 So briefly, my name is Erica Bull, I work for the Global Development Incubator. We're a non-profit organization that builds new organizations in the social impact space. So those can be non-profits, for-profits, multi-stakeholder initiatives, alliances, investment vehicles, and we ultimately work and think about a systems approach for impact. So one of the reasons we're really excited to be having this conversation today is we think blockchain has a huge opportunity for impact in the development space. We also think it's very early in its development and that there are a lot of unanswered questions. So three things that we want to do today in the conversation over the next hour with these incredible guests that have joined me. First is share what blockchain is. We want to set the stage in terms of rough understanding of the technology. We're not going to get into the nitty-gritty of it, but we do want to start off with a baseline. The second is highlight tangible examples of use cases, of what it means for emerging markets and what it means to drive impact. There's a little bit of a conversation going on right now where it's a hammer looking for problems and we want to have a frank conversation about the merits of that. Thirdly is to discuss blockchain and its potential implication for venture capital overall, what it means for the 220 structure, what it means to democratize the fundraising process for entrepreneurs. So quickly I'm going to pass it off and ask for introductions from the panelists here. First your name, organization, and what brings you to the impact space, as well as a quick explanation of if you were to describe blockchain to your grandma, what would that example be? Hi everyone. It's great to be out here. My name is Shane Ninai. I am with Day One Investments. We're a venture capital fund based out of Silicon Valley, San Mateo specifically, and Port Moresby in Papua New Guinea. Why Papua New Guinea? Well, I am from Papua New Guinea. But basically what it is that we do, we're a blockchain venture capital fund. So we invest in basically across the board anything to do with the blockchain. But we take that one step further and we're specifically focused on bringing the blockchain to emerging markets and developing nations such as Papua New Guinea, mostly because we are of the opinion that this represents the biggest leapfrogging opportunity that a country like mine has ever seen. So just to the next question about how I'd explain the blockchain to my grandmother, I've been asked this question a lot. And frankly, I think it's a trick question. My grandmother is a 80 year old Papua New Guinea woman. So I try not to get into these kind of conversations with her. I just explain it as the internet, but faster, cheaper, better and more accessible allows better things to happen. But I guess just in general, if I was to maybe give a slightly more detailed explanation, I tend to use the example of what happens in villages. So I tend to use the example of imagine if a whole village every time you did anything, the village could see it and verify it all the time so that there was no way that anyone could lie that an event happened. And that usually resonates well, a lot better than trying to explain cryptographic proof. My name is John Carr. I'm with the Asia Foundation. And we're based here in San Francisco. The Asia Foundation has got a really long history in the Asia Pacific. And we have 18 offices across the region. And we've been in Asia for over 60 years. So we're a development organization, but it's a relatively small footprint when you compare it to other large multilateral organizations. Or World Bank or other big donors. We give grants and we support innovators and entrepreneurs in the region. And my work is focusing on technology and how we can use technology to enhance the impact of our programs and work with our partners in new ways and really reach more people at a level of scale that historically we were not able to do in previous eras. So in terms of describing this to my grandmother, unfortunately she's no longer with us, but maybe my mom, she lives in a suburb of North Bay. And I just would probably try to tell her if you could imagine all of the neighbors all maintaining a shared record. Sometimes you might not get along with your neighbors or you might not trust them. But blockchain is a mechanism that would allow the neighborhood to kind of work in a distributed but collaborative way to develop a consensus around that shared record so that everyone has the same valid record that is historically accurate and you would call it maybe immutable or unchangeable. So that might be the way I would go about it. Hi, everyone. My name is Jonathan. I'm from Seed Face Ventures. We run an early-stage tech fund out of Manila, Philippines, as well as San Francisco. I spend my time between the two regions. And we're focused on early-stage technology ventures, mainly in the emerging markets of Southeast Asia. So I have subsidiaries within throughout Southeast Asia, Papua New Guinea, and more so like Associates in Africa also. To explain blockchain to my grandmother, I would essentially put it plain and simple. Imagine a convenience store with no employees but they know your identity when you walk in and out of the store. You can pick it as you choose and it's recorded. So that's my pretty plain and simple explanation of what blockchain technology is. Thanks. So as you can see, diverse perspectives here. We have two venture capital funds in emerging markets. Not explicitly impact investors per se, but certainly working in many of the markets that folks that soak up here are working in. And Asia Foundation, we're in a slightly different hat coming from the philanthropic side. So a couple of parts, I guess, of the blockchain that we're really excited about that we think are interesting. First, and John, you touched on this, is the immutability that it can't be changed and the opportunity, what that means for questions of data, questions of identity. The second being distributed, that it's public and can be seen by everybody, everybody on the network. And the third, that it's verified, that it's trusted. It's not inherently trusted. People need to buy into the fact that it is trusted and that trust is shared across the network. But three prominent characteristics of blockchain, GDI that we see are