Blockchain Innovators with Conor Svensson and David Palmer

The following is a conversation I had with David Palmer, Blockchain Lead at Vodafone's IoT Business. David's been very involved in IoT and blockchain for a number of years now, driving a number of strategic initiatives within Vodafone. His knowledge goes really deep in both IoT as well as blockchain, so there were some really great topics that we covered here. For anyone who really wants to appreciate what's possible with the convergence of these technologies and where we are with respect to wider adoption, I really encourage you to have a listen because there's just so many useful takeaways here. David, really great to have you here. I'd love to just learn more about where your head's been at with respect to blockchain these last few years. You come from a background of IoT, which you've been working in for a number of years now but you've been really focused on blockchain for a while. What are the big things that are on your mind and the big opportunities that you're already interested in with it? Yeah, exactly Conor, nice to be here, thank you for inviting me to the podcast. First of all, blockchain, IoT, what what can I say? What's on my mind? I think we are going through the biggest technological and business revolution and finance revolution of a generation at least if not more and I think at the center of that our technologies like IoT and blockchain, blockchain especially interesting because of the power to link industries, industry players and business models together. Yeah, what's on my mind - I've been on the journey for the last four years exploring blockchain. First of all it was okay, you know, this is a really fascinating technology behind Bitcoin and later Ethereum, you know, what's behind it. How can it be used? How can it be applied to my world, which is telecoms? And I started off three and a half years ago looking at that. I did an internet search and there was very little on it, very little talk about blockchain outside of finance and currencies and cryptocurrencies. So the journey then started to look at okay how can this technology be applied to enterprise? How can it be applied to telco? We started to look at the big things of blockchain so consensus trust, smart contracts, tokens and these are still the things that are starting to emerge at a more mature level now, which is okay in terms of blockchain. How can blockchain expand my external automation boundary? By that I mean there's a lot of work in industries and business about how you can expand an internal process, how you can expand things in your control. But, as soon as an organization links with another organization or person they don't trust then, you have to show your passport, then you have to authorize your card, then you have to have a contract sign before you do anything. Blockchain shows the potential to automate that because by providing a central ledger and trust it gives rise to a lot of automation opportunities to re-imagine processes completely for businesses. I mean, now we're starting to see that, I know I'm waffling off the point, but now we're starting to see that with covid for example, where all of a sudden we've got to reimagine processes for trusting people in terms of their travel credentials and in terms of terms of their health credentials. Blockchain's obviously coming into that in terms of these health processes. It's not the only solution but it is one of the prominent ones because it allows people to trust that health credential. Thereby, when you go into a country rather than having to show that same healthcare health credential, the original paper copy to everyone and for them to verify it, you can verify it once in the blockchain and then others can can look at that credential and and I think that's typical of the of the opportunity that blockchain provides on a wider level to automate processes in business. So absolutely keeping an eye on that and a lot of other aspects of the technology, digital identity being one I've just mentioned. Provenance of supply chain, obviously transactions, tokenization and digital currencies. Given how long you've been immersed in the space it must have been hard, especially in the early days, to get people interested. The classic case in point is like there's Bitcoin, these financial speculation things but that has kind of driven broader interest. But, at the same time, to have been on this journey for that long, you must have had a lot of conversations with people where you've had to convince them of the potential utility here, especially with all of the organizations where there's some really great convergence as you say between IoT, blockchain and also other things like 5G of course, which we can get onto. But, how's that been for you? It can't have been easy going back three years or so to do that? Yeah, so the first thing I'll say I think, this stands for now as well as three years ago, is people don't really know what blockchain is. That is the first hurdle you have to get through. Then there is a deep association of the popularity of people exploding blockchain and then the benefits of it and the price of cryptocurrency. So what I know is where you have crypto currencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum rising in value, people are fascinated with it. So you could have made all these millions, there's currencies going up, what's behind it? Blockchain. Okay, I'm interested when it goes down. Then your voice in the organizations goes down as well. But on a serious note, I mean, I think it was very difficult because I think a lot of the community that were pushing for blockchain were