Salutan al-chi-o, jen i-vul-di-e-vi-e-di-o kai hud-di-a mi valos prezenti al-vi-dul-novan kai tr-e-ex-ti-ta-in-pro-yek-t-o-in chi-o-kaz-is-la-sa-tempe-n-es-parant-u-yo ser anu-e, mi-de-vas-di-di-di-parant-u-mi-n char-mi-ne-prezent-is-la-anu-an-pl-i-fru-e fakt-e-di-o-kaz-os mor-e-gau kai-di-es-tas-grant-skala-kun-ven-o chi-o-kaz-os-poi-par-te-en-u-son-o an-en-kel-kai-lo-ko-i-en-kar-ato-kai-an-kau-en-ku-bo ser-di-di-es-tas-tr-e-n-tere-sa-a-vent-o ji-es-tas-grant-skala-kun-ven-o chi-simple-e-es-tas-mu-te-ge-da-kun-ven-o-i-ki-u-e-kaz-os-in-mu-te-ge-da-lo-ko-i-sam-tempe-kai- chi-u-e-l-kun-ven-o-i par-a-don-men-es-tas-es-par-ant-o-kun-ven-o-i do-simple-e-e-ru-a-l-chi-ti-u-re-ta-yo-j-es-tas-par-al-e-la-un-i-vers-o el-se-r-chi-u-l-lo-ko-in tr-o-v-u-le-pa-i-pr-ok-sim-an-lo-ko-on-al-vi ca-i-tiem-iru-tien-kai-kun-venu-kun-ali-a-es-par-ant-ist-o-i chi-el-vi-po-ves-vi-di par-a-chi-ti-u-ma-po-es-tas-mu-te-ga-da-kun-ven-o-i-ki-u-e-kaz-os-in-u-son-o ber-a-on-dim-de-nu-re-en-u-son-o-kai n-e-j-n-e-st-os-pr-et-a-a-m-g-is-e-m-fru-e-el-ver-on-ti-j-ar-o s-e-d-mi-vo-s-p-re-z-ent-i-al-vi-la-re-ta-yo-n-de-am-ik-umu-k-a-i-simple-le-gu-al-vi-a-m-tion-ki-un-ji-di-d-as-k-ai-d-di-k-el-kai-n-fer-o-in-k-a-i-tiem-d-m-and-i-v-in-pr-i-k-el-kai-fer-o-i n-u-mi-vo-s-p-re-z-ent-i-j-n-a-l-c-i-ti-un-a-po-d-al-vi-n-un-c-ar-vi-po-v-s-a-bon-i-al-ni-a-ret-let-er-o-k-a-i-mi-di-ras-ni-a-c-ar-mi-est-as-un-u-a-l-fond-int-ui-de-c-i-ti-u-a-po-un-u-a-l-k-un-k-re-y-ant-ui-mi-sup-o-s-as-t-o-s-simple-i-do-a-l-re-ta-yo-l-gi-lo-n-a-l-pr-i-s-k-ri-bo-n-t- n-u-mi-de-vo-s-di-ri-k-e-mi-p-re-z-ent-as-ci-ti-un-a-l-vi-t-re-fru-e-n-la-k-re-a-do-de-ci-ti-u-a-po-k-a-i-pr-es-ka-o-ne-ni-o-est-as-pr-et-as-e-b-mi-v-simple-i-vo-s-p-re-z-ent-i-j-n-a-l-vi-t-ar-vers-a-i-n-a-l-k-a-i-l-vi-jam-a-ld-is-o-ni-di-ro-in-pr-i-ci-ti-u-a-po-a-mi-g-m-u-k-a-i-mi-s a-m-k-a-i-di-ru-k-e-l-vi-sh-at-as-gi-n-a-m-k-a-i-ti-a-m-mi-po-v-as-ha-vi-pl-i-bon-an-i-de-on-pr-i-ti-o-ki-on-vi-sh-at-as-ki-on-vi-la-est-on-t-a-i-u-s-ant-oi-de-ci-ti-u-a-po-sh-at-as a-m-k-a-i-la-du-a-e-f-ero-e-st-as-ti-o-k-e-n-i-ent-as-st-a-di-i-mon-k-a-le-k-t-o-n a-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m and I think that's it. So there's a lot of links in the description to the parallel universe and also to the friendship. So that's it. If you liked this film, like it, share with it, subscribe to my channel if you haven't already, and I'll see you in the next film. And if you're not there, I'll find you for the friendship. And I'll kick your window during the night so that you'll know that I'm in the room and I'll kick your window. And as always, I'd like to thank my donors but you can also donate if you want. So I'm a donor now. Andrew Timp, Alex, Chuck Smith, Craig Robinson, Elliott Jinn, EA Burns, learn.espranto.com Jacob, James, John, Jason Knuckles, Ostranga, Lupe, Magrita, Matthew Kova, Miguel, Rafta, Robert, Nielsen, Sarah, S.C. Shane, Palakai, Tommy, Linsley.


I am Manpreet Bhatia, I am the operations director of Geospatial Ventures Limited, and I am here today to talk about what we are, what we do, on the focus on low-cost asset and manufacture infrastructure and monitoring using GNSS-enabled IoT devices coupled with INSA. So we are a startup company and we were formed in January 2020, so very new. And we are based in the UK, where we have two offices, one in the University of Nottingham, where we have our own lab on roof lab and GNSS reference stations. And the other office is in New Key Cornwall, which is also known as UK's first horizontal launch site. You might know this as Spaceport Cornwall. So although we are based in the UK, we supply our solutions across the world. And what sets us apart from the other companies is that we use geospatial technologies to solve real-world problems at a fraction of a cost. And I'll be talking some of these with you today. So what we do, well our services fall into three different categories, training, research and development and product development. We have a team of professional trainers who can provide training for beginners, right through to technical experts. And we have a range of different courses available starting from few hours to few days. And we can adapt the courses to meet your requirements. We are experts in GNSS, position, navigation and timing, mapping and surveying and geospatial technologies. And some of the companies that we work with are ACOM, Siemens, Murphy Geospatial and Manpower Group. So these are just some of the companies that just out of the name a few. And we provide solutions for lots of different applications such as track and trace, condition monitoring, structural health monitoring, air quality monitoring. So like I said to you, I will be talking some of the solutions. So there's one of our product here that you can see on the screen as well. This is a local safe device that uses high accuracy RTK GNSS. And it includes an integrated antenna and a battery inside it. I know it looks really big on the screen, but this is what the device is. This is what it looks like. It's about four centimeters across and three centimeters in piclis. You're more than welcome to come and feel for if you want. And it is designed to be used because it's easy to set up and easy to use and this links to our in-house command and control dashboard that provides full analytics. Now I'm going to hand over to my colleague Paul Batia who can be going into a bit more detail about these things. Thank you. Thank you for listening. Okay, so thanks Manpreet. So I'm Paul Batia. I'm the managing director of Geospatial Ventures Limited working together with Manpreet. So just a little bit about condition monitoring, why we need it and what we're focusing on. So that company came about from a group of individuals who've had about, well, myself about 15 years experiencing GNSS with the University of Nottingham and a team that's been working on infrastructure monitoring, condition monitoring for many, many years using state-of-the-art equipment and high-end geodetic receivers. And we've been working on land planning, bridges, dams, power installations, skyscrapers and smart cities. The device you see here is a prototype. It's got an external antenna output on it as well. It's got an internal antenna inside it here and it's self-powering and it's obviously IoT connected to the internet and through cellular as well. So why do we need these services for predictive maintenance, for proactive responses, to optimize maintenance, avoid breakdowns, extend the lifetime of structures and to help future design and to improve safety. Now how we're developing this is the first project that we're doing is called artificial intelligence for land planning. So artificial intelligence is the buzzword that you've heard a lot today and you hear a lot, but what we're actually doing is taking lots of different inputs and sensors. So for example, in this device we have an IMU, so we're doing inertial sensing in there as well and we're connecting to external data sources. So that means a lot of environmental data such as CAD data for buildings, weather data, a lot of that information going into the artificial intelligence model and in that as well we're using interferometric cell which is basically radars on satellites in space that bounce signals of structures on the earth and off corner reflectors that we put there to measure millimetric changes in land height and that's what we're aiming for in all of this with the artificial intelligence model and what we're doing with the GPS with the GNSS devices and the corner reflectors as well. So just to reiterate what Manpreet was saying, really our USP is here that we're really reducing the cost of this and we're combining different sensors to give ongoing monitoring with modern technology and processing methods. So it's a low cost ground defamation monitoring system, we use reference corner reflectors and base stations and then corner reflectors are spaced out there using free data from satellites and then combining that with the measurements from the GNSS. So this project is being used on a number of different sites around the UK and you can see our experimental system with the batteries and the solar power and everything for that. So Manpreet talked about tracking hub as well, what you see here is an early version of our tracking hub but we can do full analytics so you've got two points there and what we can do is for all of the points for the GPS devices and also for the corner reflectors and the natural reflectors from INSAR we can click on that and get a full time series and full analytics of data. So you can see here a distribution of the points that we get from the INSAR processing and then clicking on each of those points we can get the time series so we can do full analytics like I said that's for each of the devices as well. So I just recap that slide so we're using not SATA but data free satellite data for the INSAR we have a full processing chain which combines all of those readings and we have our own cloud storage so you get your own you get your own access to that portal and we have our full in-house processing and support for that. So the interesting thing that we think that we're moving into in terms of CubeSats and IoT is nowadays CubeSats is the technology where satellites is moving forward to it's it provides a massive cost saving over traditional satellites and it means that companies can get access to data and missions from satellites. CubeSat for those of you don't know consists of units each of those units is 10 centimetres by 10 centimetres the domain has largely been for R&D and for science but these are really coming into the fore now so our use here is through IoT so this doesn't exist as a constellation yet there are some constellations out there but we know that we're getting corrections from GNSS on small satellites as well as satellites are a bit further out in space and we have the experience through our company and our network around the constellation design so we've designed constellations that allow us to achieve this and we're talking about low cost for launch and for operation of these systems and what it allows us to do is to provide corrections and allow us to give uninterrupted connectivity in all parts of the world so basically they're continuous and global monitoring coverage with a prompt identification of issues for timely maintenance and repairs so like I said what that allows us to do is to deploy these situations these devices everywhere so Manpreet mentioned about real world solutions so what we're doing for our clients and the clients we're working for at the moment are Murphy Geospatial and ACOM that Manpreet mentioned looking at geohazard sites so collapsing structures such as roads and geohazards around environmental sectors and new technologies so new installations of infrastructure as well where there needs to be ongoing monitoring and the big issue there is also about power and it's about management and about remote management so those are the things that we're designing into these solutions as well as AI and and the actual sensors so just in summary what we do is integrate intelligent geospatial solutions in technology we provide cost-effective turnkey monitoring main question that we always get asked is what does that mean and how cheap is it well it's probably cheaper than anybody else so you can see here why we're working on this is this is a combination of commercial off-the-shelf components with our own firmware and our own power management on all of those and it's flexible so we can kind of tailor that to clients needs so configurable solutions providing millimeter level measurements with comms in remote and hard to reach areas we have solutions for that already but you can see where we're going in the future incorporating artificial intelligence and digital twins and we're also providing that R&D support test training and you get kind of the support of experts in this fields as well so just to summarise ends Manpreet Bhatia is your operations director we're here until the end of tomorrow myself as well Paul Bhatia we're on stand d3019 in hall 3.2 it's at the back in the corner so we haven't been getting that much traffic because everybody walks straight through so do come and see us you can talk more and learn more about what we're doing and you can scan the QR code obviously to get to our website thank you very much


