Building the Enterprise Multiverse: Connecting every workflow on the planet

[Music] good afternoon everyone good morning america how about a conversation about the enterprise multiverse i think it's an amazing time now that we're finishing the year to have such a discussion and rachel welcome on stage she will do an amazing job moderating the session welcome all thank you daniel and thank you again for having us here we are all so excited to be here my name is rachel wolfson i'm a journalist with coin telegraph and i'm an enterprise blockchain analyst with quantum economics and i'll be moderating this panel today i'm going to go ahead and let our wonderful panelists introduce themselves so david would you like to start i i'm first of all really pleased to be here at the european blockchain convention my name is david palmer i'm the blockchain lead for vodafone business i've been working uh with vodafone to explore blockchain technologies for the past uh four years and uh very excited to have that discussion in the context of the medivastary great rowan would you like to go next thanks rachel and good morning good afternoon and good evening everyone my name is rowan finn i'm the co-founder and ceo of risexo based in perth in australia and we build a enterprise platform for industrial companies to help them build digital autonomous organizations on top of blockchain technology wonderful angel would you like to introduce yourself sure thanks rachel and thank you all for for inviting us from telefonica i'm angela garcia i work in telefonica um i'm in the global supply chain function so i'm an operations guy i'm far from technology or from the utilization directly so to speak but they by usa they believe invited us because we've got one of the biggest blockchains for supply chain in the world and we've got it you know it's in production obviously and it's fully integrated in our operations so i think we're starting to take the first steps into the metaverse so to speak so thanks thanks for inviting us wonderful william yeah thank you uh my name is william herbert uh running enterprise blockchain by and large here at chain links labs and uh chain link probably is best known for being the the kind of the core infrastructure that has been powering uh defy for much of the last few years but that same infrastructure has tremendous implications for the enterprise space and so we're really excited about all the different opportunities that we see coming um to us in that area and some of that might come up today great and rudolfo yes uh very happy once again to be at the ebc i'm glad they had a chance to invite me once again um really nothing has changed on my end my name is rudolfo no i'm still the head of blockchain at henkel for the last three years so like uh like david uh helping out our enterprise to make sense of blockchain and enter and put that into our processes uh if for those of you who don't know henkel is a german company and they basically we what we do is we produce adhesive technologies beauty care products and also laundry and home care products all around the world wonderful thank you panelists for the great introductions let's get started with the first question so what is the metaverse and how does it relate to enterprise blockchain and anybody can go ahead and start thanks rachel i think it's a it's a it's a great question and a great space because it is so undefined i think uh enterprise multi-first might become the new digital transformation i think there's a lot of potential ways or or divergent views in terms of what this enterprise multiverse might look like but the one that we're interested in is the one where every single company has a digital autonomous twin of their real world organization which governs operates and controls their analog operations and where these digital autonomous organizations can interact and transact with each other in real time in an economy which operates in an entirely abstract space which we would think of as sort of being a metaverse or a multiverse and also where these digital autonomous organizations can work together to affect the most productive operating format in the analog world so that we have the most efficient most effective version of our global industrial infrastructure i think we care about this version of the multiverse because this copy of the multiverse we can use this technology to produce more goods and services to meet the demands of our global population who's growing larger living longer getting richer and also use less of the planet's resources in doing it so it helps us reduce the carbon intensity of our global industrial ecosystems and this allows us to start to move away from a finite economy we're ultimately dependent on extractive industries and linear business models and start to move towards that world where we have more of an infinite economy and while it does seem a little bit out there the journey has started we're working on this every day taking small steps every day it's not a far go it's actually just a hop skip and a jump away and it's important that we get there as fast as we can if we want to increase the carrying capacity of the planet so that's how we look at the enterprise multiverse and that's why we think it's important um but i'd i'd love to hear some views from the other panelists yeah i'd i'd maybe like to go next um and i think you know it would have been difficult to have this conversation maybe five ten years ago um because i think we're at the time now where we're having the intersection of um technologies uh on a level uh that is unparalleled um and i think the metaverse the way i see it is a framework bringing all of this together so the way the way i see the metaverse is a virtual world um where um you know we can offer new virtual uh experiences and ownership uh using technologies like ar uh vr um and ai but i'm also seeing um that uh that in the metaverse and that ownership you have finance um so things like d5 nfts uh maybe cbdc's powered by blockchain allow ownership uh in that metaverse so if you look at the one of the metaverse experiences that's gaming uh then uh you know blockchain uh nfts uh d5 allow you to uh own uh assets in the game and transact it so so that's the metabus experience layer but then there's a physical layer and i think this is what rowan was getting to which is that the metaverse will not create a digital uh experience or a digital world that is divorced from the real world you know our identities uh in the real world so our digital identities in the real world will allow us to vote uh in the real world but also uh uh have a say in a doubt in a in a mediverse one in the same way the wallet that we use to uh transact real world transactions pay our mortgage buy our crypto could be the same wallet that we use to buy assets in the in the beta verse um you know if we buy art we can we can print that on a 3d printer so one of the things that i think we've been missing in the discussion of the metaverse is that um translation from digital experience and ownership to real world experience and ownership and and from a telco point of view i believe that uh you can almost see the mobile phone and telco and connectivity as as the middleware as joining these two wells um with digital identities and currencies playing immediate medium exchange of course the finance side is important of course data will will span from real world to physical wealth um and and and i think that uh the ecosystem uh that organizations like meta or previously facebook and their announcement um you know the social media companies will bring ecosystem to this and adoption quickly but i believe that the metaverse enterprise uh will be uh applications and solutions that span all three of these things i hope that made sense i've seen quite a lot there but uh right i find it actually quite interesting these uh two definitions right um generally when you hear this uh word of anything ending in verse or metaverse multiverse whatever you immediately go back to these recent announcements that david said of what facebook had to say on the metaverse topic uh which is honestly how we had kind of looked at it from our perspective i also had a couple of people on my team who were quite enthusiastic and looking at this topic of the metaverse and the potential to do let's say nft based use cases in this metaverse for us uh jump into that quite quickly uh and