Cross-chain discussion with CMO of Hedera, Founder of Casper, Lead at VeChain and many more! (Part 1)

In part 1 of this Cross-chain spaces, Genfinity hosts leaders of the Hedera, Casper, VeChain, XDC, and other prominent web3 projects. The discussions include conversations about enterprises entering the web3 ecosystems, current applications of prominent brands like the UFC, and Avery Dennison, and the winner of the blockchain innovation project at Paris Blockchain week.

Transcription

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍All right, I wasn't planning on starting it with cheesy Van Halen from the 80s, but I don't think we have an issue with that, so I am going to kick this off. So, if you guys are joining for the first time, we put together these very large, kind of cross-chain, cross-ecosystem spaces, as much as we possibly can. If you're joining for the first time, one of the things that we always try to represent within all of these spaces is to try to find synergy between ecosystems because once you kind of do, you know, delve out and start interviewing different people from different networks, you realize that a lot of people are really trying to facilitate the same aspects. Also, you know, to kind of promote, you know, giving all these kind of ecosystems follows. Like, you may be in one ecosystem as a community member, it's always interesting to pay attention to other ecosystems as well because you never know what's kind of going to come down the pike. We do have the CEO of Serenity Shield with us today. We also have the CEO and co-founder of Casper Labs with us today, and all we've got the previous CMO at Hedera, now marketing at Swirls. We've got Christian Hasker with us. We will have Quincy, who is one of the lead devs within the XDC network today as well. We've got the CEO of X Manna. We have Self Crypto up here, the CEO. We've got Douglas Forswick from Blue Canary and Jake, who is head of communications and community at VeChain. So, I'm going to kind of kick off and go around the table up here and allow for everybody to. Oh, actually, we have Hash Pack as well. I think we have Marc from HashPack today. If you're not aware, HashPack is leaps and bounds, you know, by far kind of the largest wallet on Hedera Hashgraph right now. I'm going to kind of just go in order. We do have such a large panel, so I want to allow each panelist up here to give maybe a three-minute introduction because we have a lot of questions to get through as well with you guys. Maybe a three-minute introduction yourself and your project or ecosystem. I know that's probably asking a lot because you could talk for quite a long time on it, but if you could do three minutes, that'd be great. I'm going to start with Venkett at Serenity Shield. If you want to go ahead. I will say any of you guys that are panelists that are going to be speaking, please raise your hand now so that we can get you up because there's I'm sure there's probably going to be a lot of people in here. It will be almost impossible to find you guys down there in the crowd. So, request to speak. We'll get you up as we go through introductions so Venket from Serenity Shield, please go ahead.

Serenity Shield – Venket - CEO
‍Yes, thank you. Solomon, I'm Venkat, I'm the CEO of Serenity Shield. I've logged in from India. So, my background is coming from a web 2 world with a lot of corporate experience and IT background. Then, I jumped into blockchain. I was fascinated by the blockchain technology. So, I thought that I should make use of the technology to give back something to the society where we are able to offer something to everybody. So, that's the purpose and the motive with which I jumped into the blockchain technology, coming from a web 2 world. So, now let me go straight to the project because since we don't have too much time. So, Serenity Shield is the project which I represent as a CEO, and Sanity Shield is a cutting-edge decentralized application. And we use privacy-preserving exclusive blockchain technology to provide, in the sense, to store, transfer, and also archive and restore all your confidential and sensitive data for web-free valid users and web-2 users alike with an inbuilt option of inheritance in succession. So, Strongbox is a flagship product, and out of Strong Box, we promote self-custody, data sovereignty, and ownership of your digital assets, which are some of the pressing problems of what the crypto world is facing today. So, when we started, we started as a blockchain technology. We want to offer certain blockchain solutions to the blockchain problems, but we kept evolving. We kept adapting, and today's Sanity Shield wants to be a digital bridge. We want to be a digital gateway between the web 2 and the web 3 world, where we want to reach out to the mainstream and not be left out. So, that's what I want to say as a brief introduction, and I would give it back to you.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, thank you so much, Venkat. I'm gonna get into more detailed questions with everybody. But again, if you guys are just joining, we're kind of just going over some introductions across all these ecosystems right now. Two or three minutes, you know yourself as well as the ecosystem that you're representing, and then we're going to get into some more targeted aspects here. So, I definitely want to, we shifted positions up here on my spaces leaderboard. So, I will, from a panelist standpoint, I'll ask Quincy, can you give maybe a three-minute overview yourself and the XDC Network, and then we'll get into some more targeted questions after we get through all the introductions.

XDC – Quincy – Foundation Developer
‍Yeah, he can tell. Hey, King Solomon, how you doing? Can you hear me pretty well? Yeah, so I'm Quincy. I'm part of the XDC Foundation. I'm a developer. I work on Slingy as well as Taboo and stuff. The biggest thing about XDC is we're an EVM compatible platform. We're allowing, mostly focusing on trade finance, and we're essentially facilitating an ecosystem in which traditional institutions can allow for a means for their traditional finance instruments feel to be automated on the blockchain. Now, obviously, we operate within the EVM, so we use Solidity for the most part. But the biggest point is being able to take traditional infrastructure or take traditional finance instruments and allow them to be automated within an EVM-compatible platform that makes sense. Sorry, super excited. Really glad that you brought me up here. Really glad that everyone's here to be able to talk about these different topics. It's really cool to be here and be able to talk about these things. And yeah, that's just a really simple rundown on me. I've got a YouTube channel; you can check that out, but whatever. You know, glad being here.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Thank you so much, Quincy. Marc, from HashPack, I'll give you the floor.

HashPack Wallet – Marc Ugas – Director of Operations
‍Hello, everyone. Thank you so much, Solomon. Really great to see so many great panelists here. I've been super interested to learn a lot about this. So, I'm Marc, the Director of Operations here at HashPack. We're the leading wallet here in the Hedera ecosystem, and yeah, we've been making a very conscious effort to really engage in this cross-chain conversations because there's so much to learn. One of the things that we've been truly trying to push is how do we make it extremely easy from a user experience standpoint to onboard new users into crypto because as web 3 native people, we're very used to certain paradigms, but for new people to come into the space, we need to make it easier for them. So, some of the things that we've been doing lately, we put out the email onboarding, so now you're able to bypass the seed phrases. The option is still there for more crypto-savvy people. We've also implemented certain features such as secure trade, which is a way to autonomically trade in a peer-to-peer fashion on different tokens. And yeah, we recently just put out some stats on the Hedera native staking inside of Hedera, and we've had since October around 330,000 claim events, which amounts to around 16.4 million Hbar in rewards that has been distributed all over the community. So, very excited to be here, and yeah, to be joined for by with so many great panelists.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Thank you so much, Marc. I'll turn it over to Jake. Jake runs Communications and Community Management at Vechain. Jake, if you could give us an overview of yourself and maybe just a quick overview of the Vechain ecosystem, and then we'll get into more targeted questions here in a minute. Thank you for joining, by the way.