ith your customers. If they require you to provide proof of assessments that your implementation is secure and meets certain standards, you might have to do that. So you'll have to identify that before you can go ahead with the assessment. One of the most important features is the resilience. A lot of times teams or developers may have tested really well in a sandbox environment, but when they come, move to production, the system may not be resilient enough to withstand attacks or at least attempts at that attacks. So in such cases, maybe you have to look at checking the resilience of the environment surrounding the application, not just your blockchain application. So we are looking at any connectivity to existing systems, is that validated and are you aware of any vulnerabilities that exist in the environment of the application. Finally, documentation and training, you cannot have all of these running perfectly but miss out on your training. Users must be aware of how to use the application. There must be a process and who gets to access the application and is that even necessary? In most cases, you would have to worry about privilege escalation that we generally worry about in normal implementations as well in a blockchain in production as well. Moving on to the risk areas. The first one is the untested code. The challenge we have is not just code review, it also has to be tested along with the existing code. So you cannot test pieces of code to check that it's working fine. You have to consider the application security in the environment itself. Next is basically denial of service attack. So is it possible for multiple nodes to fail at the same time? Is it possible to have natural system disruptions? Do you have controls in place to have your system back online with minimal disruption? We've talked about regulatory components and we'll cover that in the next few slides as well. A very important aspect of blockchain and where we do have some challenges in testing is the strength of encryption protocols. So what you generally have in why you're storing data and any other implementation is applicable here as well. How strong are your encryption protocols? In case of cryptocurrency, this is especially important. You would have multiple touch points with cryptography and you are responsible for ensuring that the identity and access management is well tested. Interoperability, again, your APIs are secure. You are able to ensure that the data integrity is not lost when you move data from and to your blockchain implementation. Privacy is a small area of challenge in blockchain. So there is a perception that once on blockchain, it's always there. And if you take back consent, is it possible to delete or erase your data if you choose not to share it anymore? And how do you erase data once the consent has expired? So you have given consent only for a year or only for a particular purpose. What happens to the data then? So this is one of the specific areas where you sit down with your team and see how that can be worked out. And the next two systems, next to this we cover in a little bit more detail is consensus mechanism and the design of smart contracts. For those who are new, consensus mechanism is how you decide whether the block can be added or not. So Bitcoin has proof of work. It's an example that you may all be familiar with. So similarly, you might have multiple consensus mechanisms. So one of the aspects you'll have to test is, is it possible to bypass your consensus mechanism? If that is possible, that means your implementation can fail very quickly because attackers are very, very persistent in their attempts. The next point we'll discuss in a minute's time as well is how are your smart contracts designed? A smart contract is basically a logic or a function that decides whether a transaction is added or not. So your simple transactions, they're like legal contracts working on code. So that will decide whether a transaction takes place or doesn't take place. So in this case, if your code does not check for all the possible logic that is available in the functionality of your system, then it's very easy to take over the entire application of the system and we'll see one or two examples of that. Moving on. There are some frameworks as I mentioned earlier, which talk about what to do or where you can start if you're trying to do a risk assessment framework. So accredited standards committee provided this framework on risk assessment for blockchain and it comes with five pillars. So it talks about design and architectural governance and operation trust and resilience system integration and smart contracts. So smart contracts is a very big part of testing when we do blockchain implementation testing because it's also easily targeted by attackers. We'll also link back controls that are applicable in these five pillars in the next year. So what are your typical vulnerabilities when it comes to blockchain implementation? So I mentioned that you have existing vulnerabilities and you have new vulnerabilities. The new world vulnerabilities while the logic is not new but the area is new is the consensus mechanism and smart contracts. Also a little bit of cryptography is involved. But the existing vulnerabilities like access and permission management are not having your application tested, you've not done source code review. You've not stored your data securely.  So these kind of issues will come up. We'll talk about a few vulnerabilities as well. So in smart contract vulnerabilities, because this is a big area, we'll talk about this. So one could be a re-entrance here at that. So what happens in this case is imagine you're trying to withdraw amount or a set in your wallet and transfer it to somebody else. If the system allows you to perform this withdrawal action before the previous withdrawal action finishes. That means it allows a re-entrance vulnerability which can be exploited. And this has happened in the past. This vulnerability has been exploited in the past. Now we want to access controls. So in case of access control, you could probably gain access to a lower privilege. But if the system does not check once you gain access and allows you to escalate your privilege, then you would have a smart contract vulnerability. You could probably escalate your privilege enough to gain complete control of the network. Third is arithmetic vulnerability. So this seems very trivial or basic. But if your system does not check for the negative error, so you're trying to transfer funds, but you don't have sufficient funds. Then your system obviously should check for the balance that you already have. This is obviously a very simple example. But arithmetic vulnerability can be manipulated very easily, especially in crypto context. It may not be applicable in all other contexts. So that is one thing that you have to check. The next one is the unchecked return value. So similar to the negative value, you're also responsible for checking the return value of your functions. Any smart contract that you write, you'll have to check what is the return value. If someone can manipulate the return value or bypass it entirely, then obviously you have a vulnerability in code and you would be responsible for the repercussions. Next one is the denial of service. This we are familiar with. What if you could stop a node from accessing the system and use that node to enter the network and control the network? And this has happened in the past. And moving to the last point, bad randomness. For example, you are considering an application which announces lucky draw winners, you know, randomly select 10 people who are eligible for a price. Now, if your randomness in smart contract is based on some secret value or a code that is embedded in the smart contract, then you are not actually having a random number generator. So the best thing in this case would be to have a random number generator outside your smart contract or outside your blockchain itself. Have an oracle outside that generates random value and use that random value in your smart contract. I hope it is not too fast. Moving to the next system level vulnerabilities. So we spoke about smart contract vulnerabilities. We are going to talk about hacks where these were actually used. So the first one is the use vulnerability. So this is an open source smart contract platform, which parses smart contracts and tells you, you know, smart contracts can be manipulated. Now the problem in this case was that while parsing, it could allow the attacker to gain remote access of the network. So it could control the entire, the smart contract to be manipulated to control the entire network. Moving on to the word hacks. So this was a combination of three different things. So you might be able to put consensus mechanism, which is used in Bitcoin. So in this case, they were using proof of work as a consensus mechanism. They were very flexible in their time stamps, which means they accepted blocks in the last two hours. It's not just, you know, seconds or minutes. And the difficulty was done based on dark, active wave, which adjusts the difficulty of proof of work. So what the attacker did was slowed down the generation of blocks. So he didn't actually slow down the generation. He made it seem like the time stamp was within the last one hour. The system was receiving lesser number of blocks. So the difficulty level was being reduced drastically. So at one point it was very easy to generate blocks. And then he could just very easily do a 51% attack on the system. So in this case, it's not that they did not have control templates. It's just that the combination of controls could be manipulated very easily. For example, they could be having two hours of, you know, flexible time stamp was a little too much. Also, they had a strong difficulty generator, but then they, because they allow for two hours, that could be manipulated very easily. Next is the GBP hack. So in this case, it was actually pretty simple. They just move funds from, you know, the exchange or the hot wallet to an unidentified wallet. So this allowed very easy access to, you know, move funds from the hot wallet to their unidentified wallet, which means that action should not have been allowed. And moving to the last one, the very fast smart contract. So in this case, it allowed a re-enconcelerator, which means an attacker could run the smart contract repeatedly before the state of the object has changed. Which means it showed as if their balance had not changed, but they were doing multiple, you know, transactions with the same balance. Moving to general control areas that we would have. So similar to the risk areas, we'll have controls as well in each of those areas. For example, consensus mechanisms, there are multiple options in consensus. When you have chosen your consensus mechanism to look at any vulnerabilities or any exploits that are possible to be performed by attackers, test for those consensus mechanisms. Don't just test for one or two scenarios. That is true for smart contract review as well. Test for all possible scenarios that we may have. And check if the application