Think Tech Away. Civil engagement lives here. Good afternoon. Welcome to the Global Report. I'm your host, Lily Ong. Today we'll be talking about cryptocurrency and the various mobile payment methods. We have with us today Mr. Danny Francis. He's the co-founder at the Vault Security Blockchain Company. Welcome to the show, Mr. Francis. Thank you. Welcome. Mr. Francis, before we have you explain to us how blockchain technology works, could you give us a little background on cryptocurrency, how it started and how it came about? Well, I mean the cryptocurrency phenomenon actually started quite a while ago with the creation of the blockchain technology, which is basically a way of managing transactions, whether they're financial or other kinds of transactions. And when those transactions happen, they happen on a peer-to-peer network in a distributed environment. What it means is each transaction forms a ledger and that ledger can never be changed. It's unlike the kind of way that computing is done now. Think of it as if you're writing a journal and you're recording or making a record in that journal and you've got 100,000 people watching you at the same time make that record. It can never be changed. Everyone's witnessed it. But of course in the technology, it's not 100,000 people, but it's miners that come and verify that the transactions have been made. And once they're done, they're immutable. They can't be changed. It creates a trustless peer-to-peer network. When I say trustless, I mean the kind of centralized system that we have today is banking. That requires trust in third parties. That's what ties us into banks and payment gateways like Visa or Mastercard. And governments. And governments. Whereas this, it doesn't. The people that come and verify the transaction, the verify that you have what you say you have and the person that is buying what you have, that they have the currency that makes the transactions. So it all happens without the trusted third party, the government, the banks needing to do anything at all. Of course the governments and banks can participate, but at the moment they're well behind companies such as ours. Now when you say it's immutable, it cannot be changed or deleted. What if a mistake is made? I mean how would I rectify that? Well it can't be made. So let's say we have an agreement and in blockchain technology it's called a smart contract. So I've got something that you want to buy for example. And so the smart contract is made. In blockchain technology the miners come along and verify that I've got what I say I've got. They verify that you've got the money. When those terms are met the exchange happens. So it's as simple as that. If you don't have what you say you have, if you don't have enough money to pay for it, the contract terms can't be met. And so the contract won't happen. And how are the contract firms being verified?  Can we do that through a smart contract? Absolutely. And who is going to come in and verify the other contract for terms of being met? Well you don't need to because once the contract's been made and you've paid for the rent then it's protected. If somehow there's a dispute then there's dispute resolution systems to manage that. But the initial payment, that's taken care of from the initial smart contract. So when you have multiple contracts and ongoing then of course you need additional oversight to govern that. Now I was going to ask about that because since there's no third party like the banks, credit company and government, who's going to come in to I guess referee a dispute? There are ways to do that but of course you can always fall back on the law to come in and play the role that it does. Because there's a record of what's happened. Then they've got something that can't be changed that they can go back and refer to. So it actually does away with a lot of disputes because there's no way to say oh look I didn't make that transaction or I paid too much or I didn't pay enough or because the terms have been out. Because everything is recorded and then there's witness all along the way. Now as far as a regulation because you briefly mentioned that if there's any dispute, what are the government regulations surrounding blockchain or cryptocurrency? There are regulations so it's been in the past six, eight months that the government has started regulating what's going on to do with cryptocurrencies, to do with initial coin offerings which are a recent phenomenon. So tell us more about initial coin offering, what is it? Initial coin offering, so you've probably heard of companies doing an IPO, an initial public offering and for that then there's banks are involved, there's stock exchanges involved, there's large sums of money that are paid up front. So the bankers can guarantee that these things are going to go along and then there's a lot of due diligence in order etc. It takes a long time to execute. You need to be an established company, have significant business transactions already underway before you can do something like that. And then there's other ways of fundraising venture capital. So young companies that may have only just started or not even started a business could go to a venture capital and raise funds for a venture capital. So for example I've got a great idea, I'm going to create a new line that's going to fly between Hawaii and Singapore and that's the only route it's going to do because I've got a dedicated audience in each market and I know I can fill my planes up on that route. So I take that great idea and I go to a VC and maybe a venture capital person can invest in it and I can raise money that way. It takes usually a lot of time, maybe I've got to go and see 20 VCs before I find someone that's interested in investing in me. And initial coin offering is quite different. Initial coin offering usually involves a company, it could be a brand new startup, it could be going for a few years, it could be a more established company as well. But the company creates a token and then makes those tokens available for sale. And there's a couple of different types of token, I won't go into that just yet. But so the ICO, the initial coin offering is about individuals or companies, institutional investors coming in and buying those tokens because they see that in the future those tokens will appreciate the value and so therefore they can make money through that. So because there's a lot of interest in cryptocurrency at the moment, there's a lot of people interested in buying tokens from new startup companies where they think the token might be worth one cent today but if it's worth a dollar somewhere in the future, I've made a hundred times more money. So it's a very attractive prospect to do small level bidding in companies that are doing blockchain based businesses. Now are these tokens structured in the form of securities? Because I'm thinking about regulations. For example, Singapore, the Monetary Authority of Singapore does not have any regulations over virtual currencies per se but they do have regulations over activities surrounding those virtual currencies and if they are structured in the form of securities, I imagine the government will come in and... That's right. I need to say there's two types of tokens. One is a security and the other is a utility. So a security is quite simple to define for our terms now. So let's say I'm selling you a share in my company. So it's a part of my company that I'm selling to you. I'm giving you equity in the company and that's a security. I'm going to give you a share form and you're going to hope that share form is worth something more in the future. A utility token is quite different. So for the way that a lot of companies do it is let's say my company is going to enable transactions in a new kind of blockchain exchange and to power those transactions we're going to use tokens. So the people that use our technology to make the transaction will buy tokens to do it. So those tokens that I'm selling are actually a utility think of how you pay for electricity or you're paying for this service. So that's what we're selling where we're not selling equity into our company where we're selling tokens that have a value. And so those tokens will hopefully increase in value the more people that want to use our network to make more transactions. So what might be worth one cent today could be worth $100 tomorrow. Now being that everything is digital and done online what about as far as security goes I mean have you seen malicious attacks, hackings what are the safeguards against? The most famous one I guess is the $570 million hack that was done against CoinCheck in Japan back in January. Because the blockchain exchanges that have been established so far some of them have good security, some of them don't have good security obviously in the case of CoinCheck then someone was able to hack into their network and then divert NEO tokens to an address elsewhere which has been tracked down actually. So hacking in the blockchain world is maybe a good idea but getting your money and actually stealing it is a whole other thing that needs to be coordinated. So it's not like if we hacked into a bank and were able to divert money to a Swiss account and then we'd just go and empty the Swiss account and take it over somewhere else that's how we think of hacking in the old world in blockchain you're taking it from an address and sending it to an address that can be identified. So kind of trace where it is. So it is different. But there's issues over security people are concerned because the technology is not pervasive enough to have a lot of understanding. There's not enough regulation around who does what. So that's kind of what my company is doing to come in and make sure that there's kind of an escrow between when the payment starts and before it's delivered over there we first have to verify that these two addresses are real and that it can be done. So