VeChain – Jake - Communications Lead and Community Manager
‍Hey, my pleasure. Thanks for having me, Solomon. Much appreciated. Great to be up here today with everybody. My name is Jake, as you pointed out, and the Communications Lead and Community Manager at Vechain. And I'm sure many of you have heard of Vechain, of course. We were quite famous for a long time for supply chain, but we're a lay one EVM-compatible blockchain doing a lot of stuff currently, within the sustainability field, and I'm sure we'll dive more into that in the near term. Yeah, we've got a bunch of great releases which I think really resonate well with the particular theme of this space, so you know, it's a great kind of topic area for us to discuss and obviously discuss alongside these excellent panelists you've got here today. In terms of our ecosystem, you know, it's quite a diverse bunch. We've got, obviously, the we're quite well-known, I guess, for the kind of Enterprise applications, but of course, being in layer one, we've got a lot of community staff, you know, NFT projects, we've got a sprawling VeNFT ecosystem, you know, DeFi is the kind of everything change, so our ecosystem is very diverse. We've got a very vibrant and active community, which is always great, pushes you forward in there, motivates you, you know, during those tough times. So, very blessed to have such a solid community behind us. But yeah, very pleased to be up here today, have the opportunity to talk about what V Chain's been up to and how we're making crypto easy.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Thanks so much Jake, I'll turn it over to Christian. Christian, previously the CMO at Hedera Hashgraph, now involved obviously in the marketing aspects of Swirls. Christian, if you could give us a primer on yourself and today, that'd be fantastic.

Hedera Hashgraph & Swirlds Labs – Christian Hasker - CMO
‍Yes, thank you so much for having me. Let me start with an apology, I'm actually double booked at the top of the hour, so I may have to drop. Maybe I can stay a few minutes longer. Thank you so much for pulling this panel together. I think it's great whenever we have an opportunity to present with other blockchain platforms and other ecosystem players and really sort of widen the network of folks that we're working with. So, thank you very much. Just a little bit about Hedera, Hedera is a public distributed ledger technology that is built on an alternative to blockchain. It's built on something called Hashgraph. Hashgraph is extremely fast, extremely low latency, and it has this very interesting property around security called asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerance, which is the highest degree of security you can get in a decentralized system. So, it means that the whole network is leaderless, so you never have a leader node, it makes it very difficult to be DDOSed. And then the other thing that makes Hedera unique, other than the technology, is it has a very unique governance model. So, Hedera is governed by a group of large organizations, enterprises and universities that are decentralized by geography and industry, and they steward the network, they run the initial consensus nodes in the network, and they also steward the code base that is run on those nodes. So, looking forward to this panel and diving more deeply into a host of topics.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, and I think Christian, since you have to hop at the top of the hour, you may have just volunteered yourself for the first set of questions, by the way. No worries, I'll turn it over to Douglas and Steve. If you guys want to give us a primer on yourselves and your introduction, that'd be fantastic.

Blu Canary Capital – Dougles Borthwick - CBO
‍Thank you very much. This is Douglas Borthwick I'm with Blu Canary, formerly with INX. My, I guess, focus is on digital securities on the blockchain. We did the first ever IPO on the blockchain for a digital security with the full prospectus. We're now out there, helping companies that want to do digital securities that want to raise capital, that perhaps want to create new revenue streams in the metaverse and in other ways. We're working with Steve's group over at X Manna in terms of getting a lot of companies into the metaverse where they can create new revenue streams. We tokenize these revenue streams as digital securities, and then people get not just a return on their investment from what they're holding, but also just the fact that they're holding them in their wallets in that metaverse or in a game environment. They'll require they'll get power-ups or they'll get enhanced opportunities. They'll get gifts sent to them, thrown at them. We're also talking to a large number of corporates that are facing directly with them with folks, and I guess the example is you go to a Nike store and your Nike shares, you don't get a discount, but if you owned Nike security tokens, digital securities, they've been able to see that you could verify it, you could get a discount much easier online than in a store, and we're working on all these things with X Manna with Steve. Now I give you Steve.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Thank you so much. Steve, the floor is yours.

XMANNA – Steve Stein – Founder & CEO
‍Hello, thank you for having me Solomon, and it's a known to be on the panel with all of you guys. My name is Steve Stein, CEO and co-founder of examiner. We are a cutting edge SAAS solution that is redefining value in the digital landscape. Our mission really is to empower users, partners, the metaverse, and web3 technologies with, you know, kind of familiar experiences right across gaming, retail, and entertainment. So, you know, at XMANNA, we've developed a unique set of technologies. For example, like it's not, excellentis a versatile macroverse, if you would, that's designed for everyone from teenage dreamers to middle-aged shoppers. Or our gaming apps or SDK that allow game developers to monetize their creations while offering players a rich rewards ecosystem. Plus, our white-labeled loyalty gaming app, which helps clubs, teams, brands, celebrities, and more to really kind of drive fan engagement and generate new revenue streams. So I guess, in essence, we believe that the metaverse and web3 technologies will ultimately transform our lives as profoundly as the internet. And that's why X Manna is focusing on delivering, you know, kind of dynamic enhanced experiences that users already understand, you know, granting the freedom to kind of monetize their time, actions, and their data. And by us sharing nearly half of our net profits with the users through prizes and rewards, we're building what we believe is truly a sustainable and value-driven business model. So we kind of invite you to join us in changing the mindset around the metaverse and discover some of the endless opportunities That XMANNA has to offer our investors, users, and partners alike.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Thank you so much, thank you so much, Steve. We got Rico up here, CEO at Self Crypto Io. If you want to give a brief introduction of yourself and your ecosystem, that'd be great as a sidebar, or Sarah if one of us could potentially be, you know, pin some aspects on these ecosystems up to the top that, um, as we're kind of moving along. That would be great. Rico, the floor is yours though.

