Web3 Innovators

In the seventh episode of our new season of Web3 Innovators, our host Conor Svensson is joined by David Creer, Global DLT and Crypto Lead at GFT Group who develop sustainable solutions across new technologies.

He is also a Course Instructor at the European Tech School.

Episode highlights:

• What initially drew David’s interest into the space
• How GFT has evolved into an innovation driven organisation
• How product delivery and production differs within financial services
• Why there used to be hesitation when putting products into production
• How regulation has evolved within the financial sector
• How David sees Crypto developing with banks
• David’s advice for anyone uncertain about the application of blockchain
• The UDPN network project that David has been involved in (The UDPN is a decentralised payments messaging backbone connecting the digital currency systems of the future to enable seamless, efficient payments of regulated stablecoins and CBDCs)
• How David things blockchain will influence the way financial markets operate in the future

Key Takeaways:

• The tier one banks and the tier two banks are really only working on things that they want to take into production at this point in time. So that's a completely different mindset from how things were when we started, where it was, we want to just see whether this is possible. - David
• When cloud first came out banks didn't want to go down that route at all. The policy was non-public cloud. Now a lot of banks are going down that path, which makes sense because it saves them a lot of money and it's more efficient. - David
• If you're thinking about using blockchain or distributed ledger technology for your project, you need to understand your use case really well. - David
• It's quite exciting to be involved in that because potentially that could be a really important piece of infrastructure for the financial system of the future. - David
• If smart cities develop the way that they are developing in countries such as China, I think that we will have a financial services system which is much more focused on micropayment. And therefore I think that blockchain technology or cryptographically based stablecoins or CBDCs will be used much more widely. - David

Connect with David on Twitter

Resources:

• TOKO
• Bitcoin
• Ethereum
• Satoshi
• UDPN Network
• mCBDC Bridge

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In the sixth episode of our new season of Web3 Innovators, our host Conor Svensson has the tables turned on him and is interviewed by Joshua Lory, Head of Blockchain GTM at VMware, a multi-cloud service for all apps, enabling digital innovation with enterprise control.

These were follow up questions that Joshua wanted to ask Conor after he was interviewed on the podcast earlier this season, which you can listen to here.

Connect with Joshua on Twitter.

Episode highlights:

• Who Conor believes are the three players that will capture 80% of the market in the next 10 years and why
• How this differs from Joshua’s views
• Other up and coming players in this space who it is worth keeping an eye on
• Why the decentralised infrastructure projects have got a big part to play in the future
• How we narrow the skills gap needed for these new ecosystems
• The issue with smart contract development on public blockchain networks
• The potential with AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) to help close the skills gap

Key Takeaways:

• In every single technology space the top three players capture 80% of the market time and time again. And then you have a long tail of the 20%, where you have thousands of different options that capture one or 2%. - Joshua
  
  
• Ethereum, I've always felt that it's like the Linux of this generation. - Conor
  
  
• From a personal perspective, I think Polka Dot is building a strong ecosystem. They have some very strong technology in terms of what they've done. So they're model of having this layer zero blockchain and then these power chains, which are kind of permission chains spun up on top, seems to be viable. - Conor
  
  
• We’ve got 10 million Java developers that could be writing to this new ecosystem, but are not. - Joshua
  
  
• The real challenge with smart contract development is that it, especially on public blockchain networks, is that people can't afford to make mistakes with it. - Conor

Resources:

• Ethereum
• Polygon
• CoinMarketCap
• Binance 
• Ripple 
• Cardano
• Solana
• Polkadot
• FileCoin
• Lightning Network

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In the fifth episode of our new season of Web3 Innovators, our host Conor Svensson is joined by Ben Edgington, is the founder and lead product owner of Teku, an Ethereum 2.0 client at ConsenSys.

