Hedera Mass Adoption: Swirlds & Envision Blockchain

In this weeks episode of the Hedera corner, King Solomon from Genfinity and Darren Moore interview Michael Garber, Developer Advocate at Swirlds Labs, and Daniel Norkin, CEO of Envision Blockchain. In this episode, the panelists speak about 4orum.io, the Guardian project build on Hedera and much more.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
Alrighty, we're gonna get started here. Guys, first and foremost, thank you for everybody that joins on a weekly basis. You guys do know that we do these Hedera Corner spaces in collaboration with HashPack through Genfinity, every Monday, normally at 3 P.M. Eastern Time. We pivot on occasion based on availability of some of the panelists that we can get on here. So, super appreciative to HashPack and Marc,  May, and Jacob and everybody that always helps us to, streamline these conversations. Really excited today. We've got a little bit of a powerhouse of a panel up here. So, Michael Garber, as I mentioned prior to starting, is a Developer Advocate at Swirls Labs, also the creator of web3 free speech platform 4orum.io. Daniel Norkin, who is CEO at Envision Blockchain, as well. And we've got one of the XRP community's OG of OG Legends up here helping us to co-host this space, and hoping to learn as much as you can about Hedera, that is Darren Moore Jr, Fame 21 more. I can't. We always start these out by a little bit of an introduction amongst the panelists, so I'll start with, Michael. If you can maybe provide us, you know, an intro into yourself as well as what led you into the web three space and what got you interested into Hedera, AKA becoming, an H-barbarian, that'd be fantastic. ‍

Swirlds Labs – Michael Garber – Developer Advocate
Yeah, thanks King Solomon. Oh, that was quite an intro. For me, yeah, my name is Michael. I'm just, that was a good intro. But really, I'm just another Bozo on the bus that's passionate about changing the world for good. And, I was started off in blockchain, interested some years ago, around 2013. And, I went to school for programming, and then I got a job at a consulting place for blockchain called Chain Yard. And then, after that, I worked at MasterCard as a contractor on their cryptography-as-a-service platform. And then, about a year into that, I was kind of tired of doing features and bug fixes day in and day out, so I reached out to my favorite blockchain project that I've been watching for a while, and I got an interview. They didn't want me as a developer, but they chose me as a developer advocate, and I was really grateful for that. And that's where I started my journey at Hedera. And along the way, I just... I saw that, the consensus service was perfect for making what I had been thinking about for a number of years, a immutable free speech platform built on blockchain. And so, I got to work, and now it's live. Now we're here. ‍

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
Awesome. Well, thank you. Thank you so much, Michael. Really appreciate... I appreciate the intro. Um, move over to Daniel. Daniel Norton is the CEO at Envision Blockchain. Daniel, if you could give maybe a little, uh, intro into yourself, what got you interested into the web3 ecosystem, and what got you interested in, um, the Hedera ecosystem as well and, building out the Guardian platform within Hedera, that'd be fantastic. ‍

Envision Blockchain – Daniel Norkin - CEO
Yeah, sure. Thank you so much for having me on, and, you know, it's definitely a pleasure to speak here. So just just a little bit about, Envision Blockchain. So, we've been open since the early part of 2018, and we've been building applications in the web 3 space, really since then and we help companies out, really, in three major milestones It's "we help them out, not just on the development, but also in the use case analysis and developing out a group of concepts. And obviously, once things start to take off, then make sure that we have the right teams in place for scale deployments. Actually, our journey with the Hedera folks began before 2018. So, I think it was... So, I wanted to... I'm one of the co-founders here, and an Envision, and the other co-founder's name is Jason. And our first consensus conference actually was in 2017. And we kind of had our eye in the space. And we had known Hedera as an enterprise-focused blockchain. At the time, it was still a private chain, but we made sure just to, you know, stop by the booth and say hi to the folks and, we're wearing a "Hello Future" T-Shirt, you know, from back in the day. Since then, you know, so... It's really great to see the way that Hedera has evolved into the public space. And, you know, our journey in the web 3 space has been pretty vast across many different ecosystems since then. You know, I think that the experience that we've had has really led to the work of the Guardian. Just like you had mentioned, our experience in tokenization, our experience in different cloud infrastructures, our experience in the decentralized identity space. So, fast forward to about two and a half years ago from the time that we opened. We were approached by the Hedera team with the vision on what the Guardian could be, and it was in, you know, just the idea phases at the time. And just, just like what, you know, just like what we were mentioned with doing the use case analysis and proof-of-concept development, you know, we really took it from, really the beginning stages and working with various community members to, you know, build it up to what it is today. I think that we launched at first, it was like October 2021 is when the repo went live. And since then, it's been really taken the world by storm, no pun intended on that. And it's like, I think that there's over a hundred projects that are currently using the open-source, and we also have our managed Guardian service, which has over... I just looked at the numbers. We went into beta, in a free beta period as of January, and we have over 130 users there. So, really great to be on the mission together with all the H-bar folks. ‍

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
That's fantastic. And thank you so much, Daniel, for the introduction. I'm going to... So, this is going to be a little bit of a different, um, spaces today. And, you know, one of the things that we normally focus on, uh, with a lot of our spaces on Wednesdays, is certainly breaking down silos across ecosystems. And I thought it was a perfect opportunity to bring, um, one of my probably best friends in crypto for four or five years at this point in time, Darren Moore Jr., who does lots of research across multiple ecosystems. A lot of you guys may know him from Ripple and XRP research and things like that, but he's, you know, really been an advocate for this space. I'm going to kind of let him run with this, Darren If you could provide a little bit of an intro into yourself and then kick us off with some of the more poignant questions with the panelists up here, that'd be great. ‍

Darren Moore
Hi, guys. So, as you know, I'm a content creator. I like to make content that takes really complicated ideas and try to break them down and make them more simple and make videos based off of that. So, I'm primarily focused on just macroeconomics and crypto in general at large, and I really haven't had a lot of time to explore the Hedera ecosystem until late. I'm quite impressed, you know, there's quite a bit of applications being built on top of Hedera, so I'm getting excited about it. And my first question has to go to Michael. I wanted to ask him why he's passionate about freedom of speech with the Forum initiative that he's created. ‍