in a sense we're managing the transaction we're making sure that these two people are not money launderers making sure they're not terrorists making sure that it's not a fraudulent activity we know who they are and we can manage it. So security is a big concern and we've partnered with a great company to provide that service to get around people's concerns about security. Now given that everything can be traced to a source why then is the government, you know, why did they raise the issues of money laundering and funding terrorists? Because when the technology first came out it's a peer-to-peer trustless technology. So originally and in the early days and still for many of the companies now they don't have KYC or Know Your Customer rules so whoever can get in there and deal with it. So the governments are concerned about terrorists and they're concerned about money laundering. They're also concerned about the loss of tax revenues that they can receive if everything went through channels that they could more properly audit and track. But that's happening as you can see Singapore, America, Australia, Korea, China they're all putting in place regulations so they can put an end to the complete privacy of what's happening there. And so there's Know Your Customer, there's anti-money laundering, there's fraud detection services in place. And to enable them to collect taxes too? I'm sure, yes. Well, thank you so much. We're going to take a little break here and we'll come back. We'd love to have you tell us more about the various mobile payment platforms. Thank you so much. Thank you. Welcome back to the Global Report. Today we're talking about cryptocurrency and the various mobile payment platforms. We have with us today Mr. Danny Francis who is the co-founder of the Vault of Blockchain Security, we'll come back to the show Mr Francis. Now Mr Francis, could you share with us some of the different types of mobile payment platforms that are out there? Right, I guess there's a number of mobile emerging payment platforms that are quite common in around... How much do they call it? There's a number of emerging payment I guess we call them so, there's Mastercard, has MasterPass, there's Stripe, there's Braintree, PayPal all of those are vehicles or payment gateways that mobile vendors embedding in phone devices so that you can purchase things from retail stores, you can buy a cup of coffee in the morning, they can be married with loyalty programs and it's usually the tokenisation of a credit card or a debit card. Once that tokenisation happens security layers are put in place to protect it and then it's put on your phone so you can use your phone to, you may have seen in places like Australia where people tap their phone using NFC technology or it could be done on a location basis using Bluetooth or just using pairing a phone with a point of sale terminal but there's several ways that you can enable that. Now when I tap my phone to that, what kind of information is being transferred? Just payments as if you're handing over your credit card and they're swiping at the terminal so they get no other information at all about the user except that they check with the bank that you have enough money in the bank to cover the transaction and while I say that some companies will offer payment technology on a device in exchange for gathering things about your behaviour, what you buy, when you buy, how much you spend in a week. Is this the customer aware of that? Oh yes in those sort of things that the customer need to be aware, in Singapore we have privacy laws in Australia there's privacy laws to protect consumers from anyone trying to gather that information without their awareness. Now you mentioned that it can be paired with customer loyalty programs, could you give us an example of how that works? See I go to a cafe and buy a cup of coffee. Right so quite common are things like Starbucks store, stored value card. With Starbucks it's a bit conky. You have to go and buy a physical card and then you scan the card to tokenise it in your device and then when you make a payment and then you add funds to that card and then when you come into the store you can make an order and use the funds that are in your card to pay with. When you are paying are you tapping your phone or tapping a card? With Starbucks in Asia it's scanning at a terminal. With the phone or the card? With the QR code on the phone because the card has been embedded in the phone. But then there's companies like Loke and Loke do away with all that clunkiness. They embed the card, your card into the application so it could be Starbucks. In this case you wouldn't have to get a card, download it, you just do your own credit card and then when you make a purchase you get points. As those points build up you can use those points to make a purchase. And the company is of course collecting information on what type of purchase you need. So places like Starbucks, Coffee Bean, Yaqum Cafe can gather information and improve services to customers. So customers are made aware that this behaviour information is known before they sign on. But they get discounts and they get value for being part of that process. What is the capital cost? What does it look like for a merchant to say okay I want to implement this in my channel store? Is there a very high capital cost involved? It does vary from vendor to vendor. There's probably five or six vendors in Singapore that do it. Some will do it very cheaply in terms of setup but they don't do native mobile application development. They do web development which is lower cost less secure. And so you find with those kind of vendors they're not so liked by the banks because of lack of security. But then the credit card companies will not have endorsed them because they might have passed the rules required for credit card tokenisation. So it could be as low as $50 a month per outlet. There's companies like Loak do $1,000 to set up the outlet and then $100 a month on small outlets. It's very reasonable. It's a reasonable cost considering the benefits to the merchant which are an uplift in revenues of more than 8% increase in margin of more than 5%. Significant if you're turning over $100,000 a month and it's more than a staff's wage increase in your margin. And if capital cost is not exactly a barrier, what are some of the barriers that you have seen in your industry? The barriers are probably the integration with the point of sale. So there's point of sale vendors who some are very open and some are very closed but they're usually relationships that have been married with the merchant for some time and to change rules like in any marriage could be a difficult thing. And what about educating the customers to consumers? I imagine that the older generation might be more technophobic. You'd be surprised. Women between the age of 50 and 65 are among the most mobile savvy, much more mobile savvy than their equivalent aged males. Male males of that era are more likely to not be a mobile savvy. Women have been smartphone adopters and game players, surprisingly. So it comes from that. The older generation actually don't have too many issues and the smarter that the applications get, the easier it is for them to manage and find their way. Mobile apps are very intuitive. So there used to be tutorials required when you downloaded an app that used the app and do this, do that, step one, step two, step three. With the company that I was with before we found that no one was using those things anymore. So you don't have to include them anymore because people are knowledgeable enough about mobile apps that they can navigate fairly easily. And looking at just Asia alone, what do you think is the percentage of penetration, market penetration for such technology? How many merchants, what's the percentage of merchants that have already picked it up? It's happening fast now. I think it's kind of growing with some pace. So there's a bank in Singapore called DBS and DBS is really pioneering what's happened in the earth and DBS already has one-half to 2,000 outlets. Doing it, they're targeting over 20,000 outlets in the next 12 to 18 months. In Australia, there's probably loyalty and payment. I can just think of three companies that would have more than 10,000 outlets between them. In Korea, I know of a company called Dodo Point and has over a million merchants using it. Wow. And do you operate mostly within the Asian region or do you have clients outside of the Asian region as well? Asia Pacific. Right. We're a global company, but the technology that we've developed has been focused in Australia, spread to Asia Pacific. Now we're setting up US and UK. Do you encounter different types of difficulty as you bring them to different regions? Surprisingly, no. Asia's been a market that's more mobile savvy than the West, but the West has caught up in the last couple of years. America was very slow in coming to the market. Why do you think that is so? Why are they slowly adopting it? They're slowly adopting all kinds of payment technologies. Americans were still writing out checks when the rest of the world was saved by buy. And even the kind of technology they used in their credit cards was generation behind what was happening in Asia. And Australia's quite fortunate because it followed the Asian technology and the Asian way of doing it. So the adoption in Australia is very good. And the adoption in the UK, France, Germany. Why do you think it's slow in America? Do you think government regulations have a role to play in that? Well, I don't think so anymore. They were up until two years ago, and now that's changed. America's got great designers, great UI experts. It was just a matter of time until I embraced the technology and they'll succeed as well as anyone. Well, thank you so much, Mr Francis. We really appreciate you spending time with us today. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Cheers.