from that perspective at least you think about it as a brand a little bit more than let's say maybe an individual in that perspective right because at least for us it's important to understand how a company that is producing maybe fast-moving consumer goods can make use of this let's say new digital environment uh or virtual or metaverse or whatever you want to call it uh to as david said kind of expand the consumer experience you would have right and then build a brand story uh potentially i guess for those thinking very further ahead how does that uh how would your product that today is sold physically then be able to be sold digitally in the future right uh it's something that's quite difficult also for people to get their heads around uh but at least these kind of topics get uh the discussion started and what i found interesting in rowan's perspective is okay let's maybe forget this fancy social media stuff uh let's just look at it more from a perspective of digital twin right which is maybe at the heart of what more enterprises do especially manufacturers like us uh and i honestly haven't given it any thought on that perspective right and i find that quite quite interesting to think about okay maybe yes there will be some brand stories built on these metaverses and whatever and people might be able to buy our our hair styles or whatever and these um the nfts in this metaverse but what if we then also actually looked at the physical products and our suppliers not as physical entities but as something that you digitally model then you then you can actually work and transact with yeah i i just does come in quickly there and just say that what's interesting about that is how the metaverse and the current supply chains can condense span to digital supply chains in the metaverse uh and are we thinking about that but that's maybe further or not sorry william oh no it's i look i i think the meta versus the reality is it's going to be whatever we want it to be in the same way the internet is whatever we want it to be right if it's an extension if it's a logical organic extension of what the internet already is and the internet is already everything to all people you know it's both this amazing play to be honest it's about this amazing place where amazing things happen and amazing commerce occurs and it's also kind of a scary place where some other stuff happens too so all of these things are probably going to happen in the metaverse and and companies are going to exist there the same way they exist in the internet they're going to they're going to have to deal with all the same challenges that they have you know in the internet and um you know i'm at this panel today and we're interested specifically because we we believe that a lot of that's going to be decent decentralized and that they're not we're not all going to trust the same way the internet is decentralized we're not going to all trust all of our uh entire ecosystem to one provider um and so the more decentralized that is the more that you know networks like chain link are going to play roles in that but i think it's going to be up to all of us to decide how much this is a decentralized workplace how much is a decentralized uh environment where people can interact without necessarily taking direct you know huge trust in individual parties and how much of it is going to be a decentralized location where you know things can be transacted and adjudicated through a network and not necessarily just through individual corporations so i'd like for the panelists to kind of discuss actual use cases of the metaverse being applied at your companies so um yeah who would like to go first i can jump in and join from the previous conversation a little bit but and again from an operations perspective not a theoretical blockchain or metaverse guy this new technology is open like a huge amount of opportunities from an operations perspective to improve operations and i love the concept that you guys i think it was rowan and david were talking about the digital twin and how we get you know our physical world into the digital world um we in telefonica we're trying to do it step by step i mean again i'm an operations guy i i we avoid risks at every step right we want we want the right product to be at the right time in the right place that's the most important thing and but but again the this digital new technologies open a huge amount of opportunities so what we're doing first is trying to break silos of information so uh little by little so um as soon as we have all the information shared among all the different participants hold because again at the end the supply chains are global right the product doesn't understand about about companies or or people that the product just flows so if we get all the information if we can make that join a supply chain in the digital world for everyone that you know that's the way to make things more efficient and speed speed at everything so our first approach was let's put everything in in this multiverse digital blockchain you know that is not telephonic as information is the supply chain the global end-to-end supply chains with all the participants information and that's where we are right now right we're getting a lot of valuable information and improving our processes or end-to-end processes with all our the companies involved in in the process the next step would be to start um automating more business processes like real processes like payments guarantees i don't know anything that you can think of you can automate it on top of that trusted layer of information that it's again it's it's centralized and it's for everyone um and the last one which we're a little bad a little bit far uh from there i believe it's how do we create value out of that right and i think there's several possibilities there but again we are still from our side from operation side we've only taken the the first step which is having the information flow and when and and sure there in a in a digital world right make sense um if i may make me comment i mean what i would say is um yeah the metaverse is something that we're moving towards um so so i wouldn't say the metaverse exists completely now uh it's a transition um i think rowan said that that we're we're aiming towards um but what we can talk about is um the sort of technologies um like blockchain um like like ar vr um you know that we're working on uh digital identity for example with which our key enablers or key components that will be part of that end state that we get to uh and i think maybe there's been a rush to say right the metaverse is here because we had the announcement from from meta but but in reality especially for business it's something that we're trying to transitioning towards so in terms of blockchain i think the the key thing for us is digital identity uh so digital identity across people business and things um self-sovereign digital identity how that fits into our ecosystem is something that's key that we're working on um and i believe in the metaverse uh you know the digital identity of people business and things will be critical uh to how we make that transition from the real world to the virtual world and and how those things are are synchronized uh you know and and also how we regulate it because um one of the things about the virtual world um is if you buy something in a game or you buy land from decentraland um you know what is the custody on that what is the jurisdiction how do you deal with resolution disputes um so so i believe that uh digital identity across people business and things is key that's something we're actively working on um i also um like angel um you know think that supply chain um logistics will be key and the provenance of supply chain using using blockchain um and iot is also important as well and i think one of the challenges that we have or one of the opportunities we have depending on how you look at it is how that how that can how supply chain can be extended uh to look at supply chain in the metaverse right the digital uh uh side of it um and how communication can be expended to to look at how we communicate in in the metaverse as well um so those are things that we're we're looking at um and then of course on the sort of experience side um you know gaming uh nfts are all things i think there's an announcement today that uh vodafone will be auctioning the first text message as uh