 9 time but we know that anchors are produced faster and they're smaller in size which will make them reach the network much faster that is created at a much earlier stage on one of the blocks and the fork is resolved at T plus 6 instead of T plus 9 so we calculate the resolution time of forks between every minor difference when the time difference between the time the fork was realized on the chain and the time the next block or anchor came on that chain and effectively resolving the fork and we saw that with the inclusion of anchors the fork resolution time was much lower than without anchors zero represents without anchors case and with increase in frequency of anchors this rate just decreases so the hypothesis is proved that fork resolution times are significantly improved so our second goal was to reduce the number of forks and wait often by them so let's consider the scenario here there is a block B0 and a block B1 has been mined on top of it and let's say block B2 is also mined so when block B2 arrives it would have cost of work but what has happened is before block B2 has been generated and anchor was generated on B1 so the chain containing block B1 already has a slightly higher weight so even when block B2 arrives the network would just simply discard it because there exists a heavier chain so we look at the number of such scenarios from the logs of our experiment and calculate the percentage of the forks that we were able to prevent with anchors and again as we see obviously no forks were prevented when anchors are 0 but as a frequency of anchors increases we saw that higher number of forks were able to prevent higher number of forks effectively reducing the total number of forks in the system improving security switching from the experimentation side to theory for the final goal which is to reduce the confirmation time I'm just going to add a few notations over here we'll call delta B as the maximum delay for a block to reach everyone on the network and delta A is the maximum delay for anchors to reach everyone on the network but as explained experimentally and with our delay model we know that the delay for anchors is much less than the delay for blocks and we also introduced an iteration alpha earlier which is the weight of anchors over and it is basically 1 over A which is the frequency of anchors per block so we in our experiments in our theoretical experiment we say that this whole blockchain process is in time rounds and the probability of getting an honest block at any instant is probability G so there is a very famous paper by pass one of the earliest papers called analysis of the blockchain protocol in a synchronous network that talks about how the growth of a blockchain proof of work blockchain happens and pass found out that the lower bound honest growth rate that is regardless of any attacker in a partially synchronous network in a general adversary and regardless of what is happening in the network all honest chain all honest miners should grow by at least this much in unit that that is G by G delta V plus one so this is the amount in weight that all all honest chain should grow by so we did the same analysis for anchors and we saw that the honest growth rate by all minus regardless of what is happening in the network regardless of what the adversity is doing should be this amount so as you can see it is definitely higher than what it was before the first term is passed defined for blockchain without anchors and the first term is exactly this and what we just add on to it so we can say that the lower bound growth rate with anchors is much higher than the lower bound growth rate without anchors so anchors contribute to a better chain growth and this is important to achieve to help us achieve better chain stability and lower confirmation time and overall general security so let's recall the double spend attack that we saw earlier just to recall there is a transaction that has happened that is entered in block B1 it is accepted at block B6 and the the adversary is trying to minor chain to release this chain will be released after the block has been accepted so that all the miners will shift to this chain and he's free to double spend this transaction so if the honest lower bound rate is epsilon and the adversary upper bound this is the lower bound honest growth rate this is the upper bound adversary growth rate and if we assume that epsilon is greater than beta then as this K basically represents the number of confirmations or the number of block at which the confirmation should be accepted if epsilon is greater than beta and as K increases this probability of success of a double spend attack significantly decreases so with this analysis Nakamoto suggested K is equal to 6 to be the ideal number of time blocks we should wait but we want to know if anchors can help reduce this K is equal to 6 so we see that we can the dashed line represents the chance of a double spend attack without anchors at various adversary powers and of course when adversary owns 50% of the network he's short to 60 but we see that with the inclusion of anchors are just as equal to 2 the chance of the successful attack drops rapidly at the same K is equal to 6 the plots of K is equal to 3 without anchors aligns with K is equal to 6 without anchors this means that the confirmation time with anchors is half the confirmation time without anchors at the same security threshold so alternatively we can keep K is equal to 6 and enjoy a much greater security when we include anchors so here we can see that the goal of reducing confirmation time is also achieved so Nakamoto and many other researchers accepted K is equal to 6 as the standard block confirmation time but they did this analysis at a much earlier stage when they assumed that the maximum power that the adversary can control is 10% but now we have mining pools that vary between 17 to 23% so that analysis is no longer valid but they still wanted the probability of attacker success should be less than 0.001 right so we need to maintain that same security and bring the the confirmation time value more suited to the current times so that is one aspect but this probability of attack right it also significantly varies with the arrival of the 6th block we say that we need 6 block confirmation times and if the arrival of the blocks in the blockchain are 10 minutes apart then the 6th block would on average arrive at 60 minutes and it is shown in previous work that this is not always true the 6th block can even come much earlier or come much later so if we saw that the probability of the success varies by a factor of 2.6 with the delay in arrival of the 6th block by a mere 20 minutes than the expected 60 minute delay and by a factor of 12 when the 6th block arrives about an hour late and the expected 60 minutes so this is assuming that the attacker still controls 10% of the power so this graph shows that with the inclusion of anchors even with the so 60 minutes is the expected arrival even at 120 minutes we see that anchors probability of success is much lower than what the adversary would have had without anchors so that's it let's just summarize anchors were able to provide stability a steady weight addition to the chain they were 5 times faster than block propagation they were able to reduce the confirmation time by half without any security compromise they also served as