Oh, you're joining thank you so far. It's mostly us. We've been nice if we could have arranged to have this Broadcast on a wheel screen. Mm-hmm. Yeah Matt is not All right, yes, he's traveling Do we have an agenda That was a good question. No, that's just There is no agenda Yeah, does anybody have agenda items? I Have one Dan would be here soon, but this will be his last week on No, I think so. Can everybody hear me? Yes. Okay, cool. Thanks Like deck Liza has arrived. Liza, do you have Stefan do you have any Agenda items there's nothing in there In the minutes not really My side. I don't have anything. I think there's been some reports of problems with ci but the ones that I looked at all looked like they just needed to merge master or Yeah, well, I think Think we should uncheck the The whole pipeline has required since not all of them is required right now Uh, hardly made might be able to make that change. I don't have access to that Yeah, I can make them. We can discuss that in the maintainer channel. I don't feel like particularly material Yeah So what topics with the api? Maybe uh, yeah, so I mean I can just probably a brief update. I think there's Good progress happening there.  Um, Liza's been busy adding in new features to the tooling So we can now express for example renaming of fields and uh, that will actually perform the renaming the v3 alphas Um, and Billy's working on package renaming and moving which is very important because basically as soon as that lands We can then go into discussion of what do we want to use the structure of the apis to look like in v3 Because we have a huge amount of freedom there and uh, hopefully we can start lining some prs to make that Look like a thing in parallel I'm working on the actual tooling to upgrade all of ombo and it's many thousands of references and it's in the same way and we have Now some pretty cool plan tooling which actually can do A few things including actually doing plan rewrites and um, uh, and based on the knowledge of the apis and I think that's largely going to be trickling in the landing this week Which is going to mean it's going to be a kind of a tight crunch as we go into the last Uh, you know a couple of weeks of the year Before the release, but i'm still optimistic that we'll probably that will be able to land v3 in the next release. So, uh, yeah Anyone who's interested in helping out we have lots of Things to do, uh, which is so scope for 1.13 Okay, uh anything else Okay I guess we're all set. This is uh Um Dan do you want to say? Yeah, so I'll say something. Uh, so I've been working on on boy at google for Uh, well, it's getting close to three years now, and I won't quite make it that far. I'm I'm uh, moving to a new site. I'm moving to from cambridge messachusetts to pittsburgh Pennsylvania for personal reasons and uh, I'll be switching teams when I do that. So I really uh had a good time working on on boy and Really appreciate everything that this community has done and uh, yeah so I'm going to take myself out of the take my maintainer hat off and put on my maintainer emeritus hat and Feel free. I'm still at google. Um, I'll still probably pay some attention to envoy, but a little less Yeah, look forward to maybe uh keeping in touch with the community a little bit I really appreciate this open source community is definitely, um Love and behind it in terms of uh being an accepting awesome Maintainer of the years and in particular you're a very gnarly Expert knowledge which I feel we're actually going to miss because I mean Not many folks know I see because of us Maybe we'll be able to go on your Yeah, when you're ready to move it up to 17 and uh, I was ready to meet people for 17 and the envoy wants to do that Then uh thinking you know, let's see if you can Uh prioritize something Yeah, thank you. All right. Thanks for all your help done. Thank you Thank you for everything dan said to see you go Yeah, yeah said to see you go Okay, okay, that's cool. It's like we're signing off then All right. Have a happy holidays everybody and see you next time Yeah, see you


Maybe one or two more, one minute, maybe. Hey, Eugenio, great to see you. Hello, everyone. Great to see you. Great to see you. Great to see you. I also see you. So nice to see you back. Hi, hi everyone. So anyway, we will start in a moment. The first thing is we have to talk about. The policies of the. The next foundation. Two main policies. One is the fact that. We are bound by the antitrust policy of wherever you're logging in from. So please keep that in mind. Second is. We are bound by the antitrust policy of wherever you're logging in. Basically allowing people to speak. And even if you do not disagree with people, please do not be nasty. In short. So these are the only two things that govern. This is a completely open call. There are, there's the main event is Mike. Proposing. The subgroup for now. So let me lead off with the one thing, which is. Several people have suggested to me. That the name of the group is. Not appropriate at the moment because. It is no longer dealing just with capital markets. But with all. You know, all. Things that have to do with finance, including payments. And as we know that the. First use case for blockchain is in the payment space. So that's. Definitely part of our. Part of our remit because no capital markets system will exist without a payment rail. And obviously the speed and the assurance of the payment rails. Control. Other features like. Liquidity. Like. You know, the pace at which the market proceeds. Settles. The other part that we haven't. Talked about is the. Is the fact that we also deal in short term. That capital markets are normally for. Long term. So. The suggestion is to name this as a. Finance. Special interest group. That would encompass everything. Including infrastructure. Because, you know, if you name it finance. And. Financial markets and infrastructure, then it becomes a little. Too big. The name to. Make sense. So. Finance. Was the suggestion. And I'm writing up a short. Rational. For changing the name. What are the implications of the name change? It means that all our resources. That are. That are currently on the CM sick will. Go to F. SIG. And. I don't know what to do about the. You know, the references that we have all over the place. For that. And I'm. You know, I would like to hear. Responses from people about this because. We do focus a lot on. CBDCs, for example, which is. Currently. You know, in, in the news. Of course, the other, other thing that's in the news is. What's happening to defy, especially stable coins. Has been a lot of. Press about it, but we had noted. Before. Some other problems with the algorithmic stable coins. And even with the regular stable coins because. Stable coin is just a. Marketing term. In a sense. Sometimes they're not stable nor coins. But. You know, the point is. That it, this is. Like all marketing terms. When reality. Meets. The solution. For people who are complaining that this was an attack by. Some particular parties and so on. You know, I think. If your. Solution cannot. Which stand the rigor. So. The real world. Which in this case. Do not even have regulation. Anyway, enough about stable coins. Maybe we'll have. Another session on that. Later, maybe in Mike's subgroup. So. Before we start. I want to introduce Mike McCoy. Who was the chair of the. Hyperledger healthcare group. As part of. He has developed solutions there. But now he has moved into the. New economy. Into. Block demon. Which used to be an infrastructure. Provider, but now I think they are getting into. Define. So Mike. I think you should take it away. And talk about. Your subgroup, what your aims are. And how we can help how we can collaborate. Especially with the lab project or something like that. So. I'm going to. Mute myself. All right. Can everyone hear me? Yeah. All right. I'm going to try to start. My computer's just doing a little slowness right now. But. Give me a moment. I should be able to present. Awesome. So. No, I just want to. All right. Let me know if you can see this as well. We'll take a hot second. More than a New York minute. Yeah, right. All right. Cool. Good morning, everyone. My name is Mike. Just a little bit about myself. For the past two years actually. As I've been mentioned, I was running the healthcare special interest group. I was working in a human and more so from about. 2018-2019 till. 2021. I was solely focused on everything healthcare blockchain healthcare life science blockchain. And I was able to build a lot of different. Projects, including running this. Project with the synaptic health alliance. That helped. Enable better reconciliation of payments and claims. Within health insurance claims called provider data exchange. And prior to that, I worked at Accenture and consensus. And a whole lot of different use cases. Not only within healthcare, but mostly in financial and. Another type of use cases as well. So I went from going fully decentralized protocols from 16, 17, 18. So they're working on permissioned blockchains from 19, 2021. And now working at block daemon and doing a combo of.  So if you are a large institution or bank and you want to be able to stake at scale, we provide solutions there. But we're also adding in the five components and other methods with your reward or your staking rewards. And we're also adding in the five components and other methods with your reward or your staking rewards. And being able to use that in defy pools into a lot of other things, but I want to present because I talked to Karen, a Tommy who's also the ecosystem lead at here at hyper ledger. And she believed that though my focus is more into defy and more into financial use cases that this group can kind of benefit from some of my defy work as well. So I'm just going to give it like a high overview, but I'll talk about how I like to present a defy subgroup. If this group believes that defy subgroup. If this group believes that would be of value to everyone. So it's no secret recently that like defy and stable coins out of the growth, algorithmic stable coins have really gotten a lot of pressure. We know about the terror and Luna crash that when, you know, a market maker could be able to create a death spiral within that community. It just went down and went into trouble. There are hacks within defy communities and open source working groups such as axi infinity, into bridges such as wormhole and into other defy protocol governance protocols such as beanstalk and others. And this just happened within the past couple of months, right? But though there is a lot of hacks and though there are a lot of attempts to be able to control these type of fully decentralized networks, there are still a lot of people that are getting into this space. And so.  