nft and i think uh you know and nfts uh will will play play an important role for enterprising enterprises going forward and we're we're no different um so so i don't think i'm talking too much over to another panelist right that actually pick up uh the topic that you mentioned at the very beginning of your uh as you said your longer chat david about the evolution right i mean i think in this case of blockchain like with many other emerging technologies really about how this whole both conceptually and then uh tangibly it evolves uh throughout time right i think conceptually with things like this nfts and things like that that you mentioned this is where a lot of our attention is at but it's really what's about to come or to come in a certain way especially as you said from a more enterprise perspective uh if i go back a little bit to what then angel was saying on a more tangible perspective right you're still in a certain way working with use cases around the digital assets which can be people like you said on the identity side which in our case we don't work a lot on but more on on products or things right which is maybe something more along the lines of what angel or roman had to say and here we've seen okay if you take a traditional traceability use case how has that also evolved from our perspective in three years so first you want to track maybe the paperwork that was going along the way and have that in the in somehow in the blockchain and as you learn to go through these topics especially as a manufacturing company you also have a look at huh you know it's not i see a finished good that goes out of our uh our shelves into the let's say into the shelves our retailers was made through mixing was made through chemical reactions was made with a certain amount of things where you just can't represent them with paper right you have to find other ways to collect attributes along the supply chain uh sometimes calculate things as a and go back into the history uh but at the end of the day i say you're evolving from okay i just want transparency and traceability along my supply chain to okay how will i then be able to then transfer attributes for these digital assets across it and every as far there you go on this evolution the more digital or virtual this becomes and as i said i guess the next evolution would be as you said how do we transact with these online how do we maybe uh set something unique as an nft and now that we have all this information how do we build uh cust consumer experiences around them you know i i it's gonna be very interesting to see how much of all of this um allows us to continue in a in a trust based system right where where companies are issuing all of these things and they're adjudicating these themselves you mentioned the contracts question before david when when if you're if you're buying something what what will be the adjudication process is there going to be one individual company that is selling land or is that going to happen from the the broader network right will that contract be codified on on blockchain and then you know verified by third parties uh will that be specifically just written and defined by this maybe a particular person in its particular plotline we don't really know exactly how that's going to say i will say that you know three or four or even five years ago it was impossible to think that a decentralized version could exist right until until the d until d5 proved that peer-to-peer transactions could occur without there being central parties um they could be safe and they'd be secure and they and uh they could be trusted um and that you wouldn't need uh to put all of you know that you could you could actually put your money into these vehicles and feel safe about the outcomes i don't think people could have really thought through the a world where the metaverse could be or large portions of the metaverse could be decentralized i i of course i'm highly biased coming from chain link labs but we we we strongly believe that a very portion of it will be decentralized um and i think that's you know i don't want to keep saying the same thing over and over again but i do think that's good that's really going to be the interesting topic a certain portion of that versus without question going to be you know uh uh run in a centralized fashion but other parts are going to be increasingly run by the the broader network and by dowse you know uh autonomous right as roman was mentioning and i think it's going to be really fascinating to see how large companies in particular go from being in ecosystems where they control maybe everything to where they are just a participant um who are who have a say and whoever strong opinion and and they can certainly influence outcomes but they don't necessarily dictate outcomes the way that they had in in in maybe the the the previous uh scenarios so it's gonna be very fascinating to see how it plays out and i'll go lucky last uh and i'll try and chuck in some examples of use cases that we're working on um so we're slightly different i think to maybe some of the panelists who operate companies in a sense that we build a platform called the dyna platform which companies then build a digital copy of their operations on top of and it's a blockchain enabled entity right a blockchain enabled organization and then we work in sectors that aren't well known for adopting digital technology and certainly aren't well known you know and spring to mind when you think blockchain so some of our clients are oil and gas for example we work with a very forward-thinking company called mercuria and they're a large global commodity trading company and we work with companies in australia and they provide services asset management services to the marine sector and in each case we actually do really similar stuff um we do use nfts but we don't call them that i don't think our clients would warm to that so much but we use what we call kind of boring nfts in the sense that we run transactions across a platform which are multi-party transactions so in the one circumstance we've used the platform to automate the purchase and supply of marine fuel and we use an nft to record every single contract that runs across that platform and the information that's in that contract in terms of if you think about a multiverse and we always use the word multiverse just because you know the origin of meta means other but if you can build another one you can build many um some i think will be more useful than others and we're really focused on the really useful ones um and so in the uh in the case of marine field we also track emissions against an asset so like david we're saying everything in our system has an identity whether it's a person or a thing or a company everything has an identity and we use that system to track emissions carbon emissions against in this case a ship right an asset that then can manage a carbon liability over a period of time in a separate use case a completely separate product we are building a workflow which records uh the generation of carbon credits and then in the multiverse in the blockchain layer without any human intervention that workflow that generates credits can actually trade with that workflow that's capturing emissions i think that's a new an example of an application of a technology to generate a new business model in what is a very kind of heavy industrial space where you wouldn't expect to see this technology being adopted in the way that it is um but yeah so we we do we are building what you know are they entirely autonomous today not necessarily there's still a few manual steps but certainly we're working to take those manual steps out you know slowly but surely to get to the point where that asset let's say a ship can order its own fuel because it knows where it's going and it knows how much fuel has in the tank and it knows how much fuel it's burning along the way and so there's no reason it can't you know trade in and out of markets in almost in real time um with with the other platform that we've built which sells um so yeah we use all those fancy words uh daos and nfts but when we're working in that industrial sector we we tend to sort of use different language to describe it because otherwise i think it just sort of gets associated with art and cryptocurrency and and so on but it's it's really a really useful tool i can add a lot of value in in the in