Unlocking the Future: The Role of Polkadot in Transforming Enterprise and Government Sectors | EBC10

[Music] okay well hello hello good afternoon do you hear me well it's super noisy and I have the feeling that I'm I'm talking to myself because it's quite noisy here so hopefully you are able to listen to us um urula okon um the CMO of citel among other things and I'm super happy to be here I just came this morning from Madrid and I'm happy to be here because especially with my former colleagues and my current colleagues as well from pul carat ecosystem um so I W do the introductions I will let them because I will do I want do a Justice because they're such a brilliant mind so let's start from Alan who is sitting on my right thank you hello everybody uh yeah my name is Alan V I am the founder of event we are a par chain in the polka dot ecosystem but focused on Enterprise adoption have a variety of use cases spanning uh supply chain and Logistics loyalty and rewards and consumer Brands hi I'm natal Bo I'm with pre Foundation it's the foundation behind polkadot uh I'm doing public policy and government Affairs uh meaning I watch out for regulations that might affect the industry and Lobby in favor of our industry with politicians hi I'm Ingo I'm from Kil protocol which is an identity protocol which lives in the pka do ecosystem and I'm also and probably this is the reason why I'm here on the panel I'm also a co-founder of the poker initiative which is the uh poker. key accounting unit uh which was funded by the repb 3 foundation and is focusing in the direction of government and Industry adoption for Parco do and the ecosystem hi my name is Tom Humber I'm the co-founder of our kisal and uh our kisal is focused on driving data transparency and accountability in the design and built environments and we primarily do this through onchain project management and dispute resolution hello I'm aren caraga uh co-founder of B9 ecosystem growth agency I have companies like uh energy web grow in the web 3 space so today I'm here to represent energy WebEx and luckily we had a big keynote before me uh that impacts some of the key solutions that energy web delivers and I am also poot head Ambassador so um it's great to be here on this panel today fantastic so we have a good mix of minds and experience on poat and I don't know if you know much about Pat but poat is one of the ecosystem that started in 2020 2019 and it was founded by Gavin wood the co-founder of ethereum and he wanted to fix all of the issue that ethereum wasn't delivering which is scalability interoperability and right now paulot we just launched coure time that it's going to be a game changer for the PAB ecosystem so I'll start with you Alan because you've been working with a lot of Enterprises the theme of this panel is about Enterprises and government so we have a good representation here and as you know poot is always evolving as any other blockchain you need to be evolving uh but you've been working especially with a lot of Enterprises and different ecosystem through aventus and tell me a little bit like how do you see poar right now evolving into the Enterprise World especially right now that we have coure time absolutely so I think one of the the key challenges that we faced with the previous model that polka dot had around par chains is uh predictability for the fees right so in the par chain model you essentially bought your you can think of it as like buying server time in a batch for up to 96 weeks so when I sat with CTO I mean we've worked with vone herro airports can you put the M Clos sorry is that better that's better we've worked with vone and herro airports and a variety of other big guys and when you sit with the CTO in these businesses they want predict ictable pricing you need to give them certain guarantees so when you're signing a threeyear 5-year contract you can't say I know exactly what we're spending for the first 96 weeks and then it gets a bit more difficult to define the future so this Evolution to core time where you can derive much better costing and therefore not say plus or minus 100% on your your your costs has helped us especially in some of the conversations we've had uh come about it much more productively um well on my left we have Ingo Ingo is very well experienced he's based in Berlin and he used to be the CTO budha media budha media is one of the biggest media companies in Germany so he has a lot of experience from web zero web one web two and now web three and evolving and right now he's working with a lot of Enterprises he's the co-founder of of of kill protocol and now he's launching with along with Cel uh um Pokey Ingo tell me about how Pokey is working with governments and with Enterprises because this is a key question that a lot of Enterprises in the blockchain ecosystem have triying to achiev but it's been hard slow and difficult uh yeah we noticed that too so uh I think that uh blockchain has for for the last maybe almost 10 years uh been a nice technology uh or a nice solution which actually is still looking for the problem and uh that that that is one reason why there's so little blockchain adoption actually around the world and some ecosystems uh took the easy Road and said okay if uh the government of X doesn't really need a blockchain we just pay them a lot of money and then we make like a press release together and we say that we're actually deploying something in this country and then it never happens uh and everyone's happy because the country got the money and uh the blockchain ecosystem got the uh got the press release and uh in pokka do we never did this so uh we we never paid anyone just to make a press release with us we always were on the standpoint if we um if we do something then we actually want to see it used and uh poker is going the way that we actually uh go into Big Industry and go into uh governments and actually listen to what they need and then if we find something that could actually be solved with pocket or technology and that is much more than you think um then we say okay the ecosystem is going to handle that and then then we um give it over to the to the ecosystem project and say we think that you should talk with this government and you should talk with this government and we have an idea um what you should do and uh so where do we position poka do probably is also a very important piece um poka do is as you probably know a public permission blockchain