And there's a high level of education and a high level of, of technical. Definitions that need to be put into this place, into the space to really make sense for everyone and everyday people to get a hold of it. And so the defy ecosystem is quite large. There are, there are, there are, a ton of players in the space. It goes, it goes from everywhere between exchanges and liquidity derivatives credit and lending, actual payments. There are some marketplaces on here.  But what really is coming into play that I'm seeing in everyday conversations with clients that I'm interacting with. Is how we're getting real world securities, real world mortgages, real world assets into crypto. And so the defy ecosystem is quite large. There are a ton of players in the space. There are a ton of players in the space. And so you can get really, really, really, really, really into crypto native protocols to be able to earn rewards as well as to be able to stake those assets. And be able to connect them to the full decentralized web. And so this space is only growing as, as you can see here. Now defy is not that old. And it really only came into play probably around 2019. When most people were actually familiar with it. or even 2020 where there was real growth, you could actually see that it went from zero to a hundred billion dollars in just two years. At its peak, it was somewhere around 275 billion in value as well. Some could say it's a bubble, some could say it's a pop, but there's clearly a lot of real world revenue that is actually going into this space and it's still quite young. It already has a large chunk of financial wealth. If you look at other banks that are in the world today, if DeFi were to represent the largest US bank, it would be 31st in total assets under management. And this is from DeFi Lama that is a website that is able to connect and curate all this information. So I think it's early right now. And one of my main points I'm trying to make today is that we are early and we are probably in like the early adopter stage and it's only going to grow and get better. And with that needing to get better, we need to be able to have better education through communities and open source communities like the Hyperledger one to be able to make it more meaningful. Now institutions who think, okay, well, that's just going to, they're gonna stay away from it. It's a little bit more of an error. We wanna be able to put our money into safer assets, especially when, you know, stock markets are crashing, cryptos crashing, et cetera. But this past week, when we saw a dip in Luna and Terra, we actually saw more institutions put money into crypto assets than they have all year long. And yes, a lot of that is because of the dip and a lot of that is because, hey, it's a cheap asset. Why not just buy it up while it's cheap? But I think that just goes to show that people aren't just fleeing away from crypto. They're looking for the next bull run to come around. And DeFi isn't just an internet casino. And I think like a lot of times in previous presentations within this SIG and others, we've mostly, you mostly have talked about DeFi for fraud prevention or risk management and things like that. But DeFi can be able to do so much more than that. It can be able to actually improve operational costs, improve margin costs, improve overall spend and actually get more bang for your buck when it comes to people, technical debt, technical infrastructure, et cetera. And so it's a real opportunity for banks to be able to take away some of their technical debt and be able to really expand profits using these protocols in the right way. And today, like, TradFi is actually starting to use and utilize crypto products and projects. And some of these are functional, but a lot of them are in proof of concept and pilot stages. But you could see that crypto back lending is pretty popular. You could see that facilitating and client exposure to crypto is gaining traction as well as institutional crypto derivative trading for option vaults and futures. Those ones are absolutely growing across the board. And all these banks, all these traditional financial institutions really want to learn more about it.  That sneeze, but I'm sorry about that. Anyway, there's more legitimacy coming in the space is what I'm trying to say here. And it can only go up. Now, before the Luna crash numbers, all these numbers that are DeFi based we're looking pretty good when you compare year over year. And so, if that crash one to happen, who knows, right? Like markets go up and down constantly, but these numbers are quite expansive and can really help someone, help a fund, help a family office, help a market maker, liquidity provider really get some benefit from these natively DeFi and decentralized protocols. But it's also very important to learn what is actually under the hood of these things. See for Terra, right? They had negative equity that you would burn Luna to then solidify UST. And a lot of that was just, and people were saving their money up in an anchor in the savings protocol that would give you 20% yield year over year. And that's just not sustainable, right? Some of these other DeFi protocols or DeFi communities probably have a lot more, a lot more collateral to be able to actually back what is funding their ecosystems or what are generating yields in their networks. And I think it's very important to learn the lessons from issues and negative scenarios like Terra and how these other ones are truly growing in the space today and compared to traditional markets and how we're doing that as well. And so DeFi and crypto are moving towards legitimacy. Right now, this past week compound, for example, received an S&P credit rating. It's a B minus and so it's an iffy grade, but they're trying to get regulation and they're trying to be very forward thinking in how everyday markets can be able to evaluate them from an investment standpoint. Crypto also is getting more regulatory focus from Janet Yellen and her groups and being able to have more crypto staffs not for enforcement, but for understanding and educational purposes. And even NASDAQ is posting out articles left and right about how lenders borrowers and traders will be using DeFi to be able to challenge primitive systems. And I really just think education in this space and bringing communities together like the hyperledger community and understanding how and why this is building could be really valuable. So I also want to potentially go into more details on stable coins as they've mentioned. There's obviously Fiat-backed stable coins, there's crypto-backed ones and there's algorithmic ones. I think we learned a little bunch of lessons on algorithmic stable coins and how you can be able to actually create supply and demand. And this is still like a very forward thinking may not even really be a method that people will utilize in the future due to examples of Tera but always truly an experiment really forward. So the long story short of it is this is how I kind of want to run or would propose running a DeFi subgroup. When I was with the hyperledger healthcare special interest group, we had just sections in our overall Wiki that showed upcoming events so that people could be able to attend. We also had industry news research and group action items that people could join into as well as a lot of education material on like what crypto was, what blockchain was, how it affects everyone in healthcare and life science and things like that. I would just every two weeks be able to create a very similar recap of everything that went on. We go through the news, we go through the research together as a group, talk it out and kind of go back and forth and understand what is hype, what is real and be able to then educate others that may be a little bit new to the space on how this technology can work. So that's really just what my proposal is is being able to have an educational based understanding group. Maybe we create, I'm not saying we're creating an actual protocol, we're actually create any type of tools within the subgroup as of today. I think at first we wanna make it more educational and then if we do see a need in industry for this or that and there are open source contributors that have the time and bandwidth to be able to make this happen, that's great. But I wanna bring in like industry leaders at other funds and other banks and other institutions around the world to come together and just educate each other on what is actually hype and what is real. And yeah, that's pretty much my presentation. Hope this is informative. Hopefully you see that there is a lot of potential in the DeFi ecosystem to generate real wealth. And I don't think of DeFi as just a short-term play. I know a lot of people think it's just like a pump and dump scheme and maybe beneficial to get short-term gains while markets are high or low but I see a lot of people in groups in my world at least today that want to be able to use DeFi in the long-term. So yeah, that was my presentation and we'd love to hear any feedback. Thank you, Mike. I think if you have any questions, now is the time to bring it up. Questions or comments? Hey, it's myself, it's Eugenio. I just wanted to really thank Mike for the presentation and share a couple of comments. Especially about the proposal. Firstly, I believe that DeFi space is actually representing a value in terms of having a play of a different game from institutional perspective. So I really believe that in our community as an expression of the capital market or the finance industry, we need to have a voice on that, we need to start to have a voice on that. And starting on the educational side may be the right approach definitely because I mean, just using myself as an example, I'm currently researching and studying on DeFi daily for work, but also as a passion. I am, for instance, more focusing on DAO initiatives but that's us for myself. So I can only be more than welcome of this initiative and I will support on my side. Any other comments? I do see Sandy asking whether it makes sense to call it financial services. We'll address that in a minute but let's talk about Mike's proposal first. Yeah, hey, Reb and yes, now I just want to put that in the comments. You know, I've actually attended, Mike, from the healthcare saga, I've attended a few of your sessions, those were very informative. So definitely welcome to see this here. Yeah, I definitely think I think it makes a lot of sense to have this subgroup and have a lot of information sharing and I'm sorry, I'm not on video today, I just taking the call from my work's PC. So, but yes, I definitely think we can add a bunch of like industry stuff