(Part 1) Future of Money, Governance & the Law Summit

Thank you very much, Brian. Distinguished delegates, esteemed colleagues, honored guests, welcome to the United Nations. It's my pleasure to welcome you today as we bring together experts from government, international organization, academia, civil society, and the private sector to explore how emerging technologies can be governed responsibly and deployed for public benefit. Before we commence our session, please allow me to share an important disclaimer regarding my representation today. I'm speaking before you strictly in my personal capacity and in my capacity as a co-lead with Gerard, of the Dynamic Coalition on Blockchain Assurance and Standardization, as well as the Dynamic Coalition on Emerging Technology, as recognized by the United Nations Internet Governance Forum, IGF. The views Technical reflection and observation I share throughout these remarks and across the day do not represent the official stance, policies, or decision of the United Nations Secretariat or any official UN organ. Rather, they reflect the shared mission of our IGF dynamic coalition and my individual professional journey as an enterprise architect and former information system auditor dedicated to advance digital trust. My overarching comment about this event will be composed of six parts, very briefly, of course. First and foremost, I would like to focus on the term future as the title of this conference. I also would like to ground some principles in practice, focusing on human and non-human digital identity. Then, as my obsessed mind of a former auditor always pushes me, I will provide a brief comment and some observation on my auditor's lens, fundamentally and primarily on assurance and formal verification. I will then like to address the concept of strengthening resilience through public anchoring of permission-based blockchain to public permissionless blockchain and quantum readiness. I will then move to institutionalizing quality through certifiable standards and the GBA maturity model. And finally, trying to identify the path forward. So, the future, in today's agenda, we will have a unifying theme that stands out and is the term future. From the future of digital trust, institutional governance, and financial stability to the future of decentralized markets, our schedule focuses squarely on the horizon ahead. This forward-looking orientation directly mirrors the historic consensus achieved in this very institution on the 22 of September 2024 when all 193 member states of the United Nation adopted the pact for the future and its annex titled Global Digital Compact. The Global Digital Compact established a vital multilateral mandate. Digital technology must advance human dignity, foster equitable development, and adhere strictly to international law and human rights. Above all, it demands responsible use, safety, and rigorous systemic assurance for emerging technologies. It serves an enduring reminder that technical innovation cannot outpace accountability. The topics we will discuss today, digital public infrastructure, predictive intelligence, automated finance, and decentralized governance, represent the operationalization of this shared global commitment. So let's start grounding this principle in some practical experience. As I alluded to, human and non-human digital identity. Multi-stakeholder declaration must translate into practical, functioning enterprise architecture. Bridging high-level multilateral governance with verifiable technical execution has been central to my work across global public institution. A concrete demonstration of this intersection is the design and implementation of an enterprise digital identity solution for proof of life that are implemented at the United Nations Pension Fund. In international humanitarian administration, verifying the continued eligibility of vulnerable retirees and beneficiaries across more than 190 countries poses a steep human and operational challenge. Fraudulent claims threaten fund solvency, while burdensome physical verification or postal testation risk disenfranchising elderly beneficiary living in remote or conflict affected region. To address this, at the UN Pension Fund, we engineer an identity solution combining blockchain, biometrics, and artificial intelligence. Biometric facial recognition verify the identity solution in real time. pairing liveness detection with privacy-preserving edge processing. Artificial intelligence models evaluate authenticity and detect potential presentation attacks, i.e. deepfakes, without transferring raw biometric templates across insecure networks. And distribute the ledger technology records in an immutable manner cryptographically verifiable proof of life that are accessible to distributed certifying authorities and verified by internal or external auditors. This deployment demonstrated that when privacy by design and operational governance guide system architecture, decentralized technology can safeguard human rights while eliminating administrative function. Critically, Based on my personal experience and implementation, I place even greater value today on the transferability of the core concept, mechanism, and assurance control developed for human identity to non-human identity. As autonomous agent, algorithms, smart contract, and institutional entities interact across decentralized ledgers establishing verifiable provenance and organizational authority is just as crucial as verifying a biological proof of existence of a human being. I see this transferability realized through global standard, such as legal entity identifier and its digital cryptographic counterpart, the verifiable LEI or VLEI. By adopting decentralized identity, cryptographic role credential, and routine authorization control from natural person to machine, legal entities, and autonomous systems, we can computationally verify identity, authority, and accountability across automated workflows with the human intermediaries. Let's come to the auditor lens, my long time obsession, assurance and formal verification. Moving emerging technologies into critical public and financial infrastructure requires an objective foundation of verifiable trust. Having served as an information system auditor for almost 25 years, I view digital transformation through internal controls, risk management, and empirical assurance criteria. Assurance cannot rest on subjective claims. vendor self-attestation, or surface-level code reviews. In decentralized automated environment, assurance criteria must be supported by formal verification. When deploying smart contract and automated state machine across distributed ledger, traditional unit and integration testing leave subtle edge cases undetected. Formal verification applies mathematical proof to the underlying logic, proving that code behaves exactly according to its formal specification and remains mathematically resilient against potential manipulation or unauthorized use. For institutional system where public trust and financial integrity are paramount, establishing mathematically proven assurance criteria is the baseline for institutional adoption. Let's move from strengthening resilience, and these are the domain where I'm currently focused, public anchoring and quantum readiness. Our architectural duties do not conclude once an internal ledger goes live. In my case, two ongoing strategic initiatives illustrate the continuous engineering and continuous improvement required by institutional resilience. public anchoring of permission networks. While enterprise consortia benefit from the privacy, operational governance, and deterministic throughput of permissioned distributed ledger, they remain vulnerable to potential internal collusion or centralized compromise. To mitigate this risk, Our ongoing work anchors cryptographic state roots of our permission blockchain into decentralized public networks. This hybrid design creates an immutable, third-party, verifiable audit trail that external stakeholders can validate without exposing underlying confidential data. Migration to post-quantum cryptography. The cryptographic foundation securing modern identity, digital signature, and distributed ledger, specifically the RSA elliptic curve cryptography, face eventual compromise from cryptoanalytically relevant quantum computers. Through proactive risk assessment, our infrastructure roadmap incorporates hybrid signature and post-quantum cryptographic primitives, transitioning to quantum resilient algorithm before decryption capability becomes ubiquitous is imperative for preserving the longevity of multilateral records. Let's talk about quality certification standard and the GBA maturity model. Individual engineering achievement must mature into universal and repeatable frameworks. This Necessity informs my ongoing engagement with the International Organization for Standardization, ISO, specifically the ISO Technical Committee 307. I'm collaborating internationally to develop certifiable standard for blockchain and distributed ledger technology. A certifiable management operational standard would equip global enterprises, regulators, audit institutions with uniform requirement to assess whether a distributed system meets enterprise grade baseline for security, data governance, and operational resilience. Standardization must also be matched by diagnostic rigor in assessing an organizational actual operational capabilities. This is why we recognize the profound value of structure objective framework such as the GBA blockchain maturity model. The BMM provide enterprise architect auditors, and leadership with a standardized multi-tier lens to evaluate solutions across critical dimensions such as governance, interoperability, and performance, cryptographic security and data privacy, regulatory compliance, and environmental sustainability. Crucially, adopting a structural maturity model supports meaningful risk assessment, and drive the systemic production of corroborating evidence, the obsession of an auditor. Informal audits and corroborated assertion carry zero weight. Maturity framework ensure every control objective connects to objective and verifiable artifacts. Let me conclude with the path forward-looking across our agenda today, Our session followed deliberate progression from foundational trust and financial risk to leadership in decentralized governance, concluding with actionable execution frameworks. The Global Digital Compact affirm that our collective future depends on our ability to govern technology with wisdom, integrity, and measured accountability. Thank you for lending your expertise your critical insight, and your dedication to this vital multilateral mission. I wish you all an inspiring, productive, and transformative day. Thank you.

That's how that works. GBA events have a unique characteristic in that our speakers are part of our community. Dino and I have been friends. for us for several years. And I want to let you know that when we go out to dinner, he talks exactly the same way. Now, Dino is always 100% right, right on target. I thank you for your friendship and all of your contributions. One of the things that he's very humble, he hasn't shared with you that he is the deputy chief executive officer of a $95 billion pension fund, the best practices leader across an entire UN footprint. for technology, has tremendous influence and advises some of the top people in the world. So we're very fortunate and glad to have you, very humbled to be able to call you a friend. I'm going to bring my laptop over and talk about the next thing. So just give us about 30 seconds or so to do a little transition, and then I'll go from here. Thank you, Dino. Oh, I'm sorry. Here's that. Oh, I'm sorry. I stand corrected. All right. Sorry.

All right.

Good morning, everyone. And I just want to first thank the GBA. I love coming here. My name is Ebony Thompson. I'm the city solicitor for Baltimore, which just means that I run the law department for the city of Baltimore. And any time anyone wants to sue them, they have to come through me first. So, but it is, it's been just an absolute pleasure. I also have the pleasure of leading Baltimore is the first municipality to utilize blockchain technology to combat vacant housing. We've had a vacant housing problem for quite a while, been as high as 16,000 units. We're down to a little under 11,500, and we're utilizing the technology as one of the comprehensive solutions to combat that. Today, we're talking about some of the challenges that I think any municipality or anyone that is building in this space in terms of trust, right? And as money, government and law is becoming increasingly digital, I don't think the question is really what the technology can do, but how can we build systems that people can trust around that? And so I have some very distinguished panelists with me today that I am going to really be listening to and taking notes and bringing it back to Baltimore. So what I'll do is allow them first to introduce themselves. I'm going to start with one of the people that's been teaching me the most with Paul and we'll go down the line.

I'm just the first. Hello, everybody. I'm Paul Dowding. I'm a volunteer co-chair of the Government Blockchain Association and also run the Banking and Finance Working Group. And I was a big part of the team that helped put together the Blockchain Maturity Model. My day job, I'm actually co-founder and head of design for L4S Core, which has got a differentiating layer one permission protocol that actually has double entry accounting transaction periods and can synchronize without consensus and validators. And I'm honored to be here. And I just want to say as co-chair, I'd be remiss in not thanking you hear from him. Tennyson and SafeBets as a title sponsor for this event. I know Gerard said before, but it really is a major contribution to make all of this possible. So we're very thankful.

Tennyson, you want to, well, Nimit, you want to go.

Hi, everyone. My name is Nimit. I'm one of the co-founders at Votes. Votez is an elections platform that has pioneered the use of personal devices to vote in public elections. And we're also honored to be the first election system to complete the BMM certification when it first launched a few years ago. And our focus, obviously, is on how to build trust and enhance trust. And as you all know, elections is an area where there is a severe lack of trust all around the world. So happy to share our experiences now across eight countries and covering more than 200 elections. Glad to be here. Thank you.

I think I have an additional panelist with Charles. Okay. All right. So, Charles, please introduce yourself. Oh, no. Oh, you're going to do it. All right.

Thank you, Ebony. Yeah, we had some recent changes, so we had to change the schedule up a little bit. But I want to thank Charles for making time out of his busy schedule to attend. Charles is one of the one of the founding fathers in this industry. He was instrumental in co-founding Ethereum. He's the founder of Cardano. And in the few couple of years that I've had a chance to meet him, I've seen him essentially traveling all over the world, meeting with heads of states, impacting legislation, investing a very large sum of money in different projects in the healthcare space, in many different space. His his commitment to governance is unsurpassed by, I think, anybody that I've ever met. And so he and I, we we had a chance to to spend some time talking the other day, and he shared with me his vision in terms of governance, decentralized governance, rule based. And we and he was just singing music to my ears. And I want to tell you, Charles, we had an opportunity to. We had him at a roundtable on Capitol Hill the other day, and one of the people came up to me and he said, I know a lot of smart people. I know Elon Musk and I know a lot of smart people. And he said to me, Charles is the smartest man I have ever met. Right. In fact, my son, who lives in Richmond, who's studying artificial intelligence, I called him and I said, you've got to come up to D.C. to hear this guy speak. So we are incredibly honored. that you're here. And we have a whole panel, right? So we're going to shift things around a little bit. What we're going to do is we're going to do a little mini roundtable like we did the other day, right? And Ebony, I'm going to-- There you go. So Ebony, I'm going to-- I have a tendency of throwing people under the bus and seeing how they respond. But I'm going to let you drive it-- Oh, the mic's not on. Oh, the mic is not on. Okay. Anyway, Ebony, I'm going to let you drive the conversation. But again, Charles, thank you for being here. And I'm super excited to hear how this thing goes.

Well, it really is an addition to have you here, Charles. I learned something. So thank you so much. Thank you so much. Well, I will let you. If you want to say anything that Gerard did not cover, I don't think that's possible, but if you do want to, if you missed anything, please, I want to give you an opportunity to speak and just do any intro that you feel everyone should know before we get started.

Is this on? Can you guys hear me? Okay, there we go. It's always difficult with microphones, isn't it? So I really appreciate that gracious introduction, and I'm sorry for coming midstream. Officially, I'm on the calendar, I think, for around noon. So I don't think I was actually assigned to this panel, or else I would have come a little earlier. But I've been in the blockchain industry for 15 years, and I've watched it grow and mature and evolve from dollar Bitcoin to the insanity we have today. and also watch it grow from no people to 550 million. And what's truly remarkable is it brings the entire world together. And the fastest adopting countries in blockchain and Bitcoin and crypto in general are actually abroad. They're not here in America. Places like Vietnam, where one out of three people hold cryptocurrencies. Argentina, where they have a $700 billion economy and $100 billion of it is in crypto. Places like Nigeria, 31% of the population holds cryptocurrencies or has used cryptocurrencies. So it's a tremendously transformational technology and democratizing technology because it's reset the world financial order. The prior agreements, whether they be Bretton Woods or the Jamaica agreement or the things that built the modern financial world that we enjoy today, are not relevant from a cryptocurrency lens and context. So it gives us an opportunity to reset things, rebuild things, and make them intrinsically global and fair for the first time ever. So it's a great pleasure to be here at the United Nations and a great pleasure to be able to address all of you and have a conversation with all of you. And hopefully we can all learn together and grow together and ask what this technology means for where the economy in the world is going.

