 Go ahead and do your introduction, and then I'll turn it over to you and Tammy to go through the presentation. And then we can talk about, you know, kind of after the fact doing a little networking if people are interested in that. That's good. Okay, everyone, let's go ahead and get started here. And thanks for joining this great session I'm really excited about the upcoming presentation by Craig Fisher. And we're going to go ahead and have Craig present and Tammy's going to work with him on the presentation. And then afterward, we're going to go ahead and do a Q&A session with all the group here. And feel free to raise your hand or put something in the chat. And then we can call on you individually. And then after we wrap up with Craig's presentation, if we want to do a little bit of networking after the fact and ask Craig some follow on questions, that'd be great as well. So I want to go ahead and introduce Craig. And he is the Innovation Program Manager from the Financial Innovation and Transformation Group at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service. And that's with the United States Department of Treasury. And so today Craig will be presenting a demo of his work at FIT around his proof of concept for being able to pay both prime contractors and subcontractors in this National Science Foundation proof of concept that he's set up. So he's going to run through that today. And I want to give you a little more information about Craig, you know, he's an experienced program manager with a demonstrated history of working in government administration. And he's skilled at really bringing innovation to the federal government with emerging technology, carrying out these kind of pilots that we're going to see today, and helping the federal government really to navigate the future. And I think this particular POC is going to show is really going to, you know, show the level of innovation that's going on at the Treasury Department, and in the federal government, and how they can really leverage blockchain to enhance efficiency. Previously he was with Deloitte for a number of years. He also served on the CFO council for the executive office of the president. And then he's also been on the committee for oversight and government reform as well. So Craig has a wealth of experience here. And I'm really looking forward to getting all of this great update on the proof of concept. So at this point Craig I'm going to turn it over to you and let you go through the presentation and let's have a Q&A session. Thanks. Well, again, thank you so much for inviting us to be here today. And I did want to mention I'm here with Tammy Johnson as well. Tammy's been sort of a parter of mine for the last few years on sort of exploring some of the things with blockchain technology and other sort of innovative efforts. So she's going to be along with me as well here today, but I did want to just a little bit more about the team before you know this, give you some context about kind of how we're approaching innovation, how we're approaching blockchain. And Tammy and I worked for, as John had mentioned, a small team called the Office of Financial Innovation and Transformation. It is within the Bureau of the Physical Service. We're about a 16 person team, so not very big. But we do a lot of big things, I'd say. So we're, you know, exploring artificial intelligence blockchain. We do a lot with federal financial management standards, but I think really the domain in which we are sort of looking at innovation really has to do with federal financial management. Largely the way that I like to define federal financial management is sort of the movement of money payments collections and you can see here from this slide. Really what the Bureau of the Physical Service does, which again is a Bureau of the Department of Treasury, really kind of serves as the nation's bank when it comes to federal financial management. So we disperse payments, we make collections. We do a lot of the accounting from the shared services perspective for a lot of other agencies. We sell the securities to fund the government. So again, kind of serve as that nation's bank. So as we look to innovate as we're looking for new ways to improve the way that we carry out financial management, that's sort of the things, the sort of the areas, the domains in which we are in which we are looking. So, along with that, though, is I say one of the core things the physical service does is payments and Tammy can go to the next slide. Just to give you some sort of background on kind of the our kind of reach to the end of the payments is, you know, back in 2019, probably have some better statistics but 1.2 billion payments total and 3.7 trillion of that one of the things that we actually are trying to do is to get rid of the paper. So moving away from paper check so we have about a 96% electronically dispersed payment rate right now which is good. Of all these payments, the Bureau of Physical Service does make about 87% of all those payments there are a couple other agencies that have disbursement authority, but we do most of the payments on behalf of other federal agencies and you can see that there's some examples there. And then most recently with COVID and some of those economic impact payments we made all of those payments in 2020 163 million payments worth 273 billion dollars. So as you can see, you know payments is sort of core to what we do. And we're always looking for ways to improve there's a lot of activity in the payment space right now. So we're trying to understand what are some of those technologies those things that we can do to improve. The way that we make those payments facilitate those payments, which is kind of how we got into blockchain in the first place. So Tim because I want to go to the next slide. I wanted to give you just kind of a little bit of a background kind of our blockchain journey and kind of how we got to where we are today. So, you know, back in 2017. We kind of acknowledge I guess sort of found this blockchain technology and kind of what it was doing within some of the financial services arena we saw that they was making some some inroads at some of the other banks and some other folks were looking at it. So given that we are an innovation shop and wanted to better understand this technology better understand what some of the use cases were, but we're basically starting from nothing though and I think, you know, we're a bit of a skunk works type team where we will get our hands dirty to understand something. So that was really really the approach that we took when it came to blockchain technology back in 2017. And it took us a while to really find this, the use case that we're exploring right now, which I'm going to go into a lot more detail a little bit later on but just to kind of understand that we did not come out of the gate, where we knew precisely exactly what we were going to do. This was a bit of, this is a bit of some learning that we had to do. So the very first thing that we did is we really just wanted to understand some of the fundamentals of blockchain. And we started off looking at a use case around asset management was our very first thing that we looked at where we explored using blockchain technology to better manage and track the physical assets. When you start at the, you know, government agencies, the Bureau of the physical services, no different, you get a cell phone and you get some other equipment that has to be tracked. And we spent a lot of time doing that so what we wanted to understand is to blockchain technology be used to better track and manage that so we actually carried out a small proof of concept where we use blockchain to track and manage cell phones. So, in this taught us a lot about just