is functioning as intended and that you cannot escalate privilege to get access to any other function other than what is intended. The third one is access management. So this is something that you would have across technology as long as we try to gain access to a system or need access to a system. There must be a process to identify how this access is provided and whether there is a review in place to determine if it's appropriate or not. The fourth one is preferably you do have a lot of reliance on photography and blockchain implementations. So you identify how you would store values. For example, is hot wallet the implementation that is necessary for your use case? Would you rather have a full wallet? Would you need HSTMs to store data separately? So this kind of decisions should have been done during the design of your application itself. But once you decide to move to production, at least at that point, you have to think of these elements. Next is the impropriability. When you're having your application work along with multiple other existing applications, how does the data transfer happen? Do you have controls or do you have reporting mechanisms to find out or monitoring mechanisms to find out and report to you that there is an issue? Because of attention, you may not even be aware that there are challenges unless you monitor and report back. This API management is a continuation that more governance would say you have strong controls in how the nodes can be accessed and if you monitor what's happening in those nodes, you can pretty much prevent denial of service attack but a persistent attack or might still find a way. And last is the industry specific or region specific compliance. So you'll have to think about how to comply with your industry. For example, if you are supposed to comply with PCI-DS, irrespective of how your application is implemented, you still have to go through this control checklist. Similarly, if you are in healthcare, you have to comply with HITDA. So those things are not optional. Just because you're on blockchain or the implementation is new, you still have to find a way to comply in all of these regulations that are applicable to you. So we had seen a few risk assessment areas as pillars in the ASU framework. So the pillars are there at the bottom, right? These are the domains they have provided as part of these pillars, which will tell you what to do or what kind of questions you should be asking if you're considering this assessment. So some of them don't seem like questions, but this is available online. You can download it and go through the framework. If you tell you how to think of risk in, say for example, what are the algorithms in use? How is the infrastructure secure? Do you have a business continuity plan? What happens in case of identity management? It also talks about the design and architecture of the system itself. Do you have open source elements? What kind of languages do you use? Do your programming languages have known vulnerabilities? Do you address those vulnerabilities? Are you aware of what you should be doing when you're using certain programming languages? Do you have proprietary systems? They also insist on smart contracts and AP assessments on a large basis. So you could go through it and decide how you want the execution of smart contracts to happen. So some typical controls in these areas are given here. I'll also touch upon how you might have to scope in other layers in your testing or assessment as well. So most of these use cases may rely on posting in a cloud environment. So all the controls that are applicable for cloud security also become applicable for your implementation of blockchain. So you will have to look at those aspects as well. So if you're using native services provided by AWS, GCP or Azure, do you have controls around who can access those services? What can you do with those services? Because it's not just the application layer that you have to be concerned about. You also have to worry about the cloud or the infrastructure and you are responsible for implementing controls in those areas. A lot of times we do give this answer of shared responsibility and misconceptions from what is the responsibility of the customer and what is the responsibility of the cloud service provider itself. So those boundaries should be very clear. So some of these examples are periodic code reviews. So this could be one of the controls that you can test. And vetting your consensus protocol before moving into production, having evidence of smart contract security assessment being done either by an independent team in your organization or a completely independent third party organization. Also checking for any risk management processes. That's not restricted to just access. It also talks about business rules or functionality that is allowed in your application. It's good to have these assessments either done independently by an internal team, but independent to your development team or a third party who would help you identify these issues. So this talks about some of the smart contract audit rules that are available. Some of them are open source, which will analyze your smart contract, pass it and give you a very high level view on where you stand from the point of view of security. Some of them are, you know, for your use case, it's not enough to just go through these tools. Also, you should know what to do with the results. To implement it and you can constantly monitor your implementation, not just once. At the start of moving to production, you have to do it on a regular or periodic basis so that any changes to your smart contracts are still secure. That brings me to the end of my presentation. Just a few key takeaways before I end. Identify what are applicable to you. So before you narrow your scope of search to blockchain, identify if your industry requires you to comply with any set of regulations. That's the first thing. Then you have to identify region-specific regulations that you have for existing use cases as well, existing applications as well. Just move that in the lens of blockchain and see if you can show compliance in all the controls that are necessary to be applied. Next is the blockchain-specific vulnerability. So you look at smart contracts and consensus mechanism. You do have other areas, but predominantly do look at your smart contracts to see if there is any blockchain-specific vulnerability that you have or you can identify and fix before you know the production. Third, this is not just monitoring as in to see if it's up and running. First, monitor to analyze any patterns. Are there any attempts at exploiting vulnerabilities so that you can prepare better, have stronger controls and block if necessary. And finally, this is more from any production readiness application. Your users must be aware of what they are doing with the application, especially the challenges we have faced is the developer team is very strong in their technical controls, but may not understand or appreciate processes as much as the governance team. Similarly, governance team might talk a lot about processes, but not really appreciate technical challenges in implementing these controls. It's important that both teams sit down together and understand why they need to have controls in place in your applications. And I've heard to these samples, your users should know what they should be doing and what is appropriate use. So this requires training, maybe at the start of use of application or any time you modify any functionalities for the application. While documentation for this exists, a lot of times people may not be aware that they are required to do this at all. So this is one aspect maybe people can focus on as well. That's it from my side. I will take any questions that you may have. Thank you everyone for joining on a Saturday afternoon and some other times as well. Let's see any questions. Thank you Vishnu Priya. I have one question like you mentioned a lot of the smart contract audit tools. So what should be the criteria one should look at when they want to select a particular tool? It will depend on the use case. That's why I have not mentioned on guidance as such because it would really depend on your use case and what you're trying to identify while all of them would audit and give you a set of results. Are you trying to identify vulnerabilities? Are you trying to identify? Some of them are better for our football vulnerability. Some of them might be more general implementation. It would really depend on your use case. Right. And all of the tools that you have mentioned are these open sourced or like? Some of them are open sourced and others you would need a license. You got it. Okay. Anybody who is having a question? Yeah. Vishnu Priya, so these I mean got a good insight on the security and the regulatory part. How are you making sure the performance aspect is taken care because we have nodes in multiple places and right. I mean, do you have some kind of a simulation to do it or you measure it in a real environment itself, the performance? So I'm not the right person to answer that question. I'm sorry about that because the performance testing will do it in simulation before doing it in real world to anticipate the performance issues. But we look at more from addressing performance issues as control. So I'm not sure if that would answer your question correctly. That's fine. So or even in terms of the smart contracts, whatever you're building and executing, do you individually verify them separately to ensure that the contract. Yes, we do individually verify validate all smart contracts that are critical. We do go through the entire code and identify issues that we think the organization should work on. Any validity in all of the smart contracts we do do a review. Okay. And last question is the one thing is we are having distributed nodes in multiple phases, right. How do we really carry out these kind of just things because we need to ensure that maybe consensus come from everybody and then only we are allowing it to process. Right. So do you how do you We don't start off with any risk assessment. We generally do a pilot assessment before we move the scope to the entire implementation. We wouldn't start off with covering all regions and all functionalities at once because that would be a challenge even for organization stepping into a risk assessment for the first time. So we try and perform this assessment on a pilot basis on maybe one or two functionalities when that is ready, we try and involve multiple other teams. So it wouldn't start off with a risk assessment with multiple people. That's not how we would do. Thank you. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you everyone for the opportunity. Thank you for taking out time and like briefing us about what areas we should look at. I really like the part where you went in depth about the smart contract vulnerabilities and the system level vulnerabilities. So we as developers know like which areas we should be looking at if we are planning for a production application. Thank you so much. Thank you. Let's move on. So I would request the developer panels to turn on their video. Nikita, Akansha, Shweta, Anastasia. Yeah. Please turn on your videos. Yeah, perfect. So this brings us to the session that I'm most passionate about, which is like very close to my heart because I'm a developer myself and it's a pleasure to have all these amazing women out there. So I'll start with the introduction in no particular order. So Anastasia is a full-time engineer at Philido and she's an undergraduate from UNC Chapel Hill and a graduate from University of Virginia where she has done computer interaction research in haptics and accessibility. Next we have Diana. She might not be able to join us due to some technical glitch. Let's wait for her if she's able to join us. And then we have Akansha Dixit. She's a final year doctoral candidate at City University of London and she's specializing in blockchain, IoT and digital identity. She is serving as a principal technology advisor at the information commissioner's office in London and she's like a live example like an example for somebody who has gone through the hyper ledger internship program for 2022 where she has gained experience while working on hyper ledger cactus and its applications and cross chain transactions. So I would highly recommend you guys to get involved in such initiatives where you can gain a lot of experience by doing real hands on. So yeah. And then we have Mekita. She's a skilled developer who is blockchain developer who is working at Snapper Future Tech and she is really passionate about training. So she's also a technical trainer at IBI where she has delivered multiple programs for multiple institutes and she has worked in blockchain applications like this NFT marketplace, insurance, web3 wallet and other blockchain platforms. Then we have Shweta Kumari. She's a blockchain lead at HCL and she's having experience of around 12 years and she has been in blockchain space for around 4 years now. She has worked on technology such as hyper ledger fabric Goharam, Indi and Arthrikoda and she has worked on use cases such as tokenization, identity and traceability. So it's wonderful to have you all here so the first, the ice breaker that I have for all of you is since many of you are like experienced individuals so what sparked your interest in the blockchain technology and what inspired you to become a developer in this domain? I would like to know your thoughts. Mekita, Shweta, anybody wants to go in first? Okay. So let me share my initial interest and like why I am here a blockchain developer. Like initially I have started to work with blockchain technology with HCL Tech Blockchains U18 since last 4 years ago and I started to work from like POC and pilot project and now I am doing the implementation for production based project. So during this journey like I have found there are so many factors that like motivates me to work with this innovative blockchain technology. The first one like we all know like the blockchain started from the very popular Bitcoin cryptocurrency. So like what means Bitcoin itself as a like number of potential improvement for the like financial and technical terms. So in result what happened there are many enterprises and like organizations recognize this potential and what impact this is the cryptocurrency that started working on various project related to digital currencies and now we have a number of digital currencies in the market. So like this is the first reason the blockchain is actually exploring to the enterprise and organization. And the second thing like governments and central banks like they are exploring the CDBC. So many blockchain start-up companies are working on Duffy platform and NFTs and like like a traceability and the big companies like IBM or Microsoft Amazon they are invested in blockchain technology and now we have the great feature of like blockchain decentralization and trust like which create actually a transparent system without relying on central authority. So we have a lot of in current example like global financial financial crisis and we can see like banks are default and all like this these types of like problem blockchain can solve the problem. So why this is the most important technology for me like it is innovation like which introduces in a technical terms like distributed consensus mechanism and like concept of crypto cryptographic algorithm and the new concept like smart contracts. So these technical challenges and innovation like attracts me and like I enjoy working with this cutting-edge technologies so the excellent feature and the challenge of blockchain motivates me to work here as a blockchain developer. That sounds awesome Shweta. I go with that any station I want to go next? Yeah, so my journey with blockchain starts with actually the same as Shweta where I got introduced to it through all the crypto currencies that were booming back then but I didn't do anything with it until later on when I joined Kaleido as a front-end engineer and that's where I actually learned a lot more about blockchain. I've transitioned now to a full stack engineering role so I've been able to see through client projects basically what Shweta said the benefits of blockchain being used in enterprise use cases there's so much going on in the field right now so there's always new things to learn and it's honestly a little bit intimidating because it seems really hard sometimes it just looks intimidating but to be honest the benefits of it is really worth it and I just get excited learning about the new things and the impact that it could make to society honestly so yeah, that's how I got started Good blockchain. Thanks for bringing that up like you guys so open about your thoughts Yeah Nikita, Kancha Yeah, so like everybody has something like through hackathon or something like that I didn't start it that way I remember like I was looking for internship to complete my masters and there were so many technologies, those were booming and I remember it was like COVID period and it was difficult to get through that and everything and while looking at different technologies like from data science, data analytics machine learning and everything I came across blockchain which I think apart from the word I don't know, I didn't know a thing about it but thankfully I got in my internship at snap up and from there I learned a lot of things and of course definitely most of the credit goes to my mentors and seniors Kamlesh Nagware sir from hyper ledger being one of them so yeah like I learned from it while doing this learning I saw like what it brings to the table like Shweta suggested like how it gives the freedom the transparency not only to the like the users but also as a developer it is a community based and how people work together to make it more efficient and more scalable definitely it's a niche maybe a decade back or something it was a niche technology but people are adapting to it and bringing a good efficiency in the framework and everything definitely motivates to learn and explore and keep growing in this technology so yeah right it's really good like really fortunate to have started a journey like from an internship level directly into the field of blockchain like I have had a different path like I transitioned to blockchain after having certain years of experience really fortunate in that way yeah over to Yakancha hi everyone it's so nice to meet you all here virtually and I met some of you at the hyper ledger global forum really good to be here so as some of you I also started on a different path I'm still very early in my career I believe in terms of learning the blockchain curve but I started it started when I was working as a research assistant in Indian statistical institute in Kolkata and I had this professor I was working with who was like the blockchain guru at that time and even now so I started working from there and then my like going from hardware engineer I completely switch my field to security and I landed here and I'm doing my PhD now I'm in my final year and I'm also working with the information commissioners office here so I've started looking at the blockchain and the whole distributed ledger technologies from a regulatory perspective also which gives me a lot to think about in terms of what are the different challenges when it comes to real world applications and standardizations and all those things so yeah that's about me that's pretty cool journey like you have done a drastic change in the domain itself from hardware to this it's really inspiring so like like we all know like all of us are developers and then we are the one who stay very close to the work that is being done so in your opinion what are some of the most groundbreaking developments that has been done in the blockchain technology and how do you think it has influenced the industry as a whole any thoughts I'll go first so I think it comes in all the domains like it is growing rapidly in all the domains right from the finance in the healthcare and everywhere but what I see in majority office is finance definitely like people know where their money is going and everything that blockchain brings to the table but specifically if we talk about in DeFi also I think insurance sector is where it is more prominent like I came across this one use case where you know you book a plane ticket and it refunds you it's an insurance refund depending upon how much your flight delay is going to be there and everybody knows we travel we don't want to be in that queue and everything smart contact brings that into the table like depending upon how much your flight is on delay and what was its departure time and it automatically is going to refund you so I think that was the best really much impressed by that use case and it's not just about that overall like if we see at the insurance part of it there is so much paperwork is going on and there are too many to end for and it's manual work that is there like being on the blockchain smart contracts coming to the picture that is something like it is become very efficient for everybody and so yeah I think that is something breakthrough for me talking about another is like when we talk about enterprise level I think supply chain because like I have few of the friends who are working in supply chain the management guys and I see them like every day they have to give the live update for each and every supply chain task that is going on and I have worked on one of such product so I know how it works so it's definitely bringing something that the tedious job that manually has to be done is done by automatically through smart contracts through the supply chain softwares or web applications so I think that's the best the supply chain doesn't end there we all have heard about tokenization the supply chain again moves to the tokenization tokenization is something like now like when we talk about blockchain we talk about tokenization or rather we would say it's not about it's about blockchain we know tokenization process since decade irrespective of blockchain we all have used all these brands have their own points their membership points so this is some part of tokenization definitely the blockchain tokenization is definitely a bit different like it comes with NFTs and ICOs and everything but people are familiar with tokenization so yeah I think in finance the insurance part the supply chain in enterprise blockchains when we talk about all of these do bring another one that I can think of is like in healthcare where documents are already uploaded onto the blockchain and we don't have to take that whole bunch of papers in our hand and roam from one doctor to another for our consultancy and just on a click of it we can see all the things so yeah that's what like I think those are like breakthroughs and making efficiency to the framework as well as the use cases that's for me very well put together Nikita should I wonder I agree with Nikita like she told like lots of industry impact this blockchain technology and see you describe about the use cases like let me describe here with the development perspective like what the blockchain development makes a revolution in this industry actually like blockchain started from the Bitcoin and this Bitcoin would give you peer to peer digital currency and now this increase in the market like the development of there