Thank you to everyone for attending our hyperledger meeting. This is the April 2023 hyperledger financial markets mortgage subgroup meeting. Before we get started, I'd like to express our appreciation to the financial markets special industry group for making this meeting possible and the hyperledger foundation for their ongoing support. Our speaker today is Peter Gaffney who will discuss tokenization use cases in financial services. So why don't we just go to the next slide? As always, please note that this meeting is being recorded and is under the umbrella of the hyperledger foundation. So we ask that everyone abide by the antitrust policy and the code of conduct. The antitrust policy states that we avoid discussions of company specific pricing products and projects. We don't make negative comments about other companies or products and the code of conduct means that we trust, treat each other with respect, never discriminate and communicate constructively. We fully support hyperledger's policy of openness, equity and inclusion. And for new participants, if you'd like, please introduce yourself in the chat and let us know if there's any specific or specific areas of interest you'd like to talk about or any issues you'd like to discuss. Here is our agenda for today. We've already gone through the introduction, code of conduct and so on. James Hendrick will provide an update on developments in the mortgage industry. And then Peter will take us further down the road down the topic of tokenization where we left off from last month. If we have time, we do have a brief video about the 2023 Mortgage Technology Conference that took place last week. And we'd love to share that with you guys, okay? We always cover this slide in each of our meetings. And this is to reinforce that we're all on the same blockchain journey, but we may be at different paths along that journey. This group is meant to help everyone on their blockchain path and to demonstrate the feasibility of blockchain technology through mortgage industry use cases, a defined potential implementation path for the mortgage industry and let different mortgage companies know what it takes to implement blockchain and walk through any difficulties that may be experiencing. Okay, the next three slides are our slides that I'm just briefly gonna mention. I'm not gonna spend a whole lot of time on them. This slide shows the different links to different resources, the Linux Foundation. The second from the bottom is the Mortgage Subgroup Wiki and just different resources that you can use from the Hyperledger Foundation. In order to use those resources, you will need an LFID, this slide covers that. There's a video as well. And then there's this free blockchain training from the Hyperledger Group. I've taken this training. This is how I kind of got started within Hyperledger. It's fantastic, I highly recommend it. Again, it's free. So that is the end of our PSA. And I'm going to hand it off to James. We'll talk about the state of blockchain. Perfect, Marvin, thank you. So moving into our topics for today, go ahead and jump to the next slide, if you would, Marvin. So taking a look at an article from CoinTelegraph that's talking about tokenized mortgages and how that compares with the housing bubble crisis. So, as we're all aware, the 2008 mortgage crisis was led by the poor quality of mortgage backed securities in the preceding years. AAA rated securities were packaged with lower quality ones and these bundles were passed off as top rated securities. According to Ralph Kubli, a board member of the Casper Association, this fundamental problem still exists, but can be fixed through blockchain technology. Tokenization of mortgages could allow them to become observable, verifiable, and enforceable on a public blockchain making the mortgage industry much more transparent. Financial agreements right now are written on just reams of paper and then they're given to analysts and programmers who interpret these written documents as machine readable code. You have written contracts that get translated into computer code and after about 40 years when these core banking systems are still running, no one's around that really remembers exactly what was programmed and how they programmed it. So one way to address this would be tokenizing mortgages and creating a PDF of a term sheet and hash it out into a token contract. This actually results in more of a dumb token that isn't any better than what we really have in traditional finance. In order for tokenization to succeed, Ralph states, the tokens have to be smart, meaning the financial agreement has to be machine readable and various parties involved must agree to the code itself. DeFi apps already accept machine readable contracts but have limitations in current forms and the digital term sheets that would be required would still need to be developed. The Artifical also talks about alternative options. One of the ones they talk about is creating a double tokenization with mortgage tokens wrapped inside a larger token to create a tokenized mortgage backed security. But do take a look at the article, it's got some really good information in it. Actually, Marvin, yeah, thank you, sir. It's got some really good information and a different take as to how this could be delivered. The next item that we have, this is actually a YouTube video. We're always trying to give you guys articles, podcasts, videos in order to obtain information. This honestly is a fantastic video it comes from the Hyperledge Global Forum that occurred in September of last year. Mohan Venkataram, the CTO of ChainYard does a fantastic overview of real estate property management tokenization. So ChainYard is a seven-year-old blockchain company and the presentation covers a real world implementation they conducted with a real estate property company in Kansas. Mohan covers the benefits of blockchain in the real estate industry and walks through a very detailed use case scenario involving an in-depth discussion of the tokenization process of real estate property. In his presentation, he breaks down proof of feasibility, the analysis they went through, the review of contracts, special considerations and risks that had to be considered. And then he does a very deep dive into the actual architecture of how they constructed it. Much more than I can actually talk to in this short time frame, but take a look at it. It's really a fantastic video, especially if you're looking to see how tokenization can be architected. The video is roughly about 45 minutes long and it's accessible also from the Hyperledge YouTube channel or you can go to our Wiki site and from our Wiki site, we've got a link directly to it there. Hyperledger also posts up our videos and other videos that are recorded from their presentations on their YouTube channel. And then lastly from the block, let's take a look at what Citi's been talking about. So according to Citi's latest global perspectives and solutions report, which was released in March, tokenization of financial and real-world assets may be worth trillions of dollars by the end of the decade. The bank forecasts up to $4 trillion in tokenized digital securities and up to $5 trillion of central bank digital currency could be circulating in major economies in the world, half of which could be linked to distributed ledger technology. Kathleen Boyle, who's the managing editor of Citi GPS, said that while the potential for tokenization via blockchain has been talked about for some time now, it's not quite at the point of mass adoption. So despite innovation taking time, the space is approaching an inflection point and believes the potential of blockchain could soon be realized. Mainstream adoption requires enablers, including decentralized digital identities, zero knowledge proofs, oracles and secure bridges. Legal plumbing is also gonna be critical as well as regulatory considerations to allow adoption and scalability. So Citi isn't alone in these projections. BlackRock's Larry Fink wrote about the operational potential of the underlying technologies and digital assets in the annual letter to his shareholders last month as well. So take a look at these articles, Marvin. Let's go ahead and move on to the next slide. All of these articles, as you can see, are available on our Wiki site. You'll see them on the right-hand side. Past articles you can access by scrolling down on the right or over on the left-hand side. We have our previous mortgage blockchain articles available there, along with links to all of the previous presentations. So we'll drop a link into the chat here. Thank you, Alma. If you have the opportunity, do go in and access. If you'd like updates for this meeting, when we're adding new content to the site, follow the instructions that Marvin walked through at the beginning of the call. And we also do have a tremendous