the fundamentals of the technology from a technical perspective but also what might make a little better use case. We were able to see the sort of real time transparency of sort of asset transfers, understand the peer to peer nature of blockchain understand the resiliency aspect of blockchain. I noticed that some foundational understanding of what it even meant to kind of explore blockchain. From there, we did a small little proof of concept where we try to use the same logic to manage and check software licenses. I think that the federal government spends about $8 billion worth of software licenses every year and you know I think there's has been some reports out there from GAOs and others that are somewhat critical the way that we are managing our software we buy them and then sometimes we don't upkeep them and we have a pretty sometimes challenging way of managing software. So we thought maybe this was yet another way that we could use blockchain to give us that real time transparency, if a piece of software wasn't being used going to be reused. That was sort of the proof of concept. And what we learned here is where, you know, conceptually speaking that it was a really good idea, but there was some last mile problems when it came to using blockchain here there's still a lot of manual processes that kind of taught us that watching is probably best when you have sort of an end to end digital use case and in the case of software licenses we really didn't. But again that kind of helped our learning and really got us to the use case that we're exploring now and I think the one use case where we want to continue sort of exploring because we are seeing some some value what we're doing. And that has to do with using blockchain technology to facilitate grant payments. And the really the way that this came about was the National Science Foundation NSF had reached out to us, you know, being aware of what we were doing in the area of blockchain and kind of came to us with a problem and they said, you know, our grant recipients, these prime recipients and these sub recipients who receive federal grant funding really are burdened by a lot of this reporting. That they have to to sort of have to go through to in order to just receive some this federal funding coming from a from National Science Foundation is there anything we can make potentially explore to see if watching could actually offering value. So really our use case that we're looking for and sort of looking at right now is looking to use blockchain to really reduce that reporting burden that we are replacing. And if you just want to tend to go to the next slide here. Takes a little bit for it to come up as a lot of images here but you know I think you know nearly almost half of the time that researchers are really spending it's on performing administrative tasks and a lot of that is reporting due to the fact that we don't we can't see the funding we can't see the funding going especially when there's a sub recipient. In the mix, so in many cases the federal government will and we'll get to this in the next slide, but but actually why don't you just go there now Tammy just so we can get kind of in a bit. So really what a lot of this, at least some of this burden is related to the fact that we can't see where funding is going to a sub recipients, just to kind of walk through the current state the future state. On the slide. Today, when a primary recipient is awarded some sort of grant funding, they come to one of you know there's I think there's like five major grant payment platforms, hosted in the federal, the federal government. They'll come to one of the several payment platforms and they will draw down funds. That will transfer that will transfer the money from the federal government into the prime recipients bank account, but in the case of sub recipients when that's prime recipient transfers money down to sub recipient to carry out some of the the terms of the grant you know if the by microscopes to do things teach children, whatever that that grant is we don't see that transaction we don't see that money being passed from the prime recipients to the sub recipient that's being done through the banking network that's being done through the CH network. So we don't see that, but because we don't see that we asked for the prime and sub recipients to give us a lot of information to help us better understand what that funding went to. So, and this is sort of like the burden that the prime and sub recipients were really talking about, when it came to the level of reporting that they have to do. So in our future state, what we would, you know, like to do and what we're thinking about doing from our proof of concept and moving this into a pilot and eventually maybe something into production, not there yet we have a lot more things we have to learn, but is going to this my my picture of myself over here so I can see the screen, but is going into this situation where we now can see those sub recipients using blockchain technology, and we enhance that transparency and probably many of you will probably already know this through the idea of tokenization. So if you just want to go to that next line. So, if we in our proof of concept the idea here is that if we are able to, you know, tokenize these grant awards and on the left hand side of the screen here you see from the National Science Foundation. This is a real grant letter that they use to disperse funding to some of the grantees. There is, well, effectively what we're doing when we tokenize this grant letter is we are taking key donations off of the grant letter so the grant award some of the key dates, some of the, and the, the fundings that that go along with those different categories, tokenizing all the information that and putting that into a blockchain token. The blockchain token that is transferring from the federal governments to a to a prime recipient and down to a sub recipient, as opposed to just making those funding transfers using the ACH network. So, when we use the blockchain token we're seeing where that token came from who it's going to what it's for all of these sort of deep these key data elements are baked into that token. So, to me, I think, you know, my big takeaway from this effort was that you know the real novel thing that we're doing and one of the things we can't we don't do today is really combining that grant information with that payment information today those that grant information is writing on two separate rails with blockchain what we're finding is that we can combine those that that key information that really alleviates the reportings again as you all probably know this. When that blockchain token is moving and it goes from the federal government to the prime to the sub, we can see that we can see that in near real time, in a real near time way. With that, we don't have to ask for a lot of the reporting that we do today at least that's the, the, the sort of the theory that we're sort of working on, and we do have some you want to show a couple things later in the demo just to kind of show you kind of what we did to really alleviate some of that reporting using this proof of concept. But yeah, so this is this high level this is kind of how we actually are. You know, leaving some of that reporting reporting all that information up front and token, and as it moves we can see in the near real time, the disposition of that of that watching token. So Tim, if you just want to go to the next slide. So we're going to show you or at least Tim is going to walk you through a short demo of the application and by the way, I don't know if you can probably put something in the chat but we do have a link that you all can go and check it out for yourself you want to play around with