visionaries. They were people who saw in a crazy bunch of people mining Bitcoin many years ago, and starting the Ethereum project, a wider use of digital cryptocurrency and smart contracts for business and wider use in society. Let's remember, when did Ethereum actually go live? When CryptoKitties was the first application on Bitcoin right, when was that? 2018? So there was actually nothing live so a lot of the discussions earlier was okay, this is fascinating, which businesses are in this? Right, it's only Bitcoin, it's only some cryptocurrency projects. All of the early foraging into blockchains from organizations were POCs and then very limited outside of the financial sector. There was a big discussion on scalability and security and in general, the fragmentation of blockchain and crypto at that time. Yeah, it was a very lonely road but, what what we tended to focus on was the potential. My saying was look, when you get onto a trade you're trying to get on a train, and in this case a technology train, where you think it's going to end up at the right destination so you're trying to get on a train carriage with the right platform, with the right technology. Innovation potential is going to get you where you want to go and in that case, the potential of Bitcoin for telco. I was really about joining up, if you think of telco, there's not that many telcos out there. There's a few operators but but we have to come together in a collaborative way and trust each other. Roaming for example, contract management pricing and there was a lot of potential there for blockchain to solve a lot of those problems and streamline processes. So, we really took a visionary approach saying okay, what if we use blockchain and we were able to do this and we were able to take this opportunity or it presented a new business opportunity. When we took that approach and I think that is what got us through, by shining a light that got people excited, that kept them in touch with the technology even through times where your platforms got hacked or there was a lot of negativity and a lot of negative publicity. We stuck with it and actually at the time, at the end of 2019, 17 to 18 where we saw a big dip in crypto prices when we saw the ICO bubble collapse and we went through what we call the bloodbath now, crypto winter blockchain, you actually saw that the enterprise applications of blockchain started to pick up at that time because the focus wasn't on cryptocurrencies, it was on how can this be applied to solve enterprise problems. So in answer to your question, yeah, but very difficult, not a lot of people understood but we kept an eye on the benefit and the vision that the blockchain could take us to. Now I think we're in a period where we're starting to realize that, okay positive cryptocurrency prices are going up so there's a lot of projects, there's a lot of activity DeFi, self-sovereign identity, smart contracts, just a lot of stuff, NFTs, that there's going on in the wider crypto world. And that's mirrored now in the enterprise. Well, as I was saying, with this sort of Covid health passes, decentralized self-sovereign digital identity, use of smart contracts, peer-to-peer transactions, providence of supply chains seem to be the sort of main use cases that improvements of data seem to the main use cases that are coming up now in enterprise. A lot of enterprises are starting to come together to form ecosystems for permission blockchains in that. So yeah, in a short answer to your question, it has been a very difficult time but it just shows, if you believe in something and you have a vision, as long as you keep to that and you keep trying to communicate the benefits of that along with being honest on the risk, that you can get through some difficult times, which I think we have on this blockchain journey. Given the complexity of the problems that you're trying to solve with blockchain at Vodafone, do you think that we're talking always multi-year time horizons when it comes to large enterprises and the rate at which innovation is possible just because it is so complex? Do you think you're still on kind of a similar path to what you set out to achieve originally, it's just that it takes a lot of time and you need to prove out the technology? Or, do you think that the innovations that are happening in places such as DeFi, NFTs getting a lot more attention and opening up more use cases, are they starting to influence your thinking or do you feel like you're still very much on this path there, quite a similar path to where you set out originally? I think a lot of these things, the only difference with NFTs and some of the, well DeFi is slightly different, but the only thing with NFTs and DeFi which originated in tokenization, which is some conversation we've been having for the last three four years, is that they're now popular but to those of us who have been in blockchain and crypto, we've been talking, I mean, that was one of my key lines, tokenization is blockchain's killer app. I mean, three, four years ago, I was saying the same thing and I think NFTs is just a form of tokenization right? And DeFi essentially, the same combining smart contracts to power the protocols. So I think the only difference is that these things have become popular but they don't really change the fundamentals because I think in big enterprises it's all about having a strategy, it's all about how technology fits to a strategy, not just doing technology for the sake of it. That is a mistake a lot of people in big organizations have probably made, which is okay yeah, blockchain is wonderful let's put blockchain in. Why? Why is this database of