are lots of startup companies are working on this cryptocurrency and the cryptocurrency is demanded in the market but after Bitcoin what happened like Ethereum driven from the like Bitcoin technology and they have developed a smart contract based blockchain project like they introduce the concept of smart contract and that execute the business logic into the programmer code so what happened with the help of smart contract we can develop like distributed application and can execute like a complex transaction so here like what we are creating here we are creating a decentralized finance or decentralized like autonomous organization like we have a example of like the blockchain framework those who are using the smart contract like Ethereum Polka. Even hyper laser fabric using the smart contract and there is one is like Chanlink so these are the examples those blockchain framework which are using the smart contract and they are actually very popular that is that is development wise and third in the blockchain is what like we have interoperability and scalability solution like blockchain now we have a production based blockchain lots of production based blockchain project in the market now what we require we require like interoperability and scalability is required I think Polka. and Cosmos and hyper laser cacti they are like addressing these challenges and they are working on this interoperability part and I think the development of this interoperability and scalability will solve lots of problem of the blockchain here and the third thing is like adoption of blockchain from the enterprises like we are making from the blockchain we are making secured efficient and secured system like in supply chain management health care or in finance and like companies like IBM Microsoft that developed the blockchain private blockchain network so they are providing here the solution to meet the need of business actually so in this way like blockchain development impact the like impact the industry yeah very true similar to Kooyang we have this other alternative in open source which is under the hyper laser with the hyper laser so the framework that the audience can explore and you really touched upon like the trillium of blockchain decentralization, security and scalability you covered it pretty much well so moving on I'm sure like you would have found multiple blockchain projects or initiatives that might sound cool and interesting to you but I would like to know a couple of them which are really impressive to you and I would like to also know the reason why they stand out to you like for the quorum actually quorum blockchain we are using for our sub logistic client so quorum is actually driven from Ethereum, Ethereum is public blockchain but quorum you have private blockchain and this is for the enterprise solution and one of the blockchain like we are using hyper laser indie that is provided that is providing the identity based resolution based on like DID distributed identity hyper laser indie so these types of blockchain and even we have I think we have a DML that is going to DML is a smart contract that is going to deploy into the hyper laser fabric hyper laser fabric network and like we have a polka dot so they have actually they are providing a blockchain framework where we can create our blockchain network and deploy our smart contract as a parachain so these types of examples are here yeah, Akancha your thoughts on the initiatives that you find pretty cool yeah so when I attended the blockchain hyper laser global forum I was aware of some of the projects that hyper laser community was working on and I had myself worked with fabric and indie because that's my area of work I work in digital identity and data spaces so I so these were the projects that were I mean they were providing base for a lot of other projects so for example Khalidio which we were talking about they were using hyper laser firefly I think and it was a very interesting project I attended the demonstration apart from then there was a project called Peru network which works on payment providing payment capabilities using blockchain network and smart contracts hyper laser cactus which I was working on as part of an intern at the hyper laser program it was very important before that I did not understand the importance of such a project but I understood after working on this that hyper laser cactus kind of provides an interoperability capability then we see so many blockchain projects developing in silos with their own application some are working with payment some are working with identity so there might be a time when you want these blockchains to talk to each other so cactus is working in that area and of course in terms of data governance point of view I am also aware of some projects that are being worked upon in EU like there is a project called GAICS there is a project called international data spaces in which different organizations and industries are coming together to kind of create a data marketplace for data trading and these are I think very interesting projects there are other projects in terms of identity like transmute is working on providing verifiable credentials for supply chain it is one of them and there is this matter which is working on again verifiable credentials and zero knowledge based verifiable potential for digital identity space so and as I said a lot of them emerge from what the open source work is happening in the hyper legit community so these are some projects that I really like yeah well long list for that like a long list for defined to be exciting now moving on since we already were discussing about the scalability aspect of blockchain and that is something that has been researched a lot in the blockchain space and so how do you think the emerging technologies that are there like the layer do solution how they are essential for blockchains to scale it's for me you want anybody can anybody can go in yeah let others speak I've spoken on Nikita what do you like and if Tisha would you like to take this out yeah like if you talk about blockchain it mostly covers in three trial emas and in those three trial emas I think the third one is always like a bit challenged so like and that's mostly the scalability that we talk about and when the market and transaction grow that is where like everything comes down to like scalability so even like in the recently like in Ethereum because of the scalability the Ethereum 2.0 merge came into picture where they had to like change the consensus mechanism so like scalability and to make it more efficient in the terms of scalability and efficiency the first thing that we take into picture is the consensus mechanism definitely proof of work is where it is not very scalable so we came up with proof of stake then it layer to solutions like for Ethereum like we have polygon or for Bitcoin we have light networking so even in polygon also recently they are coming with zero knowledge which again is going to make a major impact with the scalability the transactions are going to happen within a fraction of seconds and then again there are something called as like off-chain computation that happens like the transactions computation that has to be happened is off-chain and then it is put into the on-chain so yeah these are the few solutions that we have but like I see like the off-chain and even sharding for that matter as well as the layer to solutions which I think make it more efficient and make it more scalable for the blockchains to emerge and make the applications work much faster so yeah yeah anybody wants to add anything over here okay for the off-chain part like I've seen it's multiple places like what we do is we basically process the data of the chain and then it's used for like there's a huge amount of data and then we just store a hash of that data on the blockchains just to maintain the integrity of the data so yeah that's about it and so now we have seen like many there are many platforms that are offering blockchains as a service or like node as a service and it's becoming a trend nowadays so in such platforms how do you think the data is kept secure yeah so is that's for me I suppose yeah I understand go ahead yeah so if you're using a blockchain as a service platform or node as a service platform you are putting trust in the provider so there are a couple things that you know you need to take into account when evaluating your choices so it's definitely important to look into the security measures implemented by the provider for example just for basics do they have certificates or documentation to show that they are compliant with security standards you can also look into how they architecture their design do they have a proper architectural design in place so do they have a high availability infrastructure how do they handle how do they recover during disasters do they do disaster recovery how do they back up their data how they isolate it and do they use up-to-date cloud infrastructure and best practices amongst amongst other things right so how secure our data is on these blockchains run on BAS or NAS platforms I think it's definitely variable with each platform you can't say you can't generalize it I think and there are steps we can take to make sure our data is more secure right when we're choosing these platforms to work with just by conducting proper evaluation of the different providers available and just for reference since I work at Kaleido which is a BAS provider we've been running thousands of chains for over five and a half years with over 99% availability and we support multi-region environments and tenancy models that increase resiliency and we're also SOC2 and ISO2701 certified and there's robust documentation on our architecture security and maintenance practices available publicly accessible on our website so these are some of the things that you can expect or you should expect to see when you're working with a BAS or NAS provider and I feel like that's how you can ensure that your data is as much as possible like there's no guarantees but as much as possible as being handled securely by these companies that sums it up just to add on it's not just about data getting stored I feel it's also about data that is in motion so the data that is in transit needs to be secure as well and blockchain as we all know there are different components so we as customer we are somebody who are using this BAS we should ensure that the communication between different components is like TLS enabled so in a way the data that is being sent across the chain is still encrypted good line of speech right there awesome so I want to know some of the most notable code contributions that you have done in the blockchain sector and how do you think that has impacted the industry overall like all of us write codes every day but part of code you feel is the most impactful to the industry I would like all of you to answer this so you can go one by one round the table okay I can start sorry to jump in I'm not a open source developer as of yet I would like to be one day but I think when I participated in the hyper ledger program at that time I did try to learn how to work on a large open source project and I was trying to solve some of the open problems that were there so it's a good way to get started I would say there was a lot of help from my mentors at that point of time but most part of me as working as a developer on the blockchain platform has been during my research that I have implemented my prototypes or protocols on blockchain platforms and I tried to keep them open source so anyone can learn from them and I have published my results in peer reviewed papers so just to make sure that whatever I am working on is available