Ethereum Blockchain Initiatives at Thomson Reuters - Tim Nugent

[Music] right okay so my name is Tim I work in corporate research and development at Thomson Reuters in London R&D typically works on problems involving machine learning we just might background in natural language processing but I think for about the last year and a half we've been looking very closely at blockchain and trying to figure out where we as an organization fit into this space we're part of some of the other larger blockchain consortiums like r3 and hyper ledger but I think we spend most of our time working with aetherium and building demos proof concepts on aetherium next slide please so a little bit of context about our business so a lot of you will know of us as a news organization but this is only a tiny piece of what we do we essentially have five diverse business verticals financial and risk critical news and information about financial data regulatory information risk information we have a flagship product called icon which has 200,000 installs and you can you can trade and do analytics on all manner of financial instruments someone asked me last night we have either on that year and the answer is not quite yet that depends on customer interests but we're working with crypto compare and so there might be a conversation there legal legal information for legal professionals worldwide tax and accounting again for tax and accountants in government's intellectual property and life sciences so information and data for pharmaceutical firms for example and lasting reuters news and i would say that it's these first four that we are looking at potential blockchain applications we're not as a post I saw on reddit suggested thinking about doing journalism on the blockchain okay next slide please I'm just switch to my presenter view so I suppose many of our products and services manifest themselves as proprietary databases and analytic solutions but one of the problems that we've had to deal with from I suppose a commercial perspective is one of entitlement so who should have access to these tools and databases typically our users will sign a license agreement we will know their identity so essentially we're doing some form of due diligence and to help manage this issue on blockchain and I emphasize is really a management rather than a sort of control issue we put together what we call an entitlement framework which allows developers to control access to their doubts next slide please so what does this look like well we decided to call it block 1 ID 4 aetherium and we're testing it at the moment and essentially it's a delegated identity service connected to entitlement contracts so we would host an HD wallet we only hold encrypted keys ID is delegated via OAuth 2 to some standard provider so it might be terms of Reuters or LinkedIn Facebook Google etc so this is an effect a bridge between the wallet and OAuth 2 this requires that you need to be logged in to use the DAP and if you're not logged in access to the DAP is blocked we have some ID obfuscation and also isolation so there will be a separate address generated for different apps to prevent interference and then on the entitlement side that's performed on chain we have a contract that is populated with addresses by us and those addresses are allowed to use the DAP the DAP developer can require the end users sign up to terms and conditions and a few things that we're looking to add in the future note sort of certainty about this but essentially connect up to some of our kyc services and add more identity providers next slide so I suppose this is what it looks like you would get a wallet bar we were very simple API allowing users to sign in and out there's also generation of aetherium accounts on first use for each nap there's also wallet admin console and importantly we have no access to accounts or passwords we only store encrypted keys and the system received an encrypted blob from our server and down on the bottom I suppose this is just the hierarchical wallet structure and it sort of indicates that you would have a different address for each for each doubt and next slide so what sort of DAPs and services might we provide well I've already talked to a number of people over the last couple of days about kyc and naml services and this is actually a space where we already are very active and have a number of sort of so-called flagship products that are heavily used by for example investment banks and we're having a good think about how we can make these things available on chain for example via some kind of Oracle service so we have something called org ID and this is a sort of organizational level database of 190,000 compliance records we also have something called enhanced due diligence this is background checks on individuals so so all that is more of a sort of business level kyc enhanced you diligence is sort of businesses and individuals and then there's something called world check and again this is sort of entity level screening based on both business relationships and human networks so those are a few of our K by CNA ml products but there's another space where we have a very natural fit we think in the blockchain space particularly with regard to our financial and risk business unit and that's with regard to financial data via Oracle's so we have a product called Thomson Reuters electron and this essentially contains vast amounts of financial data sorry I've got to click on to the next one yeah there we go these products are already used by some of the world's top 50 investment banks so in many ways we're already a highly trusted data source what electron is is essentially a low latency feed platform it covers exchange-traded and OTC markets all manner of financial instruments currencies equities you name it and you can also get company fundamental data and we've spoken to some of the prediction market guys about that sort of information there's a real-time data you can get news from their reference data third-party data and we won't have also have something called tick history which currently contains about 2 petabytes of microsecond time-stamped tick data going back to about 1996 great ok so