a fast signaling mechanism in terms of in forks so that the forks were able to resolve quickly and the resolution time of forks decreased and they are a versatile solution because they piggyback on existing method of finding the proof for personal so we were able to achieve the three course so that brings me to my to the end of my talk I'll be happy to take questions thank you that was really informative I don't see any questions in the Q&A if anybody is having questions feel free to post it in the Q&A section I think what you can do always you can stay here for some time and if there are any questions in the Q&A you can pick them up thank you so much it was really informative thank you for joining us today thank you Nethi now I'll hand it over to Ritu for the next panel discussion sure, thank you so much I think this has been really great research and wonderfully taken up at least people who are not very technical even they can understand so it was very nice thank you so much Oviya and thank you Nithi for taking us through this one so I will quickly do a quick puzzle or a game or whatever you think of so I am going to give some names transparent supply chains maybe renewable energy trading carbon footprint tracking maybe sustainable agriculture or waste management talk about healthcare data exchange clinical trials does this anything make sense to you can you spot what I am talking about either cases keep listening we have blockchain beyond books we will talk about the real world application on the sustainability and the healthcare warm welcome again one yet another panel discussion and today we will talk about the exciting opportunity to explore how blockchain technology can really leverage or drive the positive change of two critical sectors one is sustainability the other is healthcare as we see facing a lot of complex challenges that demand quite an innovative solutions blockchain as we all know it offers a promising framework to address these challenges by enabling traceability, data integrity data privacy and the decentralized collaboration so let's talk about how blockchain can empower say for example patients enhance the data privacy or facilitate the secure sharing of medical information while maintaining the compliance and the regulation so we have again with us quite a distinguished panel of experts that are going to share their insights their experiences, their success stories something good some bad right beyond books is what we are going to do in this panel discussion and I encourage all of you to participate actively you know you can write your questions on the chat box and we will take it up by the end of this panel discussion alright so I will quickly brief out who are there on the panel today and I am very happy to be announcing their names and I will do a quick brief intro about who they are so all of us know we have Surabhi she is joining as co-founder of Dignify it's a full stack climate credit infrastructure on blockchain and she is a fintech professional with expertise in implementing sustainable credit transactions using frontier technologies like blockchain IoT, computer vision and remote sensing wow earlier in her career she has also executed more than 2 billion of structured credit transactions that's amazing Surabhi thank you so much for joining us we have Shilpa Sude joining as from HCL technologies she is into digital marketing solutions she is leading that and she has experience in digital transformation customer experience solution with a focus on marketing automation, customer data analytics and blockchain and she has been working in CDPs metaverses and blockchain thank you Shilpa for joining us next we have Srishti Srishti has been 17 years experience in technology as a technology sales leader she is an entrepreneur and she has worked as a director for settlement she has been featured as one of the most influential blockchain leaders last year 2022 and top women blockchain leader by international virtual summit women frontier in 2021 Srishti has been involved with startups as a chief revenue officer mentor, co-contributor and a program director so very happy to have you Srishti here on the panel thank you so much for taking our time pleasure thank you last but not the least is Hina Venugopal she is joining us at really very odd times thank you so much Hina for staying up that late or waking up that early thank you very much she is joining us as innovation strategy director she is at DTCC and she has immense experience on enterprise blockchain as she leads innovation strategy for project IN which at least I know of is a top 10 blockchain projects in Forbes rating rankings she has been an author she works very passionately on a lot of initiatives like she has been associated with metagen coin on harvard innovation president's challenge it was a semi-finalist protocol metaforest, metaversity classes, building sustainable communities and recycling carbon neutral elements so happy to have all of you here it's a privilege it's an honour to actually talk about this subject with all of you in doing wonderful in this area so let me just quickly start with what do you think are the positive impacts on sustainability efforts considering the kind of carbon emissions or increasing the sustainability transparency on the supply chain maybe Srishti you want to talk about that very quickly yeah sure I'd just like to share that blockchain technology is for the last few years I would say at least the last five years is offering new opportunities to improve the sustainability efforts with regard to improving the emission tracking and also the another way of course is that we are tokenising the environmental credits enabling marketplaces and all these efforts are not only innovating new models, segregating the silos the fragmented information which is there but also providing a transparency with respect to the auditability that the solution provides as well as the accountability for particularly for the organisations and corporates while they are claiming their sustainability claims for organisations and globally this has become important and it's in the purview of large organisations like even United Nations and credit registries like Vera and Gold Standard where this technology blockchain because of its inherent capabilities is being realised to improve the sustainability efforts so these are some of the areas of course where it's having impact but very recently of course also the impact is seen in the traceability of plastic productions also in reforestation efforts we had recently done one POC in Europe regarding that and also from the environmental assets wonderful that's quite quite an information to digest thank you Hina or Surabhi or Shilpa maybe any one of you who want to go next and talk about positive impact sure Srishti that was very comprehensive and you covered mostly all the points that was very brilliant and just before we start thank you for all the panellists it was very insightful and brilliant discussions to see a lot of women discussing and brainstorming brilliant solutions on blockchain so thank you for organising this so sustainability when you talk about sustainability and blockchain we all agree that climate change is real and urgent action is required immediately so one of the main applications in sustainability when you really talk about blockchain is traceability