Swirlds Labs – Michael Garber – Developer Advocate
Oh, yeah, great question. I love this. So, it all started. Passionate about free speech. Well, it all started kind of on Reddit. I was an avid Reddit user. I had friends who had subforums that had a bit of a following. They were gaining a following just for the message that they spoke. And I was in college at this time, and I would see, like, they didn't like what he had to say, essentially. We don't have to really get into it on the spaces. They didn't like what he had to say, and they quarantined his subforum, even though he was following the guidelines to a T. His subreddit was growing, and they shut him down. So, that was my first glimpse at it. He had told me about this stuff about, like, Shadow Banning, which is essentially the same thing as banning. And then I could see vote manipulations. If he'd refresh the page, you know, there'd be different counts of votes. I mean, almost like they would set the vote count rather than the people setting the vote count. And it wasn't fair and didn't seem fair. And so, I kind of migrated to an image board, and I found my home there. And I also saw problems with it as well. And through this whole process, I kind of thought, wouldn't it be amazing if anyone anywhere could just speak the truth and that truth not be censored? Everyone would have an equal opportunity to do this, regardless of whether or not the current narrative goes against what that individual was saying. And so, when I created Forum, my driving passion behind that was to empower these content creators to speak their mind freely and to be paid for it. And that's kind of how I got here. And I'm extremely excited when we released Forum, when it went live. I got overwhelming support, and I was surprised to see that. I was actually not even going to go live with it because just because of all the things that come along with it. I mean, it's kind of a scary move, honestly, to create something like this. I don't really understand the overreaching political implications of it. It could be far-reaching. And I started making a proof of concept. I didn't have any wallet hooked up to it, and I showed the developer advocate team, they thought it was cool, and then I reached out to Tyler at some very strange hours on the weekend because I had to develop this thing outside work. Thank you, Tyler, for promptly responding to these support questions, which were probably very newbish, but nonetheless, he helped me through it and saw me through it. And then he was like, "So when are you going live?" And I was like, "Go live? What do you mean, go live?" Like, I started sweating. And then, you know, I'm just reminded kind of by a tweet that I saw Patches do today. It's like, "Do or do not. There is no try, Master Yoda." So, I decided, you know, I just hit the "I." I went live, and I got support, and it was amazing to see. This H-Barbarian community is truly amazing, and I'm thoroughly grateful for it. And I'm happy to see where Forum is going. We already have over a hundred threads, and it's been almost three weeks. That's just an awesome journey, and I'm glad that I'm able to share it with you guys. There's also a thread that I made to go in alignment with this Twitter spaces. It's like, you know, HashPack and Forum. Drop a post if you, just to tell the world that you were here when it all started. So, these posts will last forever as long as the network endures. And I mean, even if all 27, now 28, we just got a new council member, even if all their servers were obliterated, you would still have the record in Mirror nodes of these posts. And it's just... Yeah. ‍

Darren Moore
So, yeah, I know, just from my own experience with social media, a lot of times, you know, you will get Shadow banned if you say the wrong thing at the wrong time. You know, I recall just with COVID, you know, just mentioning COVID, you got to be careful of saying the word COVID, to say C19 or some other thing that people would get, people would understand. And it's... It's important that, you know, the powers that be, so to speak, aren't in control of social media, because, you know, the people that control the information, you know, it's... It's important that it's spread out. My next question has to go to Daniel, uh, Daniel, and I was wondering why you, why Project Guardian? Like, I want to know how the ESG market works and why does Project Guardian make it more efficient? Like, why would I choose to use Project Guardian over other platforms? ‍

Envision Blockchain – Daniel Norkin - CEO
Yeah, sure. It's a good question. Let's kind of start at the beginning. So let's talk about the way that, um, the space works currently, uh, in the traditional technology sense and there may not even be much technology there. You know, you think about the commitment that, companies, individuals, even countries have taken in order to lower the carbon footprint. And you know, that's probably what everyone's talking about when they're hearing about carbon neutral, not neutral, phrases like that. So, it's a very simple equation where you have the amount of emissions that you have. It's like, you know, it's a very simple equation where the amount of emissions should be equal or lower than even than the amount of, you know, offsets, if you will, offsets, renewable energy credits, and such. So, the process of creating carbon offsets, it's been around for a long time already. So, there are these standard organizations that kind of set the requirements and the technical instructions, if you will, of how carbon offsets can be created, right so, for example, there are these organizations called, like, Vera, Gold Standard. Those are some of the most popular ones out there. And, of course, that there are many others in the space. But, you know, you take a look at a specific methodology, whether it's forestry or agriculture, one, and you can download one of these PDFs that they have on their website, and they're like 305 pages of literally business requirements and technical steps that these project developers that are looking at creating these offsets have to go through. So, you know, they might have to take, they might have to submit information around their project, contextual information. They might have to take satellite images, they might have to take soil samples, right? It all depends on what the methodology is. But essentially, once they go ahead and they submit all that information, there is a verification process in place, third parties. They review it, they validate it, and then these credits are then issued. And, you know, those can be sold in the market. And essentially, when they're sold, then the companies that have these emissions can then claim that they're lowering the, you know, they're lowering the footprint. So, that's where the Guardian really comes into place, is the creation of these carbon offsets and the creation even on the carbon emission side. And the process that is used today to support all the data for these claims, it's extremely manual. It's prone to errors. There's poor data, there's lack of assurance, there's, you know, something in the news like double counting and greenwashing, and it really leads to an overall lack of trust. So, what we did when we built the Guardian is that we wanted to build it based on something that resembles a business process management tool, BPM tool. So, it leverages what we call as a policy workflow engine, where you can literally make and mimic and make it flexible and mirror these standard bodies, if you will, and all of their 300 and pages of documentation. We now have made that digital, so we call that a digital methodology, a DM-RV. And we created this so that you can combine this policy workflow engine with the latest and greatest in the web3 space with the use of decentralized identities and verifiable credentials and public ledger technology, the Hedera Ledger. So, when you combine all these pieces and you're going through this methodology in this digital form, at every step of the way, you're digitally signing and you're putting it into a public domain, the measurements, the data, the contextual information. And of course, there's confidentiality along with that. We just implemented selected disclosure and whatnot to make sure that there is a level of zero-knowledge proof on top of that. But essentially, everything that's tied to this carbon offset is completely auditable, completely transparent, completely traceable, and it brings a level of prominence that just doesn't exist in this place today. ‍

Darren Moore
So, it's like compliance, right? If I meant something off of Guardian, it's going to fit all the compliance requirements. Everything's gonna be under their specifications. ‍

Envision Blockchain – Daniel Norkin - CEO
You can think of it in terms of compliance because it's bringing a level of accountability. There is accountability today in the space, but it is bringing a level of transparency and, again, a tracking, if you will, of who does what, when they do it. And it's also bringing something else to the market. It's bringing the ability for policy creators that are not necessarily the big ones that I mentioned, not necessarily the standard bodies. It's bringing a level of innovation and flexibility for those policy creators or the methodology creators, if you will, to make these methodologies maybe similar to what are from the large organizations. They might even be better. And because they're digital, you can actually compare them against each other, which then, when you're from the buy side and you're buying these carbon offsets, you're able to really see the quality of these tokens, of these offsets. Where, at, you know, before, you're just kind of taking the word of the standard body that these are quality. You're able to see it for yourself. ‍