the, the application just to kind of show what we did we did something called let's call them we'll get to there in a second but we did something called a clickable prototype where we effectively recreated the application and kind of a self guided tour this is kind of kind of walks you through so it's not actually tied to the blockchain application it does kind of give you a feel for how this all works and this is effectively the flow in which in which it kind of walks you through where we take that brand recipient, we convert it into we tokenize it and convert it into a digital asset internal controls is very important from the federal government, establishing thresholds and key dates and things like that. So there's a step where you can incorporate a lot of those internal controls into the token. And then we can log the application will show you how would they request a drawdown. And this is where the fundamental change what we do today. Today, when they request that drawdown they receive funds through the ACH network into their bank account under this scenario under this application when they request a drawdown, they will be receiving a blockchain token. And then you can do one or two things with that token you could either redeem that token for cash, where you can transfer that token to another party who's actually still carrying out the terms of that with that grant. So, and all this again leads to a hopefully a lot of reduced reporting burden from the from the from the grant recipient and some recipients perspective. But this is effectively the application that we built and we're going to show you in just a second. And let's just go to one more slide time and then we'll get to the actual demonstration. This is effectively just the screen and this is here is the, I think we can probably drop this into the chat but down below is the URL and you do need that that little password words fit underscore GPS. And it looks like you got, you have to get off of the, we can do that in a second. But, but effectively this is what we want to walk you through a couple things. Thank you Laura I see you just did that. A couple things here, just to point out on the left hand side within kind of that screen it kind of gives you where you are within this process because it can get a little confusing because there are a lot of different participants in this this blockchain network so thank you Tammy yep right there is where kind of walks you through as you kind of take the self guided to or you can kind of know where you are whether whether you're creating that that's token or whether you're setting the internal controls. And what we found here is that you know, we'll get to this a little bit more at the end of the presentation is this really the, what was a lot more transactional transparency and what we have before it does that additional transparency does really lead to less reporting. So whatever those recipients are, it does improve that customer experience. And it's a much more efficient oversight because of those internal controls that we can now bake into those blockchain tokens. But I'm going to just stop there and I'm going to pass this over to Tammy, who is going to show you just a couple things about how we are writing these things to the blockchain how it looks to the application but then really showing you this reduced reporting and how we've actually converted that real time, all that information that blockchain information into reduced reporting. So Tammy I'll just pass it over to you. Tammy I just made you a co host so you should be able to do what you need. Thank you. So as Craig said I'm going to walk you through the clickable prototype. And I want to point out a few features. The prototype will show you three different types of personas. So we have the grant officer that will work at the awarding agency, and we have the prime recipient, which would represent the grant TV review. And then we have the agency viewer, which is more like that oversight role on each of the screens you will see like a little bubble and that really explains what is happening so that's how you get that self guided you to see what functions are being simulated. So I'm going to click in as the grant officer. Anytime someone does a transaction within the blockchain itself or the application itself, you'll have a password. So we know exactly who did it and when they did it so that we sign in credentials. I will mention as Craig mentioned earlier we have the process flow. So you'll see here that this is highlighted so you'll see where we are in that process flow that we're demonstrating. We'll click in here. And I as the grant officer I have the ability to see the grants that I have the ability to create new grants. You'll see functionality up here and when we go to other views the functionality be slightly different based on their roles and responsibilities. I'm going to go ahead and create a grant. And I'm going to simulate this information and we have worked with many stakeholders to listen and hear what their needs are. So we had a prototype we've had lots of meetings we've built a clickable prototype to get feedback so that we can really understand what are those needs. Does this really address those pain points does it create other pain points and by listening we're able to you know make some changes to this. So this is simulating actually inputting the the the grant by an individual grant. But we also recognize that we will build an upload feature from the award system so that if say 20 grants are being awarded in a day they can be uploaded that that will reduce problems with keep you know key punch errors. It will also streamline that process. So we're listening all the time to what's working well what's not. So I'm going to simulate this by clicking in here and you'll see that it just populates basic information from that grant award. So Craig showed how we were tokenizing that and then in essence this is what is shown on this screen. You'll see these dollar amounts here and those are the parameters that were in the grant letter and you'll see those numbers as we go through and I'll point those out several times to you so you can see how things correlate. So I'm going to go ahead and create this and anytime in action is created and gets posted to the blockchain you will get this confirmation so you know that it has posted to the blockchain. So as I mentioned we created that grant so it was for $220,411 I'm going to click in here and I'm going to show you just a few things on the screen. So if you look here these are the amounts that were shown on the last screen and there's several functions that we can do here. But we awarded this grant for $220,411 now in that original grant we also allowed for sub grants to be to be issued and that's where we said we didn't have the transparency but by using this blockchain we do get that transparency so we have the $30,000 for the grant the sub grant to be able to be issued. So I'm going to log out here and I'm going to go in as the prime recipient because I want to show you a few transactions from the prime recipient perspective and then we'll go back to the grant making agency perspective. So again I'm going to sign in with my credentials again so we know exactly who did what transaction and we've moved to the second bullet and I won't stop every time and say how we're moving but you'll see as we move through the demo you'll see that we're moving down through that process flow. So I'm going to sign in. And as I mentioned before, we have a few more things here, a few more functions so the send in request for tokens and also the wallet. Right now I'm going to go in and I'm going to select the grant feature. And you'll see I have two grants that are available to this particular