Daniela Barbosa, The Linux Foundation | Open Source Summit Europe 2022

This is texturing TV. Hey guys, we're back at the open source Summit in Dublin. This one's for Europe compared to the North America.

But we're also here talking to Daniella Barbosa who's the executive director of the hyperledger foundation and they had their own event here a couple of days ago. So we're gonna be talking about all things related to blockchain. Daniello.

Welcome welcome. It's great to be here. I'm not sure that a lot of people know exactly what hyperledger is.

So maybe you want to describe that a little bit because there's blockchain like aetherium and it's more public and that tends to get all the noise and the headlines but it seems like Enterprises are starting to line up more on a private blockchain. No, well actually Enterprises are in the Continuum of public and private today maybe in 2016 or 2017 Enterprises were very focused on permission private distributed Ledger Frameworks, and there's you know, big deployments of those against trade finance and Healthcare and supply chain today. I think there's an actual Continuum of companies that are very interested in public blockchain and the different layer ones.

For example that are out there in the different use cases and here at hyperledger foundation. And we also had our member Summits that we had two two events for the price of one. We had our members and our community really talking about true and proven Technologies like hyperledger fabric that's been around since 2016 and deployed in most Enterprise.

Permissioned networks, but also an exciting new projects like hyperledger Basu, which is an aetherium client number three on the ethereum execution Client List, you know one is death through his Aragon three is Basu. So we are really comprehensive of where the market and the Enterprise is going with distributed Ledger Technologies and related Tech as well and identity for example and more. Is it your sense that most of these projects are moving from the pilot stage or they still in Pilot or are they starting to show up more in production environments?

It varies by industry it varies by use case. So, you know, unfortunately, there's still a lot of people thinking that you know, blockchain is an answer to a problem that they don't have so those you know, projects might start as a pilot and maybe don't go anywhere but what we see we see Enterprises we see Executives talking about the efficiency gains that they're seeing the ROI gains that they're seeing within the implementations. It's not sexy, right the media doesn't want to talk about it because it doesn't have some you know, some guy on the top talking about, you know, cryptocurrencies and there's you know, lots of there's lots of great stories and very often you've been in an Enterprise software space forever.

Right a couple things one is you don't get the opportunity to talk about it because your Corp comms people don't really want to talk about it. And if there's a word that is shaky or a little bit scary in the marketplace like blockchain most likely you don't want to talk about that. Right and you're building consortiums with hundreds.

Sometimes a Partners in these can in these communities. So you have to have agreement from everybody to be able to talk about what you're building in these blockchain networks. The other thing is people are still you know worried about you.

I say this all the time you go on a website, right and you don't say hey, this was built with a database an SQL database isn't this website? I mean amazing, you just use that website. You don't know what's powering it right?

We had Saudi armaco talk about their use case in an invoicing they have onboarded 11 vendors since March of 2021. Now these are vendors that they're spending a lot of money with right. It's a Saturday armor code.

They are seeing efficiency gains. They're seeing the their custom their customers or their vendors using the application, but they don't talk about blockchain. They don't go to their vendors and say hey, you got to onboard into our invoice portal because it's blockchain.

No, they say, hey, we just built something that's more efficient that allows us to reconcile invoices much quicker and allows you to get money faster. Would you like to participate? And that's what people are missing.

I think in in the story. Are these brand new use cases? Are they in some instances replacing say a traditional sap Ledger that they were using for some purpose one way or the other but this one that being a little more efficient because it's more distributed.

Yeah, I think you know it the processes are the same. There are new businesses being built on top of blockchain networks for sure. Right but these, you know the example I just gave you there are existing business.

They had to pay their vendors before they implemented this new, you know these new platform for them. So, I think it's a combination of both Will we consume it to your description before about it's a databasing? I'm just using it.

Is that going to be consumed more as a service provided by somebody in the cloud versus something that I build myself and deploy because you know, most of the folks that I talked to who are deploying it. Yeah, they have major it squads. So it's not really something for you know, the mid Market just yet.