Darren Moore
Yeah, so from what I understand, it's like a really fragmented system too, so you're able to compare and contrast every offset that you're purchasing. That's pretty cool. So Michael, I have a question for you about MasterCard. So, you worked at MasterCard. Do you have former colleagues calling you as the price of Bitcoin is going up? And, like, do you hear less calls when it's going down about wanting to get into the industry? ‍

Swirlds Labs – Michael Garber – Developer Advocate
I have former colleagues reaching out to me currently wanting to get a job at Hedera. ‍

Darren Moore
That's great. It just sounds like a lot of people from the fintech want to get into this space, and that's good that smart minds are coming in. ‍

Swirlds Labs – Michael Garber – Developer Advocate
Oh yeah, no, yeah, it's awesome to see. You know, I say, you know, just another bozo on the bus, just a regular dev out there, you know, looking at code in the wild. But some of the people I worked with at MasterCard, I mean, these people were, really very, I would say, exact, had a high degree of skill, and it's cool to have them reaching out to me. And not just MasterCard. I was working when I was at the Chain Yard, the blockchain consulting company in Morrisville. There's the IBM campus there, and I was on a project with IBM, their contingent labor project, which uses Hyperledger. And the people there, I'm still in contact with. Their eyes are on Hedera, and everybody's very interested in what Hedera is doing, and it's exciting to see.

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
I want to ask Daniel briefly as well. I mean, you touched on at the very beginning during the intro over a hundred projects that are utilizing the Guardian open-source application at this point in time. Looking through the site, you guys have a really diverse ecosystem. Multiple layer ones that you guys work with through Envision. I can see through Guardian. It looks like you guys work with ServiceNow and Atma IO. Have you guys had any other interests, knowing that we're moving towards kind of this green economy, 2030 kind of carbon neutral as a benchmark for a lot of financial and institutions that are out there right now, 2050 for kind of the carbon-negative aspects? Have you guys had other discussions with additional board members within Hedera? And how do you look at the defragmentation across ecosystems and crypto, potentially leveraging something like Hedera for certain services as well? ‍

Envision Blockchain – Daniel Norkin - CEO
You know what's funny is that, I guess we're kind of blessed to be in this position. There are so many companies that are using the Guardian that I don't hear about every single one. In fact, I hardly hear about everyone that's using it. And, you know, because it's open source, obviously, right? So, it's like anyone can go to the open source, you know, the repo is there in the Hedera repo. It's a backslash Guardian. And, you know, it's just the project has taken off past the point of everyone just letting us know about it. We have community calls and, you know, we have individual Slack channels, and we're definitely working with some of those that you mentioned. But it's like the adoption has gotten past the point of me knowing literally everyone that's using it. And I know that there are just, you know, there's a lot of planning and there's a lot of work, and there's a lot of conferences that are coming up that a lot of this is going to be shown. So, you know, thank God for that one. ‍

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
Yeah, I know Darren wanted to ask about, um, kind of smart grids and micropayments. That reminds me a little bit of, well, I think when I did my first interview with Christian Hasker, which was probably maybe 2019, maybe 2020, I found a DOD TechNav document that said that they were, like, testing out Hedera for building out smart grids. And he was like, "I don't know how you found that, but it's really interesting you found that." Like, Darren, I don't know if you wanted to maybe ask a little bit about kind of the micropayments, and I know you had some questions lined up around that. ‍

Darren Moore
You guys, I just wanted to know how smart grids work and, like, how does DLTs and hashgraphs actually make it more efficient? So, I know smart grids exist today, but how will the application of a hashgraph actually make it more efficient? ‍

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
I'm not sure if this is maybe a Michael question or maybe a Daniel question, or maybe we're just asking it. ‍

Envision Blockchain – Daniel Norkin - CEO
You know, I think, you know, I think, you know, I'm not going to be able to get into the specifics, but when we're dealing with smart grids, we're dealing with a lot of IoT sensors. And I think that Hedera has a really good infrastructure to be able to support that. I mean, right off the bat, you know that everyone is always talking about the high throughput that the Hedera network provides. I can get into some other topics too that are kind of a little bit more generic, if you will, but I think that you can definitely take this and extrapolate on it for sure. So, it's like not only is the high throughput important, but we also have somewhat of, you know, stable fee payment, right? So, when we're talking about enterprise adoption, I know that from a lot of our enterprise implementations, it's always a difficult part to be able to forecast budgeting and companies need to be able to do that, right? So, it's fairly straightforward. For example, you can go to the Hedera website, you go to their fee structure, and as long as you understand the type of API calls that are going to be hitting the network, you have a way that you can forecast it, and everything is always, you know, I don't want to use the word "Peg" because that's kind of a little bit of a trigger word these days, but it's kind of pegged to the dollar, right? So, even if I know that you're talking about a little bit of the price of Bitcoin going up and down, but if the price of the Hbar cryptocurrency, which is needed to power the Guardian, for example, in a smart grid system, if that price goes up or down, you're just paying a proportional amount to the dollar. There are other aspects within Hedera that make the Guardian, specifically with smart grids, work really nicely. And I want to say that we have a really interesting way of using topics. I know the topics is something that's very specific to Hedera, and this concept isn't on other type of L1s. So, whenever one of these policy creators initializes the Guardian, when they first sign on and we first create it for them, and they first create a verifiable credential and they say the hello world, we have kind of like a standardized Hedera topic that all of the standard registries get issued onto. So, think of it kind of like a Rolodex. So, if you are on the other side of the fence, if you're looking to buy offsets or Bruno blinders or credits in this case that came from smart grids, for example, then you can easily know which companies are doing it by looking at these types of topics. So, it kind of provides a really nice way to index so that you know all of these different toolings can exist and start to explore who's doing what and where and it's kind of like you don't have to go looking through the entire network, you just know the topic. We have it public and everyone can go ahead and take a look at it. So, you know, that's some interesting ways that we're able to adopt the technology for these types. Some other thing just to mention is, for example, every IoT device gets its own DID on the Guardian. And, again, they get their own topics. So, all this information is getting flooded into the same topic. Again, it just makes it easier to be able to see all this information and use it for whatever the case is. ‍

Darren Moore
Oh, thanks! That's a great explanation here. I appreciate it. Makes sense. Michael, I wanted to ask you why would you choose Hedera Hashgraph over other layer ones since, you know, since there are so many layer ones that kind of do a good job with the blockchain trilemma? Why would you pick Hedera Hashgraph over others? ‍