college and I'm going to click into the one we created. Now if you'll notice on this screen I have some additional features also on the screen in blue. These are functions that are available to the grant making agencies. We mentioned internal controls the government also has internal controls but there are times when a grantee may want to make some internal controls. They may want to have a maximum reimbursement amount. So if a researcher wants to come in and request $100,000. You know they might say, No, we don't want them to request that much upfront, they can only do 50,000 whatever that control is, or if there's certain reports or approvals that are required, we can add those internal controls. We can do that both on the government side as well as the grantee side. So I'm going to go ahead and select $20,000 so anything that's over $20,000 is not going to process without additional approvals. So I'm going to confirm those and it puts the blockchain and so those internal controls will take effect as soon as it's posted on the blockchain for anything going forward. If we've already processed transactions on the particular grant, those internal controls would not be in place for that. So now I'm going to go down here and I'm going to update the grant options. So again, as we were listening to our stakeholders, they said there are times when they want to go straight to redeeming funds. So they would have a request for funds, and they will want to go ahead and do an auto redemption. So I'm going to click this on. And what this will do is do that request and redemption all in one transaction. So I'm going to confirm that option. And again, it's posted to the blockchain. So for this particular grant going forward, every time I request the transfer of tokens, it's automatically going to do a redemption as well. So I mentioned this new function up here that's not available to the grant making agencies, and this is to send them request tokens. So we also heard from the state stakeholders that there were times that they may want to do multiple transactions at once. So they want to be able to select all or to be able to select multiple grants. So in this case, I'm going to select all. And you'll see these dollar amounts here. And those are dollar amounts that were that that were on the award. And it's always going to say whatever amount is remaining. So we haven't done any transactions. So those are the same amounts we saw on the original award. So I'm going to simulate putting information in here. But again, if there were a large grantee who had many grants, they would be able to upload this information into the application. So we've done this and you'll see that we the remaining balances are so that we don't we can't overspend. So it's another internal control. And we always know what's still available. So we're going to submit that. And again, we've got the confirmation that's on the blockchain. So we'll go to the wallet, and you'll see we had the one transaction. So we need to actually redeem it or return the tokens because this was not on auto redeem. So I'm going to click on that. And I have to two options as the grantee I can either redeem funds or I can return funds. And again, that was another function that has been a pain point was actually returning funds and it getting credited to the appropriate grant. So we built that feature in here. So that we can make those transactions, you know, make that reconciliation to show the exact funds for this particular grant. So in this case, I'm going to go ahead and redeem the funds. And again, that posts. So I'm going to log out. And we're going to get back to the grant officer because a prime recipient sometimes will need to have approval from a grant officer. So again, I'm going to sign in, and I have a notification feature up here. And it shows the two transactions. So I need to go in here and look at this transaction which is, you know, they want to request 11,000 tokens. So I can either approve or reject the request. And in this case, I'm going to go ahead and approve it. And I have my confirmation that it's posted on the blockchain. And then I can always look at my completed requests. So that was the one that I just approved. And I'm going to log out. As the primary recipient. So at this point, I'm going to get back in and I'm going to sign in. And I'm going to get back to, to the grant that we've been working on, so that you can see some more functionality. So as we mentioned, one of our pain points, apologize, I didn't mean to click on that quite so quick. One of our pain points is being able to see the funding for the sub grants. So we need to create the grants so that those parameters are created in the blockchain application. So that's what we're going to do here now is we're going to create that particular grant. And so it's the same, it's a separate grant for the grant we we already created. And these are the parameters, you know, certain salary travel and so forth. And then it will work the functionality will work very similar to what I've shown you for the prime grants. The only difference would be because that relationship is with a prime in a sub grant T, they'll have to be an approval process from the prime grant T that the payment is appropriate. So that would be the biggest difference between the functionality of those two roles. So again, I'm going to get confirmation that it is on the blockchain. And then I'm going to go down here and show you history. So we've gone through a lot of transactions. And you'll see everything is recorded on the the blockchain everything that we've done the draw downs the redemptions the, you know, creating the sub grant the transfer of tokens. And then you'll see their statuses here, which will tell you whether it's completed whether it's still a request whether it's been approved or rejected so that you can look at this and see exactly what's happened to a particular grant. Drill down so you can see the information that we would have the timestamp, the hash information, the amounts, etc. So that we have that complete transaction history of, you know, what's occurring. So I'm going to go back to my grant list. And we talked a little bit about the reporting burden. And so I'm going to click in here and there's the federal financial report for grants. And it's a common report. And by having everything on the blockchain that related to the financial aspect of this particular grant, we can actually create this federal financial report, which saves an inordinate amount of time for the grantees. And then there'll be other reporting that we'll be able to do because we have that full end to end transparency so we can look at things like USA spending and the sub recipient reports that are required by the federal government. So, so all of that will be more streamlined using this. I'm going to click out of that and I'm going to log out. And rather than spend additional time doing the agency viewer is very similar to the views that I've already shown you looking at the reports, the transaction history and so forth. That's what would be in that view. I won't spend more time talking about that so that we have more time to spend talking about what we've learned and what our next steps are. I'll pause there and see if there were any questions about the demo before I close out of it. Yeah, Laura, are you going to take some of the questions there and provide them to Craig and Tammy that's in the chat. I can or if you have specific ones you think were relevant to that portion, if you can call them out. Yeah, first one, maybe Bogdan, you want to unmute Bogdan and let him ask the questions there. Got two questions really around regulatory framework and infrastructure. Yep, I just asked you to unmute and you can ask your