because everybody is interested in knowing about who made my address where did it come from or if I'm eating some food what ingredients are in this food we all want to know the trace of that from the farm to the table or to the consumer we all want to know the entire trace so for these moments of tracing from the farm to the consumer the only way to do it is to have a validated trustable chain and that is where the blockchain comes into because it has the trusted validated immutable transactions so it is immutable and what is the other advantage of being in blockchain because the data is a decentralized distributed ledger because the data is distributed consistently across all the required participants so those are the two main advantages why the traceability and auditability is important and how it is relevant on a blockchain that immutability due to the hashing and also the decentralized distribution the blockchain is helping us to create the traceability so when you talk about a sustainable fashion example just for everybody to understand so when you talk about address let's talk about a cotton shirt the cotton from a farm from the seed to the farmer the farmer the cotton is bailed into bail or module and the module will have an RFID and RFID will show the exact credentials and the format originated from what location the longitude latitude of that farm everything because when you talk about organic farming it is divided hecto wise and some farms can have mixed cultivation etc so that RFID that bail with the RFID will be transferred to the ginner where it removes the seed and then the ginning goes to the spinning so everywhere that RFID on the spinning the cotton processing is a global process that can go to some other country through a container so the container can have IoT and that data is again being tracked and then the IoT then goes to the vet processing the designing or the graphics and the garment protection itself and when you produce a garment or the apparel like you're having a digital tag or an NFC that's called a near field communication and that NFC is also again a tag which can be attached to the blockchain so the NFC NFC apparel which is a digital apparel will move to the retailer the wholesaler retailer and to the consumer and once it is in the consumer the token is being changed the ownership is being changed to the consumers name so you can see like the entire process from the seed from the farm to the consumer is being having a digital twin on the blockchain and that is how it is traced end-to-end right so that's like a wonderful process very efficient process and that is where the sustainable fashion is heading towards and there are a lot of blockchain solutions already which is already creating it and we are so in the future which is also a digital apparel company so we are working on that solution as well the other advantage which Srishti just touched on is also the NFT of trees or biodiversity so there are companies like Rebalance and when we like the Metogen Dow we have the Meta NFT trees where we were the semi-finalist for the Harvard Innovation Labs President's Challenge so basically we tokenize each tree and each tree in that farm is being observed by the satellite imagery and we will have each data once the tree is six feet it is tokenized and the data will be like what is the growth rate, what is the humidity, what is the temperature all the soil conditions are being traced by the satellite imagery and tracked with that blockchain NFC tag so again the near field communication NFC tags and NFC tags can be multiple types of NFC tags so depending on whether it's outside, whether it's washable whether it's on fabric all there are various kinds so that NFC tag again the data is stored on the blockchain it can be on polygon it can be any of those blockchains so that is those are the two and again biodiversity animals like elephants are excellent carbon sequestrators so elephants or whales there are many animals which are being biodiverse animals which are being traced by devices and they are on blockchain just so I know rebalance earth desktop there are many companies which which adds value to our sustainability and towards climate action and we all rely on blockchain so it's wonderful to discuss that yeah I completely you know agree with almost all the points which you have brought and you know if we take a look at the current scenario something without blockchain people I mean at least here in India you are giving more money to be organic but then there is no probability even though you are you don't know if it is going to I don't mind giving extra bucks but then are they really provable are they really being generated from the sustainable practices that's something which is really lacking that's a wonderful point Ritu yeah so on the blockchain itself you can have the validators or the certifiers like fair trade like the recycle recycling wrap there are many companies which are already certifiers on the blockchain itself so they can be validators and we can attach the certificates to that as well yeah certificates also could be something really I mean for sure so we can talk about it a bit more yeah number one so happy to be in this amongst in the company or such esteemed women in blockchain so it's really a very unique platform so congratulations to hybrid ledger India chapter Ritu and everybody else amazing initiative and very happy to be here and grateful to be able to talk in front of such esteemed set of women leaders I think both Srishti and Hina really covered it very well the only thing and the only perspective I think I want to bring in is here when you are trying to solve very very big problems like which is earth scale problem world size problem which requires various stakeholders who come on a platform and interact with each other in a trust less manner right so there are stakeholders like there are regulators then there are registries then there are national body then there are start-ups there are companies and there are individuals right and then you have scope 1 scope 2 scope 3 I mean there is some jargon but it's basically like a way to measure emissions in your supply chain correct so when you have to get so many parties on a platform not even on a platform but I would say that when so many parties need to collaborate with each other and work with each other and in a trust less manner there is no other platform other than blockchain which can actually successfully execute it so I will give an example for example we have started to see carbon tax come into picture right and it has started in Europe because they have a net zero target of 2030 very soon a lot of other countries will also have their own carbon taxes and border taxes being implemented so when Europe has come up with the C-Bam and it's known as carbon border that's just a mechanism wherein they want the importers in Europe to actually declare carbon emissions or presence of carbon in their supply chain from there where they are importing the good so basically how much carbon does a good have and if it has that much of carbon then you have to pay that much of tax so such kind of monetary implications have started to take place and it can be a very big implication on the financial services industry as well because it takes into account your P&L, your balance sheet, everything will go for a price so