the sort of most carbon intensive sectors right and rowan you just kind of touched on something for my next question which is what are the main challenges of introducing the metaverse to an enterprise blockchain environment so obviously rowan as you mentioned the language can be a bit challenging when we're speaking with enterprises um but what are some other challenges that we're seeing here um so so i think i think the sort of main challenge is if you if you look at the the the sum of the medivas um so so blockchain um other digital technologies um is number one they're they're they're new um so so so scalability uh is an issue the the other thing is that you've got to remember that uh while we look at the the metaverse and we're exploring these technologies um you know there's a business and a customer base to support so you have massive erp uh systems in organization that in order in enterprise organizations like ours uh where there's you know that are actually supporting uh customers and solutions and processes now and part of the question you have is how do you um how do you do this transition how do you engage with these new technologies uh yeah is it something where you integrate uh you know blockchain um you know to uh enterprise systems uh in which case that yeah that's something that brings challenges is it something that you do separately uh or is it a combination of the two so so one of them is is definitely scale integration uh to to current systems um but but i think the the other challenges you have is um simply the the landscape so if you look at blockchain you know there's uh many many blockchains uh you know enterprise hybrid public uh if you look at cryptocurrencies and tokens there's many many tokens new being added every new ones being added every day um you know d5 nfts uh cbdcs are in their infancy um you know how we exploit data how we um how we how we look at the sort of experience level all new right so all of this is coming new at the same time and i suppose the biggest challenge is how how do we um bring all of this together in a way that allows us to run the current business but but also exploit or explore the opportunity that this provides because i think the the key thing is that why we're here talking about this as enterprises and businesses is that uh yeah it's a big opportunity uh an opportunity um that has been brought about by the combination of technologies at the same time so for example blockchain i'm seeing on uh from the audience a lot of questions on trust and yeah exactly with the metaverse in the way that we imagine it be possible without blockchain maybe not because blockchain does provide that trust layer that allows you to have uh your medium of exchange so exchange of tokens of value in the in the metaverse and it also will provide uh the means for trusted identities in the metaverse so blockchain being key but then you've got ar vr ai all of these technologies that will um also come to support this so it's a massive opportunity um that we have to look at and that's why we're discussing it but um you know the challenge you have is how do you transition to it whilst um maintaining your current operations i'm a little disappointed we're not doing this this panel in vr i mean i was i i got the goggles started right away um no i would just i'll just be five seconds before i give it to you i i to david's point there's i don't believe there's any way that we get to be having this conversation today without blockchain i think there's still a lot of blockchain skeptics out there in the traditional enterprise world and one of the things they absolutely miss is that you cannot have true ownership um unless unless individuals feel that they have true ownership or something that's that exists outside of what a company is telling you that you own right and everything else that we own in life um is something that either a government is telling is is confirming that we own or another company is confirming that we own in some capacity so it's just it's just really really interesting that in order to interact and to say i genuinely own this nft i genuinely own this piece of land and that's not because someone gave that to me and that's not because someone is saying it because i have this completely non-fungible existence that exists on a blockchain that can never be taken away it is a dramatic technological innovation which is actually leading to this conversation without it i just don't i don't think uh i just don't think this conversation could exist and i'm so sorry about i didn't know no worries i mean at the end you gave me a good segue because i mean i wanted to present a counterpoint to what david said uh because it is i think basically it's a little bit more about understanding and i think this is what you were referring to william so how do we understand this whole technological change and therefore understand the value behind it uh because i think i still another phrase from my team where they say hey technology in every project that we discuss it's technology is not going to be an issue right we will find a way scalability will happen there's lots of smart people working on making these blockchains better what's more troubling or what takes most of our time is this uh solving this obstacle as you said can people wrap their heads around what blockchain does what are the benefits that they have for them why should they actually then be talking about this instead of their good old-fashioned erp that they know and love right yeah so that's so that's kind of think a more challenging perspective i think that's the one challenge we face on a daily basis and the biggest one uh i think after you've done a lot of this groundwork the second one that we would say for for enterprises is uh what is the willingness for our companies to be first movers right and i think somebody alluded in in that sense where there was kind of many companies and many blockchains so there's a certain amount of of of let's say fear of betting on the wrong one or saying hey i said well maybe if our customers are on we are we can join but if not then we wait for them to see so kind of getting finding these good uh let's say evangelist also within the uh processes or with the lines of business can can also be a very big challenge for for adoption yeah i i i think that's everyone's highlighted it already i think it's the challenges aren't unique to blockchain they're the same challenges that people have always had in in the enterprise technology space every time there's new tech there's a there's a there's a reasonable amount of fud so fear uncertainty and doubt and you've got to convince large groups of people to take risk and i think so ultimately you know like rodolfo said you've got to find leaders that have courage and are prepared to understand it to a degree but then also take the risk to experiment with the project to david's point we often get you know we have a lot of dialogue with clients around their legacy stack but you know i paid for some old technology has never been a good reason not to start using new technology and i think it's like if you aren't building your digital autonomous organization today then how will you compete in this enterprise universe tomorrow you won't even be there right it's like it's like jeff bezos trying to sell books online without a web page so it's not a kind of you know i have an erp and you know that works well okay fine in the rp you won't be present you won't have a footprint you won't have a position in the in that new world so those are the challenges but they're not unique i think to blockchain they're just the same old challenges we've always had trying to sell tech into enterprise right it's just a bit slower and a bit harder than trying to sell the same stuff to consumers i think you're absolutely right rowan so we we in telephonic at least are um lucky that we have uh a few leaders with the enough courage or you know um that we jumped into it and and now we've got uh and it was also uh david uh a big challenge uh we've got all our erps integrated not only ours but also our you know the whole enterprise of the whole network or and of enterprises but whatever there's data it's automated we've got it integrated in in blockchain it was a little bit of a challenge also to make everybody speak the same language to your question at the beginning uh rachel so um but we made it happen