going on here, like you started the session with the whole, with the whole thing, we can definitely go maybe in a little more depth and that has to exactly, like Rippon was alluding to earlier, it was not only a little, like not only the attack thing, obviously any, like just like we do in financial services, anytime we're walking on any banking application, anything is paramount that it has to be able to withstand any cyber attacks and any ransomware attacks. So same should have applied here in case of terror. So that's something we can maybe dig a little more into, also more into regulatory side of things. I think that'd be pretty helpful too. So I basically, in short, I'm looking forward to collaborating in this group today. Thank you. This is Guang Zao, I'm from Klaido. Hey, Mike, I saw that you used to work with consensus about the time you left. I went to consensus, so we didn't see or left each other, but a great presentation today. I agree with what was said. I think there's a great values of, at least to continue this discussion of DeFi in the open source community in terms of name. I came across a few, I don't have any recommendation, but just to be on the list, DeFi is one of them, regulated DeFi is another one I came across and a FinTech is FinTech. So that's all from me. Thank you, Mike, and everyone. Hey, Mike, this is Marvin Van Tuggen, a great presentation. You're following the path that we followed just several months ago. I'm from the mortgage subgroup and a lot of the things that you're going through and talking about is what we went through and we got a lot of support from Dip in it and the Hyperledger team. So definitely welcome you and I'll reach out to you because I think there is quite a bit of overlap in terms of areas where we can collaborate. I can walk you through some of the POCs that we've done, some of the education that we've done. We have a monthly meeting and I'd welcome you to join the next monthly meeting and tell our group what you're doing. And definitely I think what you're advocating I do support, so welcome. Anybody else? Yes. Thank you, Mike, for the presentation. It was very good. And I agree with Eugenio and Marvin also. I think adding the regulatory aspect would be important. I agree that education is the basis, but the framework of regulations will work. So I'm ready to help. Thank you. Anybody else? So Mike, this is Dan Schwartz, just a question. So I agree with everyone else that it was a very informative presentation and thank you for that. Organization of the information is hard. But I just wonder why the intent for the subgroup is only informational in nature and why there isn't a reach for establishing some shared protocols or prominent modes of interaction. For a DFI to really realize its potential, it seems that interaction is critical. And so just wondering why you're not taking down as part of your charter. Yeah, I would say just in the interim that a lot of people that are part of hyperledger-based communities know about DFI, but they may not know the actual intricacies of it. I'm not saying the interaction of building and getting hands dirty into software and to code would not be part of the group. I just think the initial focus would be education. Then if we keep seeing trends that are coming from either research, coming from developments of actually building product are notified. So what we did also within the healthcare sig is eventually we got to a point where every month, maybe every quarter, we went in like use cases and we settled on about eight to 10 different use cases that were actually being built in the healthcare life science industry. And so I showed on slide two or three, I believe, right here that there are categories here today, right? But as these evolve, they may become like stable coins may be less important in the future. They need more important. Like I think just being able to really identify these and have our group a little bit more aware of them as time goes on could be more vital for a general understanding. I'm not saying that there wouldn't be any technical build or protocols that can be built within the subgroup to make it more useful for us. I just say that wouldn't be the initial focus probably in the first two months. Thank you. Yeah, and it's really up to what the community decides too. If we believe like, hey, let's get down dirty. Let's like, let's bring in a hyper-legit-based protocol. I'm all for it, but yeah. Anyone else? Mike, I lost a slide. Can you make the larger so I can take a look? Sorry, sorry for interrupting. Sure, I'll put it back on. You see it? You know, hopefully we can share these slides, but before we do that, we'll have some comments on that too from me anyway. Cool. Yeah, I'll share this with you at the end, but then to share it with the rest of the group. We did have another comment, I believe from someone else. You have any more comments? And so that I can start my talk. Hey, Reppen. Just one more thing to add in there. Mike, probably this is something I can also reach out to you and Reppen. I'm looking at specifically about the enterprise architectural paradigm between trade-fi and then de-fi. In fact, I'm supposed to be having a presentation by itself on that.  So I have some thoughts on my head and I want to run them by you and see how we can present that. Especially in terms of what are the most striking differences between when it comes to enterprise architecture, like in terms of trade-fi and de-fi. Typically, I can think about the highest level, the use of data, data services, articles. And of course, in terms of how you can still have more control on your enterprise architecture within the trade-fi system, but you really can't have much of that in the de-fi system. I just first glance at that. For example, I blocked a one of the core products I'm launching is something called permission liquid staking, where a lot of it's having a permission state before connecting to de-fi protocols. So we are doing KYC, KYB, AML checks on automated market makers, liquidity providers, and then creating a liquidity pool from your staking rewards and having a dual token model where, yes, you put in, let's just say you put in $6 million worth of ETH. And then from there, you have your $6 million peg. But then any rewards you get on there, you have rewards that go back to your digital wallet that then you can be able to use in de-fi protocols and be able to potentially expand on your rewards or do a little playing with that in the liquidity pool. So a lot of it comes with permissioning, and a lot of it comes from actually pegging and actually having collateral based on your assets and your pools or your networks. But yeah, and then oracles help with that, but a lot of times oracles can some automate processes that are unforeseen to the rest of their group. Totally agree. And again, I mean, it depends on how much other things gone on the oracles themselves. Because obviously otherwise you're depending on the oracles in there, there's automated processes and then you have no control on that. So totally agree. So yeah, I'll reach out to you guys on that, but that's something I think we can also, even from an informational point of view, I think that'd be really helpful if we can add that in here. Perfect. I'm Marca's hand up. Yeah. Thank you. Mr. Liberati. Yes, thank you very much. And a nice overview. I just wanted to sort of comment because your last slide sort of sparked a thought because often I've seen these types of slides where they're breaking down the DeFi players into sort of the different subcategories within the space. But I think what would be very useful in sort of looking at a pro regulatory approach would also be just as you've sort of broken down stable coins into algorithmic and collateralized even within that space, there are so many more architectural choices to just collateralize it on chain or off chain verification of that collateral if it's sort of all crypto itself or if you're actually using off chain assets. And similar with algorithmic models use different stability mechanisms to try to provide that peg or that reference point. So I think there'd be utility in not getting too technical as you sort of caution against but also having that sort of taxonomy build so that one can sort of look from a different perspective at the choices that those companies have made in providing DeFi services. And then you can also then identify some of the strengths and weaknesses to each of those models. And I think that would sort of shape and guide the discussions going forward. Thank you over. 100% that's highly valuable. And I know there's like, there's this company like two, three years ago created like the token taxonomy framework. It never got really real generation amongst enterprises and anyone outside of Microsoft because Microsoft tried to launch it. But I think creating like a DeFi taxonomy framework of stable coins of yield generating platforms of option vaults or whatever they are. We could create tons of those mechanisms that would help us all think better about this too.  So anyone else? Well, a couple of things. One is you know, as well as I do that this is an open forum, open source where other people are there. So normally we do not brand our presentations maybe just mention that you're a member of the block team. And but you know, if every slide I just took a thing that like I had internally anyway. I understand. I understand. I mean, it's a very difficult thing to get around because obviously you have a day job and that informs what you're doing every day, obviously. And this was sort of the challenge with Xeventus and Marvin with the mortgage subgroup as well. Because it's often difficult to switch the hats. The other thing is that we did not just have the dangers of DeFi. We had actually people presenting on various aspects, including institutionalization through insurance. For example, creating insurance into the DAO so that the institutional players are more comfortable in coming into the community. This was a pure, this was pure so-called DeFi. This was the bank, I think it was a bank or network. And of course, Mark Richardson who presented it also presented quite at length on the way in which some of the AMMs work and also DEX's work. I wonder what the effects of the rollout of staking in Ethereum itself will have on this ecosystem. Staking is a double-edged sword from as far as I'm concerned because it gives you a sense of security because it gives power to the entrenched people with a lot of coins. So it's basically a plutocratic situation. That means the more coins you have, the more powerful your voice is. And I know that Vitalik had created a protocol quadratic body which is basically based