then we have such big problems and then we have financial issues coming in monetary penalties being put on companies for their emissions which are real penalties and loss of business otherwise then we would require such solutions wherein startups or companies can create such mechanism wherein in a trustless manner data can be traced as rightly pointed out by both Hina and Srishti it can be traced, it can be tracked, it can be immutably locked and we can have a network which can work together collaboratively to make it more useful so that's from my side Just like to add one thing here to what Surbhi is saying I think she has concluded it very well but I think this all initiation is coming from the fact that the global temperatures are rising and it's estimated that the temperature increase going to be somewhere around 2.7 degrees so it's like as per the Paris agreement also and now COP28 is also coming in December there is a global effort towards halfing the emissions and it's realized globally that this technology blockchain because of its capability can actually help innovate models which would help in monitoring the data usage and also auditing so I think that's why you know how we can monitor the load which is there and also the generation and the distribution of these environmental credits which are there Just to add one thing to it you know when you're measuring it's also as Surbhi mentioned you know the bodies that are measuring and the trust in those bodies because it's not just the manufacturer it's manufacture of multiple products coming together it's the supply chain providers it's the governments that are giving data and no report is actually at this point trust of whether those efforts have been actually met and blockchain provides that platform that data we are getting from is trustworthy it's transparent it can be analyzed and it can be used as a basis here or here to see whether we are moving in the right direction or not I think that's what blockchain does because there's so many providers not just government bodies but if you imagine manufacturing of one mobile phone there are just so many smaller components that go into it some are coming from some mines which might not have sustainable practices right they are coming from regions which have terrorist activity so to say we don't know where those smaller parts are coming from and I think these blockchain allows us to track whether every smallest part in a combined product that we are getting at the end of the day and then disposition of that product you know where did it end we manufacture it sustainably but did we dispose of it sustainably as well so that entire chain it's such a large chain I don't think one body or any kind of you know organization one organization can be responsible for it beautiful yeah I think we all agree on all the points you guys spoke of so maybe I want to talk about on the healthcare side so maybe Srishti you want to talk about how the blockchain technology can basically improve the accessibility say the security the kind of data privacy we need or the accuracy of the healthcare records patient care in general what do you think sure so I think healthcare has become very very important predominantly after the covid area where you know there's been a lot of interest and it's become a barrogate of governments particularly but I would start with mentioning here that in the current ecosystems in developing countries there is a limitation of how the assets are being managed and in the healthcare sector particularly the assets are very critical I mean the way their location the place and also the aspects of the serviceability and maintenance there have been instances in the covid area where in critical scenarios equipments even present were not locatable and traceable so that's one area where asset management needs to be interoperable among the ecosystem members and that needs to be very closely linked with the patient data and the electronic health records we did a similar BOC in one of the state governments in India where we deployed it was a consortium of around 7 hospitals which were having medical institutions as well as hospitals which were treating pro bono to citizens where we deployed a hospital the asset management over a blockchain system integrated with it an IHMS which is the patient care management system so that the entire data of the patient while it goes through clinical records any kind of clinical records is integrated for accessibility towards the doctors as well as even the usage of medicines another problem which was solved using this technology is also the fraud which was happening in those areas from the commercial aspects of pricing of the sale of the medicine so that was another problem that was solved so I think these are areas where a blockchain ecosystem can solve for benefits for operational benefits as well as also the patient data which is there and once this is interoperable between the government entities I think there will be larger benefits for even the patients as well as also from a perspective of clinical trials where this information can actually be used for R&D purposes and developments of other products which is actually a very complex area currently and a limitation where different stakeholders like the pharmaceuticals as well as the insurance providers are actually struggling to get credible authenticated data which can of course be validated by using maybe verifiable credentials or as a society there are different identity solutions available within a blockchain ecosystem and not only from an identity perspective but also from a consent perspective these benefits can be taken care of. Today even I have seen especially in the clinical trials the kids right the consent is not provided on trying the drugs and the parents are not brought in in the consent as well so I think that definitely you know really helps in the clinical trials as well as you also pointed out Shilpa you want to give it a try. So as Shristi clearly mentioned assets are very important given you know for countries like India or probably other countries where the limited resources in terms of the machines the operational technical sets that are needed even doctors for that matter who has expertise on certain areas the traceability of that knowledge is essential in cases you need some product someplace another is you know on the drug manufacturing side drug provenance what is the drug being administered are they expired not expired what's the whole chain maintained when they were being transported can they be given vaccinations are another important point how many vaccinations are available when they are administered so multiple use cases when it comes to not just patient health patient data site but also all healthcare assets including drugs because there are a lot of cases we've seen where expired vaccinations have been administered or in that case fake products or you know products which were just you know sailing in medical terms was administered or they had you know certain drugs mixes that are not allowed so there are a lot of these cases which and this is more prevalent in countries that manufacture because there's already manufacturing facilities and they're just distributed I think this blockchain allows us to track what's going in each of the drug that is being administered at the lowest level right it's