Excellent. And Tennyson, we're going to round it out with you.

Sure.

Yeah, tough act to follow. Can you all hear me okay? Does it work? Okay, great. Hi, everybody. I'm Tennyson Singer, and I'm executive director with SafeBets. Thanks for the shout out there, Paul. We appreciate it. We're so delighted to be here. We had a great time the last two days in Washington, D.C., and it's an honor to round out this wonderful event here at the UN with you all today. I come from 15 years on Madison Avenue, actually just about four blocks away on 41st and Madison in branding and advertising, where I was a senior strategy director for one of Alan Siegel, the founder of modern branding firms, Siegel Vision, and then founded my own firm, Brand Singer, on Madison Avenue as well. And I joined SafeBets last quarter as executive director. It's a new kind of prediction market. And They have a really interesting and amazing proposition to that market, which is that you can win without risk. So one that sounds almost too good to be true and from a marketing standpoint was certainly intriguing. So I'm delighted to be with you all here today and hopefully provide a little bit of perspective on the rapidly growing predictions market that we all read about in the news every day. So delighted to be with you here today and thank you, Ebony.

Absolutely. Now, we just got to jump right into the questions in this one, top of mind for a municipality that's trying to introduce blockchain solutions. you each represent solutions for different use cases, but how is trust being created in your industries for blockchain solutions? And I know dealing with 600,000 roughly residents that we are trying to introduce this technology that is sometimes a struggle. And I am really interested to learn on with all these different use cases, how you are building trust. I'm going to start, Paul.

Yeah, I would say the origins of our protocol was really looking at a solution for the traditional capital markets globally. And what I've gained in knowledge and understanding from participating in the GBA, and particularly in terms of putting the blockchain maturity model together, is that we have to consider things from all perspectives. And although I've got a focus on traditional finance, I'm in awe and enamored by the DeFi worlds. And I think what's came out the last couple of days as themes is they are different paradigms. There's different approaches. And I think in order to get trust, you often got the technology doesn't necessarily work in the crypto world in traditional finance. And also the regulations in traditional finance don't necessarily apply to crypto. And so there needs to be, I think, in gaining the trust, they have to let the innovators innovate. There has to be some proof by doing, but there has to be some thoughtful, holistic design and process. And I know the crypto DeFi industry has definitely expanded greatly around the world, as Charles just said. I don't think it's going to be an industry that's easily regulated, and to get that trust. And the other side of it is, the traditional finance has some history of not necessarily being trusted as well. And so how do we make this technology work for them as well? It is a real challenge. But I think that stepping back and thinking about things holistically is the key thing and understanding that there may actually be two parallel worlds.

Nimit, did you want to weigh in on that?

Sure. So as it pertains to elections, so we got started about eight years ago with a very niche use case. focused on military voters and US citizens who live outside the country. Obviously, it's hard for them to vote the traditional way with paper. And the methods usually available are you can fax your ballot, which obviously is hard to tabulate and somebody has to reproduce it, so you lose your secrecy. Or you can email it back, which once again, is in the highest level of security or anonymity by any standards. So that's how we started with 20 voters in the 2018 midterm elections. And the focus was, can we at least show this small group of voters, and obviously the election officials, that this can be an alternative path which has a higher level of trust and assurance. And so that process, with, say, baby steps, from the very first election has now grown to our most recent 200 election we just did recently, or actually is in progress. And the key takeaway for us has been, you have to involve the voters. So in a traditional voting sense, when you vote on paper, a voter can hold the paper ballot before they put it into the ballot box, and that gives them some assurance, right? It's hard to tamper that After that, it's not impossible, but it's hard. With a digital system, especially in the world of AI and all kinds of security events happening, how do you create an equivalent level of trust? So doing simple things like giving them cryptographic confirmation IDs that they can easily go check and validate on the blockchain without being a math PhD. I think that's been the biggest sort of baby step across all the elections. How can you make that process easy, less geeky, so that, you know, every voter, regardless of their background, can actually verify that? So I would say for us, that's been the biggest learning, focusing on the end user. How can you make it simple yet, you know, get your objective done?

And I'm sorry, just on that, because it's just such a prevalent topic. How do you get the word out if it is, you know, successful in terms of expansion and being able to rely on that?

So initially, it has relied on word of mouth and, you know, we say forward-looking election officials who are willing to take the leap and offer this additional, you know, vote by phone or vote at home channel to their voters. And it has slowly grown. So obviously our initial success was in counties which have a heavy military voter population around the country. So roughly there are about 5 million people, 5 million registered voters in the U.S. who are technically eligible to use our system right now as per the law. everybody else cannot use it until laws get amended. So in that subset, the marketing has been go to word of mouth, election officials. And then if you take it outside the US, countries like Canada or Mexico, where they've opened it up to everybody to vote, there it's been a lot of So it's a pilot events, social media, inviting voters to events like this where like a mock election is conducted. Everybody gets to ask the tough questions, you know, dispute the accuracy and sort of build of that to then actually doing an actual election where you live stream the opening of the election, the creation of the encryption keys that encrypt the ballot. And then similarly at the end, you know, closing getting the results and, you know, demonstrating to people that nothing was tampered with. And if it was, it would be visible to the world. So it's been, I would say, a series of baby steps, and hopefully that keeps growing so that eventually it reaches mass market.

Excellent. And Charles, could you weigh in on that?

On voting in particular or the things we--

No,

no, no, no, no, sir. The overall arching, like in the use cases that you are--

Sure, sure.

Working with, how is trust, how have you created that?

Yeah, yeah. So what's been a joy is I've been around long enough to kind of watch the industry evolve through many different generations. You know, in the beginning, what we were trying to solve was can you build a value transfer system without a trusted third party? So can I just email money to people? Can I just send some Bitcoin or some instrument and no third parties involved in approving that transaction? And that's actually a super hard problem. We tried to do it in the 90s with something called DigiCash. David Chaum was a pioneer there. It didn't quite work as well as people hoped, and you always needed a PayPal or a bank or something in between. So minute that Bitcoin became successful, people said, well, the problem with Bitcoin is it's just Bitcoin. It's not programmable, doesn't have any capabilities other than just pushing Bitcoin around. So we said, well, why don't we make it programmable? Kind of like when JavaScript came to the web browser, you went from these static websites to these rich web experiences like Amazon and Facebook and things that you know and love and enjoy today. So Ethereum came in 2013, 2014, and we brought that smart contract revolution in. We were standing on the shoulders of giants, the Ricardian contracts and Nick Szabo and others had come up with these concepts in the 90s, Ian Grieg was another. And then people like that. So then we said, hey, we need to make it scale. So it can't just work for a few people, but it's got to work for hundreds of millions of people all around the world, which is a really hard problem. It's got to be simple and easy to understand. So really the third generation, which came in around 2017, 2018, these first wave of ventures, and they started getting good recently, have been able to bring these technologies to hundreds of millions of people. So then we now look at the fourth generation, we say, well, the problem with blockchain is it's public. And so that's great for things like public records, that's great for governance, especially open governments like democracies, it's terrible for business. 'Cause every business, it has a private side. Your HR data, how much you pay people, disciplinary actions, private commercial arrangements, trade secrets like the formula for Coca-Cola. We'd like to keep these things secret, right? So how do you, in a blockchain space, admit privacy, and then once you do that, also how do you admit identity? So we're starting to bridge these things together, 'cause right now, cryptocurrencies have no notion of ID. And his work on voting, it's the core of everything. You have to know who people are to know if you're eligible to vote or not. But would you be willing to put your identity in a system where everybody can know everything about you forever and you have no right to be forgotten? It's obviously not a tenable situation. So how do you do private identity with concepts like selective disclosure? So what's been great is that, again, like blockchain stood on the shoulders of giants. We are standing on the shoulders of giants of people been working the digital ID space in the zero knowledge space since the 1980s. Like Silvio Micali and his co-authors, they invented these concepts at MIT in 1985. And then the W3C for almost 20 years now has had a digital ID working group called the DID. And so what we're doing now as an industry is we're absorbing this academic literature and these open standards that have existed that were adjacent to blockchain and bringing them so that you can have hybrid ledgers that are both private and public. The blockchain itself can keep a secret, which means you can bring more and more of the institution into the blockchain space. Because what you're ultimately trying to do is have auditability and transparency and provability And you also want to be able to have the neutrality and objectivity that these systems have as a whole. So we run one of the largest research groups in the world for cryptocurrencies. Our labs have about 168 scientists. We've published nearly 300 papers out of the University of Edinburgh, Stanford, University of Wyoming, Tokyo Institute of Technology. So we have our own mini UN in the research side. And for the last 10 plus years, what we've been focused on has really been the juncture of those technologies, the intersection of them, so that you can start solving real problems. For example, how do you get compliance to like KYC and AML into the blockchain space, but preserve privacy? How do you automate regulation? How do you do selective disclosure to prove properties of people, like how old are they or if they're a tax resident in New York or something like that without revealing all that data? Or how do you bring a whole organization into a blockchain? Now, there's a parallel effort that we've also had. My policy office is here, led by Karen Wheeler. who's the former deputy secretary of state of the state of Wyoming. And when she was there, she was responsible for implementing all the blockchain laws that we passed. So it's one thing just say technology, technology, technology. It's nothing entirely to say a US state is going to actually try to regulate this and pass laws for US businesses to follow. So over 35 laws have been passed and implemented, and Wyoming was first in nation for a full reserve bank, first in nation for a DAO law, so you can actually incorporate a It's fun to figure out how to tax it. And asset classification and all kinds of wonderful things. So our hope was that that would serve as a national model and an international model in the conversation of how in practice do you actually use technology and regulate technology in a way that's friendly for business but still solves problems. And she's here, so if anybody wants to talk to policy office, if you're a regulator, highly recommend you grab her ear.

Can she raise her hand if she's here?

There's Karen.

Got you, Karen. Okay, no, that's fascinating. And that's someone that I probably want to track down as well. I want to move over to Tennyson to talk about on the prediction markets, as I know this is kind of taking a storm and how are you, and I know you're doing, SafeBets are doing it a little bit differently. So could you talk about that and how the trust element, would be very critical, I think, in your space.

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Ebony. So just to start by a show of hands, who in the room is familiar with the prediction market, with CalShe, with Polymarket? Okay, so virtually everyone. Keep your hand up if you feel that this new industry is a net positive for society. So, okay, fewer, right? Fewer. So it's fascinating, right? We know that this industry is growing incredibly rapidly. It's grown literally tenfold in the last year. You had 3 million people sign up in one week for CalShe during the World Cup. I mean, it's incredible user growth. So they've proven that adoption is there. There's an appetite to forecast and predict on these events with a verifiable outcome. I read a stat earlier this week that said from a recent poll, however, only 6% of Americans feel that this industry as a whole is a net positive for society, right? So perhaps not so shocking. 64% of people view it as just another label on traditional gambling. Why is that? Why is trust so low? You look at Polymarket, for example, and you see that 84% of the wallets on there are in the red. So again, perhaps no surprise, way more losers than there are winners. And then you combine that with the notion of insider forecasting or basically insider trading. People placing wagers on outcomes that they already know the verifiable outcome of in advance. And I think you just have a really big trust problem. So there's an appetite, there's adoption, there isn't trust. Is it an incentive problem? Can technology help? Is it a model problem? Yes, probably to all of those questions. With SafeBets, it's a little bit of a different model to answer your previous question. The currency we're after as a prediction platform isn't the amount you're willing to put up and wager and lose. It's really your track record and your accuracy and the track record that you build over time. That's the currency. It's the collective signal that you create if you're an elite forecaster, it's not the amount you're willing to put up and then be punished for if you lose. So at SafeBets, if you sign up for our platform, we're not interested in your bank account, you can't enter your credit card, you get 100 house tokens when you first sign up, right? And the cost of each of your forecast is one of those tokens. So that's like the gas fee, so to speak. So if you're right, you can predict on crypto and you can predict on commodities markets, you can predict on big tech stock price as well. If you're right, you'll win back a reward. It can come in crypto. Sometimes for elite tier members, it can come in cash. If you're wrong, you lose that house token. So you could be wrong 100 times, and the worst thing that would happen to you is you'd run out of gas and you wouldn't be able to predict anymore. But we're trying to incentivize people to jump on and to create that collective intelligence by forecasting. And over time, as we track their accuracy record, those who are right far more than they're wrong on certain subjects-- maybe you're great at predicting the price of copper over the course of 30 days. you rise in the ranks and you enter a tier of elite forecasters, what we call an oracle. And that data that you generate is highly profitable. So that's really the business model, is to trade off that data, to sell some of that data, et cetera, and to share the profits with the community, specifically incentivizing those top tier predictors. So it's really, it's a shift in incentive structure and it removes that inherent risk and by tracking record, tracking accuracy and making that the currency, we feel you start to mitigate some of those trust issues. So for example, Cowshy right now, in their leaderboards, you can see who's winning, so to speak, but they're ranking them based off of their monetary gains. So if you made one really good forecast and you won a ton of money, you'd be listed as a great forecaster. Okay, but how many times have you forecasted, what have you forecasted on, what's your actual accuracy ranking? That to us is more valuable than just how much money you're willing to risk and maybe win, probably lose, right? So we feel that as we build our platform, we're using blockchain, hopefully, with one of the founders of blockchain, Scott Stornetta, who spoke in DC two days ago. to help us verify not just the accuracy record of forecasters, but the rules of the game, who's winning and why, and how do you pay them out, the incentive structure, who actually benefits when people are wrong, and the record, so how many times they've been right versus been wrong and on what subject. So by verifying that, we feel we can hopefully mitigate some of those trust issues that we're feeling en masse in this really rapidly growing market.