blockchain? What problem is it solving? What opportunity is it presenting to the business? Whereas I think we took a different approach which is what are the opportunities that we are seeing and then how can blockchain be one of many components helping us to achieve that. Then for a lot of businesses, if you're not a startup, you've got to look at your comparative and absolute advantages. So if you're a bank, then you have advantages in trust. I think telcos have advantages in trust and connectivity and then somehow blockchain needs to augment that. You can't just tear it up and become a blockchain business because you have shareholders and you have strategies and you have wider considerations. Whereas, a startup can say alright, I'm going to go into DeFi straight away, it's difficult for established businesses. So I think it's more about sticking to your strategy and looking at how blockchain can augment that so in that sense, when you consider that these things that have helped to bring about the right publicity and maybe get more stakeholder excitement but they haven't fundamentally changed the strategy. I think it would be dangerous if they had, to be honest. You talk about how blockchain can augment things especially with IoT specifically, I think that's an area that's fascinating to go a little bit deeper on and learn a little bit more about. Especially for the listeners too because, on the surface you've got your sim cards, they can go into IoT devices, they're plugged into a carrier network, what are the advantages that blockchain brings to the table for IoT devices from a perspective of a telecoms company like Vodafone? So I'll start out then doing my speech on the potential of IoT but if you look at the connectivity, well we now have over five billion phones in the world, out of a population of 7.8 going eight billion people. Five billion of them and rapidly climbing, have SIM cards and handsets. If you go on to IoT, I think there's this forecast for as much as 70 billion IoT devices in the next five to seven years. It could be more but we're getting into billions and billions of connected devices and people over telecom's networks and other forms of connectivity. We've seen through Covid, you know, connectivity becomes the staple of business now and we've proven it because the last thing you want at home in this time is your broadband to cut off. I mean, that you're really paralyzed. Then you can do without the office but not the connectivity. I think you're seeing that with devices, you know billions of devices that are connected and the issue you've got when you look at IoT is that number one, these devices are connected but there's such volumes that you can't have these central entities for everything you're doing. So, for example, at the moment you've got 70 billion devices coming in 2025 or the next five to seven years, now you've got one model which is okay, each of these devices will have someone with a smartphone or someone with a computer authorizing transactions. We will have contracts, as we do now, for every interaction between these devices so they can trust each other. On one hand, when you stop putting the centralized entities into these huge volumes it becomes very, very difficult to surface just given the sheer volumes of it. I think what the potential of blockchain here is twofold. So one of them is what the first thing I'd say is that there's huge potential in connecting the connectivity world to blockchain in an industrial way. So where you have the concept of handsets and devices with SIM cards being able to automatically authenticate into blockchain platforms and and externally sign in those platforms. That's a huge potential because on the one hand, the issue with blockchain even now is about adoption. Has anyone tried to use a Metamask model wallet? Have you ever tried to swap these coins around on UniSwap? We can do it with your techies but but if you're my grandmother or someone else, they want the iphone experience where you can click a few buttons. We don't have that so, adoption for the mainstream is not there yet. We're having blockchain in some institutional entrance to the market but not mainstream yet. Five billion handsets, 70 billion devices, if at a very high level you can connect those two things in an industrial way and that will solve the adoption problem for blockchain. But, blockchain will solve the trust and decentralize the trust and scale problem for telco and I think that I just look at it at that high level. So, there's huge potential in that happening and when you look at IoT in particular, you start to get into a world where you don't have the typical use case now. So if you're developing an application now which you do very well Conor with you with your team, you'll start out with someone with a handset right? And that's the user interface but have an app will click right? If you have a driverless car or you have a connected cabinet or autonomous drone or an EV charging unit or a parking meter or a toll, you cannot have someone given the sheer scale of this, 70 billion, with a handset in the use case picking yes/ no. You need to automate that especially where you're having a car to EV charger, a car to tow, a car to smart city service transaction. It needs to be automated and then you look at how are you going to automate it. So, on the one hand you have identity right? So the first thing is how can two things that don't know each other authenticate? The blockchain can solve that decentralized identity. The other thing is, if they do, how can you automate a transaction? Smart contracts would be how you do that. Then, how would you actually do the transaction