we've already built some of this stuff out so this is this is sort of quite an old image of a sort of Oracle architectural model so you might start off over here you might deploy a smart financial instrument that might for example represent a bond for example you would make a request and that would talk to our Oracle and that would generate an event that we listen to we've got a load of sort of back-end stuff listening for the event it figures out what the price request is for so there's an interest rate then we use a standard REST API to talk to TR electron which is up there pull down the price send it back to the blockchain and update the smart contact with the data accordingly there is a slight flaw within this scheme as things stand and that is as soon as the data is written to the blockchain it essentially becomes sort of unbounded and actually a lot of our information is licensed from third parties and at the moment we can't necessarily write data to the blockchain that then everyone is available to to see so we're looking very closely at some of the privacy preserving mechanisms so zero knowledge of proofs and homomorphic encryption and some of those will probably be necessary to deploy something like this on a public chain and here is some solidity which you probably can't see but essentially you can import this as a solidity file and you essentially have to first of all make a request and in this line here there is a bytes 32 object called a Rik and a rink is a Reuters instrument code and that is essentially the identifier of the asset that you would you would query the Oracle form you also need to implement a function called on Oracle response and on Oracle failure and then whatever sort of business logic you want your your for example your your financial asset to perform on receivership of of the price you can implement them and I showed that there was a rest call in that process so this is the sort of rest response from TR electron so this comes back as a JSON object and we would essentially take this information out and put it into the transaction which cause on Oracle response and you can see the sort of thing that's in here so the RIC the Reuters instrument code which is the euro so that would be the price of euro in dollars a lot of timestamp information bid to ask bid asked size and a multiplier to go from float to int okay so I'm not really a UI or UX developer so I've put this together just to sort of demonstrate functionality but essentially this is a sort of trading system for contracts for difference and so at the top we would have an order book contract you would send orders to that order book when the orders cross a trade is entered into a positions table which is this thing here I think I can't even see it from it and the positions table is what deals with the Oracle interface so these contracts of a difference are linked to two major indices so the footsie 100 for example and from that point on the Oracle would send updates and we have a scheduling service as well so you can shed your every block or every minute or whatever sort of granularity you're interested in this data comes back and you can see in in the logging panel the events are written out and this is used to update the data and you can see the change in the value of these trades there is the the possibility to implement things like a meaning in this example actually there were some implementations of things called uh stop losses over trade drops below a certain level so if it drops below five percent of its value it is closed automatically and similarly if it if it rises above a five percent of its original level you might close that and take the profit so that's the sort of functionality that you can implement in that sort of on Oracle response function okay so just a little change of tack now so that's some of the stuff that we're doing internally that's all sort of very much under test we had some good feedback from the etherium foundation guys about ten days ago when we held this hackathon which is we thought quite cleverly named eff font so we held this in collaboration with the etherium foundation many thanks to George for helping out with the organizational side of things and we had a lot of the etherium guys down as mentors and judges as well so we had a slightly unusual format to this next slide please we had speakers on all three days so we've heard from Thomas we've heard from Peter Thomas was talking about Oracle's Peter was talking about elaborate ways of breaking smart contracts I mean had Jack Gavigan from Zed cash or Z cash talking about things like zero knowledge proves and this is probably my favorite slide but you probably can't quite make it out we managed to get control of the Thomson Reuters news ticker and just to show you the global importance of this hackathon it was sort of juxtaposed against the news story of the day which was North Korea nuclear test so we were we were quite fortunate to get control of that we had two main challenges so the first one was data driven smart contracts and the winning team was essentially a sort of crack or pro team from BNP Paribas and they put together a fantasy football DAP I think it was called fantasy football so it's a more eff play I suppose so forgot congrats to those guys who won the overall prize the etherium smart contract security challenge post my aetherium that was won by a team called truth of state and I think some of those guys are here today a wave if you're here there's a wave over there and we had a runner up team and I command what they're called bounty max so this was about providing a bounty for smart contract exploits and that was that was deemed the runner-up prize and I think those guys are here as well so congrats to those guys so just one more I think so that was a lot of fun we've really enjoyed that and we can hold another one in Switzerland at our head koffice there in bars that's going to be January 27th to 29th again a theory and based with the theorem foundation guys helping out more sponsors and some dated providers to be added in future and details about that will be made available through the usual channels ok and that's it thanks [Applause] [Music]