is uh is as you probably know a public permissionless blockchain and when you talk with big industry and when you talk with governments the one thing that they don't want is a public permission as blockchain and that has many reasons you you don't start as a government with a public permissionless blockchain because that is just too scary when you start as a government you normally start with something like hyperledger and hyperledger as we all know is a pretty old technology may be not the best um and but there's not a lot of choice if you want to go as a government and such a direction you use that and the cool thing about poka do is that that it is uh built around a framework that framework is called substrate and it's also a polka do product and you can use substrate to build a a a permission chain a private permission chain which you want to have in your bank and which you want to have in your government and you can later then choose if you want to connect it to the public permission list part and that is actually the thing where we get the governments interested and The Big Industry interested because nobody loves hyperledger everybody uses hyperledger though because they don't have a competition and now we come there as the competition as the better competition because you can also use it in the public permission this way if you want to grow in that direction which you probably want in a couple of years just one thing hyper layer is using substrate for scalability and danela Barosa CEO of hyper around here as well so hyper as you're right you're rightly saying it's super slow it doesn't scale that much that's why they're using uh substrate as many other blockchains as well like cardano they're using blockchain as well but without further Ado uh we have Tom here as well Tom he used to be a parity technolog which is a tech company that's part of poat right now he has evolved creating his own company Aral arisan AR arisal I can say so many names about that and he's exploring this new Enterprise um word as well with the real tokenization so can you tell us a little bit about that because I know that you've exploring this through Latin America especially Argentina where the local ecosystem is growing and there's a big Enterprise right now well it's not an Enterprise it's an organization which is called Cento where filecoin is very much embedded into cimento and and Juan Bennett the founder of filecoin is very much um pushing this forward yeah absolutely so uh just before I get into what ariso is doing just touching on keso there with what's going on in buenosaires right now super exciting they're really trying to push forward blockchain adoption into making it a blockchain Silicon Valley so we spend a lot of our time uh in Buenos AIS uh we have uh relationships down there which we're kind of building collaboratively with my co-founder Tim uh is part of the builders program there which goes on for two years and uh yeah I mean it's a great environment to be in there's a lot of exciting projects which are working so when we're trying to find our footing in terms of Enterprise fit uh it's a great place to be so before I went fulltime in blockchain and web 3 I worked as a quantity surve uh in architecture engineering and construction it's a very very archaic industry a lot of people still use pen and paper uh so when we're trying to sort of talk about blockchain and advocate for it sometimes it's not the easiest of conver conversations but it's a necessary conversation uh data is fragmented across the whole industry you have multiple different design softwares multiple different project management softwares and all of these conflict with one another so a big part of my old job was when there was a uh a dispute about cost or time you had to go through reams of emails designs when were things signed off it was very unclear uh so what we're proposing is a system where you have every single key decision in a design driven project so and this doesn't have to just be architecture this can be product design this can be anything which has a kind of a planning design and execution stage you have stakeholders who are going to be decision makers at different parts of this project and we would have multi Solutions which can be signed off and then that's permanently put on chain and then as you go through the course of a project planning stage you start to have a transparent timeline uh the UK government actually brought out something really interesting uh this year called the golden thread legislation and basically what this is is is a mandate and uh it's a responsibility for any uh contractors or developers and when I say developers I mean physical developers not software ones in just this one instance uh to have everything put on an immutable Ledger right and it needs to be transparent so this is where we come in um in terms of what's really important to us right now it's uh the usability you know if you're dealing with traditional Industries you need to be able to have people using their existing softwares you need to be able to have people paying with uh currencies that they used to paying with logging in with methods that they're used to using so I think that this web 2.5 is you know it's a bit of a buzzword but I do think it's very necessary uh because you need to really think about the end users um and then just going past the project management piece we'll look at decentralized dispute resolution so we'll have uh kyc dids uh where you have your credentials verified and then that gives you access to uh aine and uh resolve uh resolve cases so in a nutshell that's what we're doing at our kisal that's fantastic so um as you already have heard in the previous panel um that about energy web we have enen here enina she's been she's a force within the pcad ecosystem she's a head Ambassador working with different projects and she's pretty much embedded into the crypto world as well she's everywhere everywhere you go you will see Irena somewhere and so but she's working a lot a lot on how to bring Enterprises into crypto and especially poka so Arena H how has been your journey so far and are we ready to bring a lot of Enterprises into the crypto e ecosystem and why POA this different my journey has been like an energy everywhere energy is everywhere so I'm everywhere have to be um Peter draer said energy it's not a sector of economy it is the economy because energy sector represents 10% of the