peer-to-peer not going to a central authority? That could be done again using blockchain capabilities for fair to pay transactions and to some extent, even tokenization. So I think there's a huge fit between telco, telecoms, IoT and blockchain. I think AI plays a role because I think AI can act as a trigger for many of these things - crunching data and feeding and triggering transactions and handshakes between devices. But ultimately, I think blockchain is the anchor, it's a trust anchor that will play a role in this now. I think the difference in my vision and how it's matured over the years is that I'm not seeing one blockchain, at least in business, so I'm seeing this as a phased approach. I'm actually listening to some of the stuff on Ethereum 2.0. I don't think they see one blockchain either, I think what I've heard about 64 chains that will be running and you have a Beacon Chain and then you have some of the other improvements around it. So I think our thinking as a blockchain community is maturing on every level to say okay, chains will coexist. It's not going to be one or the other, you will have chains coexisting and just like countries where you have specialization and division of labor, you have one chain that's good at this, you've got another chain that's good at that. So, you may have one that's good at NFTs, you've got one that's good at identity and they're sort of working together. I think in the enterprise space, I'm seeing that as well. So, I'm seeing that there will be many chains, many, many, many different blockchains in supply chain, blockchains for transactions, blockchains for device ledgers, blockchains for roaming, blockchains for provenance, many different blockchains in business. But, you know, the problem that we're now solving is how you connect those? So, how do you connect permission blockchain so you can have a trust between a blockchain trust layer? How do you have a resolver between those two things, between those two entities? That's sort of where we're looking and how the vision has changed. It's not going to be one chain, there's going to be many chains not to the point where you have many centralized databases, but I think you have many chains that form one overall trust chain to execute a business model. That's how we're sort of seeing it on our site. I think eventually you will see an evolution to public blockchains but, at the moment you're seeing your ecosystems built around permissioned or hybrid blockchains in the enterprise site. Of course, with enterprises, they need to know who they're dealing with at the other end of transactions. So it completely make sense outside of it and I think in terms of almost summarizing how, well my takeaway anyway, from what you've said about how blockchain with IoT devices, what it does is stops the person or whatever it is that's talking to the blockchain and having to engage with their device as much as they would. It's like say, if you park your car somewhere, you don't need to like open up a parking app and say I'm parking here now, these are my details. From what you're telling me that with IoT and blockchain, it would be possible for that to take place automatically because your car tells whatever infrastructure that it is parked in that place and so that significantly reduces the burden on people to have to perform these interactions on behalf of these devices. Is that kind of a fair description of how it simplifies things a lot for people? Correct. So, I think you can have these zero touch automated experiences. I mean, I think we're seeing similar things with this, I think it's Amazon Go, so it's this technology where you just go in and pick up and it knows who you are et cetera. So you're not then looking at loading a payment credential and whatever, it's just automatic and and I think the same for IoT for consumers as you're describing it can definitely enhance the user experience. You're not having to log on to different passwords, you're not having to approach things differently, it's just automated for things and I think that will play a big role in joining up or transitioning from the internet age to web 3.0, as we call it. But, I think the most promising side is on the business side because for businesses friction in the consumer world, friction causes a deterioration in customer experience which can lead to bad business. There's a direct relationship in business between friction and cost. Then the ability to realize business opportunities so I think in businesses, when you think of fleets, when you think of drone registry, you think of roaming, you think of a lot of the sort of macro business side and blockchain and IoT has an advantage in a number of areas. Number one, it makes the world bigger and more connected so, if you have an identity on a device that will allow you to speak to another device from another company, all of a sudden I have a business opportunity to interact with that device to transact with that device um and to and to be able to to conduct commerce and a new business with that device that wasn't there before. Because, the previous way of doing that was setting up a paper contract so blockchain can make that immediate. This whole real-time world comes into play. I think on the other side, if you look at IoT data, 75%, some estimates say, is not used right. So, we're collecting all of this data. There's massive investment in the data but it's not used and I believe part of that is because the use of that data is near real time, where it can impact a journey or a decision in business near real time. For example, the routing of a truck that's half empty which meets the needs of a logistics