really prominent in thinking about its applicability to impact use cases. So on that note, I want to ask you all in terms of some of the use cases that you're seeing for blockchain or distributed ledger attack overall, what are some of the use cases that you're most excited about? And if you can get to a granular perspective on the characteristics of blockchain, that make it possible, that make this new impact possible, as well as the type of impact for the cases that you're seeing. So just from, I guess, pushing that question first from the high level of what makes it so special now the impact before I go into the two use cases. So obviously coming from a country like Papua New Guinea, any time that there is a technology that is, I guess, trustworthy, impossible to, I guess, fiddle around or play with and is available to everyone, allows that for that distributed trust to happen, it immediately grasps our attention, simply because of the fact that there is a massive trust problem with a country like mine and most other emerging nations. Any time you can look to a database that is essentially immutable to kind of augment the, I guess, the gaps in the trust factor of government or companies, that's always very, very exciting. So in terms of why this technology makes such a big impact, it's because of the fact that, number one, I can record something and know that no one can lie to me about it. That in and of itself is huge. You know, I guess everyone here is very familiar with use cases like land or voting. Things where people die over these things. There are tribal clashes, things like that in many emerging markets and developing nations. So for me, the two use cases that I'm particularly excited about are land and voting. Now with land, I kind of started off with my blockchain journey in about 2010, 11. Back when I was in the University of Sydney, I was studying there and just investing in it. And at that time, I thought we were on the verge of this big kind of revolution powered to the people. After about two and a half years of trying to invest in this space and make things happen, I realized that there is a pivot. This technology, the way that I'm looking at it is where I thought it was gonna take off by making the guys at the local level, the villages, these kind of guys record their title on the blockchain land database. We've actually pivoted a lot. And what we're seeing is that the blockchain might not actually take off with the actual people that are investing or that are registering their land interests. It's actually gonna take off as an independent verification tool. So what I mean by that, it's actually gonna take off by getting law firms to actually take it up. That's where we're getting a lot of traction, mostly with our work. A lot of the guys that we go to, we go to villages, we go to local level governments, these kind of people to talk about the benefits. And while they appreciate it, there is a big gap between appreciation and actually using it. There's a massive gap there. Whereas talking to a law firm, within about a week, they're ready to move everything onto the system because they know it can save money, a lot of money. And so I guess in that scenario, that's where we're looking at blockchain land titles taking off is by getting guys like the law firms, guys like the banks, who can use this trusted verification tool as a way to make money to start off with. But then over time, what we're also seeing is that when the lawyers and the bankers start accepting this blockchain database, everyone else inherently starts trusting it too. And so now what happens is when they see this big law firm using it, suddenly all the local level governments, all the villages, start gaining trust in the system. So that's something that we're very excited about. We're very excited to see how that goes. And as for voting, that's always one that's exciting. That's kind of the panacea. That's what we're hoping in about 10, 15 years, that'll be the norm. At the moment now, I still think that there's quite a way to go before we can get governments completely behind it. But it's definitely still a use case that I'm very excited about. Good, so-so. Maybe I'll just use the mic. Okay, well at the foundation, as I mentioned before, we work in the region in Asia-Pacific. And so in many of the countries in which we work, we spend a lot of time thinking about middle income countries. And the challenge is that middle income countries encounter as they try to develop. So, you need to kind of think about that because when those countries go through the process of development, it's often sort of export-led growth where manufacturing plays a significant role in the transformation of society. The problem that we're thinking about now, and this is what drives our interest in blockchain, is those jobs are threatened by automation, by artificial intelligence, and by what some people refer to as the internet of things and many other new technologies that are going to create some headwinds for countries that would like to grow out of middle income status, but traditionally would have relied on export-led growth to do that. So, how do you create more dynamic economies and how do you connect more effectively with individuals who you might call, who might inhabit what we might call sort of the bottom of the pyramid? So, handicrafts and small, medium enterprises, micro-entrepreneurs, agriculture, small holder farms. This is a very large group of people and how do you draw them more into the process of development? How do you connect with them and how do you give them new tools so that they can be more productive members of society? So, one of the things that we're really interested in is the potential for blockchain in that regard and so new tools that allow us to do that thing are the things that get us excited. So, we're actually doing a couple of blockchain projects and we launched one just this week in Vietnam which is focused on exports and bilateral relations between Australia and Vietnam. The project focuses on export of dragon fruit and how can you track through the value chain through the export process that product so that food safety issues can be addressed and also perhaps an organic farmer would be able to tap into the value that they produce in farming organically and then make sure that they are able to capture