Self Crypto IO – Rico Maverick – Founder & CEO
‍Thank you very much, Solomon and Sadaf, for hosting this space and for inviting us. It is a pleasure for us to be here. I'm Rico. I'm a computer engineer. I have been working on blockchains for around 10 years,  from layer one projects to crypto wallets. So right now, we are developing a project that is called Self. It is a decentralized project focusing on NFTs as a utility and not like art because for most people, NFTs means art, and it is not in our opinion. It can be used to provide a lot of utility to the crypto system. So we are trying to integrate, everything under a username, and there are a lot of solutions that use domains, but I think that common people don't know a lot, regarding computers. For example, my brother, my mother doesn't know anything regarding domains, but they know really well how a nickname is and how to register a service using a nickname like Twitter or like Instagram. So we are trying to centralize everything under a nickname that will work for wallets, for DEXs or sex. Will it, we believe in mass adoption that will increase in the community cycle with the strength of the traditional financial system and see a requirement for making parts of crypto easy for people for everyone, not just crypto enthusiasts or people that lots knows a lot about computers just for everybody. We are aiming to have onboard and common people on crypto. Okay, I think it is the way to go. We are trying to make transfers human-readable, we open an environment for people to think comfortably, incorporating in the crypto world, making transfers easier just using a nickname instead of very long addresses. We know how different an address can be on this space. For example, Hedera format address is way different from Vechain. They have they use a different format. We are trying to centralize everything just using a nickname, using the metadata of an NFT. So we truly think it is a good way to make crypto easier, and as we build and grow, we will be adding more products to our service. But the thing, as a beginning, is going to be very useful, uh, as an ecosystem tool for almost every layer one project and all that is surrounding them. So amazing to be here to have the opportunity to be in on a lineup with some projects that have made big movements in this space. So we are truly proud to be here.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Rico. And, last but certainly not, not least, we've got Mrinal up here, co-founder and CEO of Casper Labs. You could give us a little introductory statement, that'd be fantastic, and I'll move into some more poignant questions with everybody.

Casper Labs – Mrinal Manohar – Founder & CEO
‍So cool, yeah, thanks. Thanks a lot, Solomon, and it's a pleasure to be on with all of you on this panel, really, really impressive. Thanks for putting this together, guys just a funny story to start, it actually took me a while to log into my Twitter because I don't really use Twitter, and so, you know, I only took the name to prevent cyber squatting. So it was actually funny because I've forgotten my password, but all is well, I'm here now. Well, a little bit about me. I'm a computer scientist but started my career primarily on Wall Street, worked at BAIN Company for a few years, worked at Bain Capital in private equity and leveraged buyouts, investing on a fund 10, for just under three years, and was, the sector head for technology, media, and telecom at Cigar Holdings. You know, as part of the team that grew that from about 150 million AUM to about 2 billion. They manage about 15 right now, so that's what really got me into entrepreneurship. I've been investing in the crypto space since about 2012, and really the way the company got started was I left that job at Cigar Holdings in 2017, actually just looking to invest in the space. I was like, this space needs a red hat, someone must be building a red hat versus space, and let me go put some money into that and, you know, help them really grow. I couldn't find a red hat, and so that's kind of why, you know, I kind of met some other investors who said, Mrinal, I think you're going to have to build this yourself, and that's really how the company started. So to it, you know, what Casper Labs is trying to do is be the red hat, kind of for the Casper network, but also, for the industry in general. And what that means is one, we embrace very, very open programming standards, which is what enterprise and governments, really, really care about. The current system where you have to do a teardown of your existing infrastructure isn't really viable for enterprise and governments who are our primary target audience. The second thing is we give a higher level of control to enterprises and governments than they can typically get on current blockchains, and this enabled through two things. One, almost every enterprise and government we're working with chooses a hybrid setup, and why this is great is you get all the benefits of a public network like the immutability, the audit trail, the transferability, tokenization, etc., but you can also choose to sequester data that you don't want to go public. So you get the best of both worlds. You can stay HIPAA compliant, you can state GDPR compliant while getting all the benefits of a public blockchain. The other way we allow greater levels of control is, while the past is immutable, I think as an industry, we sort of made a mistake by trying to make the future immutable as well. And so, I think we uniquely offer upgradable smart contracts, meaning you don't have to deprecate an old smart contract and put a new one in. You can just upgrade existing smart contracts. You can put any sort of governance around it that you want. You could make a smart contract unchangeable. You could say this one's only modifiable if a CFO signs off, but basically, pick your own adventure. And this allows enterprises and governments to pursue best demonstrated practices, like fixing bugs and changing things or changing customer, business, and regulatory changes. And then finally, and again, this is not exhaustive by any means, but what Red Hat did that was really, really great was Linux being a novel technology. You know, so it's market sharing servers was about one to two percent till Red Hat came along and took it closer to 90 percent. And that's because they offered professional services, which created two or three like really cool effects. One, companies that were reticent to reuse this new technology, Linux, now had a partner who could help them up the mountain. You know, sometimes the new technology needs a sherpa to show you the path. Second, it allowed Red Hat was probably the biggest contributor to Linux kernel, and it created a very, very virtuous cycle. Linux was not the best server software in the world, but it became the best server software in the world because they got this feedback loop with enterprises and therefore were able to create an ever-widening feature gap. And then finally, it also became a sustainable revenue-based model. So that's what we're trying to replicate in the industry. You know, we've designed ourselves to be ultra-ultra long term, and so we think of everything in terms of the enterprise sales cycle, which is typically two to three years.

‍Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Thank you so much, Mrinal. I wanted to get into some of the questions here. Oh man, I spent probably four or five hours today trying to write out as many well thought out questions as possible. Shout out to the community for asking some poignant questions as well that we're going to get into. I guess I'll start with question number one. You know, I do find synergy was kind of this question with an interesting post that Quincy from XDC put out probably a week ago. Shout out to Hedera. There is the Summit for Democracy that is now going to be happening where Hedera has committed to convene a Democracy Roundtable on blockchain technology to support human rights, transparency, and sustainability via distributed ledger technology applications. I guess the question that I would have is for you, Christian, is how important is it really for Hedera to delve out there and participate and inform and educate maybe people that may not be as educated around the technology that Hashgraph and blockchain technology can represent, and is this the last initiative that we're going to see this year from Hedera, or is this something that's maybe just the start of how Hedera is going to kind of delve out into all these different initiatives?