question. Oh, hello everyone. Thank you very much and I appreciate your presentation today. I just have actually three questions because your product seems to be pretty interesting. I'm as well in more or less the same business with a lot of experience into developing this type of applications and not even. I'm actually today here with my partner Frank Petruca with Washington DC, I'm based in Romania, and we are building a pretty complex innovation center that it's focused on blockchain and some other technologies. And one of the questions to just jump in will be if there is any regulation, let's say legislation, especially in the US, using for this type of software based on the blockchain. Of course, if the US federal entities accept this type of infrastructure. Thank you. Yeah, I mean, so first of all, so we are going into a couple things. One, just on using the blockchain, you know, I think we built this using a theorem, we did recently kind of go over to hyperledger based to, but one of the, one of the issues with using a theorem that we found is that it uses a hashing algorithm that's not missed. It uses a FIPP standard for missed. So it uses a catchy 256, which is not one of the approved hashing algorithm. So from a, from like sort of a regulatory I think the nothing, nothing that we came across at this point from a regulatory using the blockchain infrastructure the blockchain. So one of the components of the blockchain how it's hashing some of the information is really one of the hiccups that were identified and we are working with the National Institute of Science and Technology and I think I got that right. NIST, to actually sort of delve into that a bit more, just to see what some of the options are. Then we're going to get into a second but one of the other regulatory things that we did find through our work is that in order for, as you can kind of see from the application, the bottom line here is that what the way we get that additional transparency is that we use the blockchain to sort of help us pass that information between participants, but we, in order for us to get that that additional transparency the federal government is going to have to pay those sub recipients that's how we know who they are. Currently in the realm of grants that there is no authority that the federal government government has to allow the federal government to pay those subs it has to be done from the primes to the subs. One of the things that we're exploring is this to better understand that regulation is to see, does that preclude us or is that a necessary reg. So more work there but that doesn't have anything to do with necessarily with the technology per se. But so that's that question and we'll get more of the statutory stuff in this in a bit. So the only other thing I was going to say is we are transferring tokens on the blockchain, but when it is redeemed for funds. We are actually redeeming out to our normal a CH payment process to actually pay in dollars. So we're not paying in tokens or any cryptocurrency. We, this will connect to the financial system and will kick off a payment process in dollars. So I don't think we covered that and I just want to make sure that everyone was clear on that we're, we're transferring tokens to show the value for reporting purposes and so forth but not actually paying in crypto. Very good point. Yeah. Okay, next question looks like was around the underlying technology you're using for this and there's also a question around, if you considered using IPFS. Yeah, we, we, the, the app that you're seeing right now is built and it's going to show that it's in vision was the app to be used to create this we are using, you know, like I said we built this on a theory and recently went over to hyperledger based sue. We are in AWS cloud environment right now. We are posting the nodes we are using proof of authority for the consensus algorithm. And there's a lot of other things MongoDB is a lot of other sort of like components in here that I don't have in my memory. And then in terms of alternatives I think, and I am just kind of seeing just a couple things from the chat. And foremost, we are not. There was a couple of mentions about Cardano and some other sort of platforms. We are not we are platform agnostic I think we're just trying to understand the advantages and disadvantages of using blockchain technology again I think, if you look at this from Tammy's in mind vantage point we are an innovation shop so we are sort of exploring and asking these questions around is blockchain a better solution than what we do currently. So there's a, I think a question in the chat about why not just use relation database. Great question I think that's from a, from that's where I hope I think team and I are trying to add more value to this this is a, again proof of concept this is something that we have not decided that this is definitely something that we're going to do but we're still exploring whether or not this makes sense, and then give our recommendations to that so platform agnostic and still you know we're still in this sort of understanding if this is something that is better than the next best alternative. And we did we have not come to any sort of conclusions at this point except that we do know that it offers a lot more transparency over our current way of doing things. So why don't we just real quickly, let's just go to Tammy instead of the, let's just go to the next steps because this might actually get to the very last line we can kind of get to some questions because I do see we're getting a little bit running sort of close on time This might start to help folks get a sense of kind of where we're going and put a little bit more of this in context so while I'm letting Tammy find those slides I just wanted to kind of mention you know one of the things that we are sort of learning from a prototype working with a lot of end users is that while blockchain is very you know which we want to understand of clock the actual technologies adding any potentially value, we are having to incorporate a lot of the things that our grand recipients one so there's a lot of non blockchain things as well that we're having to incorporate into this prototype to really scratch the edge to really helping them improve the way that they actually report and the way that they actually carry out their business. So this will quickly then I will turn it over to a full blown q&a but I did want to kind of give you a sense of like where we're going next with this recent proof of concept. So we are still in the proof of concept phase we haven't even the way that we think about this as a proof of concept, then a pilot and then production. So we are still sort of in that proof of concept. We are seeing, and what we've learned and using our end users and using word of human centered design is that there is value we're seeing value using blockchain to reduce some of that reporting burden, but getting to our step one you know we really need to understand the pros and cons the alternatives analysis, looking at the return on investment doing a much more deeper dive into a business case analysis, just to really help us understand if this is something that has the benefits over the cost if this is something to be going into production. So that's a big, big point of this and just someone's. I often think about blockchain, when I go buy something off of Amazon, and I see the product that I want it offers me like three or four other products that are just like it. We also want to do the same thing with this, like maybe there are a couple other approaches to doing what we're doing to reduce the burden that could do it easier than what watching. We want to explore that we want to understand that. So that kind of address I