No, that's really insightful. And I do have just a quick follow up. Once those 100 tokens are gone, how do you get back more tokens? Are you just kicked off?

Well, again, we're after accurate forecasters, so you can't buy your way back in. It would defeat the purpose of the platform. What you can do, however, is you're incentivized to refer. Maybe you know someone who is a great forecaster on a specific subject. Maybe it's not you, but it's someone you know. So if you refer a friend and they turn out to be a great forecaster, you can share in some of their reward and you might get a few tokens so you can start predicting again too. But if you run out of gas, ultimately maybe you've proven you're not the best forecaster and that's okay, you can do something else.

Okay, so let's move on to the next question. I don't have the thing on here, the timer, you're my time, oh I got 10 minutes, oh wow, wow, okay, all right, I gotta pick it up guys, all right, so. All right, I think I'll go to the rapid fire then, and then we'll leave it for questions. Okay, all right. Well, what is your recommended key takeaway from this session and the whole day from the audience as it relates to trust? And we can, actually, can we go in the reverse then?

Yeah, sure.

All right, go ahead.

As it relates to trust, yeah, I think, well, again, just to provide the narrow view of the lens of the prediction market, those three factors, if you can verify them, that is the rules of the game. How do the payouts work and where is it coming from, where are the rewards coming from? The record, how are you tracking people's records? And the incentive structure, like who wins when others lose, right? Is it a zero sum game where if you make a prediction one way and I make one the other, you're winning my money when I'm wrong? How does that work? So if you can use technology to verify those factors, I think you'll increase trust in the prediction market as a whole, but yeah, again, just that one narrow perspective on that market.

Yeah, and get above that 6%, right? As you said, his net positive. All right, coming back to you, Charles.

Well, I mean, trust is the single biggest and hardest topic. What makes people trust things? People irrationally trust. And when we build all these game theoretic frameworks and we try to create the rational human, they never work out the way that we want them to. But in general, For people to trust things, they have to understand things. And the fundamental challenge we've had in the cryptocurrency space, looking at it for a decade and a half, is it very complex. You got public key cryptography, you got wallets, you got consensus protocols, proof of work versus proof of stake, and it's just this word salad of things. And then that is dovetailed with hacks and scams and collapses. So every day we lose 50, 100 million in various hacks somewhere, and then you have big institutions like the FTX collapse, the Luna collapse. So consumers try to trust it, all they see is the number go down, and then they get burned, and then they look stupid with their friends who they recommended crypto to, and so life is hard. So what you do is you invert it and you say, okay, instead of trying to get them to trust the system as a whole, build an application and make that one thing work really well and have that be kind of a gateway drug into the rest of the concepts. We saw this with the iPhone. A lot of people, the killer app was Google Maps. Just because you had something, it'd follow you around, you can navigate, you didn't have to go to MapQuest and print those maps out. Oh my lord, I remember doing that. Or a map book. That was a lot of fun. Well, the minute you have that, you say, well, What else can I do with this platform? So there needs to be a collection of breakthrough applications and things like prediction markets, things like DeFi, they in particular are starting to bring a new generation of people in. So people under the age of 30 are significantly more likely to own a cryptocurrency, an NFT, a meme coin than they are a stock or a bond. So that is a preference that's not gonna change. So that generation's gonna grow and learn. What we try to do as builders is we try to keep up with the times. And unfortunately we keep getting hit with tsunami after tsunami. Now we have the AI apocalypse and everybody can use AI to hack things. And I was just talking to a maintainer, the Linux kernel, and I said, "Hey, how many CVEs, which are critical vulnerabilities, do you guys currently are working on?" He said, "Over 200." Normally, they get that in a year and they got that in two months because of AI InfoSec. So people are applying these tools to hit cryptocurrency protocols. So we've seen a 10x in hacks recently. And that directly diminishes and takes away from trust in the system. So we're trying to deal with that. We're trying to work our way through. And we're still trying to build towards safe consumer applications so that we can get that iPhone moment and get people in, and then they have an anchor to basically build trust from.

Nimit.

From our, from WOTC's experience, I kind of tend to agree with Charles. If you start with the notion that a particular system is using a blockchain technology, and hence it is safe, that is not the right way to do it. because as Charles mentioned, every day there's a hack of a particular wallet. And so you're going to lose that trust pretty quickly because if somebody thinks that XYZ system is safe because a particular blockchain is safe and that blockchain gets hacked, then you just lost that argument, right? So you completely lost that person forever. So we've tried to invert that logic. And you simplify it. You can't talk to people with complex tech jargon. Like if you tell an 80-year-old grandmother your ballot is safe because it's using, you can use a zero-knowledge proof to verify that it's actually accurate, she's not gonna understand anything. She's gonna say, "Okay, I'm just gonna go vote on paper, 'cause this is way beyond my capability." So, how do you simplify, you know, that sort of last mile thing? And those are the critical users. If you can convince an 80 year old grandmother that if she's voting on a phone and that that ballot is safe and hasn't been tampered with and is equivalent to her voting on a paper ballot, that's the goal, not to convince them that because you're using a particular technology, the whole thing is safe. So I would, depending on your use case, I would say focus on that sort of very narrow goal and who your actual user is and just find that sort of first mile goalpost. And for us, this has been the goalpost, how to use a confirmation ID that's generated when a user submits a ballot to prove to themselves that this is good, this is as good as a paper ballot. And it takes a while for that trust to happen. You can't build trust immediately. It's baby steps, so you've got to be patient. You'll have lots of critics, you'll have setbacks, like Charles mentioned, the news cycle is, you know, unforgiving. But, you know, keep going, focus on a narrow use case, you know, make that really, really good, and then you can build on it. Now, if your 80-year-old grandmother starts to trust over five, six elections that the system she's been using is actually safe, she might then say, "Okay, I just heard about SafeBets. It's a blockchain-based system, I'm going to give it a try, or I'm going to try sending money to my grandson using a particular wallet. So because you build that little baseline trust, you can now go up the ladder. That would be my humble suggestion. Inward that logic, start very simple, and build from there, and I think you'll see some success.

I'll be quick, I'll be quick. How do we trust the financial industry today? We don't. We don't always, all right? But the thing that we look to, all right, is audited accounts, all right? Now I joke the blockchain is a technology of the future that forgot the future, 'cause when you're looking at your accounts, most of what you're dealing with is payables and receivables, future-dated obligations. And no blockchain can record those on chain. They can only put them into algorithm smart contracts. What we have is double entry accounting with reconcilable and archival periods. So we actually get the chance to actually put the accounting into that pre-check so that you're getting it right first time. You're not optimistically updating it and then having an auditor to tell you it's okay, and then you find out something hidden in the weeds afterwards. So I'm happy to speak to people about this, but having the actual legally required accounting within the distributed ledger is a key and the ability to record payable receivables on chain is a fantastic way to get trust.

That's awesome. Now, Gerard, this is all your fault. You gave me fantastic panelists, so I couldn't have time for questions, but I encourage you all to track them down, hunt them down and ask your individual questions and hopefully I'm roughly on time.

Thank you.

Paradigm shift.