Swirlds Labs – Michael Garber – Developer Advocate
Well, first of all, I worked there. And second of all, they have a unique consensus service. Daniel was talking about the Rolodex concept of the topics. The topics are perfectly aligned for Forum. The way I designed it was each topic, each thread is a topic, and the posts in the thread are messages against that topic. Same thing with the votes, their messages against that topic. And so, whenever a thread is loaded all the messages are loaded, the votes are loaded, and Hedera is just perfect for this type of thing because I mean each message can be 1,024 bytes. I've restricted that to 777 words because I just like that number. Yeah, you can put text, you can put emojis. It's perfectly suited for something like this. Whereas if I were to use another blockchain, I mean you can't be really guaranteed that low finality, that quick finality. That's another requirement, that you need a very fast blockchain with very low finality time. And I just don't think that other blockchains are quite there yet. Maybe somewhere when you look at like Aptos or Sui, but I haven't really gotten into them to implement any sort of interoperability, cross-chain type thing. It's strictly on Hedera. But I chose Hedera because, first of all, it's my favorite blockchain project. I've been in blockchain for a long time, and it has piqued my interest the most. And so that's why I chose Hedera to start. ‍

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
To follow up with that, Michael, I know that you are really kind of in the mix with all the Hedera Improvement Proposals or HIPs. And I saw that you were on Brandon's Spaces. Brandon does amazing Spaces on Sundays. I certainly recommend you joining into Brandon's Spaces as well. Touching base on Hedera Improvement Proposal 551 for batch transactions. I think 584 is also out there in the mix right now. Can you talk a little bit about some of those Improvement Proposals as the network grows and expands, and what they represent for the wider mass adoption of networks like Hedera? ‍

Swirlds Labs – Michael Garber – Developer Advocate
Yeah, these Improvement Proposals are great because it decentralizes the way features are implemented on the network. So, Hedera Improvement Proposal, for people who don't know, it's a suggestion, a formalized suggestion for how to improve the network in some way, shape, or form. What's cool about it is that anybody can bring a HIP forward, and community members can come together and discuss it and make it more honed and then more perfect. And once it gets to a certain level of, what's the word I'm looking for? I don't know. Once it looks good, then it's ready for, you know, going through the stages. So, like, for instance, HIP 412, the community, the NFT metadata standard, that was an informational HIP that defined a standard for how you describe your metadata when you're making NFTs on Hedera. And the community came together, they created the standard together, and that got moved into active. And now that's the active state, developers are free to follow it. Another one is one that Patches actually brought forward, really, really cool HIP is the mutable metadata. So, big thanks to Patches there. But, yeah, HIPs are just a really great way to distribute the feature set that comes to Hedera. And because anybody can give input, that means that anybody can contribute to the features that get put on Hedera. And you mentioned 551, which is batch transactions. That is a HIP that outlines taking HAPI transactions. And HAPI transactions are defined under the Hedera Consensus Service, creating a topic, updating a topic submitting messages against the topic or like Hedera Token Service, creating a token, minting a token, burning a token through the Hedera API, and the batch transactions. Oh, it's an initiative to suggest that you can take multiple HAPI transactions like consensus topic, a topic create, or NFT mint, and you can combine them into one so they either all fail or they all succeed or they all fail. And so you kind of almost get like a smart contract-y flavor and that you can roll all these transactions into one transaction. And a good way to kind of describe that is, if you've used Forum, you'll see that there's a 0.1 H-bar micropayment to make a post or a vote or to create a topic. And so when you create a topic, for instance, you'll have to first assign a transaction to approve the 0.1 H-bar micropayment, and then you'll have to again approve a transaction to create a topic, and then you'll have to again approve a transaction to submit a message against that topic. So, batch transactions would roll that all into one. So you can just click one time and you'll do the micropayment, you'll create the topic, and you'll submit the message, and in one transaction. I know there's some work being done with the HashPack team around that to have that sort of batch transaction type of feature. ‍

Envision Blockchain – Daniel Norkin - CEO
But this is, if you don't mind me jumping in here, Michael, I want to comment on what you're saying. That we also have just implemented the batch transactions into the Guardian, and it significantly improves the mint NFT speed, for sure. So, like, I'll give you an example. Some of our customers, for example, are minting 300,000 NFTs. And if you were to do that without the batch, it would just take forever, take hours and hours and hours. You know, we can get that down to minutes. ‍

Swirlds Labs – Michael Garber – Developer Advocate
Hey, we're gonna link up then because we need to improve Form in that respect. ‍

Envision Blockchain – Daniel Norkin - CEO
Yeah, sure, we'd be happy to talk to you guys about it. ‍

Swirlds Labs – Michael Garber – Developer Advocate
Awesome. Yeah, thanks for giving that input. Yeah, so the batch transactions there. And then the last one he mentioned was 584, which is... So, everything costs money when you make transactions on Hedera. And it used to be the case that when you would do read calls for a smart contract, that would also cost money because it was submitting a transaction against Hedera. What 584 does is, whenever there's a call for a read-only function through the Hash i/o, through the JSON-RPC, that gets redirected to the mirror node, and then you get the free query. So, you get the more parity with Ethereum, how they have free read-only calls. And that was what that improvement proposal is done, and that's going live on mainnet. So, the first pieces of it have gone live on mainnet. So, try it out, test it out, and give feedback. ‍

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
Thanks so much, Michael. Really appreciate it. I wanted to kind of touch base a little bit further on what Daniel was talking about previously with all of the different ecosystems tied into what Guardian is facilitating from an ESG standpoint. And if you go to Envision's site, so I recommend if any of you guys want to check this out, obviously go to envisionblockchain.com, and you go under Industries let me take a deep breath here while I read all these out: voluntary ecological markets, automotive, aviation, energy and utilities, finance and insurance, government, healthcare and life sciences, oil and gas, telecom, transportation logistics, as well as quality assurance. Understanding that all of the global organizations pretty much out there have this pivot towards the green economy aspects, how early are we in adoption of distributed ledger technology and things like Hedera? And then, how big of a use case does that represent for all these industries? Maybe I'll preface it with this, alright, Patches is going to hate me because I always roll five questions into one anytime I ask anybody a question, so keep that on the burner there. Again, when I did an interview, like my second interview ever, with Christian Hasker, he was talking about how, you know, recently, let's say over the past two to three years, when you go to a grocery store, at least in the United States, it's like, "Hey, do you want to donate to this charity? Do you want to do X, Y, and Z?" He's like, "I, Christian, was basically saying, you know, in four or five, six years, and this was two years ago, I envision when you're at the grocery store, having the option to offset your carbon footprint. The audience down there can think whatever they want to within that, and I have my own views on that as well, but it does go to show that I think that is where we're heading. And Christian was basically saying, "I think Hedera is perfect for that use case. It's quick, it's efficient, we have the transparency. So, with all these industries that you guys are reaching out and touching with in Guardian, again, I'll rephrase it, you know, how early do you think we are with DLT adoption and utility, something like Hedera within all of those industries?‍