there and even if it is of small help it can help people get started and built on top of that so there's one project that I worked on which was using hyper ledger fabric I built an open source data market places for IOC data trading there were a lot of things to think about there like how will you make sure that the participants are trusted how you will make sure the identity verification is taking place giving a trust score to each of the participant in the network and then ensuring a reliable and fair exchange of data so this is I think one of the I don't know if notable but important project that I did using blockchain platform that's pretty interesting and I like the mindset that you had like giving back to the community that sort of mindset that we need for the open source community to grow absolutely yeah yeah you wanted to add it like as a blockchain developer actually I haven't contributed in the blockchain project but yes I know like who had actually contributed their code and that makes some like innovation and useful for enterprises like hyper ledger fabric we know like that is an open source project and developed under the Linux foundation and where lots of like organization and even individual are contributing like one of them I think IBM IBM is like their primary contributor in hyper ledger fabric and they have made significant changes in the architecture of hyper ledger fabric and that makes enterprise blockchain solution actually and one is like I am talking about like DML is developed by that digital asset that is a blockchain software company and that contributed into the hyper ledger fabric like what they will they have done they improved the usability of hyper ledger fabric smart contractor capabilities and in hyper ledger also I have worked so they are actually they have sovereign foundation and sovereign foundation is actually they are they are non profit organization so they play a vital role in deployment of indie network and advancements of hyper ledger indie and there is one more organization ever name for the hyper ledger indie so ever name is also ever name is actually providing self sovereign based identity solution so they contributed their code there and in corem I have worked for hyper corem blockchain network so there is an organization consensus they have also contributed to the corem and ethereum foundation helped to the corem blockchain networks so here like technology evolve because of these organizations yeah so true so true it's all about the intention that these organizations have to let the community grow along with them okay so what happens many times is like if somebody is like a new beginner and then they start working on a project they face certain kind of issues and sometimes they are not able to find solutions and then they give up they are like I am not able to find any help so like being a developer I myself have encountered such scenarios so Nikita would you like to describe any obstacles that you have encountered while working on any project and what was your approach to overcoming that scenario yeah so like even though I started my journey in the blockchain like my mentors and seniors were there at the starting but there on like I started exploring on my own and at times it it is challenging to explore and like blockchain itself is very in development wise as well it is very in early stage we can say so like you won't find many resource to it but what helped me is like I think whichever development you take on whichever platform I think their documentation that they have like I think they are pretty much thorough if we go it thoroughly you might find our solutions in those documentation itself most of the times what happens is that we have like we have that mindset that we have to complete it in this much time or we have other task lined up so we don't explore it as much as we must explore it so I think reading these documents thoroughly would definitely help then also there are pretty much many forums that are there like through on these forums I think the community is pretty much active please don't shy away by asking your problems even if those are minors you think it's stupid to ask please ask even if your solution is not helpful to you it might help others so these forums definitely help it helped me a lot with my challenges then we also have these discord channels where you can connect and it's like a part of forum only where you can do the solution also like you can also go through like as open source community there are so many projects available on github as well so you can go through them as well but I think like the solutions that we were looking for pretty much what helped me is like their documentation itself like going through it thoroughly and doing proper research is much like at times what happens with me as well that we go in the need of finding one solution but we go so deep that we forget like what we were looking for and it's a loop so like doing the proper research like environment and the problem is must and then research and going through these documentation would definitely help yeah yeah like I am agree with Nikita like if you are going to blockchain is actually innovative solution that is not a like when we are going to develop first we have to make document and then we have to research but like I am sharing also my experience with the blockchain as a blockchain developer what issues actually I am facing here the first one is like scalability issue like for the when I am working for blockchain corum network so here what for corum network actually what we have actually a logistic plan and what they they have like a million of transaction millions of transaction in a day so like and here what happened like scalability like it is a ability to handle a large volume of transaction like at high speed but here like in corum blockchain there is a some transaction size limit and blockchain is also like a thread save so like there is only one transaction can initiate at one time not a concurrent way so what for this problem like we have to handle it in some another way like we have limit the transaction data then send the request one by one to the corum client and this is the first problem we have faced with hyperlizard sorry corum blockchain and the second the most important challenge with blockchain is like interoperability interoperable issue like exchange of data to either blockchain network that are present on same or different blockchain protocol so we have a client like they are using lots of blockchain network and we have to actually exchange data there so what we have done here actually we don't have any framework we have tried with polka dot or cosmos and even hyperlizard cacti they are using actually they are in progress actually so what in logical way like we are exchanging the messages here and when more issue I have seen in the corum blockchain network like smart contract out of memory issue when smart contract is getting out of memory issue in that case what we have to do we don't have any solution we have to redeploy the smart contracts so these types of problems we are facing in the blockchain so this is my experience actually yeah I echo with some of the points like the points related to scalability in drop this is not something which is you this is something that the that we as community have been working to resolve it I think we are like almost there and yeah it's good to know that you are facing all these struggles and then still you managed to overcome it so it's good for beginners who are out there don't just give up if you are getting started if you are stuck reach out for help and then that's the only way to succeed so now we have talked about what challenges we have faced and how we overcame it but what are the things you think could be done from the blockchain community to keep up with the collaboration and innovation that is happening out there yeah I think within the blockchain development community it's really important to have events like these to get people together and start talking about their experiences with blockchain and where it might still be lacking and what progress could be made to make the experience even better yeah like Nikita said before this core communities I know there's already tons of them so I feel like if you're someone who's interested in blockchain development definitely look out for those communities because that's how you can learn from others that's how you can expose yourself to new opportunities in the space and yeah I mean organizations like hyper ledger we can do a lot too to help facilitate that for newcomers yeah I think that's it for me yeah that totally makes sense like we even have a discord channel for hyper level so anybody who's new and hasn't joined the channel feel free to join it and then we also have this mailing list where you can send your questions out and at hyper ledger India developer and advocate me we are part of that if anybody wants to get started with development feel free to reach us out and we will be able to guide you and we also have hyper ledger India weekly calls which is like happening on every Thursday at 3pm so that is another way you can get involved with the community and now I see this question in the chat like what advice would you give to these budding developers that want to move into the blockchain industry I can start and also it goes back to the last question that we were answering I think when I joined the so there was this instance in my first year of PhD I was working with hyper ledger India at that time and it was very new at that time and I remember trying to install a project on my laptop and it didn't work and then I was frustrated and I left it and then I moved to some other platforms I moved on to Ethereum at that point of time because it was stable at least I could get my smart contracts running testing etc and 3 years down the lane when I joined internship at the hyper ledger forum I learnt about this fantastic thing called discord channels there was a week at least about hyper ledger cactus where there were calls happening every evening and the mentors were there and I realised that it was not just me as an intern who could access these channels literally anybody could join these channels and ask the any questions like the beginner level question to even the most advanced or technical questions you might have because you're really interacting with the maintainers of the project so that's one thing and I think in terms of getting started my point of view will be to just start something choose one project and get started with it if it's fabric of course some of them are very use case based projects like indeed it's very identity based but pick a simple project probably hyper ledger fabric or Ethereum whatever you like and build something when you write code when you make mistakes you learn a lot and down the lane read papers and interact it really helps when you interact with the community and gives you really nice ideas on how to advance and definitely project building is the way to go yeah and that's really good a really good answer and to add to that I feel like when you pick a project to work on really understand it or at least understand the purpose of it so that you feel you feel driven to actually make contributions there and another thing I would advise is try to get an environment where you can actually test the project itself either locally or if they have a sandbox available where you can just access it to try it out that's a great way to start since it's an open source project it probably has bugs right so if you're trying it out and you are encountering issues where some things aren't clear just contributing a bug report that's big so don't think