Test, test. How often do you, hey guys, can you hear me? Yep. How often do you have one of the most influential people in the entire industry just join your panel? Is that pretty cool? So anyway, super, super grateful. If I can get you guys to stop talking, can I get your attention, everybody? All right, test one, two, three, can you hear me? All right. So So as I sat down and put together my presentation for dealing with this concept of emerging technology, a lot of things were sort of flooding through my head. The technology is moving at such a rapid pace with AI, blockchain, quantum. And it reminds me of a couple stories. And probably other panelists will talk about it, so I won't go into a lot of depth. But when the guy who started Uber was standing on the side of the road and he thought, why am I raising my hand to get a cab? Right. And he thought, we've got smartphones, we've got peer to peer payments, we've got GIS technology. Right. And he said, why don't we combine these technologies and essentially do this a different way? Do you have to have a cab company, right, to get a cab or to get a ride? And so he came up with the concept of Uber when he did that. The taxi, the traditional taxi cab industry wasn't really happy about that. So the taxi syndicate, right, which was benefiting from receiving, you know, millions of dollars for taxi medallions, they waged a war against against that business. And 50, 50 state attorney generals put a cease and desist order on Uber because they were they were violating the rules. They were, you know, they were upsetting the applecart. He then essentially said, "Well, wait, we're gonna reframe the entire argument and the entire regulatory framework." And he said, "This isn't a hail a ride business, this is a prepaid transportation network business." And through that innovative thought, that innovation, he changed the rules. Airbnb did it. He had a couple guys that were struggling to pay their rent, they had a couple extra rooms, there was a convention in town, the hotels were all sold out, you had people that wanted to find a place to stay, and couldn't and had the money to pay for it. You had other people who had the places to stay, but didn't have the money to pay the rent. So he said, look, we have these technologies, these convergence of technologies, let's make it happen. And so what I realized is, as I was putting this presentation together, is you didn't need me to give you a bunch of information because quite frankly, Somebody said to me one time not too long ago, "Are you trying to tell me that we don't have the right answers?" And I said, "No, I don't even know if we've asked the right questions yet." That question, do you need a hotel to be able to get a room? And so, what I'm going to challenge you to do moving forward is to ask new questions, think of things from new paradigms. But you need information, you need tools, and you need resources. And then what I realized was, What I needed to do today was to give you the resources, to give you the connectivity to be able to do that. So I'm gonna tell you a little bit about the GBA, and I'm gonna talk to you a little bit about the blockchain maturity model, because I think one of the greatest gifts to the industry is a blockchain maturity model. I'm gonna tell you about the GBA so you understand what's behind it, then I wanna tell you what it is, how it can be used for us to drive forward. So, let me tell you about the GBA first. We are a membership organization, and our goal is to help the public and private sector connect, communicate, and collaborate to essentially use technology to solve problems. And we started in Washington, D.C. Now, we have members in about 500 government offices around the world. And these are members that have requirements, right, and funding. These are people that are essentially, they're pro-blockchain, pro-digital asset, pro-cryptocurrency. They're looking for solutions. The problem is most of the solutions out there are immature and scams. Let's face it, there's been a lot of failures in our industry. So how do these, somebody came up to me one time, they said, "We're having a hard time selling blockchain to government. Can you tell me why that is?" I said, "Yeah, it's because you're a bunch of drug dealers, human traffickers, and scammers." And they're like, "Yeah, but beside that, what's the problem?" I said, "Look, That's what these contracting officers think about you. They've heard of Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX. They've heard of Terra Luna, Celsius, maybe even going back to Mt. Gox, crypto scams. I mean, you name it, it's all negative. Secondly, they don't understand the technology, and they don't know who you are. They know IBM, they know Deloitte, they know the big companies that are selling distributed ledger technology, but you guys that are coming up with these innovative solutions, they don't know who you are. And they're not going to risk their job on giving their business to you. So that's part of why we built the Blockchain Maturity Model. We have about 20,000 people in our meetup group. We've got about 100,000 or so social media connections. We've got over 50, actually, we have over 50 working groups. And the kinds of stuff that we do, we bring people together again to connect. Some of you here were at the round table that we did the other day. I'm blown away when I look around this room and I know many of you and I know your backgrounds and I am blown away by what you can do together. When I started GBA, I knew I didn't know, I didn't know anything about the industry, I didn't know anything about the technology, didn't have any connections. But I knew that if I brought people together that they were smart enough to figure it out. And that's what we're attempting to do. So we do studies and reports and standards and assessments. Here's just an example of some of our working groups. So we have about, like I said, 4,500 people in our database. You bring that many people together, right? We have people in government at the local, state, national, international level in Department of Health and Human Services and Division of Motor Vehicles and Vital Records, you name it, space, defense, finance, right? You bring those people together, they have to be organized. So we organize around working groups. So we bring people, so anybody in GBA, you guys could all join GBA for free. Civil service is all free. Again, it is a resource. You can connect with other like-minded people, right? You know, they have competing, they have supplementary technologies and stuff. We have over 219 groups. Again, these are resources for you to be able to connect with. If you go to gbaglobal.org, you can sort of find the different groups, right? We have events and webinars. So we're doing this event next year, and I'm really hoping that you pre-register for this so you know about it. We're starting this thing called trade missions, which I'll tell you about in a second, but please, please, please connect. We've got webinar events virtually every day, right? And again, these things are free. You can jump in and join. One of the projects that we're working on that I'm really excited about, and I see Dottie Romo here with us from the Internal Revenue Service, we're working with the United States Information Technology Acquisition Advisory Commission. Well, who are these people? Well, they're funded by the U.S. House Oversight Committee, and their goal is to essentially improve the status of information technology acquisitions. The problem is these acquisition people, they don't know anything about emerging technology. And that, I don't wanna be insulting. The technology is moving so fast, right? There's no way that they could stay on top of it. And one of the things we've been talking about recently is what's been happening in Ukraine, right? Ukraine found itself in a position where all of a sudden they had this massive onslaught of a challenge that was way bigger than they were, right? And they couldn't compete on those terms. So like Uber, like Airbnb, they had to come up with a new paradigm. right? And their paradigm was essentially technology and innovation. But they didn't just talk about innovating the technology, they actually innovated their acquisition processes. Because they said, you know what, the way we've been doing this thing for years, right, isn't gonna work for us today. In the United States, taking a weapon system from concept to fielding typically takes years and decades, and they couldn't wait that long. So they said, let's gamify it. Let's create leader boards. Let's think outside the box. And they can now field systems in literally weeks and months as opposed to years and decades. And so for that reason, we're working with the IT Acquisition Advisory Council to create training and certification programs to help acquisition officials understand how to acquire emerging technology. We have a strategic relationship, well, thanks to Dino. So apparently I need to start over again. My name is Gerard Deshaies. I'm with the-- Well, so hopefully somebody heard something. When Dino and I first met, he had built a blockchain-based identity management solution for, like I said, a $95 billion pension fund. And when he went to go live, there must have been some conversation that said, "You need to do some kind of IV&V." And so we went to ISO, they were working on the glossary, we went to a NAC, but IEEE, nobody had a framework. We were working on one. So when he found out about it, he was gracious enough to come on board and help us. We joke about this. He's seen how these things happen in other organizations like the International Standards Organization, what kind of process that is. And quite frankly, I don't know if he ever believed we would do it or finish it. When we finished it, he was shocked, right? It was a great, great shock. But from that, he had asked us if we would essentially together co-lead the Dynamic Coalition on Blockchain Assurance and Standardization, recognized by the United Nations Internet Governance Forum. So we've done that. And that is another resource which you can feel free to connect with us. We'll get you connected. But there's hundreds of people involved with that from all over the world. Again, that gives you an opportunity to connect, communicate, and collaborate. We've got a number of reports. Let's see, is Brian in here from VNCrypto? There he is right here. So I want to, and he'll talk about this later in his panel, I'm sure, but we have a strategic relationship with them where we're publishing reports. The main report is called the impact of AI, blockchain and quantum on financial services. BeInCrypto is one of the top three media platforms in the cryptocurrency industry. and you've got, what, 65 different publications. So this report is going to go globally, and we need to help people in government and industry understand what these challenges are and help them think through how to get on the other side. We've heard already, we'll hear a lot more about the risks and the problems and the challenges. We need to be about solutions. So that report and being credited. Brian, thank you so much for what you've done with us already. We've published other reports which are available on our website. Again, these are all free. the using blockchain to reduce government fraud, waste and abuse. Right. So tremendous number of resources available for you. We also have again, this is all free resources, the emerging tech directory. So anybody that has a solution that would like to make this solution available to governments around the world and industry, they can register in there for free. We go through a process to do some vetting, right? We don't want to have anything that that is not meet certain standards. And so that is a resource. There's a YouTube channel with hundreds and hundreds of videos, again, blogs, all kinds of stuff. Now, why do I tell you about all that? I told you about all that and all those resources because I want you to understand what is behind the Blockchain Maturity Model. It's not like two guys in a garage, it's a global network of people Like Dino, right? Like Paul Dowding, who you heard before. By the way, Paul Dowding is the smartest guy I know in the world when it comes to blockchain and banking. So if you get a chance to talk to him, you should talk to him. Right? Shana's nodding her head. Now I'm going to get in trouble. I'm going to mention names. But what happened was, going back to that question, right, when they said, "Hey, we're having a hard time selling blockchain to government. Can you tell me why that is?" And I made that comment, I said, "Listen, there's no box to check Right? In every other industry, there's cybersecurity certifications, program management certifications, right? Quality certifications, the authorities to operate. We have nothing like that in blockchain. Right? So we need to create a box to check, a certification. We then studied every blockchain solution we could for the past several years. And we looked at gazillions of them, right? Unfortunately, most of them had failed. Most of them had critical problems, right? And so we identified 11 characteristics that would make up a trusted blockchain solution, right? Things like distribution, governance, infrastructure, sustainability, identity, privacy, and resilience. And in that model, right, we came up with five levels of maturity. We said, is this solution mature enough to warrant investment or research and development funding? Is it mature enough to be a prototype? Is it mature enough to go into production? Hey, is this thing good enough to be able to be rolled out at the enterprise level or at the global or public level? And the model had to be technology agnostic, so it works for both permissioned and permissionless blockchains. And it had to be industry agnostic, sort of. Because what we realized was different industries had different requirements. So for example, if you're going to build a blockchain solution in banking and financial services, you have to do AML KYC. But where's NIVAN? If you're going to build a blockchain into voting solution, you have to have permanent separability between the voter and the vote. In other words, in that case, anonymity is a legal requirement. If you're going to do it in healthcare, we've got Heather here, Heather will tell you, if you're doing clinical trials as an example, you have to have traceability between the patient and the data but you're not allowed to know who the patient is. You may need to know their blood type, their age, their sex, their family history. You're not allowed to know their name, address, and phone number. So in banking financial services, if you're, I'm gonna channel Paul for a second. One of the reasons why so many blockchains failed in banking financial services is we put the cart before the horse. In every other industry, what you do is you define the requirements and then you build a solution. What we did in banking was we said, hey, we have this thing called blockchain. Let's ram it down the throat of the banks. We didn't think about what banks needed. We just said, hey, you need blockchain. If you're a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And so what blockchain is, it's a bidirectional record of transactions. But banks have to do things like future data transactions. Third party regulatory reporting, tax law accounting, all kinds of things. And since the blockchain doesn't do it, we said, well, let's take that off chain, let's do smart contracts, and let's add complexity, risk, and cost. And so these banking executives were saying, I've got a system, what you're giving me has more complexity, risk, and cost, yeah, no wonder it fails. And they started doing all these pilots without thinking the thing through. So what the banking financial services working group said, hey, let's start from the beginning. Let's identify the requirements. And they put together a roadmap that if you're going to build a blockchain solution in banking financial services, you now know what needs to be there before you start building. So the blockchain maturity model across all the different working groups we have started creating industry supplements as a guideline for people to essentially build. And then here's the thing. Once you've built it, essentially it is an independent third party certification criteria that you can use to go to your customers and investors and say, we've been independently evaluated by an internationally recognized certification standard that you can trust us. And Dino is the primary author of the identity management supplement. I mean, just phenomenal, phenomenal people. Anyway, so that's kind of where We were in that journey when Dino came on board. We then essentially got involved in co-hosting the Internet Governance Forum, Dynamic Coalition on Blockchain, Insurance and Standardization. So now when somebody gets an assessment, right, we essentially on the UN, on this particular page, you see the UN emblem in the corner there, the Internet Governance Forum. We essentially can list those companies there. So you can be independently evaluated, you can get listed on the GBA website and have it linked to the United Nations. So we're giving credibility to the companies that deserve it. I have to tell you this, as we started doing assessments, I was shocked at how bad the industry is. And I'll give you an example. There was a government agency that came to us. And they said, "We do stuff on blockchain." They speak in conferences about what they do. When we went to do an evaluation, we found out, we said, "Well, how many nodes do you have?" And they said, "We don't know." "What do you mean you don't know?" "Well, we write our data to an API." "Okay, well, who's your contact with the API?" "We don't know." "What do you mean you don't now?" "Oh, well, that was set up before we got here, so we just continue doing it." I said, "Can I see the contract?" So I looked at the contract. It was a two-page service agreement. And it said, you pay us money every month to write data to our solution, to our system. But if you stop paying us, you have to take all of your data off of our system. And I was like, that doesn't even really sound like a blockchain. So then we contacted the vendor. And we said, how many nodes do you have? And he said, I'll get back to you in six weeks. You've got the slowest block explorer I have ever seen. Here's what we found out happened. The person who's head of the contract didn't know how to write a blockchain contract. So they just use a standard template. When the price of Ethereum went up, the vendor looked at the contract and said, "Hmm, there's nothing on here that says that I have to write to a blockchain, so why don't we essentially just not do it?" So while this organization was sort of bragging to the world about how they use blockchain, their stuff wasn't even on a blockchain. And as people came to us and said, hey, we want you to do a BMM assessment, we think we're level five. We found out that their stuff was not only bad, but gosh, golly bad. So there have been a few that have risen. Nimitz Company was assessed at BMM level one. We've got DeLand. Is anybody from DeLand in here? DeLand up there in the corner. They've got a solution that that allows banks to custody digital assets. They just achieved a BMM level four rating. And so there's not many of them, right? The process is still relatively new, but it requires organizations to achieve a level of rigor that's not defined anywhere else in the industry. And as we're talking to procurement people around the world, we're saying, you need to know whether you can trust these solutions, and going back to the last panel, that's how you build trust. Right. But by basically defining a standard, getting people, getting consensus to standards like this is really hard. How am I doing on time? I'm over. Oh, all right. Thank you. Thanks for letting me be on a roll. There's the QR code for the blockchain maturity model. I want to say one more thing about trade missions. We are starting next year to do trade missions. We've reached out to 193 different embassies, talked to them about for the event next year to bring companies from their country. They'll spend the first day at their embassy in Washington. The second day we'll do a Capitol Hill roundtable. The third day they will be at a conference. We'll do a gala reception that night, a travel day, and then back here at the UN. So for any groups that are interested in those international things, please check that out. And join us next year. That's it. Thank you, Brian.

For.