we we had to automate also on top of blockchain some parts of the process that were not automated that were manual and we didn't want that because you know garbage and garbage out so that was another another fun part of the project our main challenge right now i would say is that i forgot to mention before but we don't have the free forwarders or customs uh in the network we we don't communicate with them they are not part of the process first because it was not you know like a big challenge we didn't have big problems with them so we didn't have the ships that sync or anything so we didn't need to to track it that that closely but at some point we'll need to um and at that point we will need to go so right now we've got an enterprise uh network so you know the digital identity is not a problem but when we go outside and and we go to more public networks uh what you were saying david is going to be a pain in the neck absolutely which is the detailed identity how i make sure that you know telefonica has or someone we think telefonica has that digital identity that you know nobody can question it's basically me and and to be honest i don't know if it's solved already but that's i believe that's that's going to be really really important and then you know on top of that this is i don't know if one of you mentioned it already but it's the regulation so um you know ip and all that if i'm settling something into the multiverse i make sure that nobody can come in and say that they are telephonic and sell a product that you know impersonating telefonica that those are things that we'll need to to look into in the future really closely but i think that those are the challenges that come next that challenge of course already exists on the internet though right and then there's people probably i'm sure i guarantee there's people out there trying to pretend their telephonica on the internet uh and on the telephones already so it's just an extension of that one thing i just quickly wanted to say about david's comment who on my screen is that way i don't know for their name but uh the first mover advantage you know i think it's very very interesting a lot of people are waiting and uh and i'm not saying waiting is the worst thing in the world but i will say within our lifetimes there has without question been significant first mover advantages that we've we've demonstrated in the 90s i there for the first a year and a half when the internet was coming out there was still discussions articles were written by journalists um as to comparing the digital economy versus the brick and mortar economy as if they were consistently gonna forever be different things and those of us who were in the internet economy who were always saying this is the same thing this is just an extension like this is all gonna be this is all going to merge and if you don't have an internet strategy for your business you don't have an and and this was obvious to us in the silicon valley in 1995 but most people didn't get it right and the the first mover advantage was absolutely outrageous the people that got in the door first are gazillionaires right the thing the same thing just happened with crypto everyone said well we'll have to see if it really plays out the first mover advantage and crypto was insane the people that did who went first who got there first are are you know having matt are basically putting their names on you know stadiums all over the world so um yeah it's true waiting might be a cautious and interesting approach but um i wouldn't wait too long i wouldn't wait too long i mean i i would agree uh i mean it's interesting that um bitcoin is now the seventh seventh largest global asset and i think ethereum is 12th or 13th um so so this is ahead of the big banks not all the banks together but ahead of the big banks so this is moving um very very significantly um but i i would just equate it to um you know someone trying to swim without weights and someone trying to swim with weights a startup can move and experiment very quickly um uh enterprises historically have not moved so quickly i'm not saying that's right they haven't moved quickly but what i think is that um that ship has sailed now so so i think uh you know looking at angel speaking to myself um you know rowan may say this but big companies are now implementing blockchain technology um you know things are going into production live ourselves uh you know angel uh other companies so the ship has sailed i think you know i think though the the the the conversation is slightly moved um because if you look at blockchain before um the stepping stone for us in enterprise was a permission blockchain all the action is now on the public blockchains and i think that's uh maybe the bridge that we we need is to is how do you bridge from uh a semi-controlled environment i.e the permission uh to public and and then the conversation has definitely moved to public in that sense in my opinion um so so so that that's sort of where i'm coming from but uh i i absolutely believe that in the majority of organizations the ship has sailed and uh everybody's heading for the line of how we you know how how we shape this new uh metaverse framework and the roles will be right david you make a really good point and i actually wanted you guys to elaborate on that public versus private within a meta you know with with applying the metaverse and enterprise ecosystem does anybody else have comments on that i'm sorry i also feel like i'm speaking too much but but um i think it's just exactly gonna near what happens in in today's world which is that there's gonna be public markets and of course there's going to be private subnets uh for specific transactions or permission networks i'm sure that you know there'll be coalitions of companies for the supply chain stuff and these there's other supply chain experts on the call than me i'm sure that they're for the 10 companies in a supply chain they're going to want to have their own uh you know permissioned area of the metaverse right but um it's but it for that to be completely walled off i think is is different i think in the past it was always going to be fully walled off but now i think that even those subnets need to have connectivity to the broader metaverse because they're going to want to you need to pull in price data they need to pull in other information that you might need to pull in weather data they might want to actually be able to sell insurance or consume insurance that's available in the metaverse that is based on the products sweep that's going on in their little world so so without question there's going to be permissioned areas but more so than ever those permissioned areas are going to have to be listening to um and reacting to the data that's on the public blockchain so it's there there's going to be i think a really nice blend um of the two yeah i mean sorry sorry i think we see that as well in the sense that philosophically we don't have a strong sway towards one or the other it's kind of like horses for courses if we're using private or commissioned blockchains they have a reasonable degree of control that we can you know we can manage the cost of transacting for example without being you know worrying about a fluctuating currency at the same time we can always group a bunch of uh transactions and publish them to to a private chain if if there's some rationale like you know you're trying to report something to a group of public people and you want to make that available so i think it's kind of like as needed and then at the same time we try and be as infrastructure as agnostic as we possibly can be in the sense that you know if a chain comes about and it has a good value proposition it runs lean it's green it's efficient it's scalable the cost of transaction transacting is low are we very weirded to the current infrastructure that we run on absolutely not and you've got like a blockchain infrastructure arms race at the moment um and so if you're agnostic to the infrastructure then at any point in time i think you should be allowed to switch to whichever blockchain gives you the the best value effectively um yeah i was going to speak up a little bit earlier because now i felt a little bit like in the stone age right with everybody saying no you know that ship has sailed we've moved on uh i i have to kind of once again point place the counterpoint uh perspective because