Hedera Hashgraph & Swirlds Labs – Christian Hasker - CMO
‍Yes, great question, and definitely hard off the press, so good job having your finger on the pulse there. So, Hedera has a global head of policy. Her name is Nelmoney Rubin. She came from Mata/Facebook prior to joining Hedera. She's also Hedera's chief of staff. And as far as other programs you're going to see in the policy arena, there will be more coming. We have been quietly behind the scenes for years since the inception of Hedera. We've made sure to meet with regulators and policy folks whenever we can and have done a lot of education. Leemon himself, who is our Hedera's co-founder and the inventor of Hashgraph, has educated folks within different departments along the way. And so what you're seeing now is sort of Hedera coming out of the shadows and doing things much more publicly out in the open. And it isn't just to the benefit of Hedera. This is to the benefit of the entire blockchain industry as well. We're big believers that there needs to be a ton of education done so that policymakers can make good decisions around the regulatory environment as we move forward as an entire industry. And we've seen some interesting moves and actions recently that, you know, well, I'll just leave it there. They're interesting.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, 100%. A couple of different things that I have here with panel questions, and for the whole panel up here, I've got so many questions. I want to try to get through all of them if we possibly can. So, if we could, as I ask these, it would be great to, like, just nail them down with answers. So, one Synergy aspect that I find within what Christian just stated there is something that Serenity Shield is working on. They just had a partnership with Contentra surrounding educational aspects. If you're not aware, Contentra has inroads into McGraw-Hill, Pearson, Edgenuity. If you've ever been a college student or a high school student or a middle school student, you probably recognize those things. I'll ask Venket real quick. How important is that partnership for Serenity Shield to really kind of delve out into the educational aspects of this space? I know it's a passion of the team over there.

‍Serenity Shield – Venket - CEO
‍So, did I rug set off the education vertical has been one of the fundamental building blocks of how we wanted to give it back to the society, and we sort of chose India as our launching pad, which is obviously one of the right decisions we did because India is obviously one of the largest markets for crypto users in the world. And also, it is having the maximum penetration market penetration in terms of the numbers, both on the quality and the quantity of uses. So we have chosen India as a launch part of the education vertical and then coming into the education vertical, we have sort of two sub-verticals. One is essentially to create full-stack blockchain developers with accreditation and certification because, you know, if you see that part of the technology of being creating full-stack developers, that segment is still very uncharted. I mean, people are just coming from sort of nowhere and they are geeks, etc. And there is that's why most, I believe, most of the edutech companies will be jumping into this segment because edutech companies, as you know, during the COVID and the pandemic times, they have raised so much of money. They are sitting with, I would say, even millions and billions of dollars. So they are going to jump into this. And we saw a great opportunity, specifically in a market like India. So we wanted to create an accredited and certified full-stack blockchain developers' course, and we are talking to some of the most reputed institutes in India, and we will get an accreditation. And that's one segment. The other segment is creating educational initiatives and workshops for the common users. And that's where we are working with the governmental organizations, the governmental entities to educate their employees and so on and so on. So that's the whole idea. And we feel that education and awareness is very, very important, both for the common public and for the people who are really trying to excel into the blockchain technology because it has to be sustained. You can't just focus on one and leave the other one. So that's why we are focusing on both aspects. Once we successfully launched in India, we will take you to the other countries in the world. And specifically, we have some very great plans for the U.S market. So you will see all the tanning out within the coming quarters in the U.S as well.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Thank you so much, Venket. Also, I see I find synergy in what Christian was talking about around that initiative with kind of a round table around educating whether it be policymakers or enterprises around the ways that blockchain and blockchain hashgraph DLT aspects can really kind of, you know, benefit society, benefit, you know, humankind, all these different aspects. Quincy from the XDC network, you know, obviously one of the most kind of in the network devs put out a really good post I think was probably a week, week and a half ago. In Quincy, maybe if you could just give us two or three minutes on this post. So what you said within this post is that decentralized applications or DApps will take over blockchains in the same way that applications took over smartphones. I would love to hear your thoughts on that, briefly if you can.

XDC – Quincy – Foundation Developer
‍Yeah, actually one of the main reasons why I even made that post in the first place was to really articulate like what these things are actually like built to do. They're built to build that they're built to build a means for further productivity or production or whatever it may be, whether it's in the form of services, whether it's a form of different applications, and which can be used by different users. Yes, there's a means in which the application layer and the payment layer are sort of brought into one, but the biggest thing is the dapps or the services that are produced off of these blockchains. They are really the biggest innovation that's going to come off of these things. When, and sort of in that post that I made, I sort of went into, "Well, you know, back in 2007 or 2008 or whatever, people would go, 'Oh, which one is it going to be? Is it going to be Apple? Is it going to be Android? Is it going to be iPhone? There's going to be Blackberry or whatever it is.' And at the end of the day, the apps won. You know, at the end of the day, we all think of Airbnb, Uber, all TikTok, all these big applications, and yeah, sure, they operate off of these off the infrastructure, and you know, in this case, it may be the cell phone technology or the mobile technology, but the biggest thing is the apps. It is what really defines how the user experience is for whatever these technologies may be. I think the exact same thing is going to come in terms of how blockchain technology is. We all look at these different protocols, and we go, 'Oh, you know, I hold this token, and I may be able to interact with this network in this capacity, but at the end of the day, you're going to be interacting with some sort of application that's going to give you some sort of service that's going to improve your life.' And at the end of the day, that service is really the thing that you're going to be interacting with. Yeah, it may operate on this blockchain or on this mobile phone or on this infrastructure, whatever it may be, but at the end of the day, you are the one who's utilizing a service, and there are going to be a million services out there. The real question is, what platform is going to facilitate these services best for the user to be able to have the best user experience? You know, like most people don't really think about, 'Oh, iPhone or Android or whatever type of phone you have, LG, Samsung, whatever.' No one thinks about that. They just go, 'Oh, look, TikTok! Oh, look, Facebook! Oh, look, Instagram! Oh, look, Airbnb! Oh, look, whatever it is.' And I think, at least from the user perspective, you're going to see more users come on from the next Airbnb or the next Facebook or the next Instagram or whatever, then you are just gonna see people focused on, 'Oh, is it Apple or Android?' And it just also comes into to play that there are going to be multiple winners in terms of what platforms are utilized, but the apps are what people are going to use, and what the apps are going to define the user experience for people. And in terms of how people are able to move forward with their adoption of these different networks, I don't even think the average person is even gonna know. The average person may just go, 'Oh, I use this app,' and it you know, just happens to be on this network or on this network or whatever but for the most part, it just comes down to the services that are provided on whatever network that people tend to choose. Is really what's going to drive adoption towards those networks. As opposed to, and the biggest thing I was focusing on those on that post is, we seem to see him a lot of investors but not a lot of users. And the users of like, I said the next Facebook or whatever is going to really define what's gonna be the network that wins or the network that is mostly adopted.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍It's interesting too, because you know, I do agree with what you're saying. I mean, you know, most people aren't even going to be utilized or realizing that they're utilizing aspects of crypto or aspects of blockchain. They're just going to see their services moving quicker, faster, cheaper, more efficiently. One aspect that I'd like to ask Mrinal from Casper Labs is, you know, there's going to be a new Casper wallet. I think it's still an open Beta right now, and I think today is the last day for open Beta, which is, if you want to check it out, it's Casper wallet dot IO. I think you can still get in there. Renault, if you could touch base on the new Casper wallet that I believe is going to be overtaking Casper Steiner briefly for us, and then I'll I want to kind of bring it over to Jake from V chain. That'd be fantastic.