Yes? Perfect. Well, in addition to all the WBF roles, as you heard, I have been a GBA member for a long time, and a board member just rotated out after several years. So, as you know, we've partnered with the GBA and WBF in 2020, trying to grow the global entrepreneurship ecosystem and encourage blockchain responsible use in the entrepreneurship ecosystem as well. So today I will focus on architecting sustainable global finance ecosystems. As we know, there is a lot of movement around the world in not only blockchain, but AI and many other technologies, including quantum. So I wanted us to talk a little bit about what do we need to do if we want to succeed with that large task. So this keynote is aligned with the priorities shaping the global policy agenda, not only the United Nations General Assembly 81, but also the agenda of G20, G7, OECD, European Union. And I'll just highlight a little bit why I do believe so. As you know, the United Nations General Assembly 81 was hosted under the theme, Restoring Trust, Managing Transformation. and it placed trusted governance, sustainable development, technological transformation, and effective multilateral cooperation at the center of the international dialogue this year. The G20 agenda similarly addressed the modernization of financial regulation, digital assets, cross-border payments, and financial system resilience. while G7 continued to provide an important forum for coordination around economic security and trusted emerging technologies. Just last month, we had tremendous work done for quantum and blockchain by the G7. The European Union is advancing digital finance, tokenization, AI, quantum technologies, technological sovereignty, resilience, and international standards. while OECD is strengthening policy frameworks for digital finance, AI governance, financial market integrity, sustainable finance, and international cooperation. Against this backdrop, Orchestrating blockchain, AI, and quantum standards is not simply a technology priority. It is increasingly becoming a complex issue that involves trusted, interoperable, sovereign, sustainable, and resilient global financial architectures. We are entering a defining period for the global financial ecosystem, characterized not simply by the acceleration of these individual technologies, but by their hyperconvergence into a new technological, economic, and institutional architecture. Distributed ledger technologies, artificial intelligence, and the quantum portfolios, together with cloud and edge computing, advanced connectivity, emerging Web3 and soon Web4 environments, 5G and soon 6G networks, are increasingly becoming components of this interconnected digital ecosystem rather than independent silos. The major challenge of this transition will therefore not be just technological capability, but our capacity to skillfully and masterfully orchestrate all these architectures. The imperative, in my view, is no longer theoretical. It is now visible across the global financial landscape. In Europe, the Euro system has moved from experimentation towards infrastructure. Just a few days ago, we had the Pontis ecosystem launched, which enables wholesale tokenized asset transactions to settle in central bank money, while Appia is developing the long-term blueprint for an integrated European tokenized financial ecosystem. In Singapore, we already had it for a while, but Project Guardian and Global Layer 1 are advancing institutional tokenization, programmable assets, cross-border transactions, governance and interoperability. Hong Kong is progressing through their project ensemble, supporting real value transactions involving digital assets and tokenized deposits. The United Kingdom is advancing its digital security sandbox and the digital gilt instrument. In the United States, BlackRock has already launched the institutional tokenization and has moved closer to mainstream asset management and capital market infrastructure. Additionally, I would like to point out that these are not isolated digital assets projects. Together, they signal a structural redesign of how assets are not only issued, represented, traded, custodied, cleared, settled, and serviced across the global financial ecosystem. This transformation is accelerating precisely as a second global architectural shift is occurring. I think you're all familiar with that one. We're moving from simple AI analytic intelligence to agentic AI and multi agentic AI intelligence. And we're increasingly witnessing autonomous systems that may now discover new financial opportunities, new financial risk. They have the authority to negotiate and execute transactions. They have the authority now to rebalance portfolios, manage liquidity, and interact with other autonomous agents at machine speed. At the same time, we're also having the quantum era upon us. As we know, at the cryptographic foundations upon which digital identity and blockchain networks, financial messaging, custody, payments, and market infrastructures depend are all vulnerable to quantum. NIST post-quantum cryptography standards are already available for implementation, and frankly, for some more advanced systems are already broken, so they need already to be updated. And the period approaching 2030 represents a critical milestone for everyone. We are therefore not only confronting three separate transformations, we're confronting a convergence of these transformations. Tokenization, multi-agentic AI, and the need for quantum resilience long term. This convergence makes orchestration an immediate global financial infrastructure imperative, in my opinion. Within this orchestration effort, I will highlight three domains today that are, in my opinion, essential. sovereignty, sustainability, and standards. I will focus mostly on standards. However, I want to also do a little bit description of why I believe that technological sovereignty and sustainability are also critical if we want to succeed long term. Sovereignty determines whether governments, institutions, and societies retain sufficient agency, control, resilience, and technological optionality. across the increasingly complex layers upon their financial and economic systems depend. Sustainability determines whether the architectures we build can contribute to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and advance the transition from just reducing environmental harm to actually being planet positive. Standards provide a common technical, operational, governance, and assurance languages required for systems to communicate, interoperate, remain secure, and establish trust across organizations, industries, jurisdictions, and technological layers. These domains cannot be pursued independently. Sovereignty without sustainability would just preserve control. However, those systems would not be viable. Sustainability without sovereignty would create strategic dependencies that also would cause long-term difficulties. Last but not least, sovereignty and sustainability without adequate standards orchestration can produce fragmented technological ecosystems incapable of interacting safely and effectively at global scale. That's why this complex orchestration must occur simultaneously across multiple layers. These include diplomacy, law, regulation, compliance, governance, financial infrastructure, and technology architectures. At the technology level, orchestration must extend from the foundational infrastructure through blockchain-enabled trust, AI-enabled intelligence, and quantum capabilities. At the governance level, it must integrate all the domains, including cyber ethics, quality assurance, maturity and readiness, auditing, human oversight, I would say expert human oversight, continuous monitoring, and sustainability. At the standards level, orchestration must connect not only individual technologies, but must connect entire standards and clusters of standards and families of standards that are essential, that not only the financial system depends on, but all industries depend on. The central proposition today is that I want to convince you that the next architecture of global finance must be sovereign and sustainable by design, and that standards enabled orchestration has to occur at every layer. Let's focus a little bit on blockchain because in this room, we're all very passionate about blockchain. It deserves this prominent position within the trust discussion because global finance is fundamentally an architecture of trust. For centuries, financial trust has been institutionalized through sovereign authorities, central banks, exchanges, clearing houses, regulators, and numerous other legal systems. Blockchain introduced an additional paradigm. in which distributed verification, cryptographic integrity, programmable execution, provenance, and shared records can complement these institutional mechanisms. Within the converging architecture, blockchain can provide a programmable trust and value layer. AI can provide intelligence, automation, and increasing agentic capabilities, while quantum can offer us advanced computational and simulation opportunities. This technological orchestration must occur also across the entire architecture rather within isolated domains. At the foundational layer, we have cloud, compute, edge infrastructure, data centers, and more recently, terrestrial and satellite connectivity, IoT, 5G, and as I alluded to earlier, soon we have 6G, the computational and communication foundations upon which digital finance operates. At the trust layer, we have blockchain. At the intelligence layer, we have agentic AI. At the quantum layer, we have not only the novel frontier for computation, but also the need for post-quantum cryptographic migration. Sovereignty must be protected across each layer, and sustainability must be measured across each layer, while standards must be harmonized and orchestrated to connect all these layers. I would like to point out that I have the opinion that sovereignty must be understood as a multidimensional architectural concept, not just a singular policy objective. Sovereignty in global finance is the capacity of governments and institutions to retain meaningful control, strategic choice, and operational continuity over the critical technologies, data, and their infrastructure. It requires visibility into the technological dependencies, authority over consequential decisions, the ability to protect critical assets and information, and sufficient optionality to change providers, architectures, or technologies without disrupting essential financial functions. As blockchain, AI, and quantum become embedded in these infrastructures, sovereignty increasingly depends on preventing technological concentration. We want to avoid vendor lock-in, data dependency, cryptographic vulnerabilities, and loss of our control. The objective is not to be technologically self-sufficient in isolation, but we want to have interoperable sovereignty, preserving our strategic autonomy, resilience, and agency. Sustainability must also extend beyond traditional ESG considerations and become an architectural principle for digital global finance. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals provide an essential reference framework because technological and financial infrastructures influence economic inclusion, resilient infrastructure, innovation, and sustainable communities, as well as climate action, institutional trust, and international partnerships. The planet positive orientation I mentioned earlier advances this ambition beyond reducing negative external impact towards our environment. It allows us to produce regenerative environmental, economic, and societal value. This also requires us to examine the complete technological life cycle. Energy consumption, as we know, is a major critical issue at this time. Computational intensity, all the data centers that we're building around the world, hardware supply chains, blockchain consensus efficiency, AI workload, telecommunication networks, and eventually quantum infrastructure. A financial system cannot credibly mobilize capital for sustainable development while disregarding the sustainability of its own technological infrastructure. And now I would like to underscore the most important part of my talk today, which is standards orchestration. The standards landscape spans multiple organizations and interconnected standards families that must increasingly be coordinated across blockchain, artificial intelligence, quantum, IoT, and advanced communications. The International Organization for Standardization provides standards families that span blockchain, artificial intelligence, and numerous other technologies. Additionally, the International Electrotechnical Commission, working independently and jointly with the International Organization for Standardization, addresses standards families that span also AI, quantum, semiconductors, data centers, energy systems, industrial systems, IoT, and other connected infrastructures. The National Institute for Standards and Technology, as well as the International Telecommunications Union, the European Telecommunications Standards Institute, the IEEE, the Third Generation Partnership Project, the Internet Engineering Task Force, are all examples of the important work that is being done globally. The challenge, therefore, is no longer that we have an absence of standards. The challenge we're facing now is orchestrating and doing crosswalks that are meaningful amongst all these existing standards. I would propose thinking about these families as interconnected standards clusters. And there are several clusters I've identified. The first one is the trust and transaction cluster. The second one is the intelligence and autonomy cluster. The third one is the cybersecurity and cryptographic resilience cluster. The fourth one, data and interoperability. Fifth one, infrastructure and connectivity. Sixth one, governance and assurance cluster. And the seventh one, the sustainability cluster. However, even these clusters cannot be orchestrated only horizontally across technologies. We must orchestrate them vertically across the entire financial ecosystem. If we look at how we need to orchestrate these standards across the investment management, across wealth and asset management, banking, capital markets, payments, insurance. Across all these domains, we have multiple layers that need to be addressed. And I attempted to do a matrix like that, but it ended up being 200 pages. So I'm still working on it. I also would like to point out that across all these domains, we must also then not only work for standardizing the technology, but we must extend to doing the orchestration for the governance and for the business processes and for the auditing processes that are extremely important. We haven't gotten yet to the performance improvement, which I hope will also happen after we do a robust auditing. This creates a multidimensional matrix we're facing when we attempt this orchestration. One of this axis of this matrix is the technology family, of course, that I already mentioned. The second axis would be finance. The third one, all the governance. The fourth one, all the cross-industry dependencies. We cannot do finance in isolation. It bleeds into all other industries. So they're equally important. This is why cross-industry standards orchestration becomes indispensable for finance. And as I already alluded to, that would involve 5G, 6G, satellite systems, digital twins, autonomous systems, and other connected systems. The future challenge is therefore not simply which standard applies to our novel technology infrastructure. The more important architectural question now is, how do the relevant standards interlock and intertwine, or maybe cause interdependencies? We must transition from just simple standards compliance to the standards orchestration I'm proposing. Compliance just simply asks whether something has been satisfied for a specific compliance or regulatory guideline. Orchestration asks whether the complete system we're trying to build remains coherent when those technologies converge. Let us now get towards the end of my keynote, where I'll address a little bit why it's so essential to have readiness and maturity assessments. And as we know, standards alone are insufficient. In order for governments, investors, financial institutions, or enterprises to be able to responsively scale all these emerging and frontier technologies, they require credible, trusted mechanisms for determining if they're ready and mature. A standards compliant technology is not necessarily mature. Similarly, a mature technology is not necessarily compliant with all other standards that we want it to be. As we heard from Gerard, our blockchain maturity assessment is critical for the industry, and we hope that more organizations will reach out to us to use it. At the WBF, we are also encouraging startups and scale-ups to already think along these lines and already engage with us early to be able to use the blockchain maturity model as early as possible so that they don't have to revise, recalibrate, or redesign their systems when they finally do it. Also, AI readiness is critical. AI readiness assessments must extend beyond model performance towards governance maturity, workforce capability, explainability, human expert oversight, auditability, and continuous monitoring. Similarly, quantum readiness should evaluate use case maturity, organizational capability, cryptographic dependencies, post-quantum migration preparedness, and ability to sustain that. So for organizations to attain quantum resilience, there is much more required. The next generation of emerging and frontier technology governance should also combine not only standards harmonization and standards orchestration, but also these readiness and maturity assessments, in addition to, of course, quality assurance, quality improvement, and measurable sustainability. And now I would like to highlight that within the United Nations system, the United Nations Trade and Development, the United Nations Development Program and UNESCO, they all connect technological transformation with sustainable development, digital public infrastructure, human rights, inclusion and international cooperation. So the transition from experimentation towards infrastructure requires coordination amongst all these key stakeholders. I wanted to share also just one sentence about the fact that we have another convergence that I did not mention. I wanted to mention it, but it took way too many minutes. I want to just highlight that we're also facing transition to Web three and Web four. In addition to all the other transitions I mentioned, we must realize how important that one will be for standards orchestration. So in closing, I would like to highlight that governance must follow the same principle for orchestration. It must have cyber ethics by design. It should integrate accountability, transparency, provenance, and algorithmic traceability into the engineering structure itself. Last but not least, the breadth of this transformation demonstrates why technology convergence is increasingly inseparable from diplomacy. No single government No multilateral institution, no standards organization, no financial authority or technology sector can independently govern an architecture crossing sovereign jurisdictions, financial markets, digital infrastructures, and emerging technologies. Diplomatic orchestration must therefore create trusted interfaces amongst sovereign technological strategies rather than eliminate legitimate national policy diversity. I encourage you to all work together so that we can achieve this over the next few years. Thank you so much.

Hello. Okay. Thank you, Ingrid. Yeah, I suppose I'll just begin by saying Ingrid really went into the detail about the moment we are facing currently. It's the paradigm shift, the transition and convergence. So today, I've got a really distinguished panel. Before I begin, Just to follow up from what Gerard was saying, we are really delighted. I'm here, it's Brian McLean, Global Head of News at BNCrypto, and we're really delighted to be invited here to the UN building and also to be co-authoring a report that's basically kicking off today. And we're opening up a call for collaboration and we'll gather together all the insights and all the detailed commentary and we'll present the findings in January 2027. So if you spot me around today or even if you spot Gerard And we've got our lovely one pager here all about the report. And the report is titled The Impact of AI, Blockchain and Quantum on Financial Services. So really, I'd like to put a big round of applause together for our expert panel here. We've got Dotty Romo. So Dotty is Chief Risk and Control Officer at the US Internal Revenue Service. We've also got Dino, who saw earlier, Cataldo Delacio, who is Deputy Chief Executive of Pension Administration at the United States, United Nations, I should say, Joint Staff Pension Fund. And of course, we have Julius Moy, who is a Product Manager for Financial Crime Solutions at Mastercard. So, a round of applause for everyone. Thank you very much. Now, today's panel is titled The Future of Financial Risk, Tokenization, Regulation and Systemic Oversight in the Autonomous Era. And I'd really like to break this discussion down into the three sections, the three sections that our report is going to be based upon. So we're going to start off with looking at AI, then we're going to branch into blockchain and tokenization and all of what that entails. And then we're going to do the third section about quantum, and then we're going to finish off about the convergence of all innovations and what may emerge. A nice gentleman said to me earlier that what may emerge would be more than the sum of the parts, which is always the way in life. So I'd like to bring in Dotty first. Now Dotty, just to kick us off here, should autonomous financial agents be either just registered or should they go through approval and be fully licensed?

Hi, everyone. Can you hear me? I think that really depends on what decisions they're making. It's going to depend on what the output of the product is. I do think that there is a place for both licensing and registration. I think everything needs to be done from a risk-based approach. And you also need to look at where is the market. Is it crossing multiple markets? Is it staying in the same market? And I think that really needs to determine what is the most appropriate approach for either licensing or registering an agent.

I'll just bring in Dino here actually. When it comes to whether these autonomous agents are either licensed or registered, I suppose that brings into the whole aspect of if you've got like runaway systems that don't really have a kill switch, what authority should have the overall control to stop these autonomous markets if they do go out of control?

Thank you, Brian, for framing for me the question. So my thinking is that first and foremost, no matter what type of automated mechanism is designed, is built, is implemented, ultimately the automation cannot be a justification of substitutional accountability. So I think that there is a need to identify the process, and there is fundamentally the need to address the issue of attribution. No matter how automated, no matter what kind of sophisticated agentic AI may be used, there is the need to identify, I think, three tiers: who developed the code, who implemented the code and who oversees the code. So at these three different layer, there are clear responsibilities and clear accountability. Now there was, and I also made before references to auditing and there are different type of audits. And I think that when we start addressing the domain of agentic AI, when we start addressing the domain of potential kill switch, there is a need for more formalism. It's not just a simple quote unquote risk based audit. The loose cut looks at the risk, it looks at the at the potential mitigating controls. But there is, I think, a need for formal verification. When you start adopting mathematical proof to really explain what the algorithm does. I put it sometimes in a different words and I say, yes, when you're dealing with AI, most of the attention is on the input and the output, but we need to start shifting, especially when we are talking about giving the authority to a kill switch, about the black box. and about opening the black box and understanding, either through explainability or through interpretability, what's happening in that black box. Otherwise, how can we expect to attribute, to assign accountability when we don't even know, or those who are maybe using this switch, what's happening? So I think that the reason needed to go deeper the more technical manner with formal verification and not just simple, if you will, traditional risk-based audit approach.