value through the export process. So, how do you trace the provenance of a good through the process of creation to export to consumption? And blockchain, because of the nature of blockchain and its ability to sort of hand off information to different actors or different nodes in the blockchain makes it possible for new kinds of tracking of products through that process. And so, we're rolling out a project with the Ministry of Rural Development in Vietnam and we'll actually be demoing the pilot at the APEC leadership conference in November and that pilot will continue on for an additional six months and we'll assess and evaluate and we may then take it further. So, it's a very exciting project for us because again, it allows a producer maybe at the bottom of that process to perhaps capture more value just because their identity is known and they're able to ensure that they are producing safe, high quality goods or even high value added goods like organic products. So, I actually have a couple of other examples but I'm gonna cut it short because we need to keep this thing moving. One more, okay. So, another project that we're doing is a really, really exciting and interesting one just like the previous one in Nepal where migration is an issue. In Nepal, migrant workers go abroad to many different countries, particularly to Middle East and North Africa countries where they're at great, sometimes physical and financial risk. They go abroad because they hope to obtain economic opportunity and oftentimes face headwinds when they meet their employers and they find out that the contracts are no longer the contracts that they signed before they left Nepal. So, one of the things that we're doing is we built a platform called Shoveyatra which is a platform for migrant workers to access information on safe migration but also on financial literacy topics and tools for financial inclusion. And so, one of the things that we're doing actually will be starting in November is building out the functionality of the platform so that we can better track identity and participation on the platform and allow that identity to be portable so that individuals could perhaps go to formal financial institutions in Nepal and demonstrate that they've participated in certain projects that are related to the Shoveyatra platform because there's a lot of financial education and financial literacy tools that we make available to users and we would also like to build out a digital wallet so that as individuals sign up for the platform they can tie into this blockchain enabled solution which would help them with their identity, with becoming formal participants in the financial sector and also accessing some functionality related to a digital wallet. We have a great platform. We have over three million users in a partnership that we've established with a great organization called Hamaropatra in Nepal and of that three million over one million of those users are migrants and they are abroad in the key destination countries like Middle East, North Africa, Malaysia. We've got a level of scale that will be really interesting for us to test this pilot that connects people again to really essential services so that it can be more productive and they can protect their financial interests as individuals and families and economic entrepreneurs and actors within the Nepalese society. I wanna ask one question on that. So on the first example of tracking dragon fruit, dragon fruit? Yeah. From Vietnam to Australia. If you're thinking about the impact of that, it's not just the technology that creates the impact, it can help us prove value and creation down to the base of the pyramid and attribute that which is hard to do right now and expensive to do right now but can you talk through the type of system or actors that need to buy into this in order to create impact and what that impact looks like? So we're tangibly for the farmer and who else needs to be part of buying into the technology creates that impact, does that make sense? Sure, I mean I think for pilots like this, probably the most important partnership is with the government because the government is the agent that oversees the process of export and also oversees issues related to food safety. So government partnerships are really essential but also the aggregators of the product, the distributors, those are partners in this process. The exporters are also involved and I think the key for us on the dragon fruit project is that the Australian government and the Vietnamese government have just recently signed a bilateral export agreement for dragon fruit and so the process is established and it's there and so when we're putting together these kinds of projects there are these kind of high level considerations that need to be factored in for the project to be successful so that ultimately as you move down that process to the originator, to the producer, they can benefit as well because I think it's really easy to build an app and then go give it to a farmer and say, hey, here's the thing, we'd like you to use it but you also have to recognize that there are all of these other actors in the process, you would call them stakeholders. They are very influential and our partnerships are with the government, with the exporters, with the association that all of the producers are members of and that allows us to connect to individual producers and to educate them on the project as well as the producers. Again, as I was saying before, we're trying to find new ways to reach down to connect with micro entrepreneurs, small and medium enterprises, farmers who the technology allows us to work productively with or to connect with but again, the stakeholders like government, like big economic influencers in the sector are also key partners in this. So, I mean, does that? Yeah. Yeah, that's okay. Can you repeat the question again? Yeah. Yeah. I don't know who, does this work? Still no. It does work. Oh, it works now. Okay, does anyone need this? Are we all okay? These are so fancy that I feel like we should be able to use them. Okay. Use cases that you're seeing that you're really excited about and concretely what that looks like. Well, the perspective I come is I have the experiences of both worlds. Gordon Reyes in San Francisco lived here all my life, went to school in the Bay Area also. Then until recently, maybe