in general in most of the engagements we have with our line of business this whole topic of permission permission not less but permission please permission my blockchain is kind of one of our unique selling points still so it removes a lot of the obstacles that uh or doors getting closed in our faces say no hey wait a minute we want to be transparent but there are certain amount of data like you said prices for example that we would never ever share or at least we are not yet at that uh cultural or mindset perspective where we could put that out out there so to speak so uh and uh and honestly i think at henko were quite advanced in the yes but there's some stuff we want to put out there because it benefits us it benefits the consumer it benefits the overall industry but you have no idea how much us are my team our partners on the line of business our key accounts have to discuss this with suppliers with customers and how much of of kind of certainty we have to give them about the confidentiality security permission uh fullness of of the blockchain so that they're more willing also to share their data for us in that sense and on the second topic as you said around these public blockchains it also has to do a little bit with understanding right so uh so as you said you just you talked to somebody and you said hey we've been convincing you during the last six months or a year to do a blockchain project with us but we finally understood what this is about and why it's good for you right but you know what now i'm going to spend the next six months to introduce you to what what a token is what is gas what is difference between a public and a private blockchain and you and you're kind of then paying for their blockchain education before you can actually get anything done right so that's that's still a process at least from our perspective we need to go through uh yes we're talking about uh stuff like tokens right you were saying uh for sustainability roman for example you could potentially uh represent sustainability credits or attributes better through a tokenized system than you would maybe just with something else so to speak uh but these are kind of discussions were still ongoing and i mean for especially for those listening to the conference i mean yes of course it's important to learn what's really as i said uh going to be the future uh but you got to start first before you get to the top of the mountain you've got to stop at the bar start at the bottom of the mountain so just take that into account when you're also having your discussions in your enterprises or with your customers yeah i mean i just add that number one if you're going to have a metaverse or a multiverse it pulls all of these things together so you won't have just one blockchain or one social media uh platform you've got a it's got to encompass all of them and i think the the discussion you know with ethereum and others is about how you pull these things together so you have a chain of change so you have um an ecosystem of blockchains that where you can have trust and i think the other thing is in terms of who can see what it depends on the consensus protocol so if you have a channel consensus protocol rather than a full broadcast then you can do that on the public chain um so so i i just counted with those two points there i think you guys explained much better than i was trying to explain before which was exactly that is that you know we've got a permission uh blockchain that you know we work ourselves as control but you know to get full advantage of of the benefits that come from this kind of technologies we need to look outside and start joining with other networks or go public with a piece of information not all of it for sure and that's where you know we're still looking at uh right now because to be honest i don't know how to do it uh directly and not not from a supply chain perspective but from a whole i mean from a supply chain perspective not not from a blockchain perspective which i'm not you know technically i don't know that much yeah i mean it's interesting how two years ago enterprise blockchain was all about private networks and today it's mainly about public um with that in mind i'm going to go on to my next question which is the metaverse for enterprise blockchain is still very early and we're talking about use cases today and what we may be seeing but what can we expect moving forward with the metaverse in the enterprise blockchain space in the future what can we expect to see and anyone can start i i hope if we get it really right then you can expect to see a massive shift in our industrial complex away from something that's based on you know fine art resources and linear business models and much more towards something that's much more infinite much more circularity we've got much more control over the resources and how we use them and how we reuse them i think if it if we use the tool for that purpose we could really improve the productivity of that system like 75 percent of all the resources we consume is in the industrial sector like in the supply chain 25 of all the carbon emissions happen in the last mile so you know everything we buy and eat and so on and so forth that counts for 25 of the emissions 75 of what we consume as a as a as a population as an economy is in that really unsexy kind of over the horizon really industrial space manufacturing chemicals delivering goods producing energy mining products etc etc so the application there if we get it right we can drive a significant amount of productivity and that that in turn can increase the carrying capacity of our our planet so i think in the context of climate change it can be a really useful tool to help us you know reduce waste and improve productivity it'll have a bunch of other cool experiences that you can plug in you could probably put on a vr headset and go and buy your phone online in a metaverse store i imagine at that point you probably get a drop ship from the oim i don't know or from the oem i don't know what that means for for a company like vodafone but there's all those retail side cool experiences but certainly i think the biggest impact is on that over the horizon you know boring nfts recording emissions generating carbon credits making a marketplace for those types of things and that's where this technology has a green field in a sense and also a significant a significant role to play so i would look at defy and ask ourselves what's happened in d5 in the last two years and beyond i mean there's a lot of different stories you could say but i think one of the stories that's really interesting is the fact that products and services are being offered to parts of the world that have never had access to them in the past right um you know relatively sophisticated financial products that are being adjudicated by third-party networks are now available to small parties in africa and indonesia and guatemala and wherever else it's it is a dramatic change in their lives um to have access to insurance products that are now being uh because and all of this is possible because the costs have come radically down right you don't you don't have to certainly if you're if you're doing everything in your store if the custody of your asset is effectively a blockchain you don't necessarily have to have these huge expensive infrastructure built in and around what what it takes to uh to produce and trade these goods and so you costs come way down you can serve parts of the world that you've never been able to serve before um and and i just think the same things that are true for businesses businesses just like the internet allowed them to basically sell to everyone on earth well this is going to let them go just one further level down because because now it's really everyone it's not just people who can afford twenty seven dollar shipping charges to go to some random place it's really literally everyone with an internet address or or a wallet or digital wallet so it's it's it's it's really um a much broader universe of clients there's a much broader universe of possible vendors there's a much broader universe of possible partners um it's going to impact the labor market right i mean an nft specialist can live in the middle of uganda and probably work for david uh in the uk you know for vodafone right i mean not that's everything we've all been dealing with but but it's it's literally going to