But maybe we'll be as a service. Yeah. So first I want to call clarify my description of the database.

I'll change that story and say when you go to a website and you don't think hey this this great experience this JavaScript as a user you don't know so that's what I meant. Not that blockchain is a database but we all know that so to answer your question. Yes, you we need networks will need to provide nodes as a service for a couple of things one reason is there are certainly just some companies that are not large enough.

They don't have it departments that can run their own infrastructure. That they run their own node. So we're seeing companies like for example AWS that has blockchain as a service and they're offering managed services on top of that and there's many others they're small and there's big cloud services providers that do that.

So I think there's always going to meet a need if you're going to build a distributed a Network that has multi, you know, participant small medium large you're going to have to do that. There was also a lot of talk during the conference about digital currencies and using blockchain as the base for that. The EU is experimenting with this a lot of countries are starting to think about it.

At least there's some examples I think in Cambodia and some other places where people are doing some interesting things. What is the future money as we think about it right now? Yeah.

I mean, there's a lot of great work happening in the hyperledger foundation across various projects right now in one of the Workshops the bank to France which is joined the hyperledger foundation as an associate member along with the Central Bank of Cambodia joining the bank of England. The Boston fed, the Mas. These are organizations that have developers and it folks that are actually in the code developing the code and the processes.

So we've been tracking Central Bank digital currencies for about 18 months and to see how the adoption of those projects are going. The first retail cbdc was in the Bank of Odia a project pecan. That was a retail cbdc built with a project called.

Aroha hyperledger atoha and they've seen you know thousands of transactions in peer to peer distribution. So I think that we're going to see it's still early. I think there's there was a big rush to get things done and Maya Santa Maria who is the minister from the Minister of Finance here in Ireland spoke on panel on cbdc's and she mentioned, you know, we're very still, you know early on on what it's going to look like.

Is it going to need a distributed Ledger? Is it going to be something else? But the push is that with DM coming along when when Facebook that made that announcement all the central banks woke up around the world and said we need to do that.

What's happening in China with the Yuan with the digital Yen there we need to figure out a way and there's going to be multiple approaches. What works for the Eastern Caribbean Bank is not going to work for the FED in the US. It seems there's also a lot of confusion about well if I have an immutable platform where all the changes can be seen by everybody.

How do I deal with confidentiality? Because a lot of these Banks want to transactions that are you know, super super private you should imagine the Swiss might be having a conversation about this. Absolutely.

So yeah, are we gonna try to strike a balance between these things or how will we get there? Yeah. It's it's a it's it's a myth that you can't have privacy of your data.

If you're participating in blockchain Consortium at all. I'll give you an example. So we have a project here at the Linux Foundation that's called open IDL an open IDL is for insurance regulatory reporting to the states in North America.

So every state Commissioner of a commission insurance commissioner has a requirement that the carriers the insurance carriers report back to them the information around the drivers, you know, the who has car insurance. Basically I could tell you that the insurance carriers don't want to tell each other who their customer base is, right, but they have a regulatory requirement that's being put into place that they have to do it and they have to do it in the same format and they have to be able to look at each other's data to figure out. Are things that shouldn't that shouldn't be doing so regulatory requirement is making them come together in a Consortium to do this and then blockchain is the way to do it with the Privacy architecture making sure that each carrier and other participants in that Network don't see the data that they shouldn't see you and I are having a transaction.

I give you the rights to see the data that I have that gentleman over there just needs to know that it happened. He doesn't need to know he just needs to confirm that that transaction happens. So then I can go on with my business and that so I think it's maybe a myth or maybe people haven't looked at the architectural documents very closely.

One of the other issues is we hear a lot about sustainability especially here in Europe. People want to know where the coffee came from and they want to know what went into it for producing energy carbon all kinds of stuff. Is that going to be a use case for blockchain because it's going to provide the mechanism by which we will Have increased transparency into where things come from.