a year and a half, two years ago, I moved to the Philippines to focus more so on emerging markets just because that's what my thesis was. And just seeing the main differences down to the individual level, for example, if I'm here in the United States, San Francisco, I can have everything brought to me towards an app and I trust those things. But if you're in the Philippines, trying to bank there, trying to do mobile banking, it's a pain. Sometimes it's good where there's a glitch in the system, says I have $16 billion in my bank account. That happened then maybe about two months ago. But then when you implement the blockchain into things like these, things like that won't happen. It's like the number one bank in the Philippines or the number one bank in the region. Looking at other use cases such as immigration or the workforce or the economy like his program with Nepal, the Philippines workforce is that 10% of its entire population is an overseas Filipino worker. Means that where they're working abroad, they spend most of their time in a random country trying to earn a good dollar. There's a lot of economic and safety measures that have to go into that. A specific use case is that I know this lady who moved to Abu Dhabi, a Filipino citizen, had her identity essentially withheld from her. So she was essentially being held hostage by her employer. That if she doesn't do these things in a specific time or ask for like even a raise or is getting abused, she's at the helm of her employer. And if she wants to run away, she'll get stuck at immigration and have to go back to her employer. So things like that, the blockchain can eliminate that. By having a mobile identity start on the blockchain, it also brings a huge safety net for those guys saying that I can go home anytime I want to if these events do happen to me. So it's a lot of things like that. Banking, imagine if you're an OFW, you have to set up a bank account and how do you transfer that money back? You have to go through these international fees, whereas the blockchain, there's zero fees affiliated with those things. So it goes down from the financial to the social level. Yeah, so a lot of use cases. And I think part of the biggest question that we have right now in the development space, at least from where I'm sitting at GDI, is what will work? And we're piloting a lot right now, but also what's the risk here given the types of populations that we're working with tend to be the most vulnerable. And so given some of the companies that you've invested in and some of the projects that you're piloting, what are some of the most significant risks that you face that you're constantly trying to work against or that you see potentially in the future? Yeah, so can everyone hear me? Is that all right? Yeah, so there's two main risks that we deal with every day. And that's regulations and reputational risk. So what do I mean by that? Regulations, again, most of this stuff comes back to my dealing in Papua New Guinea. With an innovative technology like the blockchain, you're always coming up against a regulator who may or may not be on the same page as you. So for us, it's about doing things in a way that makes the regulator feel comfortable, but also trying to explore the full potential of this technology. And right now, that's the main risk in that regulators are still trying to get their heads around what this is, just like everyone in the space. But I think that when you're dealing with an emerging market, I think the stakes are higher just because you do have a lot of things that can go wrong. And if they go wrong, they tend to have worse impacts than if they do here, somewhere. So an example would be things like digital currency. So Bitcoin, anything to do with banking. These kind of things are probably the low hanging fruit and the application that most venture capitalists like myself and probably Jonathan got the most excited about. Everyone thought, hey, look, let's go bank beyond bank in these countries. Newsflash, sometimes that doesn't work because you have to do it in a way that is conducive and politically palatable. So that's always something. There's always a fine kind of fine line and there's a big dance that's going on between big kind of freewheeling innovation and also what's palatable with the regulator. And that applies across the board. There is financial inclusion, I guess, initiatives that we're trying to do that we have to kind of wait and make sure that we're not getting anyone particularly angry about this new technology. It's not doing too much to destabilize the economy or anything like that. But also it comes down to getting mass buy-in from all the existing players. And the second one, so reputational, what do I mean by that? When you're talking about something as transformational as the blockchain, especially kind of sitting here in Silicon Valley, everyone is familiar with fail fast, fail quick, fail cheap, run around, break things, keep learning, keep going. I guess that works here. Doesn't necessarily work too well when you're going to an emerging market or developing nations where you have a very kind of narrow, I guess, bandwidth for success and failure. So when you're going in with a blockchain solution, you've got to make sure that it's going to work. And so that comes down to making sure that you get as much buy-in as possible, again, getting that regulatory support, but then also doing as much education as you can, getting everyone on board with it. Because the last thing you want to do is, the last thing that we want to do is talk about the blockchain as being so great, going in and then it failing, not necessarily because the technology doesn't work, but just because our communication around it didn't work or our marketing didn't work or we didn't get enough buy-in from someone. So in that, that's always the two biggest risks, especially for us. We tend to look at the blockchain just as a tool and we have a lot of engineers on our team. So we're very kind of, we're big fans of the Pareto efficiency 80-20. We think of the blockchain as just 20%, the technology. At the end of the day, the blockchain technology will work. The 80% is building the business case around it and that means the marketing, the communication. That means going to a village and trying to record their identity on the blockchain through a