Envision Blockchain – Daniel Norkin - CEO
Yeah, it's a big question, and it's a big... It's not like it's... It's kind of like loud. It's a lot of pressure to answer this kind of question because, like, I want to say that this is really across the board, but there's a couple... There's a couple factors that are limiting how big this can actually be. I think that, like, and some of this... And I don't want to get deep into it, but, like, a lot of the answer and how big this use case could be is kind of a little bit more political than, you know, some people say it's not, but it is, you know. It definitely is a political thing, but I think that, no matter what side that you're on, you know, we always want to make sure that we clean up our house, right? We always want to make sure that we clean up the places that we live. And I think that there's a responsibility that we have to, you know, to the Earth and to the sustainability of such. Just like a business, we want to make sure that a business is sustainable. We also need to make sure that, you know, our life is sustainable. So that's kind of like a big statement right there. And when you take a look at it, the claims that companies have taken, it's not just companies. Countries have made claims. And when you take a look at the country, then it goes down to, you know, the state level, and then it gets down to the substate level, then it goes down to, you know, the company level. And the companies go across multiple borders. And it's like, in every industry, buyers are becoming more aware, and they're becoming more forceful in their opinion on where they want to go ahead and spend their money but, it's also, you know, it's not necessarily a, what's the word I'm looking for right now? It's still voluntary, right? So there's no regulation that says, "This is what you have to do." That sort of, sort of ruling, I don't know the word, slipped my mind. But that's sort of, you know, rule has not yet been applied, and we still live in a voluntary, um, carbon market. The day that turns into something that is, um, you know, a necessity or a need or a regulation or a rule, it's just everyone is going to be scrambling. And they're scrambling because no one is really taking the steps to prepare. I believe that the Paris Treaty goes to, 2050, something like that, right? So we're, we're, like, early when you take a look at the timeline of events. Everyone is, uh, trying to realize their, their, their actual claims. But at the same time, it's like there's a lot of activities that need to happen between now and then. The infrastructure that we have building with the Guardian is literally one of its kind. We're aware of a lot of projects in the space, and they may be focusing on certain aspects of this project. But the team that we have here at the Guardian has been working at this for so long. And listen, when I say team, I'm not talking about just a team at Envision. We have a whole community that's supporting this whole effort. It's not just us. It can't be us. It's, it's, it's everyone else that's contributing to the bugs and contributing to the code and coming to the meetings and giving us ideas and saying what they need in order to do their types. Because there's really four different types of phases that we see. We have those companies that are creating the supply, those are the offsets. You have those companies that are also creating the demand, which is the emissions, right? Because like how do you begin is you have to start taking an accounting of what you're currently doing, right? You have to set your baselines. That's on the emission inside, so even that can be tokenized, and that's what we're using the Guardian for as well. And then there's the whole transaction piece of the buying and the selling in order to be carbon neutral. I mean, we're seeing the space ramp up, um, so yes, we're early, but it's kind of like if you don't have the infrastructure and the ruling comes, then it's like you're late already. ‍

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
Just very quickly because I know Darren has, additional questions, and I'll probably let Darren go for a little while here after this. I just wanted to follow up because I, I really do find these, uh, discussions kind of fascinating, especially when we talk about, maybe I should have phrased it a little bit differently, um, regardless of how early we are. Um, you know, obviously, you guys are utilizing Hedera for a reason. Do other networks, let's say, like proof of work or something like Ethereum, with, you know, still paying 70 or 80 bucks for a gas fee, with everything being like Turing complete for the most part, are they at a disadvantage? And I know that you guys work with multiple, so this is nothing against any other ecosystem, but are they at a disadvantage in correlation to maybe other networks that can facilitate the ESG aspects maybe more efficiently in different regards. ‍

Envision Blockchain – Daniel Norkin - CEO
Yeah, I mean, you know, I think that the use cases, are very specific to the layer one that is being used, right? So, we understand that there are other ecosystems out there that have a really great use case for what they're doing with regards to sustainability. I find it really hard to see how it can be done anywhere except for the Hedera network, again because of all the things that I mentioned: the use of the topics, the use of the the high throughput. Like, it's, it's, you know, with the smart grid example, we're gonna have thousands and thousands of IoT devices just for one use case, right? It's gonna, it's gonna plug up the network. You see what happens with like meme coins, right, and what it does with the Ethereum network as far as the gas piece and the fees, which you mentioned. It's a big deal for organizations to be able to forecast that kind of budget. We're talking about enterprise things at this point.‍

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
Yep, and go ahead Darren. I know that you probably have, um, additional questions coming on the pike. I just wanted to maybe get a little bit of a follow-up about, you know, utility of certain networks versus others in different use cases.‍

Darren Moore
Okay, so everyone can hear me. The stress on the Mainnet, I understand. At one point, Hedera had the highest transactions out of any other ecosystem. Where do you think, like, the point is where you'll actually see something from the stress of transactions?‍

Swirlds Labs – Michael Garber – Developer Advocate
I mean, I'll just, I'll just, I'll just be upfront and say that, um, there was something that happened with Testnet that took it down for a couple days. I forgot the numbers, but it was, it was astronomically high. I think that they were getting, they were getting hit pretty hard by something. But, you know, we're talking about, like, I don't know, don't call me, I think it was like hundreds of thousands of transactions per second, something like that. I forgot exactly the number. There's a screenshot I can go take a look at if you give me a second here. Let me see if I can find this.