change it's have a huge impact on um the breadth that we all connect it's it's i i i you could not have predicted the zoom revolution that we're in today 10 years ago and i and you go to that next level 10 years from now i guess he could have predicted the zoom revolution but certainly wouldn't have used the word zoom you probably would have used the word skype uh so the words that we use are going to change dramatically in the next five to 10 years words we don't even know yet we'll be saying quite frequently in just a matter of years does anyone else have anything to add no no no i mean i i um i think in the in the future that there are some capabilities now um that that will be key to that so so we spoke about the interoperability of blockchains i i think that will be key so that um you know when we talk about metaverse business so not enterprise metaverse business because i think there will be some democratization of business on uh with in the medivas um that um you know uh the the there's a number of blockchains that are providing a trust uh a ledger of trust uh that support that so you can automate more business processes but i think from the experience point of view people won't see a blockchain they'll just see that they'll be able to uh take their phone uh if they want to travel um they can show their passport once uh or not show their possible ones they can give permission to all the peoples in the in the chains who need to see it to check that verifiable credential out if they want to go gaming and they need to buy something in gaming the same verifiable credentials can be used um you know if they want to to buy something they can buy with a digital token uh in the real world um they can earn that token in a game or in a virtual world or in a virtual uh business transaction and you're seeing the convergence of digital and physical in a way that we haven't been seen before and and then the big um currency or the big driver around that will be data right and how uh that data in virtual and physical will converge how it will be uh transacted um and how that will be used to then feed into more experiences so um i i i think um i agree with william that um you know there's words and things we won't know but what we will know is that we won't be talking about blockchain we'll be enjoying the and that's exactly right i think that's i agree with that yeah none of us talk about cisco or any of the companies that run the internet right none of us know when those never come up it just happens it's all magic and that hits you exactly right no one's gonna no one's gonna have any idea whether it's ethereum or an ethereum clone or a proof of stake or proof of work that's all the technical details but the average person is just gonna is gonna swipe their phone on this and this and that and they're gonna have access to things that they they just didn't have access to before because it's going to be so much easier for them to get them yeah we we often use the analogy of voip which i think will work with angle and david but when it first came out people were kind of asking what it was and figuring out how to you know what we need to do to use it and today it's i think 99.9 percent of all your calls run over voiceover rp that's what we're doing and you didn't have to do anything different you just have to keep making phone calls man and the infrastructure got updated in the background i think it's very much it's not like a big bang super sexy tech it's actually really boring uh and it'll kind of upgrade in the background and just become a ubiquitous infrastructure that we all participate on absolutely right i think what's needed now though also is education in order to drive the space forward when it comes to the metaverse and enterprise blockchain so hopefully we'll start seeing more educational initiatives around that moving forward on that note i think we have about 10 minutes or so left in this panel so i'm going to go ahead and take some questions from the audience because i saw some of those coming in earlier so let me go into the chat and see some of the questions okay so here's a question from an audience member they're asking how can we associate the metaverse and play to earn economy together yeah so so i i think the play to earn uh gaming is is one of the first experiences in the metaverse games are becoming more sophisticated you can uh play to uh i think the next the the next stage and where companies like atari are going is that you complain to play to earn so you can own things in a game but then you know the value you have in that game can be transacted to other ecosystems as well so other games uh other other forms of commerce um so so i think that um the the the you know it is a you know play to earn is a way of earning it will be a way of earning income in the in the medivas and it could be either your your your um your you're earning revenue from or income from uh the data you're producing um but by by by gamification in there or it could be straight um other incentives that you have where you're buying things and again you're being rewarded for good performance but i i believe that what blockchain will bring and defy and other forms of um decentralized finance and centralized finance is the ability for that to become a medium of exchange or providing a medium of exchange for that to be transacted outside the game so the value can can uh persist to other ecosystems yeah i think that that's already the metaverse they're already there they're they're they're they're ahead of everyone else that the the ability of earning rewards in game um and on one platform has existed for ever and i'm someone who's enjoyed games for quite some time uh and now the ability to have that be transferable to other ecosystems is effectively what's happening and it's a very it's a logical extension it's the same thing with airline miles the same thing with my my coffee card you know my little coffee card down the street has like six little punches in it it has no value to anyone but me but if that were a digital if that were an nft well all of a sudden now my and if i were to pull that with david's and with rodolfos and all of a sudden we start selling coffee credits it's going to be fascinating really really interesting to see when all of these loyalty programs and all of these in-game rewards are in platform rewards or amazon dollars or whatever you earn by getting your cash back on your purchases on such ecosystem when that starts potentially having value at some something probably below dollar to dollar value but some value on other ecosystems it's really going to be interesting to see what happens in that and and how people choose to build new products and services on top of that and just to extend that as well it's uh maybe over the horizon you there's a couple of carbon credit projects where people get paid not to do things uh like a really good example is you could have a a forest right you could have land you can get paid not to cut down that tree it's possible so i think there's also an economy which is it's the same it's analogous can borrow from gaming but you can pay people not to upgrade their cell phone or you could pay people to drive less for example all of these things are equivalent to kind of playing a game to earn cash you can actually start changing the way people behave by incentivizing them to do something or not to do something and kind of uh you know netting a carbon credit to kind of to kind of pay them not to do that um so it's no different i think it's a world of new opportunities and new business models and entirely new markets and entirely new economies so it's a it's a cool and exciting space okay there are some other questions that i want to take real quick from the audience um let's see here david in terms of vodafone how would the telecommunications industry work in the metaverse i think we kind of touched on that but did you want to answer that again yeah i think it's a great question um so so so uh you know if we look at basic stats uh and angel hoping will support this there's over five billion smartphones in the world right so in terms of uh traction i think there's 20 odd billion iot devices connected to connected um so so so i think telcos have a good footprint and a good touch point with uh with people and i think that what what we can do as well as the social media companies um you can do it all platforms