that availability of that data to be checked by whoever is administering the drug and it takes away the control from you know certain parties or health inspectors to and check whether that chain was maintained so it gives the power back to the consumers essentially to know what they are taking when they are taking is it right or not absolutely I think I can't agree more on all the small nuances which you have you know touched Shilpa so what do we really think in terms of the kind of challenges or barriers we see when we start implementing these solutions say maybe on the sustainability or look at even the pure supply chain as we were talking and the kind of you know what I have seen at least at the initial side is it's more bigger a challenge to shift the mind I mean the mind shift is something which is a bigger challenge forget about the technological challenges or the capability of all of those so that's something which you know I feel what you what what do you guys think you know you want to try sure yeah the culture shift or the shift of mind as you said rightly Ritu is huge other than that like you know even the traceability tracking is one of the main advantage of blockchain what we talk about but the carbon footprint off blockchain itself is a huge issue right when you talk about mining and processing multiple copies of the same data at multiple validators and multiple miners you know it creates like so much of you know the data footprint or the carbon footprint by processing and data transfers so that's like a huge problem and it's a huge impact for the carbon footprint itself so you know when you talk about proof of work so many of our blockchains are moving from proof of work to proof of stake so for example after the COP 27 like many blockchain associations like Polygon of etc have formed the Ethereum climate platform and they all are moving towards that more sustainable practices and how can we make it a carbon neutral blockchain etc and also the zero knowledge validity proves also a batching transaction so when you talk about how can you really you know layer the transactions and first batch the transactions and then send only the batch transactions to the main chain or the EVM to process it so all of that helps us to make it much more efficient from the processing standpoint not just by the speed also by the CPU and the processing power so it reduces the carbon footprint itself so those are some of the initiatives which we are you know to overcome the challenge of the increased carbon footprint of the blockchain right so the other thing which you know is mainly one of the other challenges regulations or the lack of regulations so we are kind of like in the 1990s where internet was it is blockchain is kind of in the infancy still and you know how can we really add regulations and who are the real people like we are talking about when you talk about DAOs or decentralized autonomous organizations to really regulate a blockchain or a consortium like who are the members who are the key players how do we assign the voting rights all of that right all of those are still being you know brainstormed exactly I think one of the points I would definitely you know agree with you is on the way the technology also is evolving you know we have on proof of work and then we need to proof of stake we have you know Shanghai update coming in and all of those and then moving from optimistic rollups to ZK rollups which definitely you know really we are improving we are on the path and I would absolutely agree too we want to no great I absolutely agree with both Hina and you said I think the more we keep the user away from the technology whoever is either interacting with the application on giving data the more we can do that as builders the better success more successful we will be it should be I mean and not many people and not many companies are working towards it but keeping the user the technology away from the user they shouldn't be seeing what technology or what kind of architecture there is that should be the real that should bring a lot of adoption and success to the entire initiative and when we say about data recording data recording is still because you are recording data and these days there are so many technologies RFID somebody spoke about then you have IoT where directly data can be read so if the user is not interacting with the application in terms of feeding the data then the data directly goes to the block and it is recorded and it is not that big a challenge at that point of time as long as the user is not interacting but I mean as much as we say that users are required to come at some point of time and interact with the application say user ID or they want to fill in number of hours or anything at that point of time we need to make sure that the applications are built in such a manner such that technology doesn't come in between the real world that we want to do that is one thing the other thing is also challenges with respect to friction in things which are getting resolved gradually but in terms of wallets using wallets it's not everybody cannot use a wallet it's a challenge for example we were looking at a project in which we were to work with micro entrepreneurs women entrepreneurs in hinterlands of India and when we talk about that kind of a segment if you want them to open a wallet then the application is lost you cannot expect them to open a wallet so those kind of things in which we can solve for real challenges on the ground then other thing would be on our firm right I know that companies are trying to do and there are a lot of companies which are building for it but still there are a lot of other stakeholders involved as far as on our firms are concerned because each country has their own laws and regulations also which are built in so that's another addiction point wherein we are having an average user not interact with the LTLT application or a blockchain application that's where I see the challenge in terms of usability and obviously as already Hina pointed out that regulations is important having a uniform set of regulation wherein we know the borders if I know what border I have to build in it gives me a lot of flexibility to build if the border is not defined then it becomes very difficult for me and also for the users so I think these are the few things which I see as the I would like to add one thing here to what Surbhi is saying I think it's been covered really well by Hina and Surbhi but where I feel in my experience at face challenges is while we realize the potential the technology has but largely the impact can only come when there is a consortium in place and there is a governance around it so we already spoke about the challenges that we have with respect to the governance perspective but enabling consortium I think is one of the large challenges whether it is supply chain if you talk about even an upstream traceability for any product or if we talk about trade finance whether it's in a banking system or it's in a shipping industry where actually the benefit is directly having ROI impacts to double digits for industry folks but where are we stuck is again getting the consortium in place getting a governance in place so those I think are other big challenges when we talk about production rollouts in place this can of course also be associated with even KYC, CKYC efforts