amount of more research that we've been doing internally with our Zeventus Research Group. So if you're looking for additional information, case studies, what are other organizations doing out there, feel free to reach out. We'd be happy to share that information with you. That's all I have for this month's update. Marvin, I'll pass it back over to you for Peter's introduction. Awesome, James. Thank you. So with that, oops, sorry, pressing too many buttons. I'd like to introduce you to Peter Gaffney. He's the head of research at Security Token Advisors. Peter started his career as a five-year-old video game tycoon and then progressed to selling gum to his classmates. From this notable start, Peter graduated to CDs and iPhone apps in high school. Then Peter started Crypto Core Capital Investments, a small-scale investment fund while he was at University of Michigan. Peter's spoken and written about tokenization extensively, including the white paper that I mentioned at the beginning of the call, real-world asset tokenization in 2023. With that, Peter, take it away. I appreciate that intro, Marvin. Thanks for that compliment, James. Always try to elevate to the next level. I think we found that with tokenization here. Everyone, great to meet you, great to be on here. As Marvin said, Peter Gaffney, I lead a lot of the research initiatives with Security Token Advisors, pretty much an advisory firm, a research firm and anything in between when it comes to asset tokenization. The firm's been around for five years now since by late 2017. And we're a number of clients, I think over 40 clients all in. We actually have Jason Barraza, one of the STA guys in the Zoom right now as well. Always good to see that. But essentially, yeah, we're an advisory firm, do a lot of research consulting for real estate clients, private equity firms, general asset managers. We have had mortgage-backed securities platforms engage us before and do a lot of research and ad hoc work within that. So we'd love to break down a bunch of different use cases that I think would be just helpful to paint the context. Marvin, I actually do have a presentation if I'm able to share my screen. I also just shared it with your email if you wanna pull it up. Apologization done that before this, but happy to be able to paint some context in the meantime. I just stopped sharing. So if you wanted to share from your computer. Fantastic. That's coming up for everybody. Yep. Perfect, perfect. So here it is. We're gonna look at some asset tokenization across the capital markets in general. So I know I wanna keep this more focused on mortgages, on mortgage-backed securities, asset-backed space in general. But as we know, tokenization could be applied to anything. So I think it's important to show the context as a whole. So this is one of my favorite slides, just a whole collage of headlines. And we could scrap this entire page and throw 20 other headlines on. There's enough now where we could really do that and have multiple cycles of things. But we see a lot of more retail-driven plays. I don't know if you can see my cursor, but over here with INX and even with Exodus raising capital from their retail crowd. I'll just move over to KKR, one of the biggest private equity firms in the world, Hamilton Lane, similar deal. We have Goldman on the top right, doing a lot of their internal and kind of private side activities. And then of course we have Figure and Apollo and some other players actually working in the mortgage and the HELOC space specifically. So kind of based on our estimates, based on assets securitized on the blockchain, security tokens issued that we know through a lot of the brokers, the issuance platforms, the transfer agents and then even what we're tracking with our sister company on the secondary trading side. We'll put the primary market around $80 billion right now worth of assets. We've seen other studies, I think Bain actually put at 77 billion, so we're pretty close in that range. And then we've seen all the other, the city, the Boston Consulting Group reports. So there's a range of estimates, but based on what we actually see, I would put it around $80 billion. And then so far in the secondaries, it's probably between 15 and 20 billion all in actively trading. Our team's always talking a lot of the vendors, service providers and executors of the technology and the licensing. So we're excited to kind of show some new secondary rollouts in the near future, keep an eye out on that. But without further ado on the context, we're looking at a couple of use cases. So the way I see this and the way kind of the team use a lot of this stuff just based on client engagements, based on what's actually happening behind closed doors and behind the scenes. I think there's three different buckets of tokenization you really wanna think about. It's not like a one size fits all type or a deal. It's more so you have product initiatives, think of investment funds, think of pre-IPO shares, think of even just asset backed securities that come out on the blockchain that investors could actually buy into. So that's the product side. We have operational tools, which I think of things like collateral management, repo swaps is a recurring theme in this presentation as you'll see. And then even internal transfers and just working with like blockchain enabled fund administrators on the backend. And then lastly, which we won't really cover, it's more of a built off thing, but infrastructure solutions, kind of like what wisdom tree and Franklin Templeton have been doing, rolling out actual retail driven applications and platforms to them bring existing products on chain and then dish it out to retail investors to better cater to them. So it's super cool, won't really be covering that much, but it's good context over here. So first off on the product side, right? This is the headlines that people see. This is the KKR, the Hamilton Lane, Apollo. This is what people see in the headlines a lot. So this could be real estate portfolios, token, put them in an SPV, tokenize individual interest, issue that through a broker dealer or through a syndicated network and actually find investors and buyers. Eventually the goal may be to spin up like a bulletin board for eventual redemptions, maybe list on an alternative trading system, a regulated secondary marketplace for active trading or simply just managing, like I like to say, 10,000 investors the same way I'd managed 10. So there's power in each of those segments, but that's kind of what you think of, could be individuals, portfolios, funds. And like we said, I think a theme lately, commercial debt, private debt offerings have taken good stronghold the past quarter, really starting out in Q4 of last year, and then especially Q1 of this year, private credit, real estate asset-backed credit is also kind of big coming up. So we're gonna look at, for example, specifically, I think I threw a fifth one in there actually, but we'll get to that in a second. First off, we have KKR, which made all the headlines back a few months ago, actually more like six months ago now. When they issued a tokenize feeder fund product, essentially their flagship healthcare fund in traditional form, minimum buy-in, I believe is $5 million. Obviously that's catering towards certain groups. They're institutional partners, higher, ultra-high net worth individuals, asset management groups, RIAs even, and the like. So what they actually did was take a slice of that fund, little slice, work with Securitize, who's a registered broker-dealer, transfer agent issuance platform, and plop that up on the marketplace. And as we know, tokenization brings those efficiencies, investor management, kind of automated cap table, future distributions, capital calls, could be done a lot more seamlessly than having to upgrade your back office every time you wanna onboard 100 new investors, let's say. So they did that, they threw it up there. Minimum buy-in was they have to come down to a hundred grand, still a lot of money, but obviously it's a much larger cohort of accredited investors than that $5 million mark. So pretty cool. And that kind of set the path for the rest of the quarter to follow suit on the private side. In fact, Hamilton Lane made potentially even bigger headlines shortly after that. So while KKR was a tokenized feeder fund, Hamilton Lane is actually issuing, there we go, Hamilton Lane is actually issuing new digital native share classes in its existing evergreen fund. So the private assets fund invests, as the name in private assets, three different shared classes right now that were typically closed to qualified purchasers. The digital share classes, I believe are still, they may be for accredited investors or qualified purchasers, but the real big deal here is that it's a regulated 1940 act fund with digitally native share