global economy and yet all other sectors they run on energy they depend on energy the biggest wealth in the world was built on energy energy sector produced JD Rockefeller and now we have this big discussion on energy transition and transition from um hydrogen to sustainable renewable sources of energy and this is the most pressing Topic in Europe and yet we have seen that all of the companies that are working on energy transition majority vast majority of them are centralized so what polka dot brings an energy web being one of the power chains of polka do relying on poka Out Security interoperability and its Community is bringing decentralization and is giving power back to the hands of the people you've heard about worker notes everybody without the need of deep technical knowledge can run in this application and can help companies to become more transport more trans transparent more accountable and more sustainable because every single company at some point will have to comply with regulations on sustainability and we'll have to report on ESG and we as a community we as consumers of energy can make sure that this reporting this compliance is true and we can verify it so what energy web helps to do is to verify this logic and why poot well because pokot by its architecture and its nature is the top sustainable blockchain ecosystem it is proven by the crypto Research Institute by UCL there are independent research um documents available online that anyone can access and see the data and I am personally working in the field of sustainability for the past 4 years so already uh being present at conferences like uh conference of the parties climate uh initiated by United Nations um conference to initiate this dialogue and to work with companies that want to be much more transparent and there are plenty of Enterprises and to want to bring change to their business models and with energy what we can currently do and we can actually enable these companies becoming using the public blockchain not just hyperledger why because energy web solution helps companies to hide the logic that is sensitive um there is commercial information that they do not want to make public and unpack the information and the processes that are desirable for the public to see where the public can verify that this Solutions are you know that the company that claims to use sustainable energy sources is actually doing so and there are also multiple applications like AO green charge that uh allows individuals using electric vehicles to Pro to verify the uh that the vehicle is really charging from the sustainable energy source and this is done in your application so there's been really quite a lot develop in terms of solutions and in terms of traceability and accountability and we can keep our governments in check and we can make sure that also we earn rewards by supporting this industry transition by for example running a worker node and actually earning a reward and redistributing the wealth fantastic so we don't now that poat it's one of the greenest blockchain is just the fact that we haven't announced it super loud but it it's not been saying because of the W Foundation of parity or P has been saying that it was an external Institute that they did a lot of research on different blockchains and they had the conclusion that P is one of the least uh on expending in energy so um I'm going here to my right um she's the last but not the least uh which is very important to talk about legal issues um I was happy and lucky to work with Natalie and we're here with Daniel shanberg as well he used to be the clo at the web fre Foundation um we've been working with some legal um I wouldn't say battles but with some legal complexities in this crypto world and and Natalie right now you're an expert after two years navigating into this very complicated ecosystem and you have seen how everything has evolving and on pulat from morphing of being a a software Daniel is here he was the one who was leading that efforts but right now you're very much working with the European Union and MAA so um tell us a little bit more about maika because a lot of people we have a lot of questions um it is evolving all the time I know that it's going to be fully Lou next year but we don't know how MA will be affecting poar or ENT prices or in general thank you um when you're talking about governments I think there's two ways to address blockchain right so one thing is explaining governments as Ingo did uh how they can actually benefit from blockchain technology uh and as Ino said they don't like giving up control so this is where the other part of it comes in right they're trying to regulate the new technology especially because it's interfering with money market security right we're creating part partially not only but partially Financial products and this got us down this whole financial regulatory debate although that's not all we're doing right it's one use case out of a million in web 3 but that's a debate we're having because we have token that can be traded bottom line and it all started with stable coins so MAA is being enacted or being becoming um how do you say valid as of December this year and their main focus was looking into or regulating ating stable coins and everything else they could cover they quickly realized anything decentralized we can't really regulate it the way we know how to regulate stuff by nailing down an intermediary and making that intermediary responsible and liable for everything and making that intermediary report right usually that would be a bank report to us all the transactions decentralization who is the responsible The open- Source Community who's liable lot of questions still unanswered so while MAA has some advantages that like right now in the US you don't have it right you don't have legal certainty in the US because you don't have a law and therefore you have an SEC running after everybody at least in Europe we can say right now we have a legal framework that more or less captures everything although leaving some open questions so stable coins I would say right now more or less defined and they know what to do to be compliant so that gives us legal certainty and exchanges CS also being more or less in a framework they know how to operate in so that's a lot of legal certainty for businesses within Europe but we have decentralized projects right something like utility token other digital assets ethereum