digital system and try to assure them that no one's trying to steal your soul, this isn't the anti-Christ coming, anything like that. These are real considerations you have to have. And I speak from personal experience. This is from conversations with my relatives who are still in the village that I need to talk to about. And so in my personal opinion, those are the two biggest risks. Well, I guess I kind of agree with Shane on the certain aspects of talking about the technology and sharing the vision with partners. I think the big risk is overconfidence in the technology or a misunderstanding of the technology's potential. Because at least for the Asia Foundation, we work very closely with partners over a long period of time. There's a lot of trust, but there's also risks taken to implement projects, to try to change things. We think of our partners not only as economic entrepreneurs, but political entrepreneurs, people that are interested in change and innovation and making those societies more robust and more creative and innovative. And blockchain as a technology, at least from my perspective, we are based here in technically Silicon Valley. And blockchain has very many interesting use cases, but also there are instances where the technology might not really be a good fit or it might not really be solving a problem, or it might be a watered down version of that thing that everyone got so excited about when you first started planning this project. What I mean by that is there's a lot of excitement around blockchain and the idea of Bitcoin and the way that that works and the way that it allows you to take that third party out of the interaction and be peer-to-peer and trustable. Well, you don't have to rely on trust, in fact. And it's kind of magical in some ways when you really kind of grasp how Bitcoin, which is an implementation of blockchain works. And if you take away those economic incentives and that proof of work components and the thing that really makes Bitcoin so amazing and cool, blockchain then becomes something a little bit different. And I think we've seen over the last couple of years it's evolved from Bitcoin and blockchain to blockchain to distributed ledger to some other things. It's been a little bit watered down in my opinion. Some of the ways people talk about it now and try to interleave it into processes or projects. I don't really know if the value is there. So that gets back to that issue of trust with your partners and trust with your interlocutors, even with the government that you might be trying to work with because you do have to involve those stakeholders. You do need to understand the technology. You do need to understand the use cases and you do need to understand why it works. And certain implementations are really powerful in certain contexts and not really particularly useful in others. So there's this risk of over-exuberance which everyone understands in the valley, I guess. And it's something that a project person like myself is very wary of because my goal is to achieve the impact and to work with my partners and sustain those relationships and do good things over time, not sell a product to people that isn't really a value add or might actually, the version that I'm selling might actually not even be any different from any other kind of distributed database synchronization method. And it's a complicated political economic discussion that you need to work through in your own minds as well as a technical one because you have to understand the technology. Enough to know why it works in the first place. Why some of the North stars of blockchain and Bitcoin-related type projects are really genuinely are powerful and transformative. But there's a halo around those technologies that are kind of not really right. And I'll say that's a highly contentious perspective. I think a lot of people do think there are characteristics of blockchain that do make it valuable outside of the economic incentive. No, that's not what I said. What I said is that there are many instances and implementations of blockchain that are compelling. It is different from something like Bitcoin because Bitcoin has economic incentives built into it and a kind of a mechanism to prevent people from cheating. It's all driven by greed, really. And a network effect that's massive. Blockchain without that is a different animal. And then other kinds of implementations are, maybe they're blockchain, maybe they're not. Maybe somebody started to sell you on blockchain and you weren't paying attention and they just started to do something that looks kind of like blockchain, but it's not really a blockchain. It's a distributed ledger that's synchronized using another set of protocols. And are you going to dive down and figure that out? Probably not. But if you're going to go sell that to somebody, you better be careful. Jonathan, risk from your side. For me, let's look at the perspective of the current and the future and also the past. I guess now, every time before today, we rely on these trustless things we call the internet. We have Target, we have Uber, we have Yahoo, we have Google. But look at these things that has happened over the past couple of months. Equifax breach, the Yahoo breach and all those other breaches that we see coming up daily. All our information was stored in a silo that we trusted and we paid these high fees to the bank saying like, hey, I'm fine with giving you 30% interest if I default on my card or I'm fine with paying a $2 fee for using your ATM. They were paying them to protect our assets, right? But then Equifax happens, Yahoo happens. And then that trust is gone. If you look at it in the blockchain's perspective, you'll own all that information. For example, this app called Civic, it's a blockchain free identity. You're able to share whatever information you need cross-border. If I'm trying to apply for a loan in San Francisco, I can also bring that data from the blockchain and apply for a loan, say in the Philippines or in Africa, if something comes up no matter where I am at. These things is that we have to treat these silos as something that we initially trust but no longer can trust just because of all these breaches. And the blockchain allows us to give out all this information as needed. So that's how I think the blockchain can help. So I do recognize we have a few minutes