classes. Eventually, I think the traditional fund has monthly redemptions right now, a very small amount, maybe like 2% of Nav, net asset value. The digital version eventually could trade, it could do the same, work with monthly redemptions, pretty hands off to the back office, right? Or it would technically have the ability to list on an alternative trading system and actually give investors real-time liquidity. So we're not sure what solution they're going with yet, but obviously we'll see in due time both capabilities are technically there. It's not yet active with the SEC, still kind of jump it through a couple hoops, not hoops, just still ironing out some details but pretty confident it will come through. We have seen a 40 act fund done before with ARCA and their treasury fund. So we have great precedent, we have high quality asset, I see no reason this shouldn't eventually come through. Any questions or? I know I'm blowing through a lot here on the private side. Peter, I noticed that on the Hamilton lane use case, they're using figures digital fund service. I didn't know that. I'd heard about what Hamilton lane was doing, but I didn't know what blockchain. Can you speak, and I'm not sure if you know the answer to this, why did they choose figure technology and the provenance blockchain? Sure, I'm just gonna jump ahead just a couple, we'll come back, but so provenance blockchain was actually spun up by figure and figure founded by Mike Cagney, former SOFI founder. So also let's say in the private lending, alternative lending space. And so provenance is a layer one blockchain. I believe it's a public permission blockchain technically and it's really designed for financial services. So they have over 50 institutions as node operators right now. I think over $12 billion worth of transactions have successfully taken place on figure. And right now they have, I think the numbers, $9.4 billion of assets on chain. And a lot of that is like digital mortgages, what we call e-notes, helots, securitization bundles and just some other, we have the private fund side now and some other kind of payment services. But they show, I believe Hampton Lane, so they work with Securitize on the other deal, or sorry, they have a couple of funds announced with Securitize that's not covered here. They've worked with ADDX over in Singapore before and now they're working, I think Provence just has kind of that built out financial like institutional capability and vision. So they're testing it out here with the digitally native fund. But essentially Provence is built solely for this stuff. They've worked with Apollo on a bunch of digital mortgages as shown here, they have basically their Dart, is there a digital asset registry technologies that they created to ideally kind of take market share away from MERS, which I'm sure people here are very familiar with. And Apollo actually did a bunch of digital mortgages solely on Dart, not on MERS and it all, it's all kind of kosher. So they're kind of building solutions out like that. In terms of figures, digital fund services, that's like they're built out, we're working with private funds, mega funds, NEPE companies that come in and want to do this or on the private credit side, but they also have like equity solutions and of course their figure lending and credit, which is kind of where they made their name in the first place. Is that helpful Marvin for context? Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely. That's real interesting. So figures going more onto the capitalization side, equity side, as the mortgage industry kind of winds down. So I think it makes sense for what they're doing. I just didn't know they had gone that far. That's a real great information. Definitely, no, there's a lot of impressive stuff happening behind the scenes. Cool, but that's kind of the gist right now. Come on, Hemsley. I know I don't want to eat too much time on the private side. St. Regis Aspen, anyone that's been in security tokens probably heard this. It's one of the original real estate security tokens issued in 2018. And it actually stood the test of time, which I think is a major feat given had the last five, six years have gone. So essentially elevator returns bought up a portion of St. Regis Aspen in Colorado. Basically tokenized about a fifth of that $18 million worth of the equity issued it via security token, raised that $18 million. Year later after the lockup period associated with Regulation D, it actually listed on T-Zero's ATS. And right now it's one of seven tokens listed on T-Zero, probably one of the longest standing tokens. And like we see, originally it was $18 million in market cap, technically that sliced that tranche. Now I have the number right here. What was it? It's up to 37 million per STM.co, which is actually where we track a lot of the secondary data. And it's quite successful. It's amazing to see, obviously it kind of followed suit with the greater real estate market. But when things are listed on secondary, obviously at the end of the day, you're kind of at the mercy of the market. So it's awesome to see that this kind of followed suit. And elevator returns they announced a buyback program at one point to stir up liquidity. We've seen a couple of companies do that. This was a pretty successful example, I would say. But just one of the original security tokens wanted to include it in here. Get back to figure actually. So they do have a mortgage read that's focused pretty much on He-Locks, on mortgage backed securities and other related asset backed securities. This is managed through figure investment advisors. So they have the platform, they spun off the blockchain, they have three different service verticals and then they also have an investment advisor arm, registered investment advisor arm, figure investment advisor. So they could manage this. I think there's a handful of products right now on that marketplace. Eventually there will be some third party deals that already are, but I think their plan is to kind of build that up as well. And it's great, it's still raising capital. I think it's just tough originally to kind of pitch capital raising for funds when it's tokenized. People are already seeing challenges now in traditional form. But I think the headwinds are kind of starting to push that way, which is all positive activity. Just another sample to kind of show what they're doing. And of course they're practicing what they preach with their own digital fund solutions, DFS. I believe that is into, right. So back to this real quick, just wanted to get some numbers out. So in the original Providence White Paper, it was quoted that originating loans and related products fully on chain could yield anywhere from like 300 basis points to 500 basis points in savings. I think the numbers are probably close to that, let's say two to 3% mark, even on one of these tests, they found a hundred bips in savings on the first ever. Securitization fully on chain here. It obviously quotes $30 billion potential savings in the annual $3 trillion securitization market. Capturing all that would be amazing. But even it's a very respectable amount of savings. The clients that we deal with the size and the plans, even something like 30 bips would go a long way. And then even looking at publicly traded fund wrappers, a lot of ETFs and mutual funds are competing over five basis point difference in their fees for customer business. So I think this is really where Providence could shine. If they can prove out these savings, that will go a huge, huge way with the overarching market. Any questions or comments or thoughts on the product side? Peter on the figures of first securitization, is that what they did with Redwood Trust? Cause I remember reading a white paper where Redwood Trust said that they'd saved 100 bips. And I thought it was with figure. I believe it is. Yeah. So notably early on, and this was in March 2020, I believe it was Redwood Trust. They worked with Redwood and then they did the largest securitization in like a decade. I think it's listed here on the left, actually $308 million with like salute a great asset management, WSFS was involved, Jeffery's investment bank was involved. So they definitely kind of came out the gate quickly figure with this. But yeah, Marvin Rebson. And Marvin, I was going to even say, I do believe we actually talked about this in one of our presentations back at that time. Around the same time, I remember we talked about Dart as well. Steven, better here, Peter, quick question for you. Do you know of any established businesses right now that are sort of approaching the origination element here, pretty much establishing, pretty much that mortgage purchasers provenance, their financial credit profile on chain right now that allows for sort of later securitization or being able to speed up that process right now. Do you know