Casper Labs – Mrinal Manohar – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, absolutely. So, hey, can you hear me? Yep, you sound, yep, loud and clear, all right, great, great. Sorry, I thought I might not have hit um mute.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍So I have to tell you dude, I did check out your Twitter account because I know when you, when you came on, you're like, "I don't use Twitter." Whenever you go to Mrinal’s actual Twitter account, it literally says in the bio something like, "I don't use Twitter."

Casper Labs – Mrinal Manohar – Founder & CEO
‍Like, that's right. I only got the account to make sure someone didn't impersonate me, but yeah, I'm not big on social media, but luckily, luckily for the rest of the world, the rest of the people at the company are a lot more social than I have. Actually, I'm very social. I just don't know social media. Anyway, to answer your question, the Casper wallet really, it's built by the same team that built the Casper signer. Really, really excited. I think you know, it has a lot of features that are very, very focused on our end user, which is enterprises and governments. Especially, you know, how it handles NFTs. And I wanna draw a distinction here when we say NFTs. You know, I'm talking primarily about digital certificates. And so, I'll give an example like what we did with iPE who just won, you know, best enterprise blockchain project at Paris blockchain week. Like, the each NFT in that case represents a patent or some element of intellectual property. And the metadata within that NFT is basically who owns the licenses, which countries is the patent registered in when do the licenses expire, etc. etc., so basically all the information about one piece of intellectual property is all in one NFT, and so you need a wallet that's able to carry, you know, more complex things than just, you know, a basket of cryptos. And so, we wanted to make sure that, you know, a wallet was built that had these enterprise-grade features for things like, especially, NFTs that represent real-world items. So, it's built by Make Services, the same guys we built so we didn't build it, Labs didn't build it, we really focus mostly on core protocol and enterprise engagements, but the team at Make Services are actually co-founders of Casper Labs, and so they know the technology like the back of their hands. And, really, really excited. I believe it'll launch in a few weeks or a few days, but don't hold me to it. I'm actually so focused on enterprise stuff that I've not looked at as much at the ecosystem. That's no - does that, no?

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, that's absolutely perfect. So, I, yeah, like I said up here, when we're hosting these things, I've got so many questions, so I really appreciate everybody's answers as I kind of try to find synergy with all these questions that I've written down on the on my notepads here. I want to kind of move into V Chain in that regard because I think there's a lot of synergy with, you know, when I interviewed Sunny Lou down at the Hive Summit, one of the big goals that Sunny had from the VeChain ecosystem is to onboard a hundred thousand users regarding sustainable impact initiatives. And maybe I'll ask Jake, you know, one of the initiatives in the new white paper from VeChain is interconnected blockchain biospheres which rewards pro-societal and eco-friendly behaviors. Can you talk, can you touch base on that initiative through VeChain as well as the collaboration with Boston Consulting Group which is a behemoth, by the way, and the new white paper briefly for us? That'd be fantastic.