Absolutely. So I think you early on in 2016 and 2017 when the hyperledger foundation started talking about use cases. We actually use the coffee use case quite a bit.

Right? Because it really embed in puts together the the farmer right the farmer that is looking for Market to bring his coffee into place and it puts into place the consumers the consumer understands where that's going it also along the supply chain all the people that touch that product and how do you get money to them faster? How do you make sure that if it needs to be tracked back into a specific spot where it got missed or something went wrong with the shipment all the supply chain value chain along there.

So we've been talking about those use cases for a while, but that also has a lot of in climate impact approaches, right if you think about the EV in the car manufacturing movement, right EV cars are great. They save oil and gas. You know what, they're made out of batteries and those batteries get mine from from you know mines in Africa and other places and there's slave labor.

That is sometimes pulling out those Minds. How do you do that whole supply chain with accountability across that multi-vendor Enterprise view, right? So I think that there's a lot of opportunities and climate accounting trust is one right you want to trust there's a lot of greenwashing a data.

I planted a million trees. That's great. Can you prove it to me that you planted a million trees and then can you also prove that those million trees actually grew up to be a karmic positive for the for the the world not a negative.

There's also been a lot of fraud over the years in a lot of transactions. So is this a way to kind of get at some of that issue as well? Because you know, we have instances where people are selling things that aren't really what they say they are and this becomes a bigger issue and it can also be Health Care fraud or whatever it is.

But if we have this more immutable framework, is that some way that we're going to get after what you know, frankly. Is it multi-trillion dollar industry. It's Providence, right?

And we have the diamond supply chain, right another great use case for five years that you know, the Kimberly process has been running on ever-ledger. It's a hyperledger fabric implementation that is a way to track the Providence of the diamond and also the transfer so if you sold me a diamond, I wouldn't pay you very much for it, but I take it and then I have the Providence of where that diamond came and how many people had potential hands now. I don't need to know who had all the hands on it, but that there was five owners.

For example, we are seeing this in Friends, we're seeing it in high value art obviously with nfts and kind of the digital signature on these things. I'll give you an example. It's a fantastic.

It's a great experiment just this week. They're going to start burning when I mean burning Damian Hurst is an artist. I don't know if you're familiar with them.

He painted a very large picture he cut it out into 10,000 pieces. They sold those 10,000 pieces as nfts and everybody that bought one had the had for a year. They received they had this nft and the nft was that at the end of the year.

They had to make a choice whether they wanted a physical piece of paper. Or they wanted to digital nft and the physical piece of paper will get burned. Or the nft will get burned.

You need to make a decision. At the end of the one year next week in their gallery. They're going to be burning the decision makers who did the paper the paper version of the art piece and a Damon Hearst is a very very popular painter.

So that piece of paper is worth a lot of money that art piece that is built with hyperledger Basu, which is our ethereum client and it allows from that point also from a sustainability perspective because you're not running all those transactions on a public, you know, proof of works blockchain really helps the marketplace as well. So yes on Providence yes on traceability and yes on value It feels like we're at the customers shift where a lot of people got involved early were building pilot projects and then trying to figure out what the business use case was almost seems like we're gonna flip it now where people are gonna understand what the business use cases are and then there's going to be more people launching projects with the platform because they're going to understand it. It's very hard to build something on the it side and then hope they will come.

Yeah. So, you know, are we a kind of at this? Transition Point.

Well, I mean depends on who you're talking about. If you're talking about Enterprises, right that's going to be the case, right you see Innovation Labs pop up all the time. Now, we have blockchain Innovation Labs where now we have the cloud computing Innovation labs.

And now we have the AI Innovation Labs, right? That's how they allow their employees and their structure to go outside of their normal business so that they can innovate so that they can build new businesses, right? That's just Enterprises and those Cycles will continue to go the the proof is in the pudding.