of? Yeah, great question, Steven. I was actually, it's not in this presentation, but so there's a couple of things that come to mind. Intane, I-N-T-A-I-N, they originally had like an administrative platform with Hyperledger actually, and they, I think they guarded something close to $6 billion in assets between a lot of their partners, M&T Bank, a few big names, but yeah, their whole thing was we wanted to manage the administration process of mortgages, mortgage-backed securities, related loans and products kind of fully on chain. They've recently rolled out intane markets on an Avalanche subnet, and that's designed to be the end-to-end marketplace. So you could originate, you could service, you could distribute and eventually you could trade and just gain liquidity all in one place. So that's, it just rolled out two months ago. I don't think we've seen a completed project on markets just yet. Admin is very, is quite active, but markets is really kind of the golden goose in this case of what we wanna see. So that's something that's a built out platform active, intane, it's already operational. I would also add that to James's point earlier about a dumb token, I love that because it's true, in some cases you don't wanna just throw a token out there. A lot of times you need actionable data or something backing it that's gonna stir activity or really make use of the blockchain in this case. So this company in Venium works to pretty much aggregate a lot of asset level data, which in this case could be loan docs, could be investor docs, could be tax assessments, could be valuations, could be any third party data like that and kind of stamp it on chain. So eventually when there is a token or when that asset gets securitized, tokenized, issued, it has kind of callable data trails that can make life easier for anyone kind of managing, looking at it, doing appraisals, any audits, any accounting work and things of that nature. So that's kind of like a mid-ground solution to your question, I would say. Okay, do you know, so again, so Intane is, how do you spell that? Again, you said I- I-N-T-A, I-N. Okay, and do you know if they're, who are the participants? Is, so is it a, it's a marketplace then, right? Do you? Yep, it's a marketplace there and let me just pull it up real quick. I believe MNT Bank, MNT Trust is one of their original and like WSFS or WSFIS was one of their original people. I could get the full list a bit later on. Jam Fintop was one of their backers and was pretty active with this and I know that they've made other investments kind of in the space in a similar vein. This is super interesting. Thank you. Yeah, it's pretty cool. And we've, like even on our advisory side, we, you know, we've seen a client who's looking to make a mortgage backed securities and investment portal to kind of eliminate the calling of different desks and really have a one-stop shop. It's cool. I think it's a great case. And I think obviously all of us probably agree, but it's cool to see that and really waiting on a couple good proof concepts to successfully run through that end-to-end market life cycle to validate it. Yeah, that's kind of all I got. It's interesting to see folks, but what about data providers or data participants in this framework, credit specifically? Do you know of any aggressive movers currently? That's a good question. I'm not sure off the top of my head, I would say Invenium comes to mind just because I wouldn't say they're data provider or aggregator, it's more so a service. But like STM.co, our sister company tracks a lot of the secondary trading data. So not necessarily aggregating a lot of that credit work, but anything on the ATS and kind of the secondaries is the bread and butter there. But I'll try to find some details if I think of things. Oh, absolutely. And what about the sort of the guidance that CFPB has recently released? Do you see any of that being sort of a hindrance or a potential facilitator for these mortgage marketplaces? What are your thoughts there with respect to regulation? I think there's enough regulatory clarity now to get things done. The low hanging fruit could always be a Reg D issuance. I know that's not apples to apples here, but there's always a low hanging fruit to get things done. I think when we hear a lot of the crypto companies or asset managers kind of not denounce, but stay away and say, oh, we're waiting on regulatory clarity. I think it's kind of a cop out answer. There's definitely concepts that are proven out and there's definitely playbooks that could be followed to get to market. So that's kind of just my opinion. But then like I said, I think things are kind of building and momentum's building. At the end of the day, a lot of it comes down to the base layer management. And if you're issuing a product to retail, that will always kind of be the most stringent, but anything above board, above that is usually much more doable and kind of even quicker to market. So I think there's enough kind of validation right now to do so. It's tough. Absolutely. Any other comments on the product side? Cool. Yeah, this is Dave Fitzgerald. I got a question for you, Pete. Yep. You talked about, talked about some proof of concepts that were moving through the system. Could you be more particular? Could you give some concrete examples of where they are and how they're moving through the system? On the mortgage side specifically? Yes. Yes. So to that, I would say it's pretty, I would say, like I know Intane was managing just a lot of their existing partnerships and let's say asset relationships on their platform. I think a lot and even, it's kind of like hinted at in this section is more so like operational cases where you're kind of transferring things and transferring assets rather than issuing things publicly for investment. I would also say, like looking at movement mortgage, I know Providence has a couple other top 10 mortgage providers they're working with that haven't been announced yet, which is really securitizing digital mortgages initially on chain and getting their internal teams comfortable using it is kind of the big play right now. Even a lot of the investment banks are doing similarly with their initiatives. So everyone's kind of following that same suit. I'm trying to think of other public cases that are known right now that I could talk about, but it's kind of limited. Well, could you like, it seems to me that figure and figure with Providence chain is really the tip of the spear out there. But can you comment on what liquid mortgage is doing and what they did with Redwood Trust or are you aware of that? Or do you have any insights into figure? I mean, into liquid. Less familiar with liquid. Obviously, see the name come up a lot. They providing loans backed by crypto or not? They were the ones who, the white paper that Marvin referred to from Redwood Trust, it was liquid who put that loan package together. So there was a, I think it was a hundred, mostly California, what do we call jumbo loans? It was a hundred jumbo loans that they had that they were part of a securitization package. And then they put those loans on a blockchain. I can't remember which one it was because liquid is, I think liquid is agnostic as to where they put it. But that was in order to accelerate being able to trade between those hundred mortgages between private parties, right? I mean, between other originators or other investors. So the idea was to cut out the redoing of the due diligence for each of those hundred loans again. So it was just, it seems to me that figures in the lead and they've really committed and done the most investments in it. But I was wondering if you had any insights about liquid, thanks. Yeah, no, great. Thank you for that background. Yeah, I think it's funny. This is actually, the way I see it is that they would be creating kind of a permissioned, I guess permission is the best word. I just got permission bulletin board of sorts. And that's kind of a recurring theme, I would say. I know Avalanche has built out like their institutional on-chain finance pool for a similar thing with a lot of these institutional funds. And I think what it looks like with liquid mortgage, it's probably something similar where there's a permission network of other operators or kind of network partners in the channel that are able to kind of join this, let's call it a syndicate, a group. Yeah, a consortium. Yeah. And they have to swap between each other. That's all good. That's usually all good because you're not going to the public and everything's kind of contained. I think that's actually, to the previous question, that's a lot more feasible and kind of straight to market than anything else would be. I'll have to look into that personally to see if there's anyone else working with them that's coming onto the radar. Just made a note. Yeah, just a bit more