company at that point in time, if you can direct near real time, that spare capacity to meet the logistic demand, you've just increased the monetization and revenue of your truck. You're using data that was there at that point in time. If you take the vaccine example and your truck happens to have the right level of cold storage for example, the Pfizer vaccine, which may be rare, then again that's IoT data. As well as other data fitting into that enabling you to increase the monetization of your logistics feed in this case. So, I think there's two levels as I've explained. One of them is connecting things and then the sort of new business opportunities where devices from different ecosystems, different owners, can start to interact using blockchain as a trust anchor and I think from that you have the automation of that with smart contracts. Then on the other side, it's about the data. Yes, the IoT is about data and and you're really seeing potential for that data to be used almost as the equivalent of a sort of distributed oracle that can feed into these smart contracts and drive decisions to increase efficiency and revenues for IoT estates. Presumably 5G factors heavily in all of this as well just because of the capabilities it provides? Massively, so I think 5G low latency allows you to have very high low bandwidth processing on the move which is massive for IoT, massive for autonomous vehicles, massive for the sort of edge processing that's needed to drive a lot of these new business opportunities. When you combine that with blockchain and you combine 5G with IoT, you've got a very, very powerful mix that will give rise to whole new business models. One of them just looking at EV charging, how powerful that could be, where you have 5G h blockchain capabilities and IoT mixing there. Yeah, absolutely, and with 5G how far along the adoption journey are we with it? Of course, a number of phone providers support it and as a consumer that's sort of where it bubbles to the surface. But, from a corporate perspective what's your view there of where we are? Yeah, so I can't really comment directly that. What I do know is that there is an aggressive strategy to roll the technology out in a prioritized way and that we we're starting to see it evidenced in some of the end-to-end solutions that are being offered at the moment. Cool, so you mentioned electric vehicle charging, obviously the green agenda is very high on the corporate agendas right now. One of the things that's been announced previously is Vodafone's partnerships with the Energy Web Foundation. What's so appealing about the Energy Web Foundation? What they do and why does it make a lot of sense for Vodafone to work with them? Yeah, so yeah in fact I put something on Linkedin on this when we had the tweet about the the energy concerns on Bitcoin and it's like okay, is this an opportunity for us to come together and make a sustainable blockchain using our technology, smart contracts and connect to the grid and your real-time protocols and that was really on answering a lot of the raison d'etre that I understand that Energy Web has, which is how you can use blockchain to integrate more devices to the grid, how you can use blockchain to have providence of p and clean energy. Then, when you combine those two things it does give rise to supporting a lot of things in terms of meeting this ESG and other sorts of environmental targets of clean energy because it allows more devices and people and businesses to participate in the grid. It also provides opportunity for clean energy providence and a lot more in terms of transaction capability. So I see Energy Web as sort of a key to this area and a lot of the energy companies have joined so it's something that we found very very interesting. Of course, what's even more interesting is that we can directly link our SIM card to authenticate onto that network, which is also very powerful when you put that into a connected meter or other utility device. I think it was last year, you discussed in an interview how dVodafone demonstrated cars transacting with smart city payment services. You've spoken about potential for electric vehicle charging points, are there any other things that you're really really keen on? Seeing I've obviously touched on other areas like efficiencies with IoT data and the ability to help with health passports and also vaccine deliveries but are there some big areas that you'd like to also see blockchain having more impact and the convergence for the IoT? Yeah, I mean there's a few things in my head. I see a world where you have organizational wallets, you have wallets for people, you have wallets for devices, you have wallets for individuals and governments and I think blockchain. What I'm saying, there is the wallet contains the identity and it contains payment credentials and there's a real shift in how we think about things. We think about the identity of people businesses and individuals and this isn't Vodafone, this is my sort of thinking on this. But, I see that as transitioning a lot the way commerce and finance works and how business operates because when you have these wallets, you have the ability then to link smart contracts which can automate a lot of the transactions, a lot of the finance, a lot of the models that we have. So I see that as a sort of key thing to build on. I don't know where it will lead but I think it will lead to sort of an evolutionary approach to how business is conducted. I also speak about a lot personally, this new economy of tokens. I see some people call it the token economy. I call it the economy of tokens where I see that organizations will have tokens, you'll