Episode highlights:

• Why Ben decided to work exclusively on proof of stake and scalability of Ethereum
• The surprises with Ethereum governance
• The pragmatism surrounding Ethereum and knowing it may not immediately be perfect
• The alternatives to Ethereum and where Ben sees compromises being made
• How the Ethereum ecosystem has been expanded and what this means for adoption and new technologies
• The Shanghai Hard Fork and Shanghai Stroke Capella upgrades and what this will mean for ETH staking
• Why institutions are happy to stake in ETH
• The areas of focus for Ben moving forward
• What the Ethereum ecosystem needs to achieve just to give every person on the planet one transaction per day
• The e-book that Ben is currently working on outlining the specifications for Ethereum’s protocols

Key Takeaways:

• It was basically chaos. And yet somehow order emerges from the chaos. And I've come to believe this is really important for the health of Ethereum. We purport to be open and permissionless and we have to design and build our protocols in a way that reflects that. - Ben
• I'm not an Ethereum maximalist, right? I don't think there should be Ethereum and nothing else. I'm very much for other approaches and explorations of the design space as long as people are aware of the compromises that are being made. - Ben
• The upcoming Shanghai Stroke Capella upgrade. This is gonna happen in, my guess, early April and will unlock the rewards that stakers have put down. Currently we've got, it's about 16 million ETH staking, which is extraordinary, over half a million validators. - Ben
• In the longer term, we need a solution in which every node on the network does not need to see every piece of data. - Ben
• We are not going to get into infinite scalability, but for one transaction per day for everybody on the planet, we need a hundred thousand transactions per second. So there's a sort of order of magnitude estimate for when the Ethereum main net becomes capable. - Ben

Resources:

• Ben’s Ethereum ‘stuff’
• What’s New in Eth2
• Blockchain
• Linux
• DeFiChain
• NFTChain
• Shanghai Hard Fork
• Shanghai / Capella
• Ethereum Consensus Protocol

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In the fourth episode of our new season of Web3 Innovators, our host Conor Svensson is joined by David Palmer, a digital visionary and global platform innovator who works as Blockchain Lead at Vodafone Business IoT. 

Episode highlights:

• How the technology innovation of blockchain initially made David interested in the space
• The opportunities he saw for blockchain to help shape the telco business model
• The four use cases they focused on when looking at the application of blockchain
• Digital Asset Broker and what it means for electronic vehicle charging
• How Web3 can bring new liquidity to assets
• David’s advice for those unsure about blockchain’s potential for their organisation or industry
• How David believes blockchain can bring new business and opportunities to external facing companies
• How Web3 will not exist in isolation and instead will be a component within the digital tool set
• Business opportunities as we move to the metaverse
• How David believes Web3 and blockchain technology will develop 

Key Takeaways:

• I saw an opportunity for blockchain to really reshape the telco business model and present new opportunities. - David
  
  
• So blockchain as a centre for trust and transaction settlement made a lot of sense. That is now live, so that was one of the proof of concepts. - David
  
  
• I'm a founder, innovator of, it's called the digital asset broker. This one was slightly different because it wasn't just using blockchain for trust, it was really using blockchain to create a whole new business for IoT devices. - David
  
  
• There is a blockchain based solution out there which has been implemented with some of the biggest companies in mobility in the world. And energy and Web3 and blockchain are a key component of that. - David
  
  
•  I think services around identity are gonna be absolutely critical and a massive business opportunity. - David
  
  
• There's millions of people who are in poverty, millions of people who don't have access to business or a career or jobs or career paths. And It would be really exciting to see Web3 fill that void. - David

Resources:

• DeFi
• Blockchain Innovators
• Digital Asset Broker
• NFT
• McKinsey
• Metaverse
• European Identity Wallet

Shoutouts:

• Jorge Bento

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In the third episode of our new season of Web3 Innovators, our host Conor Svensson is joined by Joshua Lory, Head of Blockchain GTM at VMware, a multi-cloud service for all apps, enabling digital innovation with enterprise control.

He is also the host of the 48 Hours to Lead Podcast.

Episode highlights:

• What initially attracted Joshua to Bitcoin
• The plugability of Bitcoin and what this means for businesses
• VMware’s mission and how Joshua became involved with the company
• Where Joshua believes cloud could grow to despite -  being a relatively new technology
• The scepticism surrounding enterprise blockchain  
• Organisations that are building assurance applications on blockchain as a service and the solutions they are using
• How Financial Services and capital markets are building a new digital asset exchange
• The experiment that the Bank of Israel ran for their CBDC on VMware blockchain for Ethereum and what this could mean for the future of money
• Joshua’s advice for anyone on the fence about the potential of blockchain technology
• The company's current blockchain focus
• How Joshua believes this technology will have been adopted and developed in 10 years time

Key Takeaways:

• Bitcoin improves on the gold standard and it really is gold 2.0 in many senses. - Joshua
• Businesses in days can plug into something like the Lightning Network without doing any application, replatforming engineering, and have essentially instant free transactions, peer-to-peer transactions. - Joshua
• That is still the mission; bringing this technology to the forefront of big businesses so that they can transform. - Joshua
• Within financial services, it's more about new products and services and transforming the market, which means there's more budget behind these projects, that's higher priority. I think you'll see this contagion happen across all industries once financial services really figures it out. - Joshua
• If you just look at cloud in its essence, it helps organisations focus on their core competency instead of building data centres and infrastructure to move more quickly and launch new products and services. And so if you layer blockchain on top of cloud, this has very similar effects. - Joshua
• Economic energy will be running on blockchain rails, I believe that's a certain. - Joshua
• So that's what I would say to users is go back in the history books, look at all these huge technology shifts, and then look at blockchain with a fresh set of eyes. - Joshua

Connect with Joshua on Twitter

Resources:

• Andy Jassy, AWS earnings call
• ASX
• NSW Government
• Symphony

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In the second episode of our new season of Web3 Innovators, our host Conor Svensson is joined by Bharat Gupta, Senior Principal for Financial Services and Insurance at Infosys, which is a global leader in next-generation digital services and consulting

Bharat is focused on digital strategy for financial services clients covering crypto and blockchain advisory for new business initiatives.

Episode highlights:

• How blockchain as a technology initially sparked Bharat’s interest in the space
• The similarities he saw between mission critical systems and blockchain technology
• Why he became fully involved in 2019 after large organisations showed an interest in the space
• What Bharat believes will happen in the future with the digitisation of financial services
• How digitisation of product can help raise capital and introduce a wider customer base
• What regulation is currently like for financial services
• The scalability issues with the Bitcoin and Ethereum network and how these are being resolved
• How financial services are dealing with transparency and privacy on the network
• Bharat’s advice for anyone wanting to become involved in the space
• The projects Bharat is currently focusing on

Key Takeaways:

• So that really intrigued me and then pulled me in completely. If large institutions are looking into this then I think it makes more sense for all of us to look into this space. - Bharat
  
  
• It was never a thought for financial services that they need to change their product. - Bharat
  
  
• So this whole new field has opened up for startups to raise capital. And how this is happening is because of that same underlying technology, and that's what I call digitisation of the product. - Bharat
  
  
• These networks are not designed for transit. These networks are designed for settlement. So I call it the base layer. Layer one networks are nothing, but it's a settlement networks. Whatever you need to do on top of it, that is your transaction layer. So transaction layer has to be very scalable
  
  
• Now they are building, and I believe that ecosystem will definitely thrive and then scale again, because Bitcoin would not just become a store of value, it will also become a transaction mechanism. - Bharat

Resources:

• Blockchain
• Ethereum
• Bitcoin
• Lightning Network
• Charles Schwab
• ICO Rush
• MiCA Regulation
• Rollups
• ZK Rollups

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In the first episode of our new season of Web3 Innovators, our host Conor Svensson is joined by Paul Brody, Global Blockchain Leader at EY where he drives EY's initiatives and investments in blockchain technology across consulting, audit, and tax business lines.

Paul is also a Board Member of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance and prior to working at EY was Vice President and Global Industry Leader of Electronics at IBM.

Episode highlights:

• The prototype system, ‘Adapt’ that Paul built and how IBM not wishing to take it further inspired him to leave and join EY
• His role in developing blockchain within the organisation
• Why Paul is such an advocate for public blockchain
• Why there is a lack of privacy with public blockchains and the problems this causes
• The reasons you can’t migrate applications built on private blockchain to public
• Why he sees blockchain as transformational technology
• The issues around forming and working with a consortium
• The differences between permission and permissionless blockchain and the problems Paul sees with permissioned
• The key differentiators between trust anchors and trusted third parties
• The two initiatives; Nightfall and Starlight Paul is currently working on
• How Paul believes the future landscape for Web3 technologies will look

Key Takeaways:

• We had created this product, we had pitched it to IBM leadership and they were not interested. They didn't want to go any further than the prototype, and that was at the point where I parted company with IBM because I wanted to do this. - Paul
• We see this over and over again, people created these centrally run private blockchain business models and they just didn't work. - Paul
• We've had this vision of a value proposition where you can basically take any kind of business application and run it on a public blockchain, any kind of B2B transaction. But the reality has been that we can't do it. - Paul
• There will be many stablecoin firms, there will be many audit firms, there will be many external data sources at Oracles. We will have to decide to trust some of them in how we build our transactions, but none of them will become central intermediaries. None of them will become monopolists. None of them will have overwhelming power in the ecosystem. - Paul
• My goal is that in January of 2023 we will launch the first production versions of both Nightfall and Starlight as production betas on the public Ethereum main net. - Paul
• What's really cool about X.509 certificates is they are themselves public open standards supported by many different third party providers. So nightfall will remain truly public and permissionless. - Paul

Resources:

• Hyperledger
• Corda
• EY Nightfall
• EY Starlight
• X.509

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Exciting news! The Web3 Innovators Podcast returns next week with a new season packed full of new learning from leaders who are changing the face of finance and other industries with web3 and blockchain technologies 🎉

➡️ In Season 6 you'll hear from guests like Paul Brody - Global Blockchain Leader at EY, Bharat Mohan - Senior Principal for Financial Services and Insurance at Infosys and Joshua Lory - Head of Blockchain GTM at VMware amongst many others

➡️ Episodes every Wednesday with seasons that include handy recaps so you won’t miss key learnings from our guests

➡️ Subscribe now so you don’t miss out on Episode 1 of Season 6

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In this special episode of Web3 Innovators, our host Conor Svensson has picked out a selection of best bits from Season 5. It was a great season and a range of topics were covered, from NFTs to DeFi and crypto. These hand picked sections are key highlights from the season and contain valuable insights that you won't want to miss!

Follow these links if specific clips catch your interest and you'd like to listen to the full episode.

• Can wholesale payments be tokenised?
• Can Ethereum be infinitely scaled?
• Should we decentralise ownership?
• Can trade repositories tokenise assets on public blockchains?
• Is Web3 a New World or New Economy?
• Are NFTs extensions of who we are?
• How J.P. Morgan is generating revenue and saving money with blockchain.
• How will tokens change your online experience?
• Can financial speculation create useful Web3 ecosystems?
• Do we need quantum resistance in Web3?
  
  

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In the last episode of our new season of Web3 Innovators, our host Conor Svensson is joined by Marcos Allende López, CTO at LACChain and Specialist in Blockchain, Digital Assets, Quantum Technologies, and SSI at  Inter-American Development Bank

Episode highlights:

• How Marcos started to learn more about blockchain technologies and cryptocurrencies after applying for his current position at Inter-American Development Bank
• How quantum technologies and blockchain are linked by cryptography
• The work that Marcos is doing on blockchain and how this is developing
• How Marcos believes we need better assurance frameworks in addition to the regulatory policies
• The biggest challenges Marcos sees with quantum and blockchain technology both in the immediate and future
• How Marcos believes we should be focusing on quantum resistance now so we have solutions in place should quantum computers be ready before the blockchain networks are ready for them
• How they created one of the first orchestration vehicles for blockchain
• The advice Marcos would give to anyone hesitant to use blockchain

Key Takeaways:

• Quantum computing and quantum cryptography which are being actively developed are essential for the blockchain Web3 and all the assets that are now being created and generated in blockchain networks. So the quantum and blockchain worlds are actually very connected and it is very important to start having a conversation around what might happen in the next few years around this. - Marcos
• My work has been focused on building and maintaining something that is between the enterprise and the crypto blockchain worlds, which is a permission public blockchain. So basically we created this infrastructure that is intended for Latin America and the Caribbean but available globally, with suitable features for public and public sectors. - Marcos
• We need to start having the conversation about quantum computers hacking blockchain now because the solution might not be that easy. Replacing or adapting the cryptography of current blockchain networks is not going to be an easy problem to solve because blockchains are so inherent to the type of cryptographic algorithms that they're using. - Marcos
• It is important to start developing great interfaces. I think it is time to understand that not every organisation needs to run a blockchain node and run their blockchain, their smart contracts and their APIs, and do their integrations. We know how difficult it becomes because some organisations don't have the expertise or don't need to run their own notes and smart contracts and be responsible and accountable for that. - Marcos

Connect with Marcos on Twitter

Resources:

• Inter-American Development Bank
• Global Leaders Today
• LACChain
• LACNet

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