think one of the questions about why are you doing this I think this is that this is that first step is to understand like is blockchain the best thing to do for this use case. And understanding so one of the things that we, I think this is actually another question for how we are hosting this right now. We don't have any sort of like philosophy on how a blockchain infrastructure would be hosted from a cross agency application. So one of the things that we are working doing is working with NIST. And I also want to help us figure out like what would a cross agency note infrastructure look like and how would those of those ATO is those authority to operate how that actually work because those are typically done from an agency by agency perspective but now we have to be coordinated and sync up with other agencies to do that. This is a lot more exploration of what a noted infrastructure would look like. Is this something that we would buy is this something that we would build our own. So we do have a lot of questions around that. So digital laws is another area where I think especially considering that the fiscal service does payments understanding just a little bit more about digital laws and some of the pros and cons and just getting more knowledgeable about knowledgeable about that is another area. Number three is sort of expanding our ecosystem. So I mentioned before how we've been largely working with the National Science Foundation and sort of their grant recipients and helping us to better understand that this is something that again scratches an edge from their perspective. We want to expand it out you know HHS does a lot of grants Department of Education does a lot of grants. There's a lot of state and local grants that that you know we get funding to so we want to sort of get and capture their feedback as well. To still understand that this application adds value to them and to their customers. And then lastly is really just establishing connectivity with the blockchain application to an agency's financial system. So the analogy that I like to use is effectively, you know we've effectively for lack of better example, you think about a casino when you go to casino you trade money in for tokens. And then at the end of the night, you go and you cash those tokens out for cash again well we've built everything except for that ability to cash those tokens and turn them into cash again so one of the things that we want to do is explore the API connectivity that you would have to have back into a fine an agency's financial system to make that happen. So that's part of the next round of work that we plan on doing, and hopefully and hopefully you know kind of we're hoping for is that with positive findings with with positive sort of feedback from the community is advancing this into an actual pilot where we can actually run some transactions through this. And just to get a better sense of the performance and just a better understanding that this is going to add value for our customers. So with that I think there's a lot of questions coming in and Laura I'll just kind of lean on you if you wanted to walk through a couple of those. John actually if you want to call out whether you just want to read the question and chat or let me know if you want me to unmute someone to have them ask live. Yeah, I think Chris Gabriel has some good questions. So if you want to unmute Chris that'd be great. There you go take it away Chris. Hello, how's everybody first of all Craig thanks for an awesome presentation and Tammy and Laura and all the gang. They're called blockchain summit. Yeah, my first question was around. And you briefly touched on a Craig about the tying in the payment rails for token redemption I said did you anticipate tying that back into the ACH slipped. Maybe not swift if you're only doing inside the US but if some of the sub grant people were outside the US you might have to do that so. Yeah, the idea. Yes, the idea today is like even when those drawdowns happen today in our current system. It will that information is all from the agency's financial system and then the agency will send over a payment file to the to the department treasury that says pay all of these entities and then we will on their behalf. So the idea is that the blockchain kind of comes in between that process where we will facilitate that information flow to have a much more clear view of who's getting that funding, but when those redemptions occur whether it be a prime or a sub that information would flow back up to that that agency that granted that that funding. They would approve that and then it would sort of like fall back into line with how we actually make those ACH payments. Yeah, we're really just using that blockchain to, you know, again, this this application is more about unlocking that transparency when there's a multi tiered sort of like payment aspect of this that's where that additional transparency is really helpful. But we do fall back into then traditional payment rails. That's been the challenge to date so far and actually, we found that to be pretty good on hyper leisure fabric networks where you don't have crypto or mining it ties back pretty nicely to that but one quick follow up question I'll give it back to the others. I was at the Houston tech rodeo virtually yesterday where the SBA did an actual seminar on grant applications for small business and tech startups, and or any startup, and they their part was the application process so I'm curious as to why you guys didn't integrate and maybe it was just too big for your POC or if you plan to integrate the actual application process by standardizing the application API so that the first part of it is already taken care of and then the grant reviewer when they get in there it's mostly done for Yeah, it's a really good point I mean I think we get a lot of questions like that and my my answer right now is that we're, we went into this trying to understand the payment aspect of this. And if the payment aspect of this, you know, just given the Bureau's mission get the payment aspect of this makes sense. Then I think we can sort of like back it out into some of these other areas if it makes sense. But again, our philosophy is kind of like to start small start simple, but it's not over complicated things. And then let's revisit that but I but I do think there's a lot of different things that you know if successful and if it makes sense. I'm tying this into not only is the financial system but the actual grant systems and potentially other like USA spending type things is to give that real time transparency makes. You can argue that it makes sense to go down that path we just didn't want to bite off more than we could chew within these sort of six months sort of chunks of work that we do. Okay, perfect. Now to Jodi and Jodi if you want to go ahead and unmute your mic and ask Craig to a question about next. Thank you, Craig that was wonderful presentation and time me as well for the walkthrough on the prototype. My question is, is this able to provide you guidance on the security standards for implementation of these DLT platforms. Are you and also a follow up on that is, are you getting any guidance on the security assessments of these implementations. So, I don't probably know as much about the second part of that question but in terms of the first part, I feel the our approach has been, you know, this sort of lays out their different FIPS modules for how you have to, and how you have to. So for the most part we're just looking at, if we sort of uncoupled unpack the technology itself, you know, using the theorem or using whatever we're using and so like applied against those FIPS. Does it, does it, you know, marry up well. The only thing right now that we found. And