Regulators across the globe have a real challenge that's set for them at the moment, especially when these systems are autonomous, self-replicating, and if they live on a blockchain, they're kind of supernational, you know, they're not really tied down to any jurisdiction. Now, what capability would you say that regulators need currently or in the future, now that they don't actually have, like, what tools do they need or what approach do they need to handle this?

You know, I thought a lot about this question because right now we're in an era of constant change and having to evolve. And so looking at this from, you know, a control and a risk standpoint, what we currently do is we look at things in a very traditional manner. Every quarter or so or every month, we're taking a look at different reports and we're identifying, you know, where are the gaps and where are the risks and where, you know, are the potential fraud attributes. In an autonomous world, we can't do that anymore. We're going to have to evolve. We're going to have to evolve our framework, our processes, our approach to taking a look at the autonomous agents. They're making millions of decisions in minutes. And so that's going to create a different type of framework for us to look at. And we're going to have to evolve and we're going to have to adjust. And I think it's going to be dependent upon what the model is doing. What is the algorithm behind it? And I don't think it's a one size fits all type of solution.

Dottie, would you say then that we need algorithms to monitor the algorithms? And where does that get us?

I do think we're gonna have to have some sense of that. Because the traditional approach where human reviews and analyzes the data and the information to determine where the gaps are, we're not going to be able to do that in a fast enough pace to be able to catch what potentially could be a downstream you know, hiccup or fraud or a gap within the technology. So we are going to have to have a human in the loop reviewing it more frequently, real-time information, you know, cross-market information, and looking at it holistically and not just as each individual instance.

Yeah. Just to bring in -- actually, Julia, sir, can I bring you in because MasterCard -- Hello. Sorry, Julius, just to bring you in. So at MasterCard, when it comes to looking at potential down the line, major systemic problems, do you still think that human in the loop is the best approach? And the way I see it is that does human in the loop not sort of reverse or make redundant all of the efficiencies that these systems are all about, because it's all about efficiency. As Dottie said, you're able to make thousands of different transactions in a second. What approach should we have? What's the best balance between human in the loop and letting these things do what they will?

Sure, thank you. And can everybody hear me OK? Hey, yeah, we're talking about frontier technology. I'm glad I could at least get microphones down. So, yes, you mentioned the term human in the loop, and I think we absolutely do need to have a human in the loop in this system before, I guess I do want to look at a couple of historical examples previously, before we even get to autonomous markets. where problems had emerged. So we have the Knight Capital incident in 2012, which is the absence of front end guardrails and those being insufficient, leading to problems spiraling out of control. 10 years later, we have Terra Luna that was already mentioned in a previous panel, but that's an algorithmic feedback loop where we saw that no human in the loop caused that to run away. Once we get to autonomous markets, the risks proliferate and become distinctly unique. And so I think we do have to have a human in the loop, but starting out, and Dottie alluded to this as well, with more of an autonomous or machine-driven emergency response model. So when I was thinking about this, you can kind of think of it as a decision tree. So first, you have the machine come in to detect the anomaly from the outside. that there would be automated safeguards in there and it's sort of a graduated approach. So depending on what the anomaly that's detected, a certain safeguard would trigger. Then you get to the third step, which is potentially escalate if it gets to that point in the decision tree. And this is where the human in the loop comes in. So then you move over to the human led side of that process. And that's where the human decisioning is. Coordination, and I think just to give a couple of resources on how that coordination can take place, I think the Financial Stability Board has put out some really great resources in their fire framework. which is the format for incident response exchange. We also see this in the EU. with DORA and all of the protocols for coordination and incident response, then recover and a post-mortem analysis led by humans accompanied with machines to be able to see what happened, what went wrong, and how can we contend with that in the future. So short, it's really using AI and machines to apply the tourniquet and stop the bleeding and then have humans come in to do the surgery, sew up the patient.

Just to sort of illustrate where we are at present, are we still talking about speculative events that may happen in the future or currently, can you give any examples of where this human in the loop mixture, AI human in the loop mixture has actually resolved anything or are we not at that stage yet?

I think if we're talking about autonomous markets, we're not quite there yet, but I think there's a number of different examples where humans are aided by real time detection mechanisms. Again, I point to the EU and some of their cybersecurity incident response frameworks as great examples of that.

Yeah. So I'd just like to bring that up just before we move on to specific examples. When it comes to regulatory bodies around the globe, do you think the maker is a really good framework to work from or do you think it's a little bit too rigid?

So, I think MiCA is a really good framework when it comes to digital asset regulation. Tokenization, we'll get there a little bit later in the panel. But I do think that there are other regulatory frameworks, again, mentioned DORA, for instance, the Digital Operational Resiliency Act, still over in the EU, which works hand in hand with MiCA, actually. for how some of these providers and critical infrastructure providers that service the financial services industry should be operating and coordinating and dealing with these problems when they arise.

Okay, Dino, let me bring you in there because my next sort of sword looking in that direction, but also because Dino is such an expert in this. So Dino, at the UN, I suppose you're looking with a sort of a global perspective on the systemic risks that could occur from, as, uh, Julia said, we need these different regulatory frameworks to work hand in hand because we've got AI, we've got blockchain and quantum computing, which we'll come to in this panel, but really, If the code does something systemically damaging to society or to the macroeconomic environment as a whole, who truly is to blame? Where does the blame lie? Let's bring in the debate about code being law and stuff like that. What are your views?

I believe that I tried to seed the roots of my answer to this question early this morning in my opening remarks. And I share my journey, my experience in designing and implementing a digital identity solution of a proof of life for the 80,000 beneficiary of the UN Pension Fund that reside across the globe in 190 country. And when now we start to deal with a Gen. KI, when we start dealing with code as law, as you indicated, My approach, and apology for oversimplifying, it always goes back, as a former auditor, who does what, when, how, and why. And in answering this question, I think we need to recognize that the code is doing something, and it has to be associated with an entity. So my thinking, my approach, as I alluded to this morning, is to transfer and to apply the same concept that we applied for human being. We attributed through biometric facial recognition, through sovereign identity, through digital identity, through blockchain. We created this binding of digital identity to human being. I think the same approach, and thankfully there is a standard for that, the ISO 17442, exist for entity. That are recognized as LEI as a legal. And entity. And the verifiable LEI. So I think we already have the mechanism to identify through this. Mechanism to this protocols. Exactly who is running certain code. The code doesn't run by itself. So therefore, I think by Translating the concept of digital identity to known human actor and by now started to have foundational cryptographic proof of that binding, we can reach the concept I expressed before of the attribution and the AAD allows you to associate a legal entity and with a verifiable LEI, you have the possibility to cryptographically then identify the executive of that entity that is operating the code. So I think the RAM mechanism, I'm not saying that it's a trivial, I'm not saying that it's a simple, but I'm just envisioning this translation, this migration of digital identity for human being to digital identity of non-human actors.

Dotty, can I just bring in quickly on the digital identity of non-human actors? Where do you think we are at the moment with that? And Dini was saying, you know, the code is doing, the code has agency to actually transact or to make good or bad decisions. There could be a human actor behind that code, but there could also be a non-human actor behind that code. And do you think we have a robust enough system to handle that at this moment in time?

Oh, that's a tough question. I think that we're getting there. I don't know that there is any true technology that is able to fully identify who the human at the end of the code is. And I think that with some of the autonomous agents, I think we could leverage that to help us get to that point. But I do agree with Dino that at the end of the day, code theoretically does not write itself, somebody does have to start that.

Yeah. What happens, maybe I'll just, not to ask you this, Dolly, but does anyone want to come in on this? Or maybe this is a redundant question, but what happens when the code starts writing the code and the human, the original originator of the human is just kind of lost in time, basically, and time can, these things can develop very fast. Julius, I'm looking at you, if you want to come in.

Sure. Not not tossing over the easy questions. No, I think it is a very good and poignant question at this time to be able to start to think through these things. I, I don't I can't tell you exactly what the answers are going to be when it comes to code writing itself, but ensuring that the the guardrails are in place for any code that is actually operating within the financial system to ensure that there's the the auditability within it. A, to understand what the agent is actually doing and having all of those steps made clear, but then of course also having provenance to who is the actual legal or natural person behind that and who has the the ownership authority to to let that code be executed and I guess one thing that I would just point to to keep an eye on and I'm very interested to see what the results of this are going to be is the BIS's Innovation Hub has something that's called project logos and that's looking exactly at running these AI agents in a simulated market to be able to see what are the, what happens there, what are the emergent properties and using that information to then build out KYA, know your agent principles and some other governance principles as well.

Great. Julius actually just sort of like threw the ball to the next stage of this discussion because he was mentioning provenance and ownership. And I know really that's kind of where blockchain comes in because blockchain is a good innovation to work side by side with autonomous agents. Dino, could you sort of introduce the blockchain maturity model, the BMM? Now we heard a little bit about that earlier from Gerard. Do you think the BMM supplements, does it reduce the financial risk and helps us get to this stage without any kind of mishaps?

I think that in the hierarchy of assurance, it has a very important foundational role. in so far that is technologically agnostic, in so far as a structure which is comprehensive vis-a-vis, if you will, the life cycle of a blockchain solution, and in so far as allows you to fundamentally replace or associate evidence to claims. And also the concept of maturity. I think that maturity is not just or simply a stage of technology, but again, maybe because of my bias as a former auditor, is actually a property of a control environment. So I think by using the BMM, first and foremost, you are breaking down all the components of the control environment. you start identifying what are the evidence that can corroborate the claims made, for example, by a vendor of a solution or by an organization that decide to make his own using, for example, open source like what we did. And therefore, you start building the infrastructure of the evidence that will support that system of internal control. And going forward, then you start identifying the level of maturity to that internal control system and with a supplement, then you make it real because you start focusing on the specific industry, whether it's a finance, whether it's a digital health, whether it's a voting and election, whether it's a digital identity as in my case. So I think that is really about In that hierarchy that I explained before, it's a fundamental step that then can and should be complemented by those level of formal ratification that start going into the opening, if you will, of the algorithm, they start going into the specific technology that is being used. Hence, then you close the circle and the cycle by having the control environment and the specific technology assessment.

Kind of feeds into what Charles was saying earlier, just about the decentralization of blockchains, looking at them. There's so many blockchains out there, looking at the provenance of the nodes and stuff like that, and also just how robust these systems are. That kind of brings me to tokenized assets, which is kind of like a big thing these days. Larry Fink from BlackRock was saying, in the future, everything's going to be tokenized and things like that. So, Julius, I'm looking across at you and I'm thinking at Mastercard, you're obviously looking at tokenized assets, tokenized money market funds, stablecoin payments, all those different things. When it comes to these new innovations, would like When you put AI into this mix, we could be doing the wrong thing faster. It could be like drinking coffee, do the wrong thing faster. So how do you mitigate these risks?

And hopefully, I got the microphone down this time. I think being clear-eyed about what the benefits are of tokenization, real-time payments, bringing AI into the mix, but also being clear-eyed about what the risks are there. So obviously things like atomic settlement, tokenization of real world assets has a lot of pros like finality, speed, can help reduce counterparty risk. But then, if we're also looking at some of the potential risks there, things like some of the like liquidity transformation, which I'll talk about in a second, and also some of the, we have to be mindful of what the benefits are when we move from net to gross settlement, and the impacts that there are on liquidity there in the market. And just for the sake of time, I'll point folks to a great speech back in May from the Federal Reserve Governor, Lisa Cook, who talked about exactly those pros and cons, but And when we do have all of these rails moving at hyper speed and then you layer AI on top of it, the risk for doing the wrong thing faster absolutely augments. But I think if we are also clear-eyed about the risks associated with layering that AI on top, things like model herding, oracle risk, data poisoning, all of which I'll say the AI supplement for the blockchain maturity model covers quite well. then I think we can start to move faster without doing the wrong thing simultaneously.

Oh, I got the mic. Well, there's no going back, really. These things are present and they're only developing by the day. You mentioned, like, AI being, like, sort of like in that layer, being like a catalyst. Dino, what about quantum computing? Let's bring that in. So, Dino, you're currently at the UN, at the UN blockchain, you're building in the pension fund, putting the pension fund onto a secure blockchain. How do you quantum proof that, especially when you have like 80,000 different people across the globe in different countries that are relying that this thing, when it's on the blockchain, will be secure?