Darren Moore
Anything. I believe you. You know, it's just, it's, um, you know, I, I noticed that you're on the Ethereum Alliance, and I'm just curious, like, do you think Solidity is gonna have, a long-term future, even, you know, with their adoption, right? Like, there's a ton of different projects using EVM. Do you think Solidity is still going to be around five, ten years from now, and, you know, the crypto blockchain space is still going to have to accommodate EVM and Solidity?‍

Swirlds Labs – Michael Garber – Developer Advocate
Yeah, for sure. Just, just going back to the previous one, I found, I found the screenshot. I think it was, like, I don't know the time spent, but it was after 391 million transactions. I think that had reached a transaction speed of roughly 1700 transactions per second. I mean, it's pretty, that's pretty serious. And that's just testing it, right? So that's like, you know, but I think the answer to what you were just saying about civilian smart contracts, it's like, yeah, right? You're not gonna, you're not gonna be able to get rid of smart contracts because of the fact that there is just a lot of mass adoption with Solidity. And I think that this is just evident as you could see that every layer one is trying to include an EVM, and, you know, Hedera just included EVMs as well. So that, you know, it's, it's, it's a good strategy for getting, um, developers that are not necessarily familiar with working with, you know, the layer one SDKs and therefore familiar with launching, you know, applications that leverage EVM. And, you know, and you can go ahead and import that over.‍

Darren Moore
Yeah, and I know, like, the finance industry has a ton of additional regulations. When I look on Envision, like, uh, Ryan was saying, there's, there's a ton of different applications that you guys are offering services for, from government blockchains, oil and gas, to healthcare. Are the regulations more relaxed in those industries? Are you able to push the boundaries a bit more?‍

Envision Blockchain – Daniel Norkin - CEO
I mean, the regulations here in the U.S. are what the regulations are. It's kind of hard to, it's kind of hard to ignore how difficult it is to navigate that landscape. ‍

Darren Moore
So it's just murky waters no matter what sector you're in. Doesn't matter if it's finance or healthcare, it's still the same. ‍

Envision Blockchain – Daniel Norkin - CEO
Regulations in the U.S. is a little stifling, to say the least.‍

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
I think what Daniel, previously was talking about on Testnet, we remember there was an issue with, um, the price Oracle aspect when they ported over Uniswap V3 through Hashport. I think it was V3 overview, V2. That was like a while ago, but I think Darren was mentioning, Hedera Consensus Service, which is, like, racking up, like, two billion transactions every three weeks at this point in time, which is pretty staggering. So,just to add that in real quick.‍

Darren Moore
So, yeah, yeah, that's what I was talking about. I was seeing all the different Twitter infographics circulating around, showing, you know, Hedera, you know, overtaking everybody else in transactions. So Michael, what do you think about, like, micro-payments? How, if they're applied at a massive scale, where do you see the future with micro-payments, like, how can we envision a future of the internet that enables micro-payments four or five years from now?‍

Swirlds Labs – Michael Garber – Developer Advocate
Yeah, sure, that's a great question. I see micro-payments as opening up the door to content creators and creating an environment for websites to be less annoying if I implement and I, and, and Forum has this micro-payments. If you choose to upvote somebody's post, you can choose when you upvote, you can donate any amount you have to donate at least 0.1, which is the micro-payment, but you can choose to donate any amount, and that goes straight to the content creator. And then that makes the environment all less annoying because there's no need for ads. There's also, we don't have any captchas either, that's another side note. But, um, yeah, I see micro-payments really opening up the door to websites being less annoying and better quality content because now users can go and make content on these sites and be directly paid for their content, which is what happens on Forum. You make an upvote, you can choose to donate any amount, and the majority of that goes to the content creator immediately. ‍

Darren Moore
I see that, uh, really for Forum It opens up the use case for, like, I mean, I'm gonna, I'm gonna calm everyone's nerves here by mentioning, um, Andrew Tate. I know a lot of people don't really like his views, but, um, he really, really, really is saying that he is not guilty of human trafficking, and the Romanian government threw him in jail and said, you know, "You did all this human trafficking," and now they've let him go. Um, he released some tweets while he was in there. Wouldn't it be nice if, you know, a rightfully accused, wrongfully accused, it goes for both sides, if you could be in this scenario, you could get your message out and still receive financial support? I mean, and this is not just, like, for Andrew Tate, this is, like, both sides, so it's a fair game. If the Romanian government also had the wanted to, they could post on Forum too and, um, their accusations would be immutable as well. But I see, like, the micro-payments really opening up the earning potential of content creators and making websites less annoying. ‍

Swirlds Labs – Michael Garber – Developer Advocate
So that's what I see, well, just with, my experience with social media, it's like the AI is incentivized to push my button. So, like, when I get on to Twitter, it's just non-stop things that will irritate me or that I'll think about and want to post about, and then I'm spending way too much time on Twitter, right? And it's like, you know, I have better things to do than to argue with people on the internet or just watch fight videos all day. They just keep showing me fight videos. I have to, I have to train my AI not to show me this stuff. I just want fintech news. I just want crypto news. That's it. And it's like this, you know, big ordeal for me to do that, but the annoying part, no.‍

Darren Moore
Yeah, you know, you mentioned the AI. Um, yeah, it's funny you mentioned that. That's also another one of our goals here with Forum is to limit that. So we want quality conversations and dialogue between real users. Um, and we're seeing that already on Forum. There's quality threads, like good comfy threads you can go to and have a great time. My friend, for instance, Paul, shout out to Big Pauline. Um, he doesn't have a huge following on his Twitter account, but he mentioned something about some problem he was having with Metamask, and he got 60 replies from bots, like, "Hello sir, I am Metamask support. I will help you, sir." And it was just funny to see that on, please DM me, yeah, please DM me at Metamask Dot. Yes, sir, I am Man Tarman, CEO of Hedera, sir. But, yeah. So yeah, you got a ton of these things, and we see that happening. I'm sure everyone in this chat has had their experience being annoyed by bots. Um, we kind of make the friction for bots a lot more, so for posting on Hedera on a forum, because you have to pay to play. You have to, I know that's a triggering phrase for some, pay to play, but yeah, you have to pay to you have to have skin in the game to, um, get your message out there. And what we're seeing is that bots don't want to do that. They don't want to pay to put their automated content out there. And that's another thing that we're tackling, one of those problems.‍

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
I think one other question, just real quick, Darren, that I would have for Daniel, when we talk about AI, we talk about micro-payments, we talk about a lot of different aspects of this technology that are coming to fruition. I mean, I even remember Ripple rolling out Coil back in 2016 or whenever it was, and it didn't necessarily take off. It didn't mean that it was a bad idea, just maybe it wasn't ready for the adoption that we're all expecting the question I would have for Daniel is, you know, how important is it, from the Guardian platform and for building out an ESG platform in this space, to pay attention to all of these new technologies? To make sure that as they converge, you guys can be on top of your game and start integrating in ways that make sense?‍