have a lot of inter token swaps. So you'll have a real-world version of UniSwap where you have this digital barter and organizations can use one token to pay for something else. So, I was reading the other day that WeWork are accepting Bitcoin. What if WeWork accepted a sort of UK government token or they accepted another token for office space? You start to get - I can transact my token for your service etc and you have this sort of digital barter which could be a precursor to the way business works. And, I think those two things are obviously way, way in the future and quite conceptual at the moment but, I think they drill down to blockchain fundamentally changing the way we do business, the way we finance business, the way businesses communicate with each other, the boat weight businesses that their people, devices transact with each other and I'm excited to see where that leads. I mean, who could have predicted the developments in blockchain over the last 12 months? Yeah, the ability to fundamentally reimagine scarcity and unique goods in the NFT space, who could have imagined some of the things that DeFi have done, and who could have imagined some of the progress that Ethereum and other chains have made and are making. You look at that and whether you agree with them or not, you're saying okay they've made a change and they're shedding light on a possible way forwards and I think the same thing with the wallets, the economy of tokens, smart contracts, provenance. You look at those ingredients to business I think over the next five to ten years I personally think we will start to see an evolution of business using those capabilities. Definitely and with what's happening in the public blockchain domains, the decentralized autonomous organizations, yes they've had their problems and they're certainly not a mainstream so to speak but at the same time it adds this really interesting layer to the whole discussion. Especially when you talk in terms of the opportunities for much wider spread tokenization because, if you've got all these different tokens almost like infinite variations of them you almost need to have these things that can rapidly swap them but almost at the protocol there and this is where these kind of true decentralized citizens can start to emerge. It gets very interesting there in terms of seeing where we've had these big areas of growth though and with of course, tokenization, what's happening with NFTs and DeFi. Aside from the corporate sort of initiatives that you're working on, what do you think's next for blockchain in terms of the next big bastion so to speak that it's going to be taking on? I think we're there, I mean I think all the components are very very exciting at the moment. I think it's just how you package those up into solutions. Then, how you package those up into new businesses so I don't think we're gonna see any new rapid new applications as such, I think we've got some some interesting projects to work on. I think when you look at the Ethereum project and the Hyperledger projects, just doing a drill down on Ethereum 2.0 you've got 1.5 um as well and you're looking at that and that's all about scaling and solidifying. I think that same applies for enterprise blockchains and other projects we've got, it's about solidifying what we've got. I think the innovation is there but how can we make this scalable? How can we make this cost efficient? I think there's a lot of effort needs to go on the foundations now because we've seen the promise, now we need it to work enterprise grade. So I see there'll be a lot of focus on that and that will help us to realize some of the exciting innovations that are happening in the sort of wider blockchain world in enterprise. But in saying that, I still don't think we're done with tokenization. I think there is, I repeat my statement of three years ago, it is the killer application I think we're now starting to see that NFTs in business very, very, very interesting but I think the staples of business are decentralized self-sovereign, decentralized digital identity and providence in supply chain and logistics. They seem to be the ones that are getting a lot of traction now. I think if those win, we proved they could scale, if we prove the the value then they laid the foundation for applications on tokenization and other things to come in. I don't think enterprise is ready for tokenization yet but but I think with some of the things happening in blockchain, if we can prove in the projects that we have in those three areas, I think that adoption will come in the coming years. I want to talk about this sort of adoption timelines and where the jury's out in terms of whether blockchain more generally has gone mainstream. Certainly with crypto you see that, for instance the Coinbase's wallet being number one in the US app store, it kind of shows that there's this huge consumer interest and also so much interest in the speculation side. So, I think there's an argument to say that part of it's mainstream but when we think about the bigger initiatives that you're working on that you've talked about and the sort of time horizons for tokenization to really find its feet properly, what sort of durations do you think about? Do you think next three years? Five years? Ten years? Yeah, it's a moving target but it's always great. It depends, I mean look at it so Covid is said to have accelerated digital transformation, two to three years. I think it may even be more. So other things remaining equal, I think we're starting to see blockchain projects come to life now in an enterprise and business which is really important. So you're starting to see live