which are being done in consortium by different banks in different countries and it's being done in the countries also and last but not least I feel that like we said that we are in an infancy stage I think Hina mentioned that the maturity like I've been in blockchain now over three years particularly in India space and I started my interactions with clarifying that blockchain is not Bitcoin but so and now it's a stage where we are actually discussing there is a national blockchain strategy in India there is a national blockchain framework there is government rollout so I think the maturity has definitely increased we might not be at that level where maybe North America is or say Europe is but that maturity globally for the technology and the acceptances care but I think again the challenge here is there's a lot of work done by associations and by global think tanks in creating an awareness of the technology so that people understand the benefit at ground levels and then that really would help even in adoption like you know Hina mentioned because we also did one ground level root deployment in one of the states where it was a traceability solution for farmers so even in that for the farmer it was clear the question was where is the blockchain because it was like a mobile app or an android app which was given to them and the experience was similar to any other app so but they were wondering what is special about it because there was such a hula who about that this is something special and this is not there so I think what Hina mentioned is completely correct but I think these are the areas I think in the next few years we will be in a much much better position in rollouts. Yeah I think from Surabhi's point of view it should be a really successful implementation because as she was just mentioning people should not technology should not come in between technologies should actually help the users the next mile and you know when Surabhi you were talking I was also thinking about the kind of account abstraction which has been as a part of you know see like her challenges are like what because we were also like on-ramp off-ramp you know you have to convert fear into maybe Ethereum and then you have to get that arbitrage done so of course those are real-time tech challenges which the user would not even understand for talking yeah Hina you want to say something no I was just when she was talking about the conversion I was just thinking about the metaverse fashion week so my future it was like two months back so I was the one who was curating my collection and you know minting and adding it to the marketplace so the conversion of that Ethereum to the mana it was like very difficult and as Srishti was saying so for me it was difficult to do that so just talk about a normal user who doesn't even know what a wallet is we are very early and you know this is for sure this is kind of a mantra that we are extremely early and that's actually good thing also in one aspect right the more you can do you can see the entire journey also but at least I could see that interoperability in play there like you know when the gas business was very high on Ethereum chain Decent Reliant will ask me do you want to do one polygon do you want to go to mana or you know something like that so that interoperability was there that is the direction which we have to move forward more you know interoperability and combatability with different metaverses and different cryptos and all that alright yeah I completely I completely you know resonate with almost everything you guys are saying I've got so many points and just trying to in my mind and say it possibly so I'll quickly want to talk about maybe beyond sustainability or healthcare what other industries or areas do we see as having more potential in blockchain in terms of innovation in terms of adoption you know I think definitely finance for sure and you know I work with project I own so enhancing the settlement using blockchain and having that traceability and also the you know the amount of money and the efforts used for reconciliation is huge in any industry right so just talk about finance like it is the most you know impacted industry so blockchain really reduces the need for reconciliation because the same data consistent data stored across right so and also like with exploding amounts of multiple types of digital assets now right so and so many different payment rails like you know to talk about digital dollars and digital currency and every country having its own digital currency etc and cryptos right so all of that like you know the the landscape itself is changing so blockchain plays a very important role and if you're talking about instant atomic settlements or through various payment rails of CVDCs or cryptos etc and also like there is like this international settlement or the cross-border settlement so all of that once we have a good consortium and once we are moving in the direction successfully but once we have all that you know it will really blockchain will really be the solution which will be a good fit for the international cross-border instant settlements and all that in finance which we are looking forward to we are still in the infancy and the other thing I can think about is like you know the sovereign ID or the decentralized ID huge applications on real estate title healthcare even water management system right I'm sure all of you have to talk about many of those as well so so we we are still parking so I was just saying I completely agree finance I think it has been one of the leaders in blockchain they've been trying blockchain for a long time but besides that supply chain is another one all logistics supply chain I think and that's the backbone of all industries so essentially where blockchain is being used another one is you know government because the government spending the level the government is spending the collaboration that government needs I think government in itself has huge utilization in all efforts whether it will be you know their efforts in education their efforts nutrition programs their efforts in healthcare programs all government programs as I mentioned all programs government can usually benefit from blockchain adoption processes and the technology in itself then just to add another one is entertainment all the art that is getting produced all the content that is getting produced and authenticity of all of that and also to benefit the creator of it because it spreads digitally so I think blockchain gives a good backbone to all the entertainers no matter what type of art they are producing whether you know whether it's online or offline blockchain is good for individual creators big company creators all of them to ensure that they get the money of what they've been working on all right so to be completely agree global finance and global trade which why is the entire world that is as Heena said and financial services has so many use cases actually if we look at which industries when we ask that question then structurally if I look at this question then which are the industries which require multiple parties to come together and rely on a set of rules and a set of truth right number one question number two that wherein we need a single source of truth number third wherein there is traceability tracking etc is required and there is high operational