VeChain – Jake - Communications Lead and Community Manager
‍Yeah, sure. I mean, I can try and be brief. As you might have seen from the document, it's not exactly a brief document. But I guess what it touches on is this notion of incentivization through ecosystems. So, you know, some obviously a trait that blockchains are able to kind of leverage, the ability to grant value to activities. We call them positive externalities. But for instance, you may make a purchase that's in line with your kind of ethical position or based on the sustainability of a given product. And that kind of, we're basically leveraging blockchain and BCG's kind of expertise to price in these positive externalities to essentially create incentives and rewards about kind of proactive behavior in that regard. So, to dial it back, we had an early proof of concept that we did with BYD, which is one of the largest global electric vehicle manufacturers, in 2018. And what that boiled down to was, okay, you drive this electric vehicle, you reach the end of your journey, you upload data from the journey. The smart contract will basically calculate your carbon offset. That was done in combination with DNV, who is a global certification authority, to obviously create that credibility, they're an expert in that field. And then, what the outcome of that was, was you earned a carbon credit which within this ecosystem, which comprised of insurance companies, food providers, even Health Care, there were all these kinds of participants at the enterprise level. You as the individual who has then earned this carbon credit through your activity could then spend them those credits with these other providers in the ecosystem. So, that was taken a level up in 2019 when we started working with San Marino. So, San Marino is a micro-nation in Europe. Now, our headquarters got invited there by the San Marino government because we're fulfilling their 2013 roadmap sustainability roadmap objectives which are essentially to become the world's first carbon-neutral country powered by blockchain. So, fast forward a few years, BCG obviously a global behemoth as you point out in the field of ESG's sustainability, the top two Global Management Consultant, and they're on the principal drivers of ESG across the Enterprise landscape. So, we've been working with them. We've formed a global partnership with the only blockchain we currently work with. And the scope of that partnership is to take this incentivized ecosystem model to scale globally. So, BCG have a vast client network. They love the work and they're, you know, we co-developed this new white paper as you pointed out. And we're calling them blockchain bias first now. So, these we're taking this modular approach to the development of these sustainability ecosystems and applying them across many kinds of industry. So, some of the initial kind of targets are, you know, battery technology, EV, battery recycling, sorry, and you know, similar to Casper who just spoke before, is creating NFT passports for the electric vehicle batteries at the start of their lifecycle so that you have this product trail throughout, you know, ownership, sale, resale, disposal. And you create this kind of trail of culpability to demonstrate that the battery has been recycled effectively and returned to the production cycle. You know, and various other kinds of industry basically being worked on. Fashion, second-hand fashion, for example, that's a big, you know, and very common kind of use and wasteful industry. And it's about, again, leveraging NFT technology in this novel way where you may partake in a second-hand fashion marketplace. You can earn NFTs from your purchases between this marketplace. So, then you have this principle called token gating where after you acquire 10 of these purchases, for example, you as a participant in this ecosystem may earn some reward. And it's about, you know, it's almost like a next level of kind of membership, really. I mean, I was in a space yesterday, and I made the example of, "I'm sure we've all had those Costa cards, and you buy a coffee, and you get to five, and then you lose it somewhere. And you're like, 'Oh, you know, there goes my free poverty.' I mean, it's essentially a digitization of that in a way, but creating these incentivized ecosystems. But then they're also translatable, you know, between ecosystems. So, not creating silos of activity. You create interoperable incentivized ecosystems so your participation in this particular ecosystem may benefit you in another one, and of course that depends on Enterprises, publics, etc. coming together at a large scale and agreeing and kind of identifying what value they want to extract from these models. And, you know, that's where someone like BCG comes in, because of course they are the global leader in this field. And we had Vinay Chandal, who's been a figurehead of the ESG movement with BCW (BCG got acronyms all over the shop, yeah) for quite a while now. So, it's a very exciting development for applications of blockchain at large. And of course, Vechain's been around a long time. We've got a lot of battle-tested technologies. We've already worked with a lot of leading Enterprise clients. And that's why they wanted to work first. So, I think very exciting times for blockchain. I think we're all aware that we're entering NEPOC where this tech is really starting to take hold. Now, the public narrative and very exciting development for sure.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah. When we, um, I know Christian's got a hop at the top of the hour, but I wanna, you know, after Christian has to go, I want to pivot back to X Manna because we're talking about dap ecosystems. But first and foremost, you know, to put on top of that, like digital goods, there was an interview done with, um, oh shoot, I'm gonna forget the name of the individual, um, but it was done through Nausia. So now if you're not aware, Nausia essentially runs the ACH system in the United States. And the interview that they did was about traditional enterprises talking about $50 billion worth of goods are bought digitally by, oh, even only in the United States consumers on an annual basis. And then kind of looking at where that's at now, and it's certainly an easy pivot. And it's not like that number is going to go down into blockchain, into DLT, into kind of the web through ecosystem. So, I'm gonna maybe provide a couple of statistics here surrounding Hedera recently, and then maybe ask, hopefully, a decent question to Christian. First and foremost, we look at ecosystem growth, the Hedera ecosystem, especially in 2023, has been achieving well over a billion mainnet transactions on a monthly basis, which is a pretty insane stat. We did just see Dell join the governing council. I think they're the 28th member at this point in time. And certainly, if you read the press releases, they're kind of researching Edge Computing aspects as one potential use case. The question that I have for Christian, this is a question that Christian is probably not going to be able to answer, is there was a video that came out from the Paris blockchain week from a ServiceNow employee that he basically said that there's 33 organizations on the governing board of Hedera instead of 28. I found it a little bit curious because we do know that the 28 members  within Hedera, I can answer that one. Yeah, okay, okay.

Hedera Hashgraph & Swirlds Labs – Christian Hasker - CMO
‍He totally misspoke. There are 28 Governing Council members.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Okay, okay, great. Um, so I guess, you know, to piggyback on top of that and thank you for clarifying, which is why I found it curious. Because, you know, Governing Council members actually do govern the network. So for somebody to say that there's more, it's like, yeah, but really is there?

Hedera Hashgraph & Swirlds Labs – Christian Hasker - CMO
‍So, the fact of the matter is that council members can sign the LLC agreement, but they actually do not become active council members until they are announced publicly. That is when their membership actually starts and goes into effect. So when the world finds out about a council member, that is actually when they become an active council member. So we're at 28.

‍Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍I figured. Thank you so much for clarifying. I do also want to give a shout-out. I mean,  the Hbar Foundation just essentially onboarded a gigantic powerhouse in regards to not only traditional finance and the powers to be. Brian Brooks, who was previously the Chief Legal Officer at Coinbase and the former Comptroller of the Currency, Brian Brooks, onboarding him. I wanted to ask you a question though, Christian, which is, you know, with the surge in transactions, you know, I think most of us know that have been in Hedera for quite some time that that comes from a decent amount of that probably comes from atma.io through Avery Denison and their Connected Product Cloud with the RFID tagging and the billions of products that they deal with. Should we expect potentially another large use case, maybe the Coupon Bureau, uh, something like that to maybe be going live at some point this year? Um, and I know you probably can't touch on it, but what is your expectation for transactions and network growth over the course of 2023? What are you excited about?

Hedera Hashgraph & Swirlds Labs – Christian Hasker - CMO
‍So at Atma themselves, that's the first application in the entire industry at real Enterprise scale. They themselves have big plans to grow the number of digital fingerprints that are tracking on Hedera, and they have decarbonization initiatives as well. Coupon Bureau, yes, we're all waiting. I think they're waiting as well. That industry is moving more slowly than initially anticipated. And, for those that don't know, there's a new standard for digital coupons called 8112 that will be adopted industry-wide by consumer product goods companies. But the deprecation of the previously old standard, which is paper-based coupons, if you can believe it, they get shipped to a warehouse in Mexico and get counted and reconciled by hand. Um, you know, that deprecation is taking a little longer. You did touch on ServiceNow. ServiceNow has, you know, big plans around Hedera. Well, in some of their applications, will be going live later this year as well as one other council member that I can't mention a name yet. But they've been working on an interesting use case around customer engagement and loyalty that will also be going live later this year as well.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Awesome. While we still have you up here, Christian, and these are actually a couple of cross-panelist questions here, so I'm going to get to some community questions because I know you're double-booked at the top of the hour. This is from Tyler Bajata, and he asks, 'Ask Casper and Hedera if they want to hire somebody to head their recruitment/talent acquisition teams from the US.' So, Christian and Mrinal, are you guys open to hiring somebody for talent acquisition in the United States to lead the group?

Casper Labs – Mrinal Manohar – Founder & CEO
‍We already have one, so we already did it. I believe June of last year, so Richard Morrow, who basically runs all our talent acquisition, has been with the firm for, you know, since last June or May. So the answer is yes, we already did.

Hedera Hashgraph & Swirlds Labs – Christian Hasker - CMO
‍Yeah, same boat. His name is Luciano Belazan, and he's been on board now for a while and he heads up talent acquisition for both Swirlds Labs, which is the product development and marketing arm for Hedera, as well as recruitment for Hedera themselves.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍I mean, yeah. And I apologize to Tyler, no United States head of acquisition talent acquisition positions currently available with Hedera's worlds or Casper, but good question. I definitely want to ask Quincy as well while we're up here. So, Quincy, is there a likely date for the XDC upgrade which I believe this is referring to XD POS 2.0, and the guy said don't just say soon?