left and I want to leave space for questions. One question around Robin here, around the potential implication for venture capital structures. Given there are a number of VCs and impact investors, alternative structures in the room here today, there's been a lot of conversation around initial coin offerings and what the ability to use cryptocurrency means for democratizing the fundraising process. Would love to hear from you all around what the potential implication is moving forward and what this could mean for the impact investment sector as a whole. Sure. So I guess I'll start off with just kind of quickly defining what an ICO is and then maybe it's in fact on VCs. So ICO, initial coin offering. Basically what it is is it's a mechanism using the blockchain that allows a company to raise some capital by essentially issuing tokens out to the public and the public, if they believe in the company's vision and the company's mission and they believe the company can pull it off, essentially just buy in, they buy this token and that token is then used to fund the company. So it's just a new way to raise capital. It's kind of broken down into two main kind of categories. The first is an ICO that is a utility or that's an equity free way of raising capital. Utility, what does that mean? It's just do I buy this ICO and is this ICO a way to actually incentivize users and developers on this blockchain network? For instance, if I buy into Ethereum, that Ethereum token is a utility because the developers are incentivized to use or to power the network because they get Ethereum tokens but I also own a share in Ethereum, I get money from it. The second category is just equity, straight out and that's where you start getting concerns from the likes of the SEC. That's just a quick way for a company is just to raise capital. It's just, hey, look, I've got this great idea. It doesn't necessarily power the blockchain network itself. There's no developers that are incentivized. It's just, I've got this new building that I want to put up. I'm going to use an ICO, you own X% in this business. So two very different tokens all issued through an ICO. Now, the basic, I guess, impact on VC from the way that I see it at the moment is an ICO is basically a much more liquid way for investors to participate in funds. Now, what does that mean in a normal VC structure? I guess if everyone knows 220, your capital is locked up for X amount of years, 10 years. There is, I'm sure if you're not familiar, look up blockchain capital. They're the first venture capital fund to raise their fund off of an ICO. And basically what that allows you to do is any investor can now invest into this VC fund, not necessarily being an accredited investor, I think. And basically what you do is any time you want to exit or enter your position, you can. It allows you to sell your tokens, sell your membership in this VC fund. This VC fund still goes and invests into companies for you. From my experience working between Silicon Valley and also in emerging markets, what does an ICO mean for, I guess, people in emerging markets, firstly? I think the best example could just be with my own personal experience. So I ended up leaving Sydney Uni in about 2012, sorry, 2014, basically to run my own venture capital fund. I was convinced that Papua New Guinea needed a venture capital fund. And so I basically put together a fund thesis and went about trying to raise capital for it in Papua New Guinea. Now what happened was I wasn't able to raise any capital in Papua New Guinea. I had to actually come out to Silicon Valley to raise capital and then go back to Papua New Guinea. Now, number one, I wish ICOs were around back when I started. Probably would have been a bit easier to actually raise the capital for my fund because I would have just used an ICO. What everyone does now is they put up their idea, they put up their fund thesis. They say, hey, look, if you'd like to invest, please purchase my token, this ICO token. And if you are outside of the US, you can get buy-in from investors that aren't necessarily accredited. Accredited investors being, I think it's guys, people with $1 million plus of surplus income, I think. Again, not too familiar with that. But yeah, so that's, I guess, from a very entrepreneurial perspective, what that means for people in emerging markets that would be looking to guys like yourselves in the social impact investing space is how can the social impact investment fund use an ICO maybe to raise capital for themselves or to train entrepreneurs in an emerging market to raise capital for themselves using an ICO machine? So what does that mean? One of the biggest problems in emerging markets, as we all know, is access to finance. What does that mean, access to finance? For me, to even try to get a loan at a bank, it's very, very hard. Also, most people in developing nations are just convinced that the only way to get capital for their idea is to think very locally. They only think the avenue is just go to a bank, a microfinance institution, and try to get money from there. What an ICO does for the first time is that it democratizes the access to finance for anyone. Someone in Papua New Guinea who would usually have to spend two hours getting on a bus to go into a bank lining up for two and a half hours just to lodge a loan application, wait X amount of months just to get rejected. That presents a very, very high barrier to entry to gain finance. What an ICO allows anyone to do now is basically, if they have a good enough business plan, put that up to the internet, to anyone out there. And if there is someone sitting here in Silicon Valley who thinks that their business plan is great, they can now purchase a token in that locally run ICO. Now, what does that mean? Again, taking that one step further, if I'm in a little village and I have all this land, this land has some oil in there, has some access to gold, instead of going to a bank, maybe I put up an ICO. I say, hey, guys, my village here, we've got all this land. We have X amount of minerals. We'd like to raise money for it, and we'd like to offer that to you guys here in Silicon Valley. People in Silicon Valley buy in because, hey, why wouldn't I want to own land with gold? So I buy in, and then let's say that little village raises enough capital that now they're taken seriously enough that they