Thank you for, good question. So, indeed, we went live in 2021, we have been production for five years, we have a community of thousands, 80,000 individuals that rely on, on this solution. around the globe. And as a former obsessed auditor, my second dilemma was, what about quantum? What about harvest now, decrypt later? Am I going to lose the main proposition and value proposition of this solution because what is gonna be in five years, seven years, three years, quantum will come and make everything meaningless. So we started a journey in looking first and foremost really at our specific application. And we started to look, what is it that we are writing on the blockchain? And vis-a-vis that concept, we started to identify, for example, the timestamp, the public key address, the different element. And we started to map this element with the potential post-quantum computing threats. And what emerge is this, some lesson learned that I am pleased to share with you. So first and foremost, I think there is an implicit tendency to think that quantum computing is like Y2K. It will happen one day, you do whatever you need to do, and that's done, it's over done. And indeed, it's not like that. When that day will come, the Q day as it's referred to, it will come, but you're not finishing working there. You have to continuously and constantly look at your inventory. You're looking at a cryptographic bill of material. You're looking at the lifespan of the data that they may be vulnerable. So that was the first, if you will, realization that there is no such a Q day as a Y2K in quantum. The second thing is this. If and when, I hope soon, we are going to migrate, because we are in the process of migrating to a post-quantum computing resistant blockchain, because the current one is the Hyperledger Indy is not, just to be very clear. The point is, what about what's happening until now? What about the past? I'm going to lose all the transaction and the blocks already created. So the option that we're looking at, and I alluded to this morning, is the public anchoring. We're going to go back and re-encrypt those blocks and then create the hashing of the Merkle tree and put it on the public blockchain. So we are learning by doing. And another concept that I think is not usually included in this conversation. People think that when you start dealing with quantum, you need to start looking at quantum physics. I think there are more lower level operational issue that needs to be considered. For example, the length of the keys of the post-quantum computing new cryptographic primitive, the one approved by NIST, are much, much, much longer than those that are used today. And there is the need to start looking at the network level, at the firewall configuration, at the network boxes, and whether the hardware and the software that we are using today will be capable of handling the length of those keys. So I think that the concept, if you will, of post-quantum can and should be demystified and look more at the network operational level.

Okay, that really does sound like a fierce petri dish of competition between risk vectors and security. Dottie, can we just finish off with, could you tell us what part of today's regulatory frameworks could become obsolete first when we see quantum computing and Q-Day, as Dino had said, the onset of Q-Day, basically?

I would have to go, I think the biggest part that's going to become obsolete first is our speed. Right now, we're reviewing things at a very traditional pace. That's not going to be sustainable in any format or any fashion. And so as technology evolves throughout the history, we have to evolve with it. And those who evolve will do well, and those who don't evolve will be left behind. And I think that's going to hinder some of the financial markets as well.

Wonderful. I think we're out of time. It's on. We're out of time. And guys, round of applause for Dottie, for Dino, and for Julius. I'm Brian from Bain Crypto. And if you want to know about our exciting report, the impact of AI, blockchain, and quantum on financial services, just come up and ask me. Thank you very much.

Well, thank you guys. That was a great panel, wasn't it? Wow. So I think we've got one more, Brian, do we have one more session before lunch? Is that it? Awesome. Well, I always put Charles on the spot because when he speaks as a wrap-up speaker, it's always right before the reception and alcohol. Today we've got him right before lunch, but he's been very gracious. So for those of you who might have come in in the last couple hours or two, I'd like to introduce Charles Hoskinson. Charles first came to speak at our event at the National Press Club. It's the first time I got a chance to meet him and ever since then, test, two, three, can you hear me? Test. Test, okay, can you hear me now? Can you hear me now? All right. Yeah, okay. Anyway, for those of you who don't know Charles, he was one of the founders, first of all, he's got a math degree. So I didn't realize that, he started speaking the other day, and his knowledge of mathematics, I think, really inspire his analytical abilities. So he's one of the co-founders of Ethereum. And then from that, he went to found Cardano. He's been involved in many, many things involving governance. He's set up many, many different projects. He's got a huge ecosystem globally. He essentially is responsible for one of the blockchain ecosystems. It's one of the largest in the world. And has since, in addition to solving or addressing major projects like healthcare, He's been very involved in the policy space. I know in Utah, actually not just at the state level, but at national levels, he's traveled around the world. He meets with some of the industry leaders in Silicon Valley, and is probably one of the most influential people in this industry. We are incredibly honored and very grateful to have him here as a speaker, and listen to every word he says. you will be captivated. And Charles, you can take as long as you like, right? If people start passing out because of hunger, that might be a clue. But thank you again. Thank you for your friendship and thank you for all that you've done for this industry.