of any contributions as small even if it's just a typo fix you can start there because even when you're working in an open source environment submitting pull requests for just small fixes there's usually a lengthy process or there's a couple things that you need to prepare before you can merge something to the main branch of this code base that's probably being used by a lot of people so learning that process I think is really valuable as well you don't have to start contributing hundreds of lines of code you can start small and then slowly maybe you can look through the issues page on GitHub and look for labels usually there's labels like good first issue where it's supposed the issues are designed to be easily tackled by beginners and they're not too complicated and not too big so filter through those and then if you need help like everyone else said there's usually discord communities don't be afraid to reach out and ask if your fixes are looking good or what else needs to be done to get that into the main branch and yeah I think that's my advice just being able to test it report any bugs you see that's really valuable and then if you're tackling issues don't get intimidated and don't be sad if it doesn't get merged that's yeah you're making an impact when you're contributing to something that's being used by so many people and I'm seeing this as a hyper ledger firefly contributor as well hyper ledger firefly repo is you might want to look into it because it's just to give a quick overview for people who are not familiar firefly is a blockchain based project built to identify the integration of off-chain systems with blockchain technology and so often times when people are looking to build on blockchain they find out that the main problem isn't actually the blockchain part itself but the off-chain plumbing so things like being able to sequence events properly deliver events reliably tokenize assets and being able to keep an audit trail of all their movements and so firefly aims to take away this problem so that blockchain developers can not even blockchain developers I feel like this is a design for just even web 2 developers to work with blockchain so it's designed so that developers can focus on their business logic instead of trying to figure out all these complicated off-chain plumbing portions and so you can try the sandbox it's very easy to install that on your computer and you can try the sandbox to see how to see the capabilities of hyper-allerger firefly and from there you can expand to maybe use it in your own use case because it's very easy to get started with it and there are examples that you can look up online as well so if you ever want to contribute to that codebase we're more than happy to have you contribute and there's really friendly developer documentations and the hyper-allerger channel firefly channel on the hyper-allerger discord as well that you can look at and another thing that I would suggest is being familiarizing yourself with smart contract development obviously that could be pretty complicated but being able to understand how smart contracts work or be able to understand the solidity code I think that's a good first step to just you know being a blockchain developer and then you can move on to learn how to deploy that to different networks starting with test networks and yeah there's a lot of complicated pieces when it comes to robust smart contract development so you don't have to go there right away but just learning the basics of it I think is really valuable and there's a lot of resources online for that so yeah that's it for me that was really insightful so if you want to contribute to firefly you know home to contact to yeah moving on Shwetha would you like to add something I have some points like who wants to join the blockchain industry so like first if anybody comes for a blockchain so first they have to understand the blockchain concept directly no need to jump on the network setup and the smart contracted deployment first you understand the blockchain architecture the distributed lesser concept or consensus or smart contract then only you go for the development and because every blockchain have their own specific language so you should strong in programming language like hyperlaser fabric have like go zawa or not or ethereum have a solidity so like you must have a strong logical and programming skill and like when you are going to blockchain then first you have to decide which blockchain platform you have to use on first you check your use case and their developer community or the blockchain features they are providing and then determine which blockchain platform you are going to use and like blockchain is not only this application development here you have a infra as well as your application development skill both skill like for the infra you should you should aware of bash or sell a script you should have a knowledge of docker you should aware of a family with a linux command and like for a smart contract development either you should strong in java or go or node so and always stay updated with blockchain technology I think that pretty much some what Amreej Singh was asking like he was interested in also knowing like what skill should be developed he answered it very well so Kartikey would you like to add on something okay so yeah there are like it's not this limited to one skill set it is like you can work across different projects if you have like a different skill set so let's say if you talk about the hyperliger fabric that is written in Golan somebody who is expertise in Golan who wants to get started with Golan start looking at the fabric source code if you are a java developer then you can get started with hyperliger based on and if you're somebody who is interested in learning python or rust and you can get going with hyperliger sort of all these frameworks that are out there that are like written in different programming languages so that is the thing you can build like a versatile set of skill set to work across different blockchain framework okay so just to touch upon Shweta like you mentioned we need to like stay updated with what is happening in the technology so would you like to tell us like what are some of the blogs, medium or references that you want to follow to stay updated with the advancement that's happening in the blockchain space this would be like a special interest to the persons who want to stay on top of the technology okay so stay updated with the blockchain technology like first let me tell you about hyperliger fabric so hyperliger fabric they have actually awesome read talks like they explained very clear way with their advice if you are working for like hyperliger fabric project first go their read talks and if the hyperliger fabric community is releasing new version then they are updated into the read talks as well and like quorum they have a consensus ethereum they have their own community talks so first go through the community talks and one blog is like medium, medium we are using actually for any solution like medium is a platform like where like individual and organization share their knowledge like expert their post to their like how you can set up the network how you can deploy the smart contract these types of blogs you can find in the medium but for cryptocurrency like I can see when there is a coin desk there is like one of the blockchain and cryptocurrency news they are providing so it is widely used so you can use medium coin desk and read talks for the community Nikita would you like to add add on yeah so I think all these like whichever blockchain you want like you are an expert their official documents would definitely give you the insights but also like their ambassadors and as well as there are POCs like a point of contact and they nowadays also have influencers for that particular platform so definitely follow them on their social media so like they have linked in these people are also present on medium itself so you can subscribe to their newsletters I think that pretty much covers everything and these influencers and these ambassadors pretty much they have put in their work they put in their time to research and everything and give us like a pointers to this so I like what I do like I personally practices follow these people find them and follow these people on social media and I think that pretty much covers everything and if you want in-depth like I think most of the time it covers but if you still want in-depth this thing you can definitely go to their official the like links to that but to go there you need to know that something is coming up so the LinkedIn pretty much covers and even like nowadays Twitter space is quite active when we talk about blockchain so if you subscribe to these things if you put in the interest to these you would definitely get through these news and everything since I am an Indian Blockchain Institute trainer I know what content goes because some of the part I have contributed to so you can definitely subscribe to those channels on Instagram or LinkedIn on YouTube as well where we definitely put Delhi or not maybe not Delhi on weekly basis we put in the updates is whatever going on in the market of blockchain irrespective of which blockchain it is so yes you can subscribe to that channel and you will get all those updates and like we already have so many panelists here so like Anastasia is there for Firefly so if you are interested in those you can subscribe to her channel or follow her on LinkedIn and you would definitely get those news so yeah yeah just to add a little bit blog posts or blog pages on company websites that is also like blockchain company websites that is also really helpful because they are on the cutting edge they are actually building this stuff so they know the ins and outs of you know how these complicated things work and sometimes the insights that they share might be like the newest and greatest that you could find so yeah we have things like for example collido has a blog where we talk about not just like obviously we have to market ourselves as a company but we also share our knowledge about the different things that we are building that could be really useful just for you to know and to know like the direction of where things are going in the future and I am not just talking about collido it has really useful and interesting blogs blog posts that they release every now and then so keep an eye out for those as well I think that's really a nice source to learn from right I agree to that even hyper leisure is having its own blog so they post about different use cases that is being handled using the hyper leisure play words that is another means of getting information okay so Akansha I would like to know from you how do you stay updated with the technology yeah so I would like to add apart from what everybody has said great insight there I think what you would like to read will depend on which stage of understanding blockchain you are at if you are a beginner also it will depend on your area I mean in terms of whether you are looking from a technology perspective from a research perspective from a regulator perspective so that would vary there is this awesome website that I started following recently and they also have these fantastic podcasts called A16Z Crypto which is heavily working and funding web3 based companies so that's for web3 and if you are interested in CBDC stuff I have been reading some papers on BIS which is banned for international settlements they have some really good papers in terms of CBDC implementation on by different government and what they have achieved what are different analysis and outcomes that they have got some really good papers there apart from that