on suppressing that incredible effect of whales being able to control the protocol. And this is a problem in almost all so-called decentralized protocols because the protocols do favor the people with a lot of coins or a lot of liquidity state or a lot of governance coins which causes asymmetric effects. In fact, I have a feeling that some of the terror stuff that we have seen has something to do with that. So these are sort of systemic problems with the so-called decentralized autonomous organizations which have to be addressed that some, to make it more decentralized or in my opinion, the use of the word decentralized itself is problematic because in the network theory distributed from decentralized in the original paper that this word is taken from, decentralized is a way in an evolution towards distributed. But in our industry, decentralized has taken on value and more than it's meaning implies. But anyway, that's besides the point. In terms of the actual mechanics of how we're gonna do this, we probably, I mean, I don't know, it's up to you but start off with a once a month meeting which does not coincide with ours or maybe we can even host a couple of meetings of the DeFi subgroup inside ours. Now coming back to the name which Sandy had commented on, which is basically that it should be called financial services. I think that is a, I mean, we do concern ourselves with financial services. This is the old, I worked in an investment bank for many years and there was a divide between business and IT. IT was seen as a cost center, as a services sector, not directly contributing to the bottom line. So the budgeting and so on would take a hit because of that. But in reality, without IT, you cannot run a bank. In fact, some have even suggested that a bank is a technology business with a little reconciliation thrown in at the end. But even reconciliation now is based on technology. So in that sense, the name financial services I think would limit us. In fact, I had proposed financial markets and infrastructure but Karen brought up the point that we should just be called finance special interest group because it encompasses short-term and long-term capital markets, market making, cost study, all the other stuff that goes along with it, including payments. And we have had several presentations on CBDCs and such things. And we are supposed to give a response to the Fed on CBDCs but unfortunately we could not get it together to do that in a factured way because for a group now, we have also divided between Asia Pacific group and Europe. So the meetings are at different times. So the US EMEA group only meets once in four weeks and the other, the APAC group meets once in four weeks on a staggered two weeks schedule. So that's one more thing that has happened and you know that the Asia Pacific region is very active on this, not only DeFi, but well, Terra is based in Singapore for example. So, you know, there's a lot of activity in the East and so there, you know, we are kind of split into two sections at this moment but we all collaborate on the Wiki, the projects that we have, the labs that we've started. Again, another lab that we started is Neferti which is meant to be a tooling infrastructure for NFTs but even that, you know, we are having some trouble getting really off the ground because again, people have real jobs and you know, to do open source work is thankless. Now to come to, coming back to TTF that you mentioned, we actually developed ETALR, a CBDC based on TTF and I'm happy to report that TTF is still alive and well inside the Global Blockchain Business Council. They are the ones hosting it now. Microsoft is of course still prominent but other people are coming in there. So the TTF could, because it's a generic framework, could still encompass your, what do you call it, DeFi taxonomy. If you want it because it can definitely encompass, definitely encompass NFTs. I don't know whether it can encompass, I think it can because I've looked at the sort of the building blocks and they are open to it. It's an open protocol. You can contribute and they're still working on, you know, they're focusing now on two other subjects, which is one is the climate change, carbon, you know, or that kind of tokens and the other one is the net capital markets, which is basically bonds and bonds have a great similarity to some of the DeFi protocols, especially with respect to the to the yield and so on. But a yield of 20% of course is sort of unsustainable unless inflation itself is 20, 50%. So anyway, so that's and Alfonso just posted that learning tokens is working with GBBC and DTF. That's all I have for everything, even though I had promised that I'll do something on the response to the Fed. I am involved with the open CBDC project and sending them some proposals, but that's in my private capacity and also the response that I'll be providing to the Fed paper will also be in a private capacity because we were not able to get the thing together. And I encourage all of you to do it because but the last date is Friday, but these are questions that we have been tussling or having discussions on in this group for a while. Many of the questions, there are 22 questions. You can only respond to just one or two. You don't need to respond 22. So with that, I want to say that, you know, I have said my piece, if Mike has a comment or two, it would be helpful to listen to him. Yeah. Yeah. I would love to start with some group. I think maybe, you know, a monthly at first could be beneficial. And maybe we have it as like a sub, like, you know, within capital markets as it's labeled now. It's just like another tab you click into and we can go into that wookie page and be able to start meeting cadences and I'll have to just connect with Tomas or to talk about logistics within Hyperledger when we would schedule a meeting. I think at first maybe having it based in America's EMEI friendly hours will be beneficial. Potentially moving to night times where we get more of an APAC crowd could be of benefit too. But yeah, I'm happy to help create those administrative steps and I'll look to join this biweekly group as much as possible. And for Marvin as well, we can coordinate to get more of an APAC crowd. I think it's a great time where I can do a very similar presentation to the mortgage subgroup and seeing where there are similarities. I will say most of the interest I get professionally and personally is how to get mortgage backed securities into a crypto native pool. So very, a lot of interesting things. We could always collaborate on as a group. Yeah, mortgages are a very interesting thing as well. Again, I worked on mortgages for maybe 10 years. So I built systems in traditional investment banks, but mostly for risk management and also for trading risk. In fact, real time risk, which is a tougher thing for mortgages than for anything else. But to come back to mortgages, they have a characteristic at the bottom layer of NFTs because each house is a unique thing. And the mortgage that attaches to that house is particularly unique. And then pooling those NFTs and then building a bond on top of that based on the underlying cash flows. So the underlying cash flows, this is the key. Underline cash flows in real-world assets can be easily sort of identified. But in DeFi or in some other areas, it's difficult to identify the cash flows, except for the fact that some people are paying huge yields, which is of course a cash flow, but how stable is that cash flow? What underpins that cash flow? Why is somebody paying you 20%? Is it because they're using the new money to pay off that 20%? In which case it's called a Ponzi scheme. It's a very familiar thing to all of us. But if it's not, if there are some other ways of making money like staking on Ethereum, staking on something else, but how stable is that payment?  I'm not going to tattoo Luna on my arm or any other DeFi protocol unless I completely understand it. I heard that Mike Novogratz probably went and got that erased. I don't know.  It's a tough thing to have to forget something that's etched into your skin. So if you have money, like a lot of people have lots of money, then, you know, 5%, 10% loss is not a big deal. But if you're putting all your eggs in Luna, then you're probably on the Luna tick fringe. Anyway, enough Luna jokes for today, but that's the joke of the day of the week, I guess.  Another thing that Mike would be interesting would be like look at stablecoins, for example. How much is the TBL in each type of stablecoin?  We have algorithm-based stablecoins. Some of these are theoretical constructs, in my opinion. Of course, something like Luna was 8th largest or something. But even then like USDT is much bigger than anything else. And now they're bleeding money and people are going into USDC because there seem to be more transparency in the collateral. Yeah, USDT and Tether just morphs any other stablecoin out there today. USDC is gaining traction and they do have a little more transparency. They do have a little more transparency in their network. But yeah, no, I think it's a very valuable thing to dig into. Well, I mean, I had actually written an article about USDC and criticizing that they are only providing you a monthly audit. Whereas month-by-month growth is like 10, 20% sometimes. And what is the point that was the audit one month ago and that too, that is released only 15 days from the end of the month. So it's really a month and a half.  Why can't you have at least go look towards real-time auditing or real-time monitoring instead of additional audit company coming up with, you know, numbers once a month. And obviously the USDT, we don't know, the only thing we know is the secret sauce. The secret sauce is that you've invested in some high-yielding product. Again, if the high-yielding product price falls, then it's worth less than what you bought it at. So in the end, I mean, stablecoins, we have to look at, because stablecoins are the basis of defy itself because if you think about it, without that rail, that digital rail coming in, we wouldn't have all these interesting things. But it's definitely linked directly to that. Anyway, sorry to ramble on, but I think it's a valuable experience to be available, experience to listen to you and to participate in this group. And Eugenio is going to volunteer. I heard as the vice chair of this group and I welcome Eugenio. He's still interested. Most of it is just administrative work, but we need those two to get the group sort of set up and going forward. So Mike, I look forward. And that's it. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks. Bye. Thank you. Thank you, Mike. Thank you. We've been for the kind of work. All right. Thank you guys. Bye.