Envision Blockchain – Daniel Norkin - CEO
Yeah, uh, I'll just say this without leaking any information, keep an eye on the managed Guardian service. We have AI on our roadmap, so definitely check it out. I'll, I'll just say that. I think, you know, it's really interesting. AI is not new. It's been around for so long. It was like, you know, how we talk about the crypto world, there's like a bear market, whatever it was, and an ice age. AI has been dormant and frozen for so long, and then, like, it just became, just like, it just took off. And here's the reason why it took off, and you know, this is not news to anyone, but it's, you know, there's no way to say it, that for example, like OpenAI and ChatGPT just made it really easy, made it really easy for people to use this technology. And in the Web 3 space, it's, like, really difficult, right? It's, like, if anyone remembers their first time ever buying any crypto or sending something, you got these long, long, you know, strings of characters, and like, did you miss one? Did you make one? Is it there? Is it not? You know, but it's, like, with ChatGPT, you just have an interface, you type your question, bang, the answer comes out, and it even makes your day-to-day life even easier. So that's kind of what the Web 3 world needs. It needs to be able to be as easy as that, to make, like, you know, an analogy. So, to incorporate elements of AI to be able to make that all easy, it's just super important, and I think that it's super, right? It's also kind of scary at the same time, and just like there needs to be regulation in the crypto space, same thing with AI as well. ‍

Darren Moore
So Daniel, your Envision Blockchain has different solutions for oil and gas and everything, but Project Guardian is specific to ESG. While these other areas, do you venture out into other things besides ESG? Is there, I don't know, for instance, NFTs, enterprise NFTs that could be applied to the supply chain? ‍

Envision Blockchain – Daniel Norkin - CEO
Yeah, so, you know, if you take a look at the business model that Envision Blockchain has, we're a professional services firm. So there is the Guardian work that we're doing in the ESG space, and then, of course, there's also the other work that we have going on with helping out with different companies and projects, and their use cases. We definitely have had our fair share of NFT work in the past. So, yeah, it's always open, and definitely working on projects outside of the space as well.‍

Darren Moore
Yeah, I wonder how more resilient the supply chain can be if DLT, hashgraphs, blockchains are introduced to the supply chain. If it could be more resilient than it was, like, say, for COVID, everything got stressed and we witnessed not having food in the store, not having toilet paper in the store. You know, when it's all said and done, and all these technologies are applied to each individual sector, do we have a more efficient world where things like that don't happen?‍

Envision Blockchain – Daniel Norkin - CEO
It's not so much about the efficient or not efficient, you know. We have to remember the most important aspects of Web3 and why blockchain and Web3, you know, where's the most amount of value. And what we're really talking about is being able to show provenance of assets being shifted from hand to hand. That's some of the most important things, you know. So yeah, tokenization is going to be important. It, for sure, can lead to more efficiencies. We kind of have a saying over here that, you know, the blockchain use cases should really either help you save money or make money. So, you know, you can look at it through that lens.‍

Darren Moore
Michael, I'm interested to know if you got into crypto, like, other people, was it with the store of value narrative, or did you come into crypto thinking more towards a store of value or an applied technology?‍

Swirlds Labs – Michael Garber – Developer Advocate
I came into crypto, um, well, I was at my dad's house, uh, I was living with my dad, and I was kind of, like, I was kind of halfway serious about school, not really. And so I looked on the internet, all, like, all wise kids will do, "How do I make money online?" And I, it was, like, 2011, I found this really obscure thing on BitcoinTalk.org, this forum, and I, I looked at, I didn't really understand it, but I just went through the tutorial and, like, grueling, went through it, and I set up the client, and I started mining. This was back, you could solo mine. You could solo mine from your Bitcoin client. And after a few weeks, my dad was in Europe, he was traveling around, so I had the house to myself, and I just, like, I had two computers set up, and I was just running this client, and after he got back, from about a month, I had a few Bitcoins, and they were only worth, like, three dollars. And, you know, I also, that, that turned me on a little bit about the Silk Road. I learned about that, and, you know, in a previous life. I got my first Bitcoins after mining some. It wasn't enough, so I went to the bank, and I sent a wire to somebody named, no, I don't even remember the name, but you would just send a wire through the bank. They're like, "What is this for?" And I'm like, "Uh, for Bitcoin." And they're like, "We don't know what that is." Or what, they, you know, went through, and it was just like a peer-to-peer transaction in that way, and I thought it was really cool. And, that's kind of how I got into it. I totally forgot about what I admined and the change that was left over from all that past life stuff, and a few years passed, I saw an article in the news. It's like, "Bitcoin is a hundred dollars." And I was like, "Whoa." So I, like, looked at my wallet, and what was just a few dollars was like several hundred dollars now and then there was a meeting in Congress. It was like in November, and it went from like a hundred dollars to like a thousand in an hour, and I was like, "Holy crap!" So I just, I mean, I basically got in there like swimwear and had to learn everything that I could possibly about blockchain and Bitcoin decentralization. That's how I got my start.‍

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
Real quick question for Daniel as well. You know, going through the Envision Blockchain site, I see multiple ecosystems that you guys are working with. And I know I mentioned that previously, not just industries but ecosystems. I think you guys still have a relationship with the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. I know at the beginning of this, I mentioned that you were kind of on the board for the tokenization aspects within the EEA. You also obviously work with Hedera, that's what Guardian is built upon. Polygon, Corda through R3, Cardano, Quorum, Stellar, EOS, Hyperledger Fabric as well. Like, how in tune are all of those solutions? I guess, maybe it's like a weighted question. I don't even know if you can answer this. Are you working within Guardian? Is that kind of the core product you guys are facilitating? And then you have services that you manage on top of that across multiple ecosystems? Because, you know, you guys are obviously a solutions provider. How much is that kind of weighted towards Hedera? Or is it not weighted and it's just, you know, whoever wants us to build? If you want to come into Envision, let's see if we can provide a solution for you guys for whatever your needs may be.‍

Envision Blockchain – Daniel Norkin - CEO
Yeah, sure. So, you know, obviously, the Guardian is a huge focus of ours. What we're up to, around 65 FTEs right now. So, we're constantly getting bigger. We have a bench size of upwards of 300 different types of resources to handle different types of use cases. So, you know, it's like we're kind of blessed to have good customers and good opportunities. ‍

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
And I'm assuming based on the answer, and this is a super respectful way for me to reply, there's probably NDAs in place with certain ecosystems and things like that as well, which is kind of a given with all the stuff that's going on within crypto. Did want to welcome up to the stage, I know we've got the H-bar Foundation up here. Briefly, I wanted to mention we've got a good amount of people in here. Our friends, we try to help out as many people in the community as possible. Batty Hattie is one of the oldest school people within the NFT community within Hedera. Battie's daughter, obviously, if you don't know the story, the backstory, a lot of the work that Baddie and the kiddo and the family does is focused around mental health initiatives towards kids. We had an event back in February, and we donated some to Battie. So they have a competition that just started today. I know that they're giving away an iPad for somebody that's under the age of 18, as well as art supplies and all these other aspects. Certainly recommend giving Batty a follow. I pinned it up to the Jumbotron as well. Baddie, thank you so much for putting together this initiative. And then Hbar Foundation and Brandon go ahead, the floor is yours. I know you're up here as a speaker. I wanted to ask a little bit for Michael if you could give, and we do know that recently there was the governing board kind of meeting at Google headquarters, I believe, for Hedera. What excites you about that? Is there any alpha that you can share with us? I'm sure not, but curious as far as your thoughts on the governing board getting together and talking about all the Hedera ecosystem at large.‍