something like this this is not entirely defined we just know right now they're not obliged to have a white paper white paper is crucial because it comes with a lot of life liability so if an investor loses their their token whoever wrote the white paper is responsible for that so that's a lot of pressure and now think of new projects so this is where the effect comes in Old projects that want to be listed on an exchange are grandfathered they don't necessarily have to have a white paper and they might have negotiation power with exchanges because exchanges want to want to list you so maybe the exchange has to provide the white paper I do have an extra question so that means that banks are going to be competing with exchangers as well I don't know I don't think this is the problem the problem is who has to provide the white paper and therefore has the responsibility and the liability for that token so in this case bank or not bank is it the exchange that has to provide the white paper or the project and let's say for the bigger projects out there they have the negotiation power to say I'm not providing we're decentralized we're not providing it we're grandfathered but in exchange might have to do it but if you're startup you're new you don't have that negotiation power and you we will see a lot of startups struggling in the European Union as a hurdle to get in because taking on the liability of a white paper is a lot to ask and um that's one thing and the other thing is the issuance right so if you're issuing a token you have to all of a sudden comply to financial Market regulations which are very difficult so I wonder and I think a lot of startups will have to reconsider the way they're issuing Tok tokens so maybe they will not fund themselves with a classic Ico because that might be considered a financial instrument maybe they have to divert to airdrops in order to distribute their token to their users or other ways to distribute it so I think we will see some changes in the way things are done because of the regulation because otherwise a lot of startups will have a difficult time so there are benefits in terms of legal certainty but also I think startups have a harder time entering the market there's a lot of legal work right now cuz I as as I understand Mika will be live by January 2025 if I'm not mistaken yeah it's as of January it's like um enacted but I think exchanges have like a grandfathering period of two three years to be fully compliant so the whole debate on who has to do the white paper and those negotiations still up but what is as of December is this um obligation to provide to stainability data and all token and this is an obligations mainly exchangers have to provide and the pressure is on by December on them well so you all have to be aware that if you're a crypto startup you will have to do all of these papers um so what are the last question that I wanted to ask to everyone here on this panel especially the ones that are out building with padot and this is a typical question that we always ask many many times and but we've been having different publics why why have you chose pad up to build your startup maybe I'll start on that one so aventus has been through many iterations over the years we started as an event ticketing protocol on ethereum looking at how we can solve secondary Market problems with tickets right so this was in 2017 before there were big conferences like this um and in going through that Journey the first problem was scalability so we were still on ethereum and we did a review of the market uh tender substrate the various other Technologies ethereum itself and we picked technology polka dot for the technology for the substrate technology I guess uh gav and his team from learning on building ethereum learned how to really build that in a modular and scalable way for Enterprise so we were actually never part of polka dot itself we just picked the technology built that as a layer to on ethereum for a while and then I think 2020 2021 we migrated into the polka dot ecosystem for the variety of other benefits that kind of launched with the relay chain so from our perspective it was always very solid technology what didn't matter so much was uh sort of user traction defi traction because we go after very traditional Industries supply chain Aviation you know loyalty and rewards um so that was less relevant but I think also the compliance when you see different projects there were a whole list of tokens the SEC has at some point said our Securities changed their mind dot has never been part of that conversation and to us that was very helpful thank you Daniel he's here and he's been working with Natalie on all of that as well yeah so for us that made it much less risky Ingo yeah so the first part I think Alan has already mentioned so what we needed as an as an as a chain for digital identity is uh constant stable cost and that you can actually only achieve if you run your own blockchain and when we started in 2018 there were not too many Frameworks out there on which you could build a blockchain and one of them was substrate and it was like miles ahead of everything else and uh so we said we're going to use the best and newest technology but then it turned out that also the mindset in the community is very much very close to what our mindset is like not scamming uh actually building uh looking at the signs behind everything actually delivering something that is so stable that it could actually be used by government and Big Industry and this is why we stayed now in the parot ecosystem for over six years now um so we are basically the ogs probably of the ecosystem um and we're still here very short we right in out of time sure so um obviously coming from PIR Technologies and it was when I made the decision to go and work there and change Industries I was really careful about what ecosystem I wanted to attach myself to uh obviously all the work that gone into the dot token in terms of with the SEC that was a big driving Factor uh and when I think you're talking about ENT Enterprise businesses uh you want to have shared security and that's what the relay chain uh offers and for us as a Dap we may want to uh develop one day into a layer one uh within the polka do ecosystem that makes it very easy to do so so yeah multiple fantastic well thank you you very much a big Applause to my colleagues here that they've been representing this panel thank you thanks