no longer need to wait six hours in a bank. They can actually go straight to someone like the Social Impact Investment Fund or something in country. What that allows everyone to do is just raise capital a lot more efficiently, gives everyone with an internet access the ability to do so. Again, just as easily as you can sign up for Gmail or Facebook, you can list a great business idea and throw it out to the internet to fundraise. Essentially, Kickstarter on the blockchain. So that's what I think from the perspective of an entrepreneur trying to raise funds from a VC or from an angel investor. And in terms of, I guess, venture capital, a fun fact, companies have raised more money from ICOs this year than all of venture capital combined. So what that means is, again, venture capital is in for, is one of the industries where it's due for disruption. It's been due for disruption for a while now. Now, whether or not venture capital is completely disrupted or whether ICOs are just used as a tool to kind of augment or help venture capital is something that I think I'll leave for Jonathan to delve into a bit. He's got a lot of great insights on that. So thanks. Thanks. John, your perspective. Shane, you covered so much of the topics that I thought I might cover, but I'll take one dimension of what Shane, you were saying. Maybe the thing that's interesting, just focusing maybe on the utility ICO, the idea of selling some access to the functionality of the platform that you'd like to develop using an initial coin offering. To me, that's really interesting because of Shane, what you were saying about access to capital in emerging markets because what we're seeing now in the Asia Pacific region in particular is this emergence of a creative class of people that are empowered by the cloud, by mature software frameworks and the capacity to build things, to make new things online that are really powerful and can function at scale. And also the fact that everyone's connected to the internet now, like when I started in the business many years ago, we didn't have the connectivity. It was sort of like let's make a technology project in the field and not plug it into anything. It would be awesome. But now, mobile has really kind of transformed the region in a way that makes that kind of entrepreneurial effort a real thing. So builders, makers can actually create in the region to solve local problems. And if they're building a really powerful platform that has value, then the offerings, the coin offerings as a utility offering might be a way for them to sell access to features or functionality of the platform to investors in a new way until regulation comes in and influences. That's why regulations are so important and regulators are sometimes potentially problematic because you don't wanna kill the opportunity for innovation because you can direct capital to these innovators in new ways now and the innovators are capable of building amazing new products. They don't have to come to the United States to do it. They don't have to go to Europe or other developed parts of the world. They can do it locally as long as they have an internet connection. So that to me is why it's really cool and interesting and powerful. It needs to be explored while also recognizing that there's potential for fraud and all the related stuff. Which is why regulation is partly actually useful and important. We need a balance, but there's an opportunity here that we don't wanna quash by overreacting to something that seems so strange and unusual. But it's really a portal through which we can get at new solutions to the problem of funding and capitalizing entrepreneurs in these local country contexts. Cool. Jonathan, from you, and then we'll open it up to questions for the last couple of minutes. All right, for me, it's more so like the use case of ICOs. It not only democratizes the way people raise money, it also opens up the cross-border movement. For example, we all have these, each country has these use cases. For example, the same thing with the overseas workers of Nepal, we have them in the Philippines. We have that in Vietnam. We have that in the United States. Doing an ICO for that, for example, an ICO for overseas workers, the way that it'll work and it'll gain value is that if more people go into it, the more people that play into it, the more value it creates. For example, Ethereum, I invested in January and by June it was up 3,000% in hard value that I was able to cash out. Just because the use cases became more apparent and more people started building on top of the technology. Going specific, like if we do an ICO for people, overseas workers, it'll essentially do the same thing. When looking at it from a funder's perspective, whether it be impact investing or venture capital, profit, economic investing, we see that it's not necessarily a disruption but more of like a supplementary thing where there's always gonna be a need for upfront capital immediately, whether it be 10% equity for someone who wants to build something for impact investing. And then maybe they're not ready to essentially launch a token or a special use case on the blockchain but they're on that route to become a blockchain specific company in the future but not at the moment. So a venture capitalist can fund that to that point of becoming a use case for the blockchain technologies. So I see an ICO as not only needed but also more of a stepping stone in this industry, not necessarily a disruption. Different perspectives on that. And I think a lot more research and questions that need to be asked around this. So we have four minutes left and way too many questions. So I don't know how the questions sessions work but maybe we'll take four in a row and then unfortunately probably we won't have too much more time. Hello, I understand 4% of the addresses own 90% of the blockchain which tells me that it's not really money. It's an intangible asset, a virtual asset that's been designed to maximize speculation for the insiders that got to hold that or the big miners, one or the other. But I do understand that this is actually very useful for remittances. And I wanted you to help me understand how do people that use blockchain based currencies, cryptocurrencies for remittances deal with the intraday volatility which is an implicit cost when they go from say US dollars to when