And this segment that we have right here, predicting which players would have broken out or broke out in 2020, some of these players I was right and some of these players I was wrong. So I'm going to be transparent with you guys. I pulled up this video because week one of 2020, that episode, that podcast, we dedicated it to which players would break out in 2020. So what I did, we have seven players. I'm going to go through each of these seven players, take a look back at that video, and then react to me predicting them to break out and if I was correct or not. So let's go ahead and start off with our first player. Starting off with the first player that I'm personally high on as well, Van Jefferson in LA. When you catch the attention of a head coach because of your work ethic, you're going to get some playing time for sure. Jefferson is just one injury away to Cooper Cup and Robert Woods from really taking off. Oh my gosh. Well, we're not off to a good start. I can go ahead and tell you that because Van Jefferson did not do much in 2020. As a matter of fact, a stat line for 2020 was 19 receptions, 220 yards in one touchdown. My reasoning back then was that he was getting all these rave reviews and training camp that he was going to be this breakout star for the LA Rams. And it turned out it wasn't the case. I thought that he was going to be the slot receiver, the number three receiver behind Cooper Cup and Robert Woods. But it ended up being Josh Reynolds. I thought the Rams ran a lot of three wide receiver sets and that Van Jefferson will get his fair share of receptions and targets. But I was wrong. I missed the money on that. So, hey, first breakout player, I admit I was wrong on that. But the beauty of this is that we have six more that we want to talk about. So let me go ahead and pull up the next one. And let's see if this one was correct or incorrect. Dan Arnold, tight end Arizona Cardinals may not have even heard of him. Don't know who this guy is, but let me fill you in. He was on the New Orleans Saints just last year until he was picked up by the Arizona Cardinals at the end of the season. He was a wide receiver converted to a tight end. The Saints were also big on him because before they had Jared Cook as their tight end, they wanted Dan Arnold, who's a big guy, but also fast, like a wide receiver to be that tight end for Drew Brees. And I'm not saying that Arnold is going to be the next 1000 yard tight end receiver. But he is going to be playing a significant role in that Cardinals offense for you guys that play fantasy football.  But he's going to take a step up and carve out a role for him so that maybe in 2021 he could be a fantasy tight end that you guys could draft for your team. Wow. I can go ahead and say because of that analysis right there, I think that was a success. Again, he didn't be this amazing 1000 yard receiving tight end. That was not the case with Dan Arnold and the case with me saying that he's going to be that breakout player. It was the case that, okay, he's not a well known guy. He's now going to be a starting tight end and he's going to have a role in that Cliff Kingsbury offense, which ended up being true. Based off of the tail end of 2019 and how successful he was in that run. So his stat line was 31 receptions, 438 yards and four touchdowns. Not the best stat line in the NFL for any tight end or any player in general. But as far as breaking out compared to doing better than what people expected him to do, I would say, yeah, he broke out in that sense. The next one, let's go ahead and stick with the tight end train. And if you guys are fans of time to football, you know this man very, very well. I talk about him way too often. Let's go ahead and show it. I've been big on him for the last two years ever since he entered the NFL. And in year three, I believe this is finally going to be the season for Dolphins tight end Mike Gisicki. This guy is athletically gifted. Do not sleep on Mike Gisicki. Not much to talk about with him right there because it's pretty much settles the debate that Mike Gisicki did have a breakout season in 2020. 2019, the last half of the season, was starting to come around with Ryan Fitzpatrick at quarterback. 2020 had his ups and downs as well. He was way more productive with Ryan Fitzpatrick. And when two came in, his numbers did dip a little bit, but his final stat line was 53 receptions, 703 yards, and six touchdowns in 2020. So the prediction of Mike Gisicki breaking out in 2020 was correct. Now to go on to the next player. We're going to transition to another pass catcher and we're going to transition back to the wide receiver position. Michael Pittman on the Indianapolis Colts. The reason I love Pittman so much is because his size. He's compared to someone like Vincent Jackson when he was playing with LA or San Diego at the time and Tampa Bay. Pittman was touted by Frank Reich, the head coach of the Colts to be one of, if not the best wide receiver in that draft class. It's noted that in training camp, he's been looking impressive and that he's going to have a significant role with Phillip Rivers and that Indianapolis Colts offense. So watch out for Michael Pittman. So that was a bullet statement by Frank Reich. They drafted him in the second round. I think it was Jonathan Taylor, then Michael Pittman, or maybe it was reversed, but either way, two second round picks were Michael Pittman and Jonathan Taylor. They loved him. They really did. They love the size and rest in peace, Vincent Jackson. They compared him a lot to him and the player he is and the type of body that he has as well. He has three receptions, 403 yards and one touchdown. So as far as like a breakout player as one of the best wide receivers in the NFL, absolutely not. But as far as an emerging target for Phillip Rivers, like we predicted, yeah, I'm going to go ahead and say that this wasn't incorrect, but it also wasn't correct. So I'm going to go ahead and give myself the credit, but I'm also not going to say he was a complete bust because he's still trying to get into the rhythm in 2020. So I'm going to say eh with Michael Pittman as far as our prediction with him. And let's go ahead and pull up another one. The next player that we have back to the wide receiver position, continuing on with that. This one, pretty good one. Justin Jefferson on the Minnesota Vikings.  You got to use your knowledge. You got to use your knowledge of the scheme that Minnesota plays. Their coaching staff going into 2020 hasn't changed that much. It's almost pretty much the same offense that they have minus Stefan Diggs. Oh, he lost your number two receiver and comes Justin Jefferson, a guy that you drafted to be that replacement for Stefan Diggs. B.C. Johnson is listed as the number two guy, but like we mentioned earlier with all the other players, they try to give those veterans that deference because they respect the veterans and they want to list them ahead of the rookies on the depth chart. But Justin Jefferson has been looking way more impressive in scrimmage and in OTAs. And he's going to be the next Stefan Diggs for that Minnesota Vikings offense. Hmm, 88 receptions, 1400 yards, seven touchdowns. But the candidate for the rookie of the year award was one of the best receivers in the NFL. Now, one prediction that I think I put in there or I might have left off was I said that Adam Thieland was going to be the number one. But I just after reading that stat line is obviously Justin Jefferson that ended up being the number one receiver on the Minnesota Vikings. So in that sense, I wasn't correct. But as far as the breakout candidate when I said that Justin Jefferson was going to be a breakout candidate, I was very high on him. If you saw my fantasy football rankings back in 2020, I had him ranked a lot higher than where ESPN or NFL.com was drafting on their draft board. I believe it was like 35 or 40 spots higher than when he should have been drafted. The fact that he got 1400 yards, I didn't expect that. I thought it was going to be more 1100 like Stefan Diggs, but he's shown to be much better for the Minnesota Vikings than Stefan Diggs so far in his rookie season. So Justin Jefferson, breakout player, correct. Oh, gosh, I'm just reading the list and the next one that we have. It's not too terrible, but I don't think this one is a hit for me. It's definitely a mess. I'm going to go ahead and