information. It was liquid mortgage in tandem with Figure and Redwood Trust that did that securitization, this reference on the slide. So liquid mortgage was a part of that. Awesome. Yeah, they've done, big deal looks like 313 million even. Yep. Nice. Awesome. I'll have to do my homework on that specific deal, get some details to follow up. Cool. So that's, we'll get close out the kind of the public product side on that front. The other end of the, that's the tip of the iceberg behind the scenes is what a lot of operational tools are happening. And this is kind of what I've been looking at just as our clients demand this and kind of move to this space and the commercial banking, investment banking, general asset management uses. So like I said here, a lot of things looking at collateral management, repo, asset swaps, excuse me, fund administration, this is where a lot of high volume, just capitals moving nonstop. And this is a great case if you can have real-time settlement, quicker transactions, let's say less hands-off transactions. This is where a lot of the cost savings will actually come to these types of parties, which is why we can't ignore it. And there's the whole thing of, people look at public blockchains versus private blockchains. Some are very opinionated. I'm not super opinionated because I think there's a use for both of them in this whole ordeal. I think for product issuance, public blockchains are a great way to go given the integrations. The behind the scenes is probably not necessary. And that's where I think a lot of these chains are about to look at kind of shine, or these services rather. So one, I'm not sure if anyone's familiar, HQLAX pretty much stands for high quality liquid assets exchange, European base firm, pretty much there, they're looking to be an institutional grade enterprise service built with R3 Corda. They already have Goldman, BNY, Mellon, UBS, a handful of banks, asset managers, and kind of big names like that are using it the whole purpose to take existing money market funds, cash equivalents, even treasuries for now, and tokenize them, have them basically swap seamlessly across the database to represent collateral, represent any repo swaps, any asset swaps, any short-term or long-term loans between the banks and parties. Ultimately, this is there to kind of get rid of any delay and settlement, any miscommunication or kind of misguidance between fees, between timing and things like that, which ultimately would reduce error and ideally make everyone happier or whoever's on the winning side of that. But this is very popular in Europe, has a lot of partners involved right now. It's definitely invite only if you will. It's definitely institutional focus. You're not gonna have a retail or kind of a smaller issuer join this really made for banks who are transferring a lot, a lot of volume of assets and eventually proving this whole method out on their digital collateral record with money market funds and kind of the usual suspects. Once that's proven out, we can start going to more alternatives like real estate, like private equity interest, maybe even pre-IPO shares eventually to be used as collateral. So that's kind of a cool future to look at. I'm sure we could find ways and to use existing credit products, asset backed securities to do the same too. But for now, I think they're focused mainly on money markets and treasuries, something a bit more stable, predictable. And I see that kind of as just a wider version of JP Morgan's Onyx division. Onyx is one of the more impressive divisions in any banking parties right now to date on the blockchain side. My opinion, the repo network launched late 2020 already almost at $500 billion worth of transaction volume. This is invite only as well. They have Goldman, the usual suspects as members in the syndicate. But the whole goal here is to kind of test out tokenization, digitization of funds for repo purposes. I saw the original deal with Goldman. They were usually charging each other interest by the minute. So you'd have the JPM broker saying, hey, this transaction took two and a half hours. The Goldman broker saying, no, this was four hours each buying for their better deal on the side. And one shared ledger, the blockchain said it took three hours and five minutes. That's it, the end all be all. Everyone knows what fees are paid. Fees are paid automatically collateral swapped upon closure. And boom, that's it. So looking at it like that's pretty powerful and similarly to HQ LAX, proving that out on the repo side with like money markets mostly could eventually roll out to the tokenized collateral network, TCM, using this with all sorts of asset types eventually even expanding from Onyx to JPMs like private banking, wealth divisions, asset management divisions, maybe even to the public side, although that's, you know, longer, longer term. But very cool. I mean, they're trailblazing. They created JPM coin originally as a settlement token back in 2018. Many people, myself included, did not realize the purpose of JPM coin. I remember saying to myself, you know, I was younger, just what is it trying to be a different Bitcoin? How does this work? But now it all comes out in the wash and we see that to have a digital network, a closed loop, you need some settlement token. So props to JPM for seeing that whole vision through and now it's kind of really, really coming if you're with that. Any banking things? Could you give the context on what happened with Quorum and JPM moving that and then them standing up Onyx and why those two things are completely different? I could, yeah, give him my best shot. In terms of actually focusing on this, a lot of my focus is on the tokenization specifically. So I mean, the settlement side is pretty solved with JPM coin. I remember Quorum back in the day less familiar with what actually happened at the end there to be completely honest, not to be completely honest. But yeah, I mean, right now JPM just, it's basically a tokenized deposit. I think they put out a whole white paper about deposit tokens versus stable coins. Instead of having pegged assets, these are actually issued and minted by JPM itself backed by their existing deposits and their products. And it's totally meant to be an internal use case. Anything coming through Onyx is gonna settle in JPM coin. You're not gonna find JPM coin issued with other, in other networks or other permission parties unless they really see a reason for it, which right now it doesn't look that way. So maybe Quorum was supposed to be more of a public facing. And Dave, feel free to correct me if that was more public facing at the time. I think they kind of shifted to just be more so internal private use on JPM coin side at least. Yeah, that's helpful, thanks. Definitely. And it's a, you know, just speaking from conversation, it's a recurrent theme now, the settlement side, because people are realizing I'm probably not gonna pin my whole operation on USDC or on a different stable coin after just the general digital asset markets the past 12 months. So a lot of these commercial banks are looking at, should I issue a deposit token, provenance? I don't know if I mentioned this before, provenance has a consortium actually USDF, which is basically a dozen bank, FDIC insured bank consortium, FDIC insured deposits that are accepted by every bank in the consortium. Ideally as they add new banks to it, it grows in strength and credibility and usability. And then even asset managers like Franklin Templeton, they're on chain, Money Market Fund, wisdom trees products that we mentioned a bit earlier and kind of traditional money market yield generating products that are just being wrapped on chain to be stable coin substitutes. So that investors have a bit more confidence in the backing that could actually generate some yield or some returns on that front and make use of it in this fully digital network. So that could be a whole different subject not to ramble on about it, but it could be like, JPM coin super internal for JPM usage. Whereas these other products may be trying to serve that public facing market and just get adopted by a bunch of different banks asset managers, wealth groups and even retail users at the end of the day. So pretty cool trend to keep an eye on that's definitely where I have my eye on just from conversation and client needs. Peter, those are two great examples that you mentioned and onyx as well. I especially liked the settlement example that you provided, but is there any hard data that actually shows that blockchain does lower the speed to settlement? Because one of the things that I think we as a group have been talking about and I've been thinking about is is there a enterprise grade platform for trading mortgage backed securities? I think that's where we're all kind of leaning towards and what the enterprise grade solutions that you