they go to US dollars to a cryptocurrency and then back into their local currency isn't there a lot of intraday or intra-weak volatility that they're facing when they do those translations and how do they do that by skipping the banking system? Don't you need to deal with the banks going from dollars to blockchain currency and then from blockchain currency to local currency? Isn't there still a fee in those two translations? Sorry, quick ask. Can you ask one more time with the mic a little bit closer? We're having a hard time hearing you up here. Yeah, acoustics are not. Can you hear me now? Remittances and friction between banks, is that? The question was... And currency volatility. How do you deal with the volatility of these cryptocurrencies when you're using them in remittances? It's an implicit cost, translation cost. And how do you deal with, don't you need banks on both ends going from dollars to cryptocurrencies and cryptocurrencies to local currency? How is that fee being bypassed? Overseas workers? Do you guys want to take that? Oh, for example, if you look at... Let's take a few just in time's sake. Let's take three more and then we'll round Robin answers. Sorry. Are there other... Okay, so second question was, if anyone on the stage speaks a different language, please answer it in your language as well. Just the question is, what are the resources for somebody that wants to start building blockchain in their community that their community might not know anything about blockchain? So what are some of the early stage resources and then just please say it in your language? So my third question was, applications are great and I'm sure they're gonna have a lot of impact, but the blockchain is really complicated and I didn't hear anything in your description that couldn't have been implicated with strong cryptographic signatures and any other database system. So given that the human factors are really the hard part of what you're doing, why did you choose to use the blockchain when it's more complex, more expensive and less reliable? Can I ask or no? Yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry, one more. My question's about blockchain in Brazil specifically and the question is for an impact investment fund, which we are, I'm finding that several companies, for-profit social enterprises have said they're doing blockchain turns out they're not and basically they all say, if I'm in early stage for-profit social enterprise, I've got so many things to scale that to add the blockchain aspect is overly complicated and it's not a well-known technology or proven technology in Brazil and so they're basically saying later that kind of thing. So how do we encourage the uptake of it when it's not familiar, it's not common, it's not proven in that specific emerging market for impact investments, thanks. So round Robin, give him, we're out of time and whoever is running the show, please cut us off when necessary, but maybe each take one question to tackle. So I'll address the banking and the remittance part. A friend of mine in the Philippines, he built up Bloom Solutions and another friend of mine built up Align Commerce, which is now called Veeam. So they're more so like they work on the, when everyone was focused on Bitcoin technologies so a couple of years ago back, these guys said let's bypass Bitcoin because there's so much hype around in volatility and let's go in the blockchain remittance side. These guys are working with, these guys have become the back end for B2B transfers and these guys have become the back end for these remittance sensors that you see on every corner of every market. What they're doing is that they're not necessarily working on the Bitcoin as far as the transaction phase but the blockchain. It's more so of like saying, hey, I have a float here, why do we have to transfer that over the web to go through those FX transaction fees or cross-border transaction fees? We find guys with float here and float here and just use the blockchain to say, hey, I'll pull out money from here and transfer that directly to you. It doesn't necessarily have to go through the bank but at the moment it does go through the banks so it will get there. So. Just wanted to try to tackle the gentleman's question at the back there and it might kind of feed into your question. So basically I also largely agree. At the moment now there is a lot of, there are a lot of people talking about the blockchain and there is quite a bit of noise. Being in VC, myself and my co-founder, right now are optimistically skeptical. We also see that there are quite a few use cases being touted around as blockchain use cases that aren't necessarily blockchain use cases. Basically what we're seeing is a lot of faster horses and not enough cars. And so we're very careful about what we back. While we are very big fans of the blockchain and the potential that the technology has, we believe that technology is supposed to or best used for completely new business models. So we don't necessarily see the blockchain, yes there are applications to existing business models but where we're excited about is maybe not this year, maybe not next year but maybe three or four years from now, we're gonna see completely new business models coming up from the space. And that's where we're the most excited about it. New business models, we can talk about how now it's economic to actually serve the unbanked. That's a new business model. You can actually make money from opening up an account for someone who deposits a dollar into a some bank account. There is just that whole thing about ICO's new crypto currencies. These are the cars, not so much the faster horses. We're not talking about a blockchain ledger that makes banking more efficient or saves a bank a couple hours. We're more looking at game changing new ideas, things that made something not an attractive investment because there was no economic model to it. We believe that the blockchain now allows for something, a business model that wasn't economically attractive to now be economically attractive. I don't have the exact answers for you right now. I wish I did but I don't. All that I know is that's what I'm gonna look out for. So with that being said, again, very, very skeptically optimistic and still on the lookout for cars, not so much a big fan of faster horses. Thank you. Thank you.