XDC – Quincy – Foundation Developer
‍Actually, that's a huge thing that's going on with these infant protocols team. I hate to say this this way, but definitely within the next three months, four months max or so. I'm not part of that team in terms of that's putting forward that initiative, so I'm sorry with the bad news, but no, you're fine.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Christian, I know you got to hop. I wanted to ask you before you do. You know how I don't even know if the word impressive is the right word, but watching community builders within the Hedera ecosystem has been something that I've found a lot of interest in recently. I can think of HeadStarter, I can think of Age, part of the Moon launching Citadel wallet. I can think of NFT here launching an NFT marketplace that has, you know, massive amounts of data analytics. What's kind of been your impression or, you know, patches that's been here with HGraph IO and the GraphQL API, aspects, like what's been kind of one of the more impressive things that you've seen? Like, I'm just curious. Like, I'm sure that you guys have been seeing this. Like, Hedera's or Swirls's thoughts on, like, the community builders really bootstrapping and just doing the work.

Hedera Hashgraph & Swirlds Labs – Christian Hasker - CMO
‍Yes, it has been. If I reflect on where we were a year ago, so we had just released the new smart contract service in February 2022, and in one year, the community has built an entire ecosystem around the Hedera token service with the smart contract service. And you know, you've heard me talk a lot on their spaces and in the past about the focus on enterprise adoption, which is natural given the council governance model. But it is the individual builders, community members, small startups that build out all of these networks, right? Not just Hedera. And without these communities, none of our ecosystems would exist. And that's not lost on me. It's not lost on the folks at Swartz Labs, certainly not lost on Mance and Leemon and the governing council members themselves. And yeah, I'm just so appreciative. So it's really hard to pick out any, you know, one organization. We have HashPack on this call. I will say I've used wallets across various ecosystems, and HashPack is a delight. And I think one of the things that sets HashPack apart from maybe other wallets in both the Hedera ecosystem and other ecosystems is their attentiveness to community feedback and the speed at which they add features based off of that community feedback. So for anyone building in any ecosystem, I think an organization like HashPack really sets a high standard on community engagement and development.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Before you hop, Christian, I wanted to mention because I know, you know, I always try to find as much synergy as I possibly can between the panelists up here, and, I know Leemon is working on decentralized recovery aspects within users' wallets, uh, x, y, and z. I do know that that probably, it, there's a little bit of synergy probably there within, you know, some of the aspects that Serenity Shield is building out around, you know, data sovereignty and custody. Do we have a date on, on direct, potentially, from what Lehman is working on right now, or is that kind of just, you know, still being worked on?

Hedera Hashgraph & Swirlds Labs – Christian Hasker - CMO
‍Yeah, no, no, no date. The libraries will be open-sourced, though, and it will, you know, it's not just to the benefit of Hedera, right? It's to the benefit of the entire ecosystem. So, yeah, no, no date, but, uh, I know Lehman is hard at work on it.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Well, thank you so much for joining, Christian. I tried to ask as many questions before, uh, the top of the hour here for you. I think I did get through all of them. I'm looking forward to, I should mention, by the way, guys we're going to be doing, we're still doing this. I've got some questions for all these panelists up here. I just, I didn't know that we were going to lose Christian here. We're going to be doing another big cross-chain space on the 12th, as well as the 26th of April, so stay tuned for that. And thank you so much Christian for joining us today, thank you. I'm going to pivot over. It, thank you Christian. I'm going to pivot over to Jake. You know, we talk interoperability, and you know even within the white, the newer white paper, I know one of the big pivots, not pivots but the big shifts towards interoperability in 2023 for VeChain is, you know, a multitude of things. Can you give us a brief overview of what Voyage represents within the VeChain ecosystem? You guys describe it as a web 3 as a service platform, and I know that you guys are focused not only on sustainability but interoperability moving forward. Maybe give us an overview of Voyage and what that represents within VeChain and what that potentially means for the vegan ecosystem.