show it. Raiders wide receiver, Hunter Renfro. Oof, a slot receiver. The reason being because they drafted Henry Ruggs, who's projected to be their number one receiver, Brian Edwards in the third round, Tyrell Williams is now hurt. So on the depth chart, don't be surprised if they have Ruggs number one, Brian Edwards number two, and then Renfro at number three. That just means that he's going to be working out of the slot and they're going to use him the same way that they did last season. And how they use him last season was in the last two games, he had 100 yard games back to back. We expect him to have 88 targets for the season, about 60 receptions or so, 750, 70 yards receiving and about six touchdowns. So after hearing that stat line, I would say it's not too terrible. I predicted 750 yards, six touchdowns, 60 receptions, was it? 56 receptions, 656 yards and only two touchdowns, which isn't too off. But if I want to go ahead and say, was that a correct prediction or was that incorrect? I'm going to say that was incorrect. I'm going to go ahead and say that he just didn't live up to the expectation that I thought that he would have in 2020. It wasn't that much bigger of an expectation or that much of a leap that I predicted him to have compared to what he actually put up. But still, I'm going to go ahead and say that was a miss. We have one more player that we predicted to break out that we 100% missed out. Let me go ahead and play the video real quick and let you guys listen in. And then I'll get back to you guys. Oh my gosh, this is awkward. You're going to roar your eyes at this name, but Levy on Bell. Why not? Okay, let's talk about the negatives of Levy on Bell. Let's say why people don't like him. 3.2 yards a carry last season. Okay. Yeah, that's not good. Jett's offensive line was poor. That whole offense in general was not that good. Plus, Adam Gase is the head coach and was not a fan, according to multiple reports, of the signing of Levy on Bell. Sources are saying that Adam Gase is going to use Frank Gore and use Michael Pirine to split carries with Levy on Bell. Maybe that's true, but honestly, Adam Gase has said himself that he did not use Levy on Bell the way that he wanted to use Levy on Bell, which means that he could see an influx of work. Nope. Listen, I'm not saying he's going to run for 1200 yards in 10 touchdowns, like I said. But 1,000 yards rushing. Yeah, it's believable. 60, there's 70 receptions as he had 66 receptions last season. It's doable. 5, 6, 7 touchdowns total. Yeah, that's believable. Hey, guess what? For you guys that are fancy football fans, those numbers that I just said, those are solid running back to numbers. Oh my gosh. He's not going to be a breakout as far as the best running back in the NFL, but he's going to be pretty freaking good for the New York Jets. So Levy on Bell is a guy that I believe is going to have a good season in 2020. All right, now we're done. Okay, now I can cut back to me because I just wanted to get off the screen because it was just so embarrassing. Oh my gosh. Hassan, what the heck? Levy on Bell as a breakout player, I had no idea what I was talking about in that case. Apparently, I just had so much hope for him and I thought, okay, well, people weren't giving him that much love. I'm not saying that he was going to be a running back one first round peg, nothing like that. But at least give him credit where credit is due. He's the RB1 for the New York Jets. What could go wrong? I thought they drafted Mackay Bechton and things were going to get better. Supposedly not. 82 carries, 328 yards, two touchdowns. The 70 receptions that I predicted, way off. 16 receptions, 138 yards receiving. So that on my end, I am so sorry, ladies and gentlemen, if I steered you wrong, I told you guys to draft Levy on Bell fourth round. And if he falls anywhere past the fourth round, you got to grab him immediately. I was wrong. I was completely wrong. And I apologize for that, admitting my mistakes. So let's just recap with these breakout players. Which players did I predict correctly? Which players were incorrect? So the players that I predicted, let's start with the bad news first. Incorrectly was Van Jefferson, Hunter Renfro and Levy on Bell. The players that predicted correctly were Dan Arnold, Mike Kisicki and Justin Jefferson. And then Michael Pittman was kind of in the middle. Could be incorrect, could also be correct, whichever way you want to look at it. But that's me reacting to the players that I thought would break out in 2020. Some did, some didn't. But leave your thoughts and your comments and your opinions down below. If you have a player already right now, it's kind of early. But if you feel like there's a player that could break out in 2021, let us know in the comments. We would love to hear that, hear your opinions and interact with the guys and give our thoughts as well.


This presentation introduces you to the content of the VLC Multimedia on the Web class. It is organized as follows. First, we will look at the content of the class and its syllabus. Provide an overview of the e-educational principles and strategies that are applied and will finally define the class requirements students have to fulfill in order to get the credits. Let's look at the class description first. The main goal of this class is to enable participants to understand and apply the principles of language documentation with special emphasis on doing this in a multi-medial way. For this reason, the class is subdivided as follows. After a brief introduction, the first part focuses on the development of all necessary multi-medial components such as graphics, sound, animation and video, all those components that constitute the necessary elements of a well-documented language. This part is supported by numerous screencasts that introduce you to the use of the underlying developmental tools such as graphic, audio and video editing. In the second part, we will put it all together using HTML5, the Platform Independent Markup Code. This includes a discussion and the use of jQuery. As a result of this class, each student will create their own website that documents at least one language or, more precisely, one speaker with all possible multi-medial elements incorporating a high degree of interactivity. Like all VLC classes, we will use the inverted classroom model as the backbone of our educational strategy. Let's look at this model in more detail. In traditional teaching and learning, content delivery and content acquisition are realized in class where several dozens, sometimes several hundreds of students have to gather at the same time to be entertained by their teacher. In the second phase, students practice on their own, on the basis of additional exercise material, homework tasks, etc. Now, we will flip or invert these two activities and apply the inverted classroom model. Content acquisition is now self-dided. It takes place first and is done online. The additional in-class phase is dedicated to practicing, rehearsing, discussion, analysis, etc. In our particular case, we will practice a lot, we will develop material and we will develop our websites. This model of teaching has been referred to as the inverted classroom model or the flipped mastery education model. It simply means that prior to each in-class meeting, students must have worked through the online content, whether it's video material, multi-medial material or just texts. Classical frontal teaching is now just one method among many. For example, if the online content needs reworking or if additional information has to be provided. Now, the central teaching method, well it's not real teaching anymore, is that of a co-operative interaction between instructor and students. Now finally, you want to know what you have to do in order to get the class credit where one credit is the equivalent of about 30 hours workload. All in all, you will be given six credits for this class. And this includes and involves active participation, that's a prerequisite. Then you have to deliver five ungraded worksheets, you have to take part in our e-exam and pass it successfully and you have to deliver your term project, that is, the language you want to document. This class has been especially designed for our MA programs, linguistics and web technology and for our online master web development and linguistics. See you online and in class.