You know, when I started at hyperledger in 2017, we used to get those calls from someone who's like I just got out of executive meeting large company executive meeting and my c-suite said you got to do something with blockchain. What do I do? That's just not the right approach right?

It's good if you want to experiment. Well, what's your business like? Oh you do this.

Well, here's five use cases. You might want to experiment with we have companies that run hackathons and have for years where they allow their employees to build Solutions and come up with things come up with things that Your business problems. Don't worry about what technology to use and then bring it into a hackathon and then we'll pick two to three to take it into MVP or POC depending on the structure that it's there.

That's the kind of innovation that enterprises need to do whether it's a blockchain or any other technology that they're looking at in my opinion. How do people get involved with you guys or is there a form I fill out somewhere. Do I just show up and kind of start hanging out with people?

Yeah. Well, you know open source communities are open. We're all or welcome.

We've been here for three days one day with just our members, which is an amazing way to understand what their strategy is in the market and the other two days with our Global Community. We had people coming from all over the world our Brazil Regional chapter. For example, they were all large group of them.

We're here for the last two days our India Regional chapter Africa our members from around the world you can show up at events and we're so excited to actually have you can see my I the last three days I have enough energy for the last the next three months just being with people as well. We are all welcome. I just had a conversation with the young woman that we do diversity scholarships and she came from Bolivia for three days in Dublin to spend time with the hyper electric community and it was the most inspiring Thing for me to have sponsored, you know, the hyperledger foundation sponsored.

We do quite a few with the support of our sponsors. org and you click on participate you can see our chats our community meetings pretty much on of any day. You can jump on a community meeting and you'll be welcomed and people will share with you what they're working on we have events.

We have meetups dirt virtual and in person now that you can participate over 80,000 people participate in our hyper-ledger Meetup Community. There's so much ways to get involved. I know it's confusing sometimes because hyper Ledger Foundation, we're 15 projects.

We have 10 special interest groups. We're hundreds of companies. We really cover hundreds of use cases.

So how do you get involved just show up? Ask the person there? This is what I love.

This is what I'm passionate about. How do I get involved? And I hope that will tell you I know they'll tell you exactly how to get involved.

So get out your little crystal ball. Where are we a year from now? Where are we from a year from now?

I think that we are going to be the hyperledger foundation is going to be a much stronger Community today you things a digital identity for example are a topics decentralized identity. We just launched a new course on self Sovereign identity with partnership with the Linux foundation training organization five years ago. We launched an Enterprise blockchain course and edx course a free course over 200,000 people have taken that course and we updated every year and talk about educating the market in 2016-2017.

We needed to do that. We needed to have business and Technical leaders understand what Enterprise blockchain was all about yesterday. We just launched SSI a self-sover and identity at edxcore same thing free really for business and Technical users because essentially you're gonna have to be facing These decisions in your product development.

You're going to be having to face this decisions in the Partnerships that you have right one company always, you know partners and has networks with others digital identity is going to be core to things. So I encourage everyone to do that as well. So in the Years time, you know, I hope that we have more companies are willing to talk about the work that they've done the last two days, you know, you saw a lot of the companies large Brands talking about the work that they're doing and the results that they're seeing.

So we'll see more of that. I also am very very excited about the conversions of kind of the coming to this the middle or the central point of those that are working on public blockchains. And those that have for many many years actually worked on the distributed Ledger technology the core blockchain principles, right public blockchains or blockchains everything that we've been working on for the last seven years is blockchains as well.

The community's coming together. So for example, we just had Casper Labs join. We have had Dara we have consensus ethereum.

Nation just did a presentation yesterday around their client incentive program that they awarded to hyperledger Bass who these are things that are happening. I believe that the hyperledger foundation over the last six years has got us to this point due to Enterprise developers and I just am so excited about where we continue to build. All right, folks.

You heard it here. The future is here. Once again, it's just as always unevenly distributed Danielle.

Thanks for being on the show, right? Thank you.