VeChain – Jake - Communications Lead and Community Manager
‍Yeah, absolutely. So Forge is one of the key products that's kind of been being built at the moment, and for context, if anyone's familiar with ToolChain, it's a kind of precursor that was essentially built for Enterprises, and it's a kind of, you know, the whole rationale is taking the blockchain out of blockchain. So through this ToolChain platform, you can essentially have a nice user interface, you can drop and drag things as you need them, and as a relative layman, you can deploy a solution and get blockchain up and running within your business. You know, and combine it with NFCs and NFTs, and you know, combining the RFID elements that you may need within a supply chain or perhaps, you know, fidget tools for fashion designers or, you know, other kinds of user. Where Voyage comes in, it's the evolution of this. So as you touched on and as our other panelists have touched on, interoperability is going to be, you know, vital, and we're an EVM blockchain. So, we've asked SmartChains are kind of, well, you know, they're largely Ethereum-based, but they have a subtle tweak. So one of the things the dev team has been running towards now is just making sure we are aligned with, kind of, Ethereum, you know, EIP-20 standards to make sure we've got the kind of wide widest kind of applicability. And those we're seeing the fruit of that now in the last few days and this week we've seen various tools deployed to the network just to make sure, you know, for example, with the Enterprise users we're working with on private referring-based blockchains where they are looking to migrate or become hybrid public privates. So, you know, this is important for VeChain to be able to offer that public aspect in a seamless way. But to get to the crux of your question, Forge, essentially it's this. So, I've had the pleasure of having a little play test the other day, and FYI, it should be out in the next couple of weeks. I know you never want to put a time scale on things, but I know it's imminently due, so keep your eyes peeled. But it's this interface, essentially, where you have a series of templates, smart contracts, fungible tokens, non-fungible tokens. Whatever you might need as a builder, so you can come along, essentially, Drag and drop and drag your kind of solutions as you need them, or you know, the various components, and essentially just deploy without the hassle of having to learn, you know, blockchain, go through the rigmarole of how to, well, you know, deep dive into blockchain. It's obviously a new field for many people. Critically, you can deploy as of a Vechain specific smart contracts or ERC-aligned contracts. So, for that interoperability element, I think you would naturally more likely opt for the ERC standard, which you know, makes sense. We've got Bridges coming that will allow that kind of cross-chain communication. But where this kind of comes in as a real power tool and the kind of one of the key drivers here for it is the web 2.5 companies, as we kind of jokingly call them, right? You've got this transition underway for web 2 Businesses looking to move to web3, and you've got this roadblock of developing and building solution in the first instance. You know, can you there's a lot of lead time and effort and expense that can go into this. So we're working with various projects at the moment. Well, actually, I shouldn't name names, but one particular vendor who, for example, you can do it. You can literally name names in this space. Nobody's gonna listen. I mean, but essentially, you know, they're a web 2 company, let's put it that way, and they want to build out this web3 service platform. And yeah, they're using Voj to basically fulfill their objectives. I know we've got another one, which is a really cool one, actually, because this came through the community, which, you know, again, as a friend from Madera just touched on, the power of community in the Blockchain space is just such an amazing tool. In a sense, you know, like the power of this expanded reach is just, yeah, unrivaled. But to get to the point there, um, there's an individual, they produce a health food product, and they want to integrate this means at the checkout to essentially, you know, check as, uh, so sorry, I've stumbled over my words, but there are certain NFT projects in Vechain, and if you're a holder of this, through this vendor who's formed a kind of, you know, collaboration, you can then get to the checkout, and using Forge, they can, and an API, it can then check, "Oh, they're a holder of this particular thing," and then they can apply discount code. So it's a very simplistic example, but of course, when it comes to things like the blockchain biospheres approach, you know, this kind of simple integration through APIs and Forge is an extremely powerful cost-effective tool to help these companies that are very not versed, but who want to adopt these technologies move into the space so, in terms of VeChain's technological offerings, this is a real core part of, you know, what's going to form the kind of strategy this year and beyond, as we move into this kind of adoption curve for the technology at large. So yeah, Forge is a really exciting platform that I definitely recommend. You know, a couple of weeks, come back, check out Twitter. I'm sure we'll have some releases and updates about it and you can just have a play. It's going to be free, initially, so no reason not to come and have a little play and test the power of VeChain.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, 100. I mean, I think that, you know, you mentioned smart contract functionality, as well as we were talking previously about the Dapp ecosystems, and I want to ask for an all, Step 78 through Casper is coming out, you know, extremely. I think it's up for vote right now, but it's easy, you know, essentially easily upgradable smart contracts, mutability, tangibility, whitelist functionality, and then really, you know, one of them, another interesting aspect. I know people have different thoughts around NFTs, but NFTs create community. April 6th, I think Casper punks are also coming out. Can you talk potentially on, maybe I'll ask you like a dude? I'm like the worst because I'll ask the most convoluted questions like I'll do like three paragraphs, and I'll be like, can you give a brief explanation on these 40 questions I just answered? Can you touch base on Step 78, the power of community in Dapps, as well as Casper 2.0 as well?

Casper Labs – Mrinal Manohar – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, of course. So just to be clear, the community and Dapps is much more in the association's wheelhouse, the non-profit. So, you know, I represent Casper Lab, so my focus really is much more on enterprise and government. That being said, you know, obviously, we want to have a really, really healthy Dapp and, you know, call it retail ecosystem as well. But just so you know, I focus on the enterprise side. So, everything I say going forward will be in that context. So let's talk about Step 78 and Casper 2.0, two things I'm super excited about. So Step 78 is our NFT standard. Now, where it varies from other NFT standards is there's a multitude of things. One, the metadata is very, very rich and customizable. So, you know, you could represent a patent and all sorts of metadata about the patent. You know, like I mentioned with IPV, if you're NFTing a bunch of mortgages and you want mortgages to go, you could put in, you know, what's the rate, what's the Libor curve look like? You know, the amount of metadata that you can put into this NFT is actually pretty huge. And so we created basically an enterprise-grade NFT standard. The other thing is, just like our smart contracts, these NFTs are also upgradable. And this is really important if you think about some of the enterprise use cases that use NFT, so I'll give you an example. Kind of named the company, but we're working with a company where they basically need to take calibration readings of microchips and call it other test equipment. Now, each of them is represented as an NFT, and you know the NFT has ultimate metadata of when the last test was and the result of that test. Now, you want that metadata to continually be upgraded, and so you know you don't want that to be off chain, you want that ball to be on chain. And you know, we've allowed the NFT standard basically to create a living, breathing NFT that reacts to changes of the underlying call it physical good asset, what have you. So, set 78 is basically a super advanced NFT standard, but it's really, really rooted in enterprise use cases to make sure that, you know, when we think NFTs, we're thinking less monkey pictures, we're thinking more, you know, is it a digital certificate of a real thing like a patent, a mortgage, a car lease, etc. Casper 2.0, uh, you know, the first upgrade that's going to come out is 1.5 and 2.0, and we will be communicating a specific timeline on 1.5 and 2.0 soon. So, the final specification is being done. Uh, 2.0 brings a host of amazing features. One, uh, we've upgraded our consensus mechanism. Uh, again, you know, we came up with the first, you know, version of CBC Casper, but we've upgraded it again. Uh, it's gonna take the overhead down a lot while maintaining, you know, ultra security that we've, you know, we've always been known for. So, really excited about the new consensus protocol. It's really like the message passing overhead is much lower. It's actually way more secure as well because you use attestations as part of call it the, uh, approval flow. The other thing that we're really excited about, and I can't go into too much detail on this, but there's a really, really cool mechanic coming up in 2.0 that basically will allow you to budget, uh, gas fees very, very accurately. So, you know, one of the issues that enterprise and governments have, and you know, one of the reasons why they haven't adopted blockchain technology, isn't that fees are expensive or cheap, it's that they're unpredictable. And you know, as tokens go up and down in value, you know, your gas fees go up and down pretty severely. And if you think about them using infrastructure, you know, when they use AWS or a payment processor, etc., it's a fixed rate. And so, we figured a way to offer effectively a fixed rate. I can't go into too much detail, but really, really excited about it. You know, we have two full-time economists on staff, and you know, I personally enjoy macroeconomics a lot, and so you know, we really geeked out on trying to figure out how to square this circle. But those are the two main things. I mean, there's probably 10 to 15 things in 2.0, but the two main things really are the stabilization of gas fees and the new,  new consensus mechanism that I'm most excited about.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
‍Yeah, thank you so much Mrinal, I did because I know we just had Christian hop and we were talking about Dapp ecosystems previously as well, and I want to give x-manna the opportunity to touch base on. I mean, I went to the site today and looking at kind of all the aspects of applications with web 3 initiatives that you guys are building.