inefficiency is built in if there is any industry wherein which is struggling with these four issues blockchain is the answer so obviously meaning anything in the capital markets if you look at the leakages are very high so ultimate cost to the user is high because leakages in the operational inefficiencies is very very high then your documentation the way parties share documentation and global trade it is it is a long way to go actually in a global trade scenario similarly I mean parallel to finance wherein there are clearing settlement and it bonds innumerable ways in which finance can be improved other than that I see welfare programs and also education wherein there can be very large scale impactful applications of blockchain so for example welfare programs of which are being distributed to a large set of people and we need to trace and track where actually the welfare purpose went to whom it went what was the end usage of fun if you want to track and trace them this would be a very good method and very good tool actually to bring that veracity into the process and second would be the education sector right from we are from a developing country and we know that primary education is one of the biggest problem in our country at this point of time so if you want to improve the status of primary education in the country wherein we include our gun body workers and also panchayats sent back to the process and then create an educational system which has some kind of a chain of truths built in wherein we know that a student has gone through what all processes what all curriculum has been already inducted where exactly that would really give a big fill in to the agitation sector so these are the two which I think in addition to the others we have already talked about. Yeah I think that's very well mentioned I think capital markets is a very big area where in the financial services whether it's the private debt or it's the public market and the tokenization market now is doubted to be a trillion dollar market which includes the securities as well as the real world assets that's a big very big use case and of course like Surbhi mentioned traceability for the charity and donations is another relevant use case which is being used also for the sharing of subsidies across government so we did a use case which was for subsidy distribution of 26 countries across Sharia compliant countries so that these are very very good use cases and I think Surbhi put it really well where she explained the complete decision tree of blockchain which industry blockchain makes now you know you were saying something you know I was just saying brilliant insights from Srishti and Surabhi and Shilpa agreed and I allowed the point of Surabhi on the education and the need of adding even the Anganwadi workers and you know all the entire process into the trustable system I think I'll hear back or something I read that even the prime minister had in some of the IITs had you know done the certificates he did an inauguration that you know the certificates would be available on blockchain and I think that part so of course so I'll come to the next question where we talk about what goal do you guys see on the governments and you know the regulatory bodies they play in promoting the adoption and the development of blockchain technology we touched upon few of them but not in so much of detail in you can take about almost any industry right and what policies of frameworks there we might be you know necessary to support this group yeah regulations are like you know very important when you talk about the global adoption right so without and we as we are saying we are in infancy a clear lack of regulations and many of the failures which we have already tasted you know just talk about FTX right so definitely the governance and regulations are the two areas where I would say we need to put a lot of focus if we need global adoption otherwise people are going to be scared away and it's not it is the right right thing to do we need some regulations but what is the regulations being this being a decentralized autonomous technology that is the principle behind it so we need to understand like what is the amount right balance or the sweet spot between the regulated and the decentralized you know world so definitely if you ask for an example like if you're talking about environmental footprint right like so you have already mandated the product environment footprint PEF for almost all the organizations across EU so when you talk about how to calculate that PEF and if it's on blockchain like who are the certifiers who are the validators what are the regulations which encompasses that entire footprint calculation right how is it being validated who validates it so all that regulations like for any blockchain project or a firm all of it should be on smart contracts or it should be all machine readable governance or it should be automated governance on smart contracts etcetera right so those are those are the main things which we can think about when you talk about blockchain governance from my point go ahead I just love these kind of discussions you know speak and give wonderful it's been a great session actually it's it's a lovely plan and this is my third time at hyper ledger India you guys make it actually and I think this has been one of the most enjoyable sessions for me so it's a lovely session that is there I should go ahead and I wanted to add something to that so what Hina mentioned is yes government essentially on the regulation side but government if you look at any technology that we've had so far the private sectors develop the technology the governments expand it and take it to the roots to the basic level and expand it and make it a technology of the masses that cannot be done without the governance help in any technology that we've seen so far whether it would be even internet digital technologies digital wallets that we are seeing everything had been there for a few years before it got to the masses and only government has the ability to do it the private can only do so much you know and so I think like you know we talked about digital certificates on blockchain right that is taking something to the masses people who have nothing to do with blockchain suddenly have their certificates or their licenses on blockchain so it's a familiarity that comes in and government can push adoption through their own programs and it becomes an everyday word for people who are walking down the street and that brings in more and more people working on blockchain because everybody is doing it that's the only way adoption goes forward if the government says yes blockchain is where you know I have 5 programs 20 programs running on blockchain and everyday programs which makes it everyday word right now blockchain for everybody is it's something half of the people don't even know besides bitcoin the others who know beyond bitcoin are the people who are fearful of it because of bitcoin and they know okay there's something but it's something you know high tech something that doesn't concern us at all right so I think the government bridges that gap so it brings it to the people and the people use it in everyday language it's like pay-tm I see it like pay-tm exactly yeah I just like to put a different perspective to this I think when we talk about blockchain technology there