again, it's because we use the theorem is that it uses that catching 256, as opposed to a shot two or a shot three hashing algorithm. Right now. But I do think, you know, given blotching is more of a decentralized application where again it's not so you're just not just hosting something necessarily within your agency it's going to be cross agency. I probably would need to sort of ask them if there's other standards other things that we need to consider that we haven't considered to date when it comes to, you know, the, the missing the right word but the okay to actually, you know, use blotching and that in that space but I don't know about the security. I'm not knowledgeable enough about the security stuff. I will say that we are working with them on this next this next project where we are looking to sort of understand the that that cross agency authority to operate. Just to understand like what does that even look like how do we even do this as a government. So hopefully we'll unpack a lot more of the things with that effort. Thank you. I appreciate your answer. Greg another question comes here from Jay Jamal about standards. And so Jay if you want to go ahead and unmute and ask about NIST. That'd be great. Yeah, thanks. So thanks Greg and the team is impressive POC I work in a concert for the government agencies so few questions so you mentioned that the compliance and pointed out that fifth to the guys had any communication with the I don't think we we've encountered anything yet with NIST on that and again you know we've just been kind of scratching some of the surface here. If you actually looked at it and if you have that we sort of looked at four different components from NIST the hashing algorithm was one the key management there's another fifth module related to that there's two others that I'm that I'm missing. And the only one that we sort of like having from the NIST to the standards perspective right now is just the hashing algorithm to date anyway. So so do you guys participate on the NIST standard bodies or, or you don't for the black. Yeah, he's asking a good question there, Craig. So what is your department doing as far as participating with NIST, or you know, other ones like I triple E around, you know, being a part of the group that creates the standards for blockchain and and being an active participant there. I missed that so yeah, we are so NIST is was has been a part of this entire project I should have mentioned that earlier so with us working with NSF they've been pressure testing this application with us from the very start and again this is more of like a getting back to whatever we're doing, seeing things we're not going to be seeing from their perspective so they've been they've been along the entire time and then we'll continue to be along with us. At this point we're not really, you know, making any of recommendations to change any of the standards we're just trying to understand if if what that gap actually is between the standards and what we're doing what blockchain can actually achieve. We're aware of what we're doing and have been a lot of the entire time. Thanks. Let's see guys are ahead of other agents. I appreciate it. Thank you. Okay, next I'm going to call on Stephanie Fisher. Would you go ahead and unmute Stephanie and I just want to say what you're doing is extremely tremendous and I was very excited to see this. In particular, I go back to I was lobbying in DC during 2011, and it was at that time that a lot of the failure of a lot of the bailout and the stimulus packages of Obama's massive infrastructure and spending was becoming evident and in particular, I remember a news agency that was going to be showing the results of all the spending, and they showed two tables full of binders of what was going to be massive infrastructure spendings and projects and job creation in America and it was supposed to be a story of hope. And what ended up happening was after a week and a half, they had to stop because every piece of follow up information they did was a bridge to know where was a road that was not built was a project where the money just simply disappeared and it didn't create the jobs or. And so this is where we're on this cost Stephanie just around. Do you think that this would do an advantage to how the documentation and reporting burden can be reduced. I guess that's really what I'm seeing what you guys have just built this, this pilot you have built is in your token. You have tied to internal controls to a date, and you have the total ability to tie your internal controls to releasing milestones and dispersing payments if contract in the case of an infrastructure deployment, releasing that when milestones are met to reduce the type of corruption and the lessons that are learned from the Obama era and I see what you're building as something that could have huge massive. Let's just keep it very, you know, straightforward here is to, you know, what the proof of concept is, and let's, you know, just look at the way that this can improve visibility and reporting, how about that. I mean, I guess that's where if you can tie the on an infrastructure deployment tie this to milestone metrics. It just seems like that could be a way to learn lessons from what happened during the Obama era loss of funds. Okay, so I'm going to let Craig kind of just respond to that and just Yeah, I mean a lot of it says that we we've It sounds like some of what you're talking about is internal patrols we were able to specifically with some of these grants bacon those internal controls and then Given that agency that that additional oversight capacity to to before we make a payment so I mean I'll let's all say is that I think what we did find is that we did have more enhanced internal controls when it came to this application, which I was wasn't that positive but Okay, good. So what we're going to go to is going to be Brett carpenter Brett you want to go ahead and unmute and ask your question about taxation here. Hi, my name. Can you hear me. Yes, yes. My name is Brett carpenter and I'm being incubated by the county of Oakland in Michigan for a business taxation component. My question is, have you given any consideration to the taxation models, because I feel like that would move at least some forward thoughts for, you know, for the long tail of what you're doing. We were just, you know, again, kind of keeping this really small, really simple just focusing on this application. We haven't expanded it beyond the scope of what we're talking about today. So, yes, but that's about as much like by offer you. And then, and then, and then my next question is, have you explored decentralized derivatives at all. No, I mean, that's just not not that it's not that that's a, you know, I'm not taking a take on the question it's just more of like that probably falls a little bit outside of what we do within the Bureau of the fiscal service with a financial management perspective so Right now we're just going to just focus on the payment aspect and its impact on reporting. And then my next question is, are you is the quantum department in DC. Has it been shut down or something and why are you not applying for funds with quantum. This is something purely that will be quantum in the future. Yeah, I don't even know what to say to that, but I don't, it's, we get our funding sources through different means but yeah. Okay, thank you. Thanks Brett. So Craig I want to circle back around with you on more of the reporting burden and on internal controls. So one of the great things that I saw about this proof of concept was, it looks like right now grant recipients are spending 44% of their time on kind of the administrative burden of receiving grants. So, kind of with looking at the optimization from