can do is bring ecosystem you know we can bring people um to this new technology and we can um you know as roland would say you know about voice i think we can make it very simple uh for for them to engage with these technologies so simple to engage with gaming simple to um to to make transactions simple to link their devices uh simple to um use their ids to to um to enter into uh metaverse experiences um so i think that's where we can we can play a role simply by driving adoption uh maturity um and and making the experience simple uh to use uh better verse technologies and engagement great okay oh go ahead no no i was going to say that yes yeah absolutely agree i mean we could we're not only the basis of where everything goes through the pipe right and the connectivity joining everything but also the technology that goes on top and we've got the close relationships to with the client so making that technology available and easy to use is also our responsibility so fully agree is the bandwidth there guys i mean is there enough bandwidth to to grow 10x or whatever we need to do is it all under your desk yeah but i think but i think there's i think there's two different types sorry angel you could go if you wanted no no no no no i think there's different types of connectivity so the way i see it is physical to virtual so this is where someone's in the physical world and they want to somehow engage with a person or an entity in the virtual world it's physical to physical so i've earned money from a game and i want to give it to angel and then there's virtual to virtual which is how you communicate with two entities in the uh in the metaverse and i think there'll be different uh solutions for for both of them and i think as uh as communications companies we need to evolve uh in in that but um i i think the i think i think you know with the technology we have and and efficiencies in the future uh we can meet that uh yeah absolutely i mean the technology is there so the fiber will will play a critical role having you know as much fiber as possible because that's you know gives you the capacity that you know your software permits and i think that will be enough it's just i would say a matter of of having the right amount of investment into the network and when we can do it and there you know there's things like regulation and you know there's a lot of things that that can influence that but i think it's just a matter of having enough investment if i may add one quick point i know i'm talking a lot but but also the efficiency efficiency we talk about you know with verifiable credentials where you give people permission to see it rather than doing it that can actually drive down um the demand for communications in one area and allow us to push that towards uh other areas where there's new development as well cool okay we've got five minutes left so i'm going to go ahead and ask maybe the last question here um so someone from the audience is asking do we think google maps could be ported into becoming the next global metaverse i see no need for physical addresses like home addresses in the future just an address where you currently are since everything will be automated internet based what are your thoughts on that i don't know if you've seen the application if you haven't got it i highly recommend it's quite fun there's an app called what three words so there's a company that's divided the world into three meter square blocks and if you put your address in it'll actually give you three words three random words right like goose mirror cup but then that's a that's actually an address it's a unique address for that three that three square meter block and they're doing something not dissimilar to that question so they're allowing you to take a sort of you know take a photo of something in that three meter block and then say yeah here's an experience that occurred at this time in this space on this day so that you can kind of recreate history in a sense or a timeline a chronological series of events in that space-time block which is a weird concept but it's a fun application and they're starting to do something not dissimilar uh the logic being you could kind of buy space time yeah an area of space time for a portion of history that makes sense yeah i guess it would depend also on the on the use case right i think what you said could uh lend itself to what the person was asking on the on the question of if they want to be if i want to find a person or a unique asset anywhere you could potentially as you said move that into the digital world and just have that link done there and of course i mean you can think of well then i can deliver it no matter if you're at home at office walking down the street it doesn't matter really uh the if you look at it from the other perspective of the metaverses i guess you would have to ask yourself well how much of the of what the real world we have today we want to port into the virtual world right so do i really want to have my streets and my and my office et cetera et cetera or would i rather live in decentraland or some other sort of uh fantastical world out there right but that i guess we will have to i want to be very clear that i will have hair in the metaverse what's great about the metaverse also is that uh we're seeing virtual fashion and you can you know you can buy these outfits and some of them are quite expensive on some of the apps that i have and you can wear anything you want in the metaverse so there's so much opportunity there yeah exactly um we've got about one more minute let's see if we can answer just one more question well someone one of the audience members made the point meta might become the new entry point to crms does anyone want to comment on that yeah i mean i think the concept that from an enterprise perspective the concept of this very functional style technology will go away in the blockchain world because you can kind of stitch workflows together um end-to-end across multi-companies across sectors across experiences the idea that you'd have a kind of crm software to manage a small piece of a process i think is a bit i think that's a bit old school i think that's where a lot of the enterprise disruption will occur it's the same with kind of anything that has the word e if the e stands for enterprise and it's functionally driven it's planning technology for the planning team or it's logistics technology for the logistics team or it's finance technology for the finance team the minute you start to build those end-to-end flows across supply chains across functions i mean there's no silos in web 3.0 so anything that's designed around a particular function i think has a finite life in the web 3 in the web 3 universe so yes i think you kind of see crm as a category of software over a period of time rather change and and evolve or or just disappear entirely yeah i'll just quickly add uh crm in the metaverse will equal decentral self-sovereign uh uh decentralized identity yeah digital identity so so uh the digital ident sovereign digital identity will essentially be the uh the crm of the metaverse and it will be distributed i was just gonna say i mean at the end of the day david's right right i mean we still gotta sell stuff to people right so if you can now do that in a certain more decentralized ways as the way data is collected and processed now then maybe yes indeed as you said so we would need to do some sort of these activities in the metaverse instead of in these siloed applications that we do today right well unfortunately we're out of time i mean we could keep talking about this topic forever but our panel is now over so i just want to thank all of you guys for joining us thank you to the european blockchain convention thank you to the panelists it's been great and yeah hopefully we can further explore this topic moving forward thanks thank you thank you what a fun discussion that yeah it has a lot of uh examples and ideas that how we want the future our digital lives to be right so it has a lot of options up there still to create all of them so thank you to all panelists that's all for this session but we still have four or five sessions still left um yeah so we will cover some gaming members also but also crypto regulations so a lot of topics still to cover thank you see you in a bit thank you daniel thank you thank you thank you guys thank you very much that was cool good fun