are currently two aspects of it one is the technology itself which is the underlying infrastructure for the different applications and the other is the digital asset part of it the digital asset part is where we have a policy framework in place where globally in countries US has a framework in place with SEC putting different rules in Europe also London also Australia also has a regulation VARA is there in UA which is the virtual asset regulated so I think that's one regulation policy which is very important from a digital asset perspective because as a benefit from an ROI perspective I think in the financial services or the tokenization area that is where there is maximum benefit or utility real-world utility for the end user whether it is an entrepreneur or it's enterprise or it's a government entity so that's an area where there's a lot of work to be done and there are so many policy makers and individual associations and entities and foundations working towards it but the other is the structural layer and at a government level specifically I can talk about India there is a lot of work which is being done by the government there is a national blockchain framework where there are nodes being set up which can be used by different states and centers it's a five-year program there is a blockchain as a service model and then there are going to be different production rollouts which has been done the government has laid out use cases for e-governance in particular land registry use cases have been done there have been use cases which have been done on seed traceability amongst different states e-voting has been done so this is just you know this is a case to highlight that the technology is here to stay the government is using it for different areas the government has an intention to integrate this with the services used at scale which is adhar a digilocker so there is an integration plan to use the blockchain infrastructure so it in itself is an indication of the power of the technology and once we have a framework of the digital asset in place I think there is no stopping and we I think it's going to be a different world I think and just I think there is time restrictions but there's also a lot of work which is being done on the standards part of it like there is WSPC working on that I'm also part of international token standard association which is a European organization where we are creating token standards so there is a lot of work which is being done in silos and I think maybe three years or five years down the line we might be in a very different position wonderful just to add I think I completely agree with the entire panel on these things because when you have to innovate you need to know the borders and if the borders are defined then your playbook becomes much much much more simple you know that what are the boundaries so I think the biggest the best thing that the government is doing is basically bringing up the sandboxes so your innovation sandboxes your regulatory sandboxes wherein you are given a room to experiment and innovate in a very trusted and in a very private environment and you can then understand the impact of your product on other users and other parts of the chain if you were to bring this product out in the market at this point of time so definitely sandboxes are a great way we are also part of one sandbox in Telangana government where we are also going through and understanding what impact our product will have once it comes live and open what are the kind of regulations it is touching and what are the barriers that we have to understand before we launch the product so I think these are very important things other than this I think from user perspective there are few things we need to make sure as builders number one is also data privacy norms, data localization norms, compliance and user consent right when we talk about open ledgers exactly what data can be open and available for everybody to interact with you are seeing that data who has access to that data what kind of nodes do we have does regulator operate a node or not so this becomes privacy kind of issues become very important when we are talking about application which have financial impact and user consent impact where in the personal data is being shared like your PID data PII data is being shared these are some of the things that is already being worked upon but while building we need to make sure that we comply with these regulations which are there and completely India is working working on it and we sent in fact reserve anchor is a body called reserve anchor innovation called RBIH which is actually part of the subsidiary of reserve anchor of India they came up with a paper on interoperability of distributed ledger technology and they laid out the entire concept that how exactly it can be built how various systems and chains can be interoperable within the network so there is a lot of work being done both at the regulatory level and also at the government level and I think over a period of time once we have more clarity gradually we should know about the play book that we are allowed to operate in so I think that's what I have to add on this there is a question on the chat so can we answer here for you we can answer here so I think for the regulation again it depends on the country what kind of regulations are we talking about but when we talk about these technology solutions we really need to understand these are composable solutions and right now at government level there has been a lot of work which is being done where even the regulations part of it are actually codified into the smart contracts and being made part of the ledgers so that's the power of the technology here with open source platforms like hyper ledger there the entire hyper ledger umbrella to support our technology pioneers to build solutions so I think a lot of the regulation work with respect to different use cases is being sorted out like that and there are a lot of red tech solutions being created to cater to that but from a policy perspective I think at least in India from a digital is that there is no timeline per se because the government per se does not believe in anything which is associated with the word crypto so I think for India particularly there is no timeline but you talk about UAE or Dubai I think Hina can talk about US I think the regulations are in place and you can innovate and create new applications as desired the SCC and also and Dubai all of them are in place wonderful I think I stop here and say a big thank you to all of you Srishti this is going to be my favorite also because I am acting with all of you and I had so many points to talk about and a lot of things were coming while you guys were talking and it is amazing and I am going to repeat again all these sessions or discussions they are the best when they ask you to think even when these discussions are over you have points to think about I think those are the best discussions and this is one of those thank you so much for taking out time each one of you and please stay back here for I will hand over to Deepika Thank you all so much I love the panel discussion thank you so much thanks Ritu that was very well moderated I think we have a few attendees we will just see if they are ready for a panel discussion I mean now a networking session Nidhi do we have you on the