have right now are for repo swaps but mortgage backed securities and maybe there is nothing out there maybe it's something that provenance or figure maybe that's what they're building and just keeping quiet about but I'd be interested in your thoughts on that. Great question. I know HQ LAX their whole thing is about delivery versus payment and solving that and a lot of the like when ABN AMRO issued their digital bond that was a whole thesis, right? The real time settlement and it's easy to kind of talk about like we are now in terms of the mortgage backed security space I think that's what intane's goal is to be. Okay. And like we said, would love to see the live product on intane markets to see that through and how it's actually kind of looking but I would keep my eyes there and then if anything rolls out on figure HTS which I don't think there's anything live right now trading that would be another good indicator of this type of action. Because I totally remargined it's easy to say real time settlement, this and that 24 seven trading but to really see in action is a different story. So that's definitely something. Yeah. Okay, cool. No, of course. It's a good note for me as well to keep my eye out on on any developments in that front share with you afterwards. Yeah. Now I was going to say the same Peter that's something we all have our eyes on. I haven't seen or collected any articles for it yet. So yeah, if you do come across anything, let us know and I'll reach back and do the same. Definitely. We're seeing efficiencies on the capital or the primary side as things are coming through but really the secondaries are to be proven out. So definitely very curious on that. We'll do. And so similarly as kind of the third leg of the operational case, we were looking at fund distribution and management. This may be a little less related to this group's focus although it could kind of be changed to loan servicing and kind of life cycle. But if anyone's familiar with all funds they manage about $1.3 trillion in assets at least under administration that they manage on behalf of clients with 3000 fund groups. Their whole thing is that they could kind of be a fund distributor, help raise capital and manage investors for a lot of their groups. One of them being Alliance Berenstine which actually mid-2022, I think it was June or July, maybe May, they Alliance Berenstine announced they'd be shifting some of their focuses from all funds to all funds blockchain which is just kind of the blockchain based fund administration platform. And the goal of this was as we kind of mentioned before to get Alliance Berenstine's team comfortable with tokenization, with blockchain and kind of managing assets and thinking about things in a more digital world. Eventually the goal is to kind of roll this out for a product use case and start raising capital or managing funds fully on chain and investors but right now it's more like taking existing products placing them on chain with digital twins and then getting used to it that way. So kind of early stage but a cool thing to see super big name obviously 800 or let's say 687 billion in assets always good to kind of see that validation. But then all funds blockchain similarly I think last week even announced this with Asimut an Italian asset manager and BMP Paribas their original servicer. BMP actually agreed to integrate with all funds blockchain in favor of getting used to that blockchain interface too. And BMP has already been pretty active in the space as we saw a couple of examples but pretty cool to see multiple, you know bigger name groups working together on this rather than kind of just buying even in a competitive way to keep a client like separated and fully on board. So I personally like that just for the narrative and eventually, you know things have to be interoperable to an extent to make things work right now. So I think it's a great kind of case study. Again, not super relevant to this group but definitely good context for the overarching capital markets and how they're kind of shifting. And lastly, I don't have a slide for this but broadridge kind of legacy transfer agent and administrator. They have a distributed ledger repo network that apparently is already clocking $1 trillion worth of repo volume a month. I want to, I have to dig in and just kind of came on my radar recently. I want to dig in and see kind of what their clientele looks like and their actual transactions and setup because that's just, you know a ridiculous number to quote and it would be awesome to see that come through but also Marvin and James I'll follow up with some data some materials after this when I can. I believe that's kind of the gist of the presentation at least. Anyone, you know like I said, secure token advisory group we work with one-off clients as we can. We have a whole research consortium a hundred plus members already early access right now going live in a couple of weeks ranging from some of the big banks that we talked about today a lot of asset managers, service providers layer one, layer two blockchains private blockchains and then even third party kind of services in general, legal groups, whatever. So if anyone's curious, you know the links are right here. My email's peter at securitiesopenadvisors.com always happy to chat provide some research materials just put out a real world asset report recently and we'll have a Q1 report coming out soon enough. Hey, awesome Peter. That was a fantastic, appreciate presentation definitely appreciated. Good conversation. You got us thinking about some things that I think everyone wants to take a look at. I did put the link to Intane in the chat. So if you guys want to take a look at that I know I'm going to be reaching out to him and see what they have as well. So thank you for that, Peter. That was awesome. Oh, I absolutely appreciate you guys having me on. Of course, this was great. I hope everyone found it useful. Try to tailor it towards, you know mortgages a bit more as things come on the radar too. Yeah, and we do have one last bit of I did want to share a video with everyone. Can everyone see my screen? Or do I, I think I need to share it yet. So I'm going to share. We're not seeing it yet, Marvin. Okay, I'm going to share my screen and then we're going to go through the video from the MBA Technology Conference just really quickly. Several people from Zaventas and I went to the MBA Technology Conference last week. It was in San Jose, California. I thought it was actually a great event. The attendance was down from last year, but there was some great discussions, great opportunities. I think there are quite a few good leads that we picked up from there. And we just wanted to share this video with you guys. So let's see here. I'm going to try and get it started. Hopefully you guys get the sound too. Hey everyone, it's great to be here at the 2023 MBA Technology Conference in San Jose, California. It was a great first day with an interesting presentation from the father of IBM's Watson. It was a great presentation on AI. Today started off with another interesting presentation from the MBA on different economic indicators. The MBA expects probably another 25 basis point increase and then interest leveling off at the end of the year. Frankly attendance is down from last year, but I've been pleasantly surprised with the number of interesting meetings and potential opportunities that we've been identified. Hey guys, that was it. Just wanted to share that little video with you guys. Before we end, I wanted to just give everyone an opportunity to ask any questions. If there's any questions on any future presentations. If there are any requests for future presentations or any additional information. Okay, with that then, I'm going to go ahead and sign up. Thank you to everyone for attending. We will be sharing the recording for this presentation on our wiki and usually we get quite a few downloads on that, so we will let everyone know when the recording is available. Again, thank you Peter for attending. It was a great presentation and thank you to everyone. Have a good day. Have a good day everybody.


In this study, researchers examined the differences between children who had mild, moderate, and severe cases of acute respiratory distress syndrome, ARDS. They found that children with more severe cases showed decreased levels of interferon stimulated genes, ISGs, as well as changes in their mononuclear phagocyte transcriptomes and progressive airway neutropathy. Additionally, they discovered that a protein called FOLR3 was highly expressed in children with moderate to severe ARDS. These findings suggest that different inflammatory responses may be responsible for the development of mild, moderate, and severe forms of ARDS. This article was authored by Tim Flairlage, Jeremy Chase Crawford, E. Caitlyn Allen, and others.