Hi, everybody. Can you hear me okay? Is the microphone working? figure the United Nations would have great microphones, come on. Well, it's such a pleasure to be here. First, I love New York, and so I don't need a strong excuse to come on out to New York. Used to live here in Jamaica, Queens. My bars had bars on them. Right next to Van Wyck Station, take the E line into the city. And we kind of invented pizza rat back then. I'd come back with some leftovers, feed the rats, and they just kept getting bigger and bigger, and I'm glad to see that they've all grown up and become celebrities. New York's a wonderful city. The UN is a wonderful place. And it's a wonderful place because it gives a voice to the voiceless and it allows the world as a whole to come together and have a conversation about what type of world do we want to live in. And while it's frustrating and while it takes a long time to converge, it's a valuable conversation, especially when you live in an age of exponential technologies. Exponential technologies are counterintuitive in that very little does something, a little bit more does everything. And the first time in human history that we encountered an exponential technology was nuclear weapons. Typically with explosives, they scale linearly, more bombs, more explosive power. With nuclear weapons, just a little bit more, then suddenly you could end the earth. And we didn't really understand what that meant till we used it. Then we realized that we had to create a comprehensive regulatory structure for it. And most of the 20th century, the second-half of the 20th century was influenced or in some cases principally guided by the existence of these weapons. Then the internet comes around. It's our next exponential technology, computing and the internet. And then suddenly we could all just talk to each other instantaneously and for free. And that seems like natural state of affairs, but if you're old enough, you remember that sometimes you'd take months to find out that something had happened. If you lived in England during the 19th century and you'd traveled to one of the colonies, if the queen died, you wouldn't probably know about it for three months to six months. Imagine that, you live in an empire and the head of the empire, you don't even know that they're dead. It's why in the Catholic church, when the Pope died, they'd break the fisherman's ring because they didn't want anybody impersonating him for months and months and months and using that ring as a signet to seal papal bulls in his name. So now we live in a world where I was on my ranch. I have this beautiful ranch out Wyoming, middle of damn nowhere. You know, it's a Medicine Bow National Forest. And I have a satellite connection and suddenly my phone pings and I saw headline happened 30 seconds earlier that Trump had been shot while he was running for office in 2024. Can you imagine that? Just the middle of nowhere, 30 seconds after an event happens in Pennsylvania, suddenly you're aware of something, which is truly extraordinary. And our governments, our technology, our social structures, our money wasn't really built for a world where everything is instantaneous and everything that happens everywhere in the world influences in some way, small or large, the things that happen in your world. Then we have more exponential technologies coming, not just the internet. Now we have AI, that's another exponential technology, inferences scaling at a rate we've never seen before. You know, Opus 4.5 came out last year, that was incredible, it was an amazing moment, multi-trillion parameter model. Now we have Quinn 3827B, just as powerful as Opus 4.5, but it's 99.8% smaller, and it runs on your laptop instead of a data center. So every year you're getting like a two to three order of magnitude efficiency improvement. So intelligence is basically becoming ubiquitous and universal, and all this amazing infrastructure and tooling is open source, and just like the internet, you can have it pretty much any time that you want to have it. So then you also have synthetic biology and nanotechnology and these other things, and they're also exponential technologies. I own a company that genetically engineers plants, and we've been doing some pioneering work where we, a small team, have been able to make plants bioluminescent and make them very bright. But more importantly, we've built a whole platform and small team can start conceiving of how could you use plants to completely rebuild the world. remove all the toxins from the soil, terraform the desert. These were traditionally things that were done as nation states, not done as private industry, not done as startups in private industry. Because exponential technologies feed into each other, we get to use AI and eliminate thousands of bad experiments and accelerate the research by decades. So we can do in just a few months time what normally would take 10 to 20 years of desk research. So cryptocurrencies come in and they live in that native world. They're exponential technologies. There's a small group of us that founded Ethereum, now it's a quarter trillion dollars. Probably one person founded Bitcoin. It's a multi-trillion dollar ecosystem with half a billion users, just a tremendous amount of growth in 15 years. And really the purpose of this speech is to talk about the convergence of exponential technologies, because as regulators, policy makers, business leaders, You have to think about how do you control these types of things? We had just one, and it was the defining technology of the 20th century. And despite our best efforts as a society, twice we came to the complete annihilation of the human race where a single person prevented it. Once in 1962 and another time in the 1980s, where literally a single person was the deciding factor of whether to use nuclear weapons and end the world. And it wasn't a world leader. In both cases, it was a Soviet military officer, in both cases, who was punished for deciding not to end the world. To think about how crazy that is. In fact, I dined just the other day in DC at a restaurant, and they have, they call it, it was Occidental, and they have the pork chop that saved the world, where the KGB negotiated a stand down with somebody there. to not invade Cuba. If we didn't invade Cuba, they'd get rid of the nuclear weapons. And it just made me think about how close we actually came. Those were technologies in the hands of governments, Soviet Union and the United States, and lots of people, and checks and balances, and tough regulatory structures. These are now technologies of the same power or greater, but in the hands of private industry, open source, and available to everyone everywhere. So really, we're at a moment in human history where we have to take a step back and assess where we want to go over the next 100 years and what problems we want to solve and also what risks do we want to resolve. I would posit that the only way to regulate these types of technologies is to use the blockchain space, the blockchain industry. And the reason being is it evolves at the same rate and pace. as the rest of these technologies. In just the last 15 years, we've gone from we push bitcoins around and you can't really do anything with them and nobody owns them. In fact, they were so worthless that it was fifth prize at a StarCraft tournament. First prize was $100 and fifth prize was 25 Bitcoin. So if you're bad at StarCraft, congratulations, you're a millionaire. To a global system. where we have DAOs, 18,000 of them, hundreds of billions of dollars of assets flowing, and every nation state is building regulatory frameworks for it, whether it be MiCA in Europe or the ADGM and their sandbox in Abu Dhabi, or what's happening in Japan with the JFSA. Every country is saying, how do we regulate and control these things? There's an age gap. When I meet older regulators, they say, oh, well, we'll regulate it like the legacy financial products. We had people like Gary Gensler, probably the worst chairman in the history of the SEC. He comes in and he says, oh, don't worry, we're going to get our revenge on that. But he comes and says, come in and register. And I say, exactly how do you do that for a decentralized blockchain ecosystem? If the founders die, it still runs. If the company that created it goes out of business, it still runs. And also, there's no permission to use it, so how do we even know who's using it, where the tokens are at, and what's being done on it? Well, that doesn't matter, come in and register. And if you don't, you're a criminal. Okay, can you give us some guidance? No, we're not your lawyer, figure it out. So what we lived for three years as an industry, it was patently absurd, hurt the United States, tens of billions, if not hundreds of billions of dollars of business went abroad. The largest exchange in the world, Binance, is not principally based in the United States. Every other major financial market is here in New York. for the last century, that was what we got. But we lost the crypto headquarters because of those decisions. So we know we can't regulate it the legacy way, or if we try, it's Pyrrhic at best. But there's no guidance on how to control these systems. So should we live in total anarchy and chaos and just accept that at any given moment, you can lose your life savings, and at any given moment, a person can just show up, take all your stuff, and there's nothing you can do about it? feels like there needs to be a third option, some form of control. So that's really where I've been spending the twilight of my career, given I've been in the industry for 15 years, I feel old and ossified, grandfatherly, should open up a pizzeria or something, just retire. But I said, you know, one last chain, one last big endeavor, and then I think we can kind of solve these issues. So I've been building a product called Midnight, and I've been highly involved in the privacy space and the identity space, I think these are the missing components to unify blockchain in a way to make it interoperable and compatible with the intention of regulators as opposed to the action of regulators. Regulators, if they're being honest and legitimate and not serving a corporate or geopolitical interest, they want to protect consumers. They want to make sure that you're not subject to waste, fraud, and abuse. They want to make sure that your life, liberty, and property is protected, if they're being honest. So if that's the intention, How do we leverage what we've learned in the last 15 years and the technologies that we've learned in the last 15 years to create a regulatory structure that's global first, operates 24 hours a day, seven days a week, doesn't cost a lot of money to manage, and is recursively self-improving? Why AI, exponential technologies, things are so interesting and difficult for us is they... improve themselves. They get faster and faster. You know, we had a major model released every year, then every six months, then now every month one's coming out. And they're not getting just a little bit better, they're getting dramatically better, dramatically more lifelike. Why is it then that regulation doesn't do that? Why isn't then that law and policy doesn't do that? Then when we discover a problem somewhere, just everything naturally fixes itself and the system is self-healing and anti-fragile in its nature. We do this in software, we can do this with law and policy. So part of the twilight of my career has been focused on recursively self-improving open source systems that allow us to combine blockchain privacy and identity in such a way that we can fundamentally change the relationship between the people who govern and the people who are governed. And the world I'd like to live in is a world where you as a regulator give your intention. What are you concerned about? What are you worried about? It's a challenge, almost like an X Prize. You know, we get $10 million if we can figure out how to fly to space and land. Okay, so you have some sort of challenge. And we in private industry, through the same techniques we use in open source software, can come together and just solve the problem. We can come up with a tax system where you can't cheat. We can come up with an identity system where identity theft doesn't happen. And we write it as an open source project and we share it with you, the regulator, you look at it, you let us know if you like it. And if you like it, you know, you do, you certify it. And if it's certified, you know what that means? Means that any entrepreneur anywhere, when they adopt that, they're in compliance with the law. And we move to settlement is compliance. This is important for two reasons, one, the cadence of collaboration and the scale of it speeds up and grows. So instead of just having engineers in one particular jurisdiction, one particular place working on a particular problem, you'll have people all around the world sharing interesting ideas with each other about how to resolve these collective problems and eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse. But the other thing that's really cool and interesting about it is that every nation is equal. You see, we're here at the United Nations, we'd like to believe that we're all equal, we all represent each other's nations, but the reality is whoever has the biggest army tends to win. We call this great powers conflict as opposed to rules-based international order. We tried the rules-based international order in the '90s and we were starting to get somewhere, but we're descending back into great powers conflict. We have a war in Europe, first time since World War II. Now a war in Iran. Soon we'll probably have a conflict over Taiwan with China. You may have some sort of contract or international agreement, but do you really think it's going to be honored if the United States and China have a military conflict? Do you really think some World Bank or international institution will override these armies? No. Let's not be naive about that. We already lived this. from the close of World War II on, when the Soviet Union and the United States were fighting each other. We'd sign treaties and make agreements, but they'd meant nothing at the end of the day because it was always the foreign policy of the two big countries that mattered. I don't want to live in that world. I think we're beyond that. And if we want to live in a world of peace and equality, we need technology that respects everything. The labors of this public-private partnership of treating regulation algorithmically and as an open source project means that I, as an entrepreneur, to comply with your law, call the software library. What that means is my cost of compliance is nothing. If I have a Mexican user, I call the Mexico library. If I have a German user, I call the German library. I don't care what the tax law is, the data requirements are. I don't care how they comply, the library figures that out. So when I have a transaction with 10 users and they're in 10 different jurisdictions, I can comply with the laws of all 10 jurisdictions simultaneously. Otherwise, I'm gonna pick a winner. And living in Wyoming, in the United States, it's probably gonna be America. And if there was-- And if I'm in China, guess what? It's probably gonna be Beijing. And if I'm in Japan, it's probably gonna be Japan. And how does that work for international law if we, the entrepreneurs, just pick the country we're worried about arresting us as opposed to what's best for our customers? and where they live and where they do things. So there's a real power when you start changing these things. And it also changes the relationship from adversarial to cooperative. A lot of things can be solved if you just invert relationships. Why Gensler was such a bad SEC chairman wasn't just that he weaponized the SEC and went after us and we'll never forgive him for it. He was bad because he eliminated every avenue we had as entrepreneurs to talk to the SEC. They'd say, come talk to us. In other words, come admit what you've done wrong and we'll sue you after you talk to us. So the advice every major law firm gave during that time period is don't talk to the Securities Exchange Commission. So effectively what that leadership style did is that the people who are most qualified, know the most about this domain and this technology, are unable to engage with the people who are most in need of their advice. most in need of their counsel. It's catastrophic when you think about it. If you change the structure that it's a public-private partnership and you share intention and we write the software, what you're doing is the opposite. You're saying the best people in the world are invited to create things on our behalf as a society. And they have a very strong incentive because that's the law that's gonna regulate them. So they're gonna work really diligently and really hard and more importantly for the taxpayers pockets, you don't have to pay them. You get rid of compliance officers and you create compliance engineers in your society. And what's also really cool about it is that if a small nation has a real good idea, as many of them do, having started businesses across the world, From Cayman to BVI to Panama to Barbados and Bermuda to Singapore to Japan to Hong Kong, Seychelles, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, I've had businesses in all these jurisdictions. Believe it or not, it turns out that there's a good regulator or two and a good idea or two in them. Wouldn't it be nice if those ideas merge and float into our legal system if they're a good idea? We do this every day in software. If you're an engineer in Silicon Valley, do you particularly care if the code was written by somebody in Senegal or somebody in Mongolia? No, you ask, does it work? What are the GitHub stars? How many people have adopted it? Has someone audited the code? You're asking the actual function, not the origin, and there's no political bias to it. So why can't regulation be this way? If there's a good idea, there's a good idea, just heavens sakes, do it. Why do we need this? Well, we need better collaborative and governance structures because exponential technology is a race to the bottom. If five or 10 people coming together can use this stuff to change the lives of billions of people, we really have to get good at collaborating with each other because we can no longer do it top down. We can no longer do it with a bunch of governments getting together and saying, this is the way it's going to be. By the time you have the conversation, the problem's already happened. You know, Trump brought all these AI CEOs together at the White House, beautiful photo op. And their accomplishment is we've renamed AI, SI. Congratulations, we're living in the age of super intelligence now, not artificial. Artificial is bad, no preservatives. We got super intelligence. Does anybody honestly feel like we've achieved something here? Because every single one of those people, because of game theory, went back to their respective labs and said, yeah, they need to slow down, but we need to speed up because shareholder reasons, right? And it's just like steroids in baseball. Maybe you didn't want to take them, but if everybody else is taking them to win the game, you got to take them to stay competitive, right? That's the problem with game theory. It's merciless. So you can't solve the problem by having flashy panels and bringing people together at the White House or at institutions like this. You solve it by fundamentally inverting the incentive scheme and the collaborative structures, and you bring people together and you have the courage to admit things. Now, here's the benefit. Every year we spend about $500 billion globally in the compliance cartel. That's the audit and oversight, the KYC stuff, the fines, the investigations, all these things. To give you a sense of the magnitude of that money, you could buy Tokyo every three years. So congratulations, you get three Tokyos a decade for your global compliance system. I hope you enjoy your purchase. It's a beautiful place. Very nice. A lot of people. So maybe, just maybe, we wanna live in a compliance system where that goes down by an order of magnitude every decade, and it gets cheaper and cheaper to comply. And maybe we should live in a regulatory system where you don't create a financial panopticon. Why I don't trust you Europeans with your digital euro is we all know what you're gonna do with it. Here's what's gonna happen in 10 years. Asset and transaction discrimination. You're gonna have digital euros in your bank account, and you're gonna go to buy some fuel, And even though you have 2,000 euros in your bank account, it's gonna decline your card and say, "Well, I'm sorry, you've already purchased 50 liters of petrol this month. You're not allowed to buy anymore." Don't believe it? Well, then put it in some sort of law that you're not gonna do it. You're gonna do it. You see, and that's why my industry's winning, because we have enshrined in our technology, not don't be evil, can't be evil. Part of the social contract is we are turning over more and more of what it means to be a human, the good stuff and the bad stuff, to digital systems. We outsource so much to AI, we outsource so much to Google and all these other things. There has to be some appreciation and respect that we have a right to privacy and we have a right to some basic liberties and freedoms, whether it be what we buy, how we associate with people, who we love, or where we go and what we do. if you control the money and the identity it's like the Arrakis you know spice controls the universe you control humanity you can control everything a person thinks and does because if they speak out against the system you simply just turn their money off and how long will they be able to resist you if they can't pay anybody they can't travel anywhere they can't even feed themselves this is the danger of digital money without restraints and controls. And I'm sorry to say, after COVID, after the 2008 financial crisis, after the Iraq war, after all the things that have happened in the last 20 years, all time faith in institutions is the lowest it's ever been since probably the 1930s when we were shopping for new governments, whether it be communism or totalitarianism or restoration of republics. We just don't trust the governments anymore. They haven't earned that right. They really haven't. Anytime something comes, their immediate instinct is, how do we control it? How do we wrap our hands around it? And then how do we hand that control to a collection of trillionaires and billionaires and cartels? So we in the blockchain industry, it's not about number goes up. It's not about coin market cap. It's not about which token is doing well and which token is not doing well. It's just much more fundamental. It's about how do you create trust amongst people who don't trust each other and how do you restore faith and trust in institutions as a whole? How do you get people to believe in governance again and how do you get people to believe in each other again and work with each other again and how do you restrain the powerful Here in America, we pride ourselves in rule of law, we pride ourselves in strong institutions, we pride ourselves in our ability to be the good guys. And I've watched my president now issue a meme coin and extract $1.3 billion. Trump coin. I've watched so many ethics violations, they're almost inconceivable now. It feels not like America anymore. Why? Because the checks and balances that normally hold people accountable have been systematically unraveled. It wasn't done by this particular president. It was a path. Years and years of partisan politics have led us here, and it was a bipartisan effort to lead us here. And it's only going to get worse. What does this mean? It means that we, the American people's faith and trust in our institutions of government is at an all time low. So how do we work with them as a partner to restore things? So blockchain is meta in that its job is not just to restrain us, the users of the system, but it's equally important to restrain the behavior and actions of governments as well. We're walking into a world of digital ID. We're walking into a world where we're going to get rid of cash. We're walking into a world where most of your life lives in the cloud and most of the things that are economically important to you are regulated by agents, controlled by companies you have no relationship with. So how do we restore constitutional controls and give you a right to privacy, give you your freedoms back, ensure that those liberties we put on paper a long time ago in documents that people seldom understand, much less read. How do we ensure that they're revitalized and brought in? That's the purpose of the blockchain industry. And no one person has the right to say the way it should be. Just like open source projects, it has to be a collaboration of the many for the many. We all have to come together and talk to each other. This is the challenge of our time. It's not like we haven't done it. We've done it multiple times in the 20th century. There's a beautiful picture. It was at an English king's funeral, and I believe it was 1910, and most of the European monarchs were there for it, and you can still find it on Google. And what was so extraordinary was that those people were so powerful, they controlled about half the wealth of the world and about two-thirds of the surface of the earth in that one room, those people. In 10 years after that picture was taken, the vast majority of them had lost their empires, been kicked out, and all of Europe had been restructured. So we had this concept of a durable social order and everything works this way. 10 years later, worked very differently. And so we've done this multiple times. Many of you witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall. If you'd asked somebody in the 80s, you think that Soviet Union's gonna go away? They said, well, they're going through a hard time, but let's be real here. The Soviet Union is not gonna collapse. And it did. And it did without the world descending into 50 years of civil war and chaos. That was an empire that killed a lot of people and had a lot of grievances. It was a miracle that we didn't descend into that. And many people worked really hard to prevent that from happening. That's why it didn't happen. So we have precedent for it. We've gotten rid of kings. We've gotten rid of evil empires. And we can do it again. And so what we need to do is come together as a society, as a group of people, and we have to start with fundamental rights we care about, fundamental things we wanna preserve and protect. And then how do we use these new technologies to serve the people, not the companies, not a particular country's interest. And once we decide those things, we in private industry, what we can do is we can write the code. We can write the protocols. We can build the technology. We can move from a world of don't be evil to a world of can't be evil. And then once you have a world like that, you have trust again. And I'll tell you what trust does for all of us. I'm a rancher, and I always love using this example. It's a nice ranch example, you know. So let's say that I want to get another pasture for my bison. Now, my next-door neighbor's got some land I want to buy. Let's say I trust him. We have a great relationship with each other. So I go over to him, get some whiskey, we get ********** drunk, get a good steak, talk about it, and we shake on it. And guess what? A month later, his half-brother shows up, says, "That's my land." All right, well, we go get some whiskey again, we talk it out, we solve it, and then we shake on it, deal closes, I get the deed, now I got that pasture, congratulations, there you go. two two meals. That's basically what that cost me. Now, let's say we didn't trust each other. We don't like each other. First, I don't talk to him. My lawyer talks to his lawyer. We start negotiating. We think we have a deal. We sign on and after a lot of tough, expensive, billable hours. All of a sudden, that half brother shows up. We are in litigation and for two years, we're suing each other over this damn thing and I finally win. Guess what I got? My grand prize is the same piece of land. What's the difference? Getting drunk and two meals with friends versus lawyers, lawsuits, and a lot of hard feelings and probably decades and decades of bad blood with me and my neighbor. The only delta between these two is trust. Did we trust each other? Society cannot work if we don't trust each other. Everything lawyers do, accountants do, laws do, at the end of the rainbow, is to try to create higher trust structures so we can get things done. The most damaging and dangerous thing to modern society is if we lose faith and trust in each other. Why we're having so many problems right now is the technology is moving too quickly. Globalization is moving too quickly and we're not able to adapt enough to be able to trust everyone. So we're regressing to tribalism. And it's not about the truth and it's not about this data or that person. That stuff is just excuses. At the core of all of it is we just don't trust it. What we sell in the blockchain industry are structures of trust. That's what we sell. That's our core product. and we build them collectively and collaboratively with each other. So we need to come together and work together. And as we come together, work together, what we could do is decide where we want to go over the next century. How do we build a structure of trust in the next century? And how do we make it fair for everybody? How do we put those pieces together? I'm not a particularly partisan person. You know, I spent so many years running around doing things and going to different countries. But one thing that I really do admire is when I feel like regulators actually care about the people. When I was in Switzerland, when I was in Switzerland years ago, I'll never forget negotiating with the Swiss government when we were setting up Ethereum. It's a tough negotiation. How many Swiss people are you hiring? What are you doing for Switzerland? How much money you're bringing in for Switzerland? I said, Switzerland, a business? I mean, this is crazy. And when we signed, he said, welcome to Switzerland. Don't make it our problem. I said, oh, that's pretty good. So in closing, I'd encourage you, if you are in a policy or lawmaking or a regulatory position, have that same mentality and attitude. Remember the people that you work for. You don't work for a bureaucracy. You don't work for a code or a law. Laws can be changed. You don't like laws, we change laws all the time. We changed 35 laws in Wyoming. Here's a law. They're just representations of where we're at. You work for the people, and you're supposed to do good by those people and take care of those people. And you have the best tool of your entire life before you. You have a tool to rebuild trust in you and rebuild trust in your institution. and use that tool to rebuild trust in you and your institution. And if you do that, not only will you have their trust, you'll have their respect. And because of that, you can leverage them. And with them, you can change the entire world. So thank you all for coming and being part of this dialogue. Thank you all for taking this industry seriously after all the chicanery, the meme coins, the NFTs, the crazy things that have happened. And thank you. for giving me hope that we actually can solve these problems. It's good to have agency again. I'm so tired of just watching the news and seeing bad thing after bad thing and you just feel like you don't have any control and you can't say or do anything. It's nice to be in an industry where if we don't like it, we can just change it. It's pretty cool, so cheers.