your proof of concept. What do you see that burden going down to you think it would be more of 24% of the time that they would be spending on that administrative reporting, or what do you think the efficiencies could be gained from this proof of concept. We don't have we didn't, we don't have any precise numbers at this point that's kind of one of the things that we want to look at in the next phase of this is to get to start to quantify what that burden reduction would actually look like. We have identified a couple of burden some reports that we think that we could largely eliminate if we use blockchain to facilitate those payments. But at this point we probably don't have a really good understanding. And I think that's sort of just the nature of proofs of concept is you sort of do it and you sort of say, does this offer any value you maybe sort of look at a couple of those reports that are that are causing some of the burden. But the, but the breadth of which, you know, I think it's still a little too early for us to to to know to tell. But we're hoping, you know, as we as we sort of advanced this that we're going to have a little bit more, a little more information around. And then a follow on question that is, it looks like you've really been listening to your stakeholders here. And one of the things I caught when you're going through the presentation was the ability to return grant funds. And it sounded like that was really a big win for a lot of the stakeholders here. So maybe can you walk me through some of the challenges that you're facing today that that really addresses and makes it much easier to almost kind of reconcile the books. You probably are better suited for this one than I am. Yeah, so people can return grant funds through checks back to the agencies or sometimes they're returned through Treasury, and sometimes they're not tagged with exactly what grant that they are returning the funds on so then it's a challenge to figure out which grant it actually ties back to, and sometimes it takes extra steps because it doesn't go back like to the program office it goes to the financial office and it starts there. So that tracking doesn't track back to the individual grant and it takes a bit of time to figure out, you know, which grant it belongs to why it was returned. So what we're doing with being able to track that on the within the application is it will actually tie back exactly to that grant. We'll know exactly why they're returning those funds we could get it posted appropriately in the financial systems as well, so that all the books are in saying so that the grantees, you know, we'll know that yes we did receive it it's tied back there and then all the that comes out of it will include any returned funding or you know any adjustments that were made to the funding. As far as like the obligations and so forth will have that full transparency, and then everybody can come to the blockchain or, you know, is posting to the blockchain, and that's the central point of truth of what exactly happened to that particular grant. So that's, you know, kind of the challenges, you know, when when funds are sent back in that, you know, they don't always have the right tracking numbers on them or they, you know, it could get separated from the right, you know, tracking numbers and and by doing it on the blockchain will have all of that transparency. Yeah, that's a perfect answer. Tammy thanks for that greater insight into that. And so the other follow on question I had for that is, you know, right now you're doing the proof of concept with the NSF. What is the kind of the timeline and you know additional agency participation look like going forward after you're through with kind of the initial phase of the POC. So we do want to capture the thoughts and feedback from some of the other grant making agencies and those recipients as well so we know like HHS is a big one. Somebody said USAID, they also give grants out. Department of Education, there are some like to stay local. So we do want to kind of capture, you know, if you look at if you look at all of the use cases that that will be paid grant recipients across the federal government we would like to try to capture, you know, 60, 70, 80% of that this next go around just to get those stakeholders and just to give us more of those insights into what would work what wouldn't work. So, but I think, you know, for example, right now the HHS is a big one for us, I think some of the state local for us as good would be good feedback and insights as well. But, you know, I think, is there any that we all have targeted for this next round. So, so we'll be working with the CUSMO and we actually are looking at HUD, as well to to expand based on some of the common grantees, you know that we have in common. That's perfect and I think, you know, once you see kind of the feedback that you get from the National Science Foundation and work with, you know, a few of these other agencies, I think really seeing what should be included in the solution and how that can really, you know, increase the efficiency will come through loud and clear. Yeah, and unfortunately, Tammy is going to have to drop I can spend about another five minutes before I have to so. Yep. Before I have to, before I have to head off to another one. Yeah, no problem. And that's good. And I think it's good to wrap up that there's anybody else here that has a good question. Laura, do you see anyone that pops out at you. I think we have everybody covered you had a question from Kate and a question from Gordon if you want to look at those to see if either one hasn't been answered. We're talking about transparency. We talked some about us aid. So I think we're pretty good here. Craig if you have anything or Tammy you want to convey to the group let's do that. Otherwise I think we can go ahead and wrap up here looks like maybe one more questions come in here. Yeah, I just think everybody through the insights and things like that that we're getting that we like to do presentations like this just to get the feedback with the important thing to know is that, you know, from our perspective this clearly is still a proof of concept it's still sort of clearly the innovation exploration phase we are seeing some places where it could add value but we're also seeing some hurdles and some challenges as well. So we want to continue working through those things and getting feedback and other thoughts are really important for us so. And, you know, a lot of thanks for, you know, giving us the venue here today to sort of assure we're doing and we really appreciate it. Yeah, no this has been a wonderful presentation and I think everyone got a lot out of it. The other question I think that Chris Gabriel just kind of asked about is, are you looking for any assistance on the R&D side or where does that currently stand with the agency right now. No, currently we're, we're, we're, we're good and we're looking to do a next round of contract work. So we put that out through our procurement shops to do that. But at this point I think we're, you know, those are the avenues that we use to do that. So, so yeah that's that's that's all I can always say about that always it gets into procurement to do sensitive stuff but we just go through our procurement process to to get some of the help that we need around any sort of anything with with any of the technical things that we have to do. Okay, perfect. Okay, Craig Tammy I really appreciate your wonderful time this morning and thanks for the great presentation looks like some innovative work going on there. And I look forward to, you know, future presentation where you come back and we go through this again and just kind of say, you know, here's the wins from what we did with our POC.