everybody has already spoken and I concur with that in terms of medium blog posts follow people on LinkedIn I got help of my information from there follow relevant people you meet you hear them talking that I think is good enough right I think one of the things that the audience can also follow is if somebody wants to stay close to the domain then we have this special interest group in hyper leisure so we have this special interest group from climate to healthcare to supply chain and various other groups are there so if you want to know what is happening in that exact domain maybe you can subscribe to this mailing list and then you can even attend their meetings you can be part of their meetings you will know what is happening in that particular domain so that is another way for somebody who doesn't want to go into too much technicality of it but wants to remain more on the domain side so that is another way of staying up to date with the technology trend so yeah feel free to post any questions in the Q&A section we are out of time but if anybody is having a question we can take it up in the next 2 minutes if not it was wonderful connecting with you all Nikita, Shweta, Gansha Anastasia it was like a truly it was a session where which I was most excited about throughout this day and it was like a privilege to host you all and it is very nice of you to see all the kind of work that you are doing and how you are so passionate about contributing to the open source and then you want to give back to the community so yeah, thank you so much for joining us thanks a lot Nidhi thank you for hosting good to meet you guys and I would also like I would also like all of you to stay on the call because now we will be having a networking session so hi Vikram hi everyone it was great to listen to all the women no disturbances from us I hope so great to hear all of your views and get that understanding because you guys are all experienced developers we had some research to talk about very interesting topics on the behaviors of drug schools so it was great to listen to you and I think now is the time when we should get started with networking so I know that many of the people actually joined some of them of course but I guess there is a time when they get to connect with us as well we hear from them as well what are their thoughts let them ask their questions so with that in mind we can start our networking session and I don't suppose we have options to create


Just a few weeks ago, we were talking about a constitutional coup in Senegal, where the former president Macky Saul decided to postpone the election, which was to occur in February to December 2024. According to the former president, he wanted to investigate and settle the dispute regarding the candidates, but that was a farce. Either he wanted time so that he could contest again, or he needed time to ensure that the candidate from his political party, Ahmed Ubaa, won the election. Unfortunately for him, his plan did not work out, as it was met with resistance from the people and regional bodies. Eventually, the election was rescheduled, and to the surprise of all, the opposition party candidate Bassarro Diomai Faye, won the election. And today we are celebrating the youngest elected president in the world, President Faye, who is ready to do great things. However, it seems like the military coups which started in Mali and spread to the other countries in the Sahel, attempts at constitutional coups have begun to spread. Today, like Senegal, Togo, a Francophone country, is on the verge of a constitutional coup carried out by the current administration. Similar to what happened in Senegal, the current administration headed by President Fahor Agnasinghvi announced a constitutional reform ahead of the elections. The constitutional reforms which were approved with 89 votes in favor, one against, and one abstention would see Togo move from a presidential system to a parliamentary system of government, essentially ushering in the country's fifth republic. What this means is that the constitution would no longer grant power to the people to choose the next president of the country. Instead, power would reside with the parliament which would choose the next president, essentially no more direct voting in Togo. The constitutional reform essentially restricted the power of the president who would be directly appointed by parliament for a single six-year term. This means whoever is elected as president would have to rule just once for six years and he can never contest again. This seems like a good deal, but under this system, the executive power would rest on the prime minister who would be the president of the council of ministers. This means that the presidency would be reduced to a ceremonial role. Whoever holds this new prime ministerial position would run for a six-year term and he would be the leader of the party or the leader of the majority coalition of parties following the legislative elections. Since it was announced the reforms have been met with opposition from the citizens of Senegal and the opposition parties who called it a constitutional coup. There have been protests and unrest which was further aggravated after the proposed legislative and parliamentary elections were postponed originally scheduled for April 20, 2024. In a bid to calm the situation, the president sent the reforms for a second reading and rescheduled the proposed election to April 25, 2024. The reason why the people are angry is because the constitutional reform if passed has a great implication for Togo. Togo is a small country with about 9 million people that has been ruled by a single family for the past 57 years. It started with Nassimbe Ayedema who organized a coup in 1963 where it's reported that he assassinated Sylvanus Olympio, the first president of Togo with his own hands. Four years later in 1967 Ayedema organized another coup together with the help of France which installed him as president of the country. With the help of France Ayedema who is said to be a personal friend of French president Jacques Chirac went on to rule Togo for the next 37 years until he died in 2005. It's very certain that if he had not died he would have continued to rule Togo till today. As president Ayedema was a dictator who ruled using oppression, violence and manipulation. But did you ever hear France call him a dictator? Of course not. Instead they called him an ally how hypocritical of France. After his death the military swiftly installed his 38 year old son Fauré Nassimbe as president of the country similar to what happened in Chad. This action was declared unconstitutional and the pressure made him temporarily resigned. However in the same year standing with his union for the republic party Fauré won the elections to become the president of Togo. However it was widely noted that the election was fraudulent and his victory led to serious unrest which resulted in the deaths of over 500 citizens by security forces. After serving for two terms the streets of Togo erupted in protest and demonstrations in 2017 and 2018 calling for the president to step down. These protests were met with violent crackdowns including an internet shutdown by the government resulting in hundreds of deaths and thousands of arrests. The crackdown on the protests ensured that president Fauré survived and in May 2019 his government voted for a change to Togo's constitution potentially enabling him to remain in office until 2030. President Fauré is obviously following in the footsteps of his father who reportedly told him never to leave power. Political opponents believe that the new constitutional reform is the president's latest amendment to the constitution designed to keep him in charge even when the presidential term limits end. According to Brigitte Ajamagbo-Johnson of the Opposition Democratic Convention of the African people the move towards a parliamentary system is a way for Nasingbe to avoid facing voters at the polls. This is being done to avoid direct voting for the president because the person holding power knows very well that it will be difficult to continue to cheat and tamper with presidential elections she added. It is believed that if the reforms are passed not only is it very likely that the president would be reappointed as president until 2031 but he could also step down from the job and switch to the new role of president of the council of ministers thereby ensuring that power remains in the hands of the Nasingbe family. This is because the new constitution does not take into account the time already spent in power. The question now is will the constitutional change go through? Opposition groups and civil society have been agitating and calling for the reforms to be ditched but given that the first hearing was approved by 89 lawmakers with only one against and one abstention it is clear that the opposition is weak and divided and may not be able to do much however the calls and demands have been ongoing. Josu who is running as a DMP candidate in the parliamentary elections in the gulfa constituency in loam believes Nasingbe planned to rush through the reforms before the elections to sidestep the potential later risk of parliamentary opposition. It's an organized scam people have been swindled by those in power for years he said. A group representing togo's catholic bishops stated that members of parliament had no right to pass a new constitution because the parliament's mandate had ended in december prior to the elections they encouraged nasingbe to postpone signing the new constitution meanwhile about 100 academics artists politicians and activists have signed an open letter that was published online and calls on people to protest and reject what they called a violation of the constitution they have gone too far said the letter how can we flout all the pillars of democracy unashamedly touching the fundamental text of a country with no broad political and social consensus while calling ourselves democratic protests and news conferences have also been planned in a bid to compel the president to ditch the reforms however recently the president placed a ban on the three-day protest over the arrest of opposition figures and new legislation scrapping presidential elections the government called it illegal saying that it would disturb public order right now there are tensions everywhere from the people opposition parties civil society and the government the question is what will happen next will the people now or the government time will tell what are your thoughts let us know in the comment section don't forget to like subscribe and share this video


I think of my job in two aspects. One is to create more jobs and try and make sure that BC remains the strongest economy in the country. The second one is to make sure that all British Columbia can see the benefits of that growing economy. And one of those benefits is more roofs over people's heads. We have committed $855 million to create close to 5,000 new units of affordable housing throughout the province. And today we are announcing that with $516 million of that investment, we are going to create 68 new projects, 2,900 additional units, and we are doing that because we've stuck to our plan. Having the strength and the support of a network of people, especially those close to you in the neighbourhood, is something that housing like this can afford to give a whole lot of families, a whole lot of single moms. Because once we have that foundation and that base, we can meet any other challenge that's facing us. We can provide the support and the nurturing and the love to our kids when we don't have to worry about the cost of our rent being not affordable and our living arrangement unsustainable.