scaled production projects and I think for any other technologies coming through, I think you're looking at three to five years before we really start to see an impact. But, it's a journey so you gotta start now and then that maybe translates into that but but where you have a shock, an external shock, like Covid, where you're forced to innovate very quickly to solve a problem or where there's a new business opportunity where you're forced to innovate very quickly to realize that, I think blockchain will be one of the ingredients for that and that may well speed up adoption in different areas. I think for the core to really see translation in big business along with the regulation and everything that comes with it and and the acceptance of the changing of processes that have been around for years, I think it's three to five years. Now in saying that, it leads me to another point that we probably missed out which is about CBDC's, central bank digital currencies and that that is an interesting thing because we've spoken about the economy of tokens and the public blockchains etc but what we haven't really tried to assess is the impact of CBDC's on all of this. That is essentially a play by trusted central authorities who have a lot of domain knowledge to say 'okay, yeah we see the advantage of digital money, digital currencies and when we want to now introduce that into our business models' and the question is - what does that mean? What does that mean to some of the already established projects? So, the digital US dollar versus Tether et cetera sort of got a few more research digital dollars, it'd be interesting to see how that works and if inevitably that will involve some sort of integration or integration or coexistence with Bitcoin and Ethereum or whether they become competitors. If they become competitors, I think the bets are off. I think if there's a coexistence then there's co-benefit and alignment then it'd be really exciting because I think in the revolution or the evolution that we're seeing in blockchain, one thing that is important to note in business is that the technology coexists. So, I think when you're in a public blockchain you just go on Ethereum, you build a Dapp, everything's new but you've got to remember in business this huge backbone OSS and BSS systems that already exist, they're the core of that business so you can't just rip it off, rip it up and let's start something new. Blockchain needs to be a part of that so integration with legacy, how it fits in, how it plays a role alongside these technologies so in saying that it's going to be the same for CBDC's and wider crypto because to transition from the finance and business system we have now to DEXs and DeFi etc is a really big leap. I think what we've seen even with all the popularity, it's a marginal business. The mainstream is way, way bigger maybe 95 plus percent so that transition you could argue or that digital transformation requires the incumbent central banks and financial financial organizations to be a part of it. Then the CBDC's is the first step. What we don't know is what happens then but they have huge domain knowledge, they have new huge systems of scale, huge experience so I'm watching that with interest to see how that translates. Yeah, yeah it's definitely fascinating to see just how many regulators have really, well central banks, are embracing the technology and taking it very, very seriously no doubt, so it's not going to be too long before we see some even more big announcements there. Excellent, yeah exactly. Yeah so I think it's probably a good time to wrap up there now David. It's been really, really, really awesome chatting. If people want to engage with you or just reach out off the back of what we've discussed here or just pick your brains about IoT blockchain and the convergence of all these technologies, what are good mediums for them to contact you or follow you? So Linkedin is my platform, the platform I use most. So, yeah my Linkedin profile hopefully we can post it on here. And yeah just contact me on there, that's best. I'm often posting on there about by thinking, on events as they're happening so that's a good way to engage. Yeah I think that's the best way to contact me but also for those of you who are engaged you can email me as well and reach out. I know that you'll be popping up at more and more conferences as well talking about this stuff. Yeah, yeah well I think there's a lot to say, there's a lot more to say than there was in the past because I think the difference before is that we were talking about something that may happen. I think now things are happening and then there's a lot more to discuss but it's still a journey we're working out as we go along. I think organizations like yours are others leading the way in development, have taken a lot of risks, sort of a beacon - shining a light to some of the things that are possible so I also want to thank you - organizations like yours and the innovators that have worked tirelessly on blockchain projects through the winters, through the very cold storms when it wasn't popular, for some of the incredible things that are happening. That's giving us blockchain ambassadors or people working in blockchain and enterprise, the fuel and then some light to continue what we're doing. Yeah it's awesome to be at the frontier of this space right? We've all been through the fair share of ups and downs but yeah, as you say we're in a good, in the best place now I think for the future. Excellent. Awesome. Well yeah thank you, thank you so much David, it was great to talk to you and have you on as a guest today. Thank you, thank you so much. Thank you.