Envision Blockchain – Daniel Norkin - CEO
All I can say is, I'm sorry to interrupt over here, but I do have to jump. I know we're a little bit overtime. Let's have some other calls lined up, but I really appreciate the time with everyone. Thank you so much. ‍

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
And we'll wrap this, guys, in like 20 minutes, by the way. But thank you so much, Daniel, for coming up. Certainly, I hope that you can come back on again in the future. Thank you. Yeah, thanks, Daniel.‍

Swirlds Labs – Michael Garber – Developer Advocate
Now, to answer that question, all I can really say is, keep your eyes peeled, watch the space. And then, to kind of quote Brandon, I'll give you guys a winky face. That's it. That's the tweet.
Darren Moore
I think we got the H-bar Foundation as a speaker now, so they can talk. Yeah, yeah, I'm up. Sorry about that. King, I wasn't up as a speaker quite yet, but yeah, I'm around. Oh, no. ‍

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
Yeah, I mean, I know Brandon, I know you came up to speak, and maybe for us, if you could maybe give us maybe a five-minute snapshot about some of the most interesting things that you've seen throughout the Hbar ecosystem within the past week, because I know you do so many fantastic spaces. What are you most excited about? We know that we just had the governing council meet. Maybe just an overview of all the aspects you've been facilitating over the past week or so.‍

HBAR Foundation - Brandon
Yeah, well, there are two things that come to mind right off the bat. One is Neuron. Neuron is focusing on combining DLT and IoT (Internet of Things). The first place they're focusing on is on aviation solutions. So you can check out, you know, I just put out my video last week, last Friday. And there's, you know, we have about a 12-minute video clip with them just running through that. And they just came out of essentially stealth. They had kind of a bit of a launch party or something along those lines where they had the regulators, the aviation regulators over there in the UK. They had executives across all kinds of different companies very interested in what they're doing, including Google Wing, so that is their drone subsidiary. But what they found, talking to James, their CEO, what they found was that their technology is going to have implications well beyond just aviation. That's just the first place they're starting. So I see them being a competitor, at least working in the same spaces as what we're seeing with Helium. But I do think, because they are building on Hedera, which I think is maybe a better backbone than what they might be working on right now, I think they're going to have a bit of a leg up. The other thing that was exciting is over the weekend, I went down to Karate Combat 39 and using their new app, they're up-only gaming. And then, of course, the tokens that are accrued are also going to be used to help govern that platform, to help govern that league. I mean, and the difference in how engaging those fights were, now the fights were always really entertaining, just the way they have their rules set up. It makes for very engaging, fun fights. But when everybody has skin in the game with this application, with these karate tokens, it makes it a lot more interesting. I think they're really onto something. Those are the two things that I'm really focused on this week.‍

Genfinity – King Solomon – Founder & CEO
Well, thank you so much, Brandon, for coming up. And again, if you guys don't check out, if you don't follow the Hbar Foundation, if you're coming in from a different community right now, I certainly recommend that you give a follow because Brandon does such fantastic spaces. Also, Brandon manages the Hbar Bull account. He does a lot of unique interviews throughout the ecosystem. I also recommend it's Brandon who is down there who does Sunday night spaces, like I mentioned previously. And then again Yeah, maybe I'll let Darren kind of close us out here. I did want to once more give a shoutout to Batty Hattie down there for the community initiative for youth mental health awareness. There's a competition going on that just started today. Your kid can win a free iPad if they're under 18. Just, you know, go on and participate. It's free to participate within. And we've got some pinned tweets above for Envision Blockchain, so all the ESG initiatives, as well as Michael Garber with forum.io and the fantastic aspects there. Darren, I will let you lead us out, maybe ask if anybody has any closing thoughts or anything else.‍

Darren Moore
Yeah, I always like to wonder if anyone has anything that we didn't get to that you'd want to talk about. ‍

Swirlds Labs – Michael Garber – Developer Advocate
Something I want to add, if that's okay? I know I spoke a lot about Forum, but really what I wanted to say is that free speech is facing challenges. It's under assault, frankly, across the entire world. I'm 35 years old. There was stuff that people, you know, kids would just joke about and the teacher might look at them and say, "You know, that's not a very nice thing to say." Now you'll get expelled, canceled, you'll lose your job. So I made the Forum, I made it for them, and I themed it out to look like the Matrix, the movie The Matrix. And so I kind of viewed the users akin to the chosen ones. It's for a reason. So trust that plan, go the distance, and make a post on Forum and bring the truth to light, and get paid while you're at it. Yeah, that's what I wanted to add. ‍

Darren Moore
Yeah, I love what you're doing. I tested it out earlier. I like the design. It's very simplistic but has a nice feel to it. And I 100% agree with you. It's to a point of almost like tyranny, right? Like you, yeah, you get canceled if you say the wrong thing. You get shadowbanned. And yeah, really have to walk a fine line just to stay on some of these platforms. I know for myself, I say things in a certain way just because I don't want to get kicked off. So I can't really speak my mind. I have to walk the fine line. So with that being said, everyone that came up here, Michael, Daniel, and the Hbar Foundation, I really appreciate you guys coming up and sharing your insights with us. It's been a pleasure. Thanks, everyone. being on an H-bar space. He was doing a little bit of deep dives yesterday and today. It's really awesome to have such an individual that I certainly respect in this space coming up and help us to facilitate these. So we will see you guys certainly again soon to give you guys maybe a little bit of a snapshot of what we have coming down the pike. If you don't know who Paolo Tasca is, we're going to be interviewing Paolo Tasca in the next two weeks. He's a co-founder of Quant. He is co-chair at the DLT Science Foundation. He's worked with Algorand, multiple governments for CBDC initiatives. We might have Brad Garlinghouse through GenFinity as well coming up soon. We've got potentially WorldPay. We've got a lot of stuff coming down the pike for you guys. Really excited to nail down some of these interviews and just keep doing what we're doing. So, as always, thank you guys so much. Thank you so much to Michael. Thank you so much to Daniel. Thank you, Brandon, from the H-bar Foundation. Shoutout to Baddie. Shoutout to Brandon down there with the Sunday spaces. Thank you, Darren. Thank you, Valor. Thank you, GenFinity. And we will see you guys next time. Thanks, everyone. Thanks, King Solomon. Darren, GenFinity, everybody, you guys are awesome. Thank you so much for inviting me.