Hello people! I'm Ginny Metherall, I'm a fourth generation witch, and welcome to my channel! So we're coming up to the 1st of February, that incredible pagan festival of Imolk. This has always been celebrated with the use of the pagan square cross, otherwise known as the breed cross, the bridged cross, the bride cross, depending on your religion, and the Christians know it as the Saint Bridget's Cross because they tried to incorporate this pagan symbolism into their religion when they were taking over pagan practices to make them more Christian. It is however of deeply Celtic origin, and one of my subscribers has asked me to show you how you can make one, and so here it is. I have my cutty thing, so I'm going to go and pick some reeds.  So we're going down to this area here, this is the common rush plant and it grows in boggy areas everywhere. So I've got plenty, you need not this many but I'm going to make a few because I want to give them away to my friends. So the first thing we're going to do is to cut them all to the same length. Each cross takes traditionally nine reeds to make, and so that's how many you'll need. Take your first reed and bend the second reed at its midpoint around it, like this. Take your third reed and bend it at its midpoint around the main two reeds that are sitting up, turn, and take fourth reed and do the same. And keep taking your reeds and bending them around the uprights, turning, taking a reed and bending it around the uprights until you have used all of your nine reeds. However, you could use more, which I'm going to do because I like a thick Bridget's Cross. Try and keep the central piece all together and tight, which is why I'm holding it with my thumb and fingers, and pushing the reeds down into the tightness of the square to keep them together, like so. Keep adding in reeds until you are happy with the size and shape. And I have now ended up with something looking like this. This is when you take some wire, like I've got here, which is florist wire, but you could use string or cotton or whatever takes your fancy. I prefer wire because it's more easy, and I tie off the ends and then trim them until they look neat and tidy. And so now your Bridget's Cross is ready for your altar and offerings. I always make a few of these because I like to give them away to friends and family for their use. So I love a St Brides Cross. Traditionally they're made on the 31st of January for use on the 1st of February, Immulc. You would hang them on your doors and windows and from your rafters if you had one of those very old fashioned thatched roofed houses in order to prevent negative entities and energies from entering your home and bringing you good luck for the rest of the year. You also use them to decorate your Immulc altar with because they are part of the symbolism of the pagan tradition at this time. And I can't show you my altar because I haven't actually made it yet, but I will do. So do go to my Patreon page at patreon.com forward slash a Ginny Metheral because I'll be putting up the images of my Immulc altar on that platform and telling you the traditions and the reasonings of what is on my altar and why there. So hopefully see you there. In the meantime, please don't forget to like and subscribe because your subscribing directly affects my channel and so I would be seriously grateful if you could do so. And otherwise, I'll see you next week.


Hello everyone. Today, I conclude my participation at the United Nations General Assembly. During the last few days, with the leaders across the world, I have worked on important issues such as environmental protection, the fight against poverty, and gender equality. As the world marks the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights this year, Canada continues to reaffirm the importance of the rule of law and the rules-based international order. We need these rules to foster the stability that is essential to global prosperity and economic growth. Yesterday at the UN Security Council, I called on Russia to withdraw its troops from Ukraine immediately, completely, and unconditionally. On top of the horrors caused by Putin in Ukraine, Russia's war is causing global inflation, which hurts all of us. Russia is weaponizing energy and food, leading millions to face shortages. Canada will continue to support Ukraine as long as it will. And we will always stand up to defend the sovereignty of the right and the international order based on the rules. Over the past few years, many challenges, like Russia's war in Ukraine, the pandemic and global inflation, have shown us how interconnected we all are. It's increasingly clear that economic policy is climate policy, is security policy, is social policy. A good example of this is gender equality, one of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals. Gender equality plays a key role in achieving all of the other SDGs. The latest World Bank estimates show that GDP per capita would be almost 20 percent higher if all gender employment gaps were to be closed. Discrimination is holding all of us back, not just women and girls. Whether it's gender equality or other SDGs, our targets cannot be understood and effectively addressed in isolation. And that's also true for climate action. Here in the United Nations, I have talked about Canada's efforts to fight climate change, while making life more affordable and creating jobs. I have announced new commitments to reduce pollution more, including methane emissions. I have also announced funding to support countries that are vulnerable to climate change and for which we must ensure access to aid. And I have discussed with leaders from all over the world the next steps to protect our oceans, develop clean energy, and increase sustainable economies. We know that our citizens are living the realities of climate change, so I invited two Canadian firefighters to speak to leaders about the need to keep increasing our ambition. Back in 2021, in Glasgow, I launched the Global Carbon Pricing Challenge, which brings countries together on cutting emissions through pollution pricing. Chile, the Republic of Korea, the United Kingdom, Germany, and New Zealand have already joined. The EU Commission has also confirmed its support, and yesterday we announced that Norway, Denmark, Vietnam, and Côte d'Ivoire are joining too. And we're continuing our work so that more countries join us in the months to come.  This morning, I also had a meeting with several partners to talk about the situation in Haiti. Our goal is to promote solutions to the crisis led by the Haitians and to mobilize the support of the region and the world. Canada will continue to support Haiti. We will invest $45 million to help feed up to 100,000 children every day at school for five years. We will invest in the common background in justice for the development of the United Nations program to help, among other things, fight against violence made by women. And we will continue to help strengthen the Haitian national police. In addition to this help, today we are announcing new sanctions on three members of the Haitian economic elite. I would like to once again thank all those who were present this morning and all those who are actively working on solutions to help the Haitians. Before I end today, I want to say a few words about the Affordable Housing and Groceries Act, the first piece of legislation introduced by our government this fall. This bill will amend the Competition Act to better protect families and consumers and help stabilize grocery prices for Canadians. And it will remove the federal GST on the construction of new apartment buildings to help get more rental units built faster. I urge opposition leaders back home to help us get today's real solutions passed quickly. We're focused on making life more affordable for Canadians and we'll be continuing this work in the days and weeks to come. Thank you for being here.


So, good morning everybody. Why is this so funny for you? Because you don't know what we are talking to. Good morning or good afternoon or good evening? Just hi and welcome back to the YouTube channel. Yes. My name is Kwame and this is... Elaine. Yes, it's good to have you again. We are husband and wife. Maybe it's too much. Well, for us it's morning, that's why I said good morning. Yeah.  Okay, so much information out there today. Yeah. So, we are back with a new video. As you know, I'm a writer, so I write everything down. So, we'll dive into that very quickly. Because last time we did things men wish... Women knew about them. Yeah. Yes. But of course, hello, we also have to do it the other way around. So, that's why I gathered some notes. And we take it from there. And we also had quite a bit of discussions amongst ourselves. Because, I mean, we played around with the gender roles last time. Like men wished... Wanting this. Yes, exactly. But ultimately we are aware that not everybody fits into those boxes of a stereotype. Because that's what we're doing it in a stereotype. Yeah, what men want and what women want. It's very binary. And we know that... And limiting. Limiting as well. Yeah. We are very aware that not everybody aligns with those gender stereotypes. And we also believe that men and women have female and masculine energy. So, it's not to put anybody into a box. It's more to play around with it, see where you can relate to and take it from there. And we find it extra important to stress this. Because, especially now in Ghana, there's a bill that's going to be passed or they want to pass it. They want to pass it. It hasn't been passed yet. Yes. That is limiting or criminalizing LGBTQI plus people. And not only they but also their allies. So, even if you would share something on social media about their rights then you could be criminalized. Yeah. Basically infringing on basic human rights of those people. And the funny thing is a lot of people haven't even gone through the proposed bill very well. But there are some elements in there that also criminalize or put certain activities of even normal quote unquote heterosexual activities into the criminalization margin. Which it just doesn't make sense in total. Everything about the bill. So, that Ghana is also talking about what would this mean because it also limits freedom of expression. They're not allowed to gather into organizations anymore. So, it's quite problematic. So, that's why we got talking about gender stereotypes and this whole discussion we had over this week. So, that's why I wanted to also share this, that this is going on. We'll link to some news articles in the description. So, you can form your own opinion. We are not here to start this discussion but we do want to point out that that's currently happening in Ghana. It's something that also we discussed at home and something that's... Yeah, we want to share with you guys as well. So, just basically letting you know that this video is not putting both or doing a gender role thing where it's limiting to only heterosexuals what men want, what women want. So, you can also look at it as what I want more from my partner. No matter the gender or how you define yourself or what you identify with whether it's female, male, non-binary... Whatever you want, whatever you demand from your partner if you can relate to any of the things that... Well, we're doing the reverse. So, Elaine is going to actually read out some of the things and then we're going to react to it. So, if you haven't seen the first video as well you can check out the first video and we're going to do today's talk. So, I tried to look for exactly the same article online so things that women wish men knew that is not there and it often was very on a sexual thing. So, apparently the wishes of women are immediately sexualized which is also problematic. That was just a side note in my research but then luckily I found someone, a Buzzfeed article it's also in the description about small gestures that women wish men did more. So, I picked a few and then I will talk on it as well. The first one, it hit home right away. Sorry, microphone. So, putting your phone away while you're doing activity together it shows that you're focused on me and the conversation and the activity. It's the ultimate sign of effort. Speaking of which, I don't know where my phone is. It's the ultimate sign of effort for a YouTube channel. So, yeah, do I do that often? So, for me, this also relates to what kind of love language you have so for me my love language is quality time so spending time either with you or my friends or my family I want you to be present I want us to have adventures like me in the moment and of course the phone is always there but I for example, I don't look at my phone when I'm with my friends and I remember that I used to have a big problem with that because before we started dating she would go out with her friends and she is like 200% present in the moment and doing stuff with your friends and you text her and from where I was coming from was what if there's an emergency that you react too late? I don't say look on your phone all the time but I mean do check from time to time it's okay to check from time to time Yeah, but now you're moving away from initial feedback is that when we're doing something it's nice if your phone is out of the room and especially with you because a lot of your interactions are on social media I mean your work is on social media so your work is social media so I know it's difficult for you to disconnect from it but I guess you already know because you're not giving any counter Yup, I'm not even going to know Alright, let's move to 2 before you get to work comfortable No, no, no, I'm fine I mean it's the truth, if it's the truth, what am I going to do? No, I'm not going to do anything about it I'm just going to admit and work on it Yeah, I think you do... I do ask and we have a phone with dinner some quality time together or sometimes I was like what's happening on your phone so I understand that if it's something like work I can back off but if it's not work I'm like Can you put it down for me? I'm here Okay, number 2 it's not number 2 because there are many more but the one I selected sometimes I need guys to just be listeners and not fixers when I have a problem My husband, okay so the lady had a husband My husband always wants to go into fixing mode but sometimes the fix is sitting with me holding me or letting me cry out Yeah, that's very applicable Yes And in my defense when I see my partner in the situation that they're in like instinctively what kicks in is to try and help them not feel sad or terrible or find solutions immediately So it doesn't always click to me that sometimes they just want to be listened to and it just doesn't feel okay not doing anything about it Yeah, but I think that's where your perception is different because sometimes listening to it I'm capable to find my own solutions but sometimes my feelings are so all over the place that that has to be expressed first before I can move on to like okay this is how I can fix it and I see that you're carrying that you want to provide a solution but sometimes you need to process the feelings that it triggers so yeah I think recently we had one where I came from work, had a long day we had an event and there was something with a colleague and I couldn't really put my finger on it and I felt like I had done something wrong or I didn't act accordingly and I was just so sad about it but I was also tired so because I was tired it made me cry but And I don't like seeing that So the problem was trying to fix it like oh no but you can do it like this and that just overwhelmed me like no I can't do anything now and I'm just sad I need to take a break I need to breathe and then I also tried to tell him like sorry I can't process this right now so sorry so I see your intention but I need to fix it I need to breathe first let it manifest and then you can go forward but that's also sometimes difficult I can understand and also when to do what because maybe at some point I want a solution and then he's listening and he's just like yes and sometimes you do that like you say that can you say something or what do you think and then oh ok so now you're allowed to or not allowed but now how do we make a distinction then it's difficult a different situation so how do you are you going to tell me the situation that you need something all the time I think we're already doing it a little bit I think never stops ok number three when you compliment a woman instead of complimenting her looks so something physical give her a compliment about a part of her personality this goes further than you think yeah because how I look it's just temporary I know but I think I do well on the complimenting side not just like physical look I do tell you how kind you are how actually really smart like quick thinking on your feet and how you support so I do compliment you on those things it's not just it's nice because especially with skills that I mean these are my skills so I know I have them but they're not extraordinary for me but they are extraordinary to me because it affects me in the way you are experiencing it so it's nice when it points out and it's also yeah I think for me also the biggest compliment is when I make you laugh it's like my hobby and it's funny because also I mean we speak English together because obviously you can't do Dutch she's going to say that she's very funny in Dutch yes oh my paper fell I'm going to go get it but just for the sake of document I am more funny in Dutch because I mean that you know how humor comes to very subtle things yeah I can I see that a lot in tree how people are making fun in tree is so different than in English even the translation I think I'm also funnier in G that's what you also said so actually we're not a lot but this could be much more we really master each other's language but there's a topic for another YouTube video yes number four random little gifts like your favorite candy bar something small like your favorite candy bar flowers they can go a long way flowers but it's funny because last in the other video guys also said this but I couldn't generally relate but you do like yeah okay you're not a kid person but because of the last video I think one of the guys mentioned coffee in your favorite mug yeah one of the guys I mean the comments of the things that men wish women knew and I was like no but then on Saturday or Sunday I don't remember when I told him how to do my coffee in the morning so I had to ask for it but at least I got a coffee in my favorite mug the reverse actually works for you like what the guy said actually was more in relation to you I mean the little things like you know a pat on the back or a coffee in my favorite mug makes me know that it's going to be a good day and I was just like I just want to go to work yeah that's true but I also think for me small little things is also like buying things we need in a house so for example now we need sponges or anything like you just buy it or you already bought it before I thought about it or replacing the soap when you finish bathing and the soap finishes yeah that I cannot stand so then he finishes the soap and then I'm going into the shower but I mean when you get into the shower you're not checking if everything is there at least I'm not doing that and then I'm already in the shower and then I want to grab soap but there's nothing there and I'm just like I don't have to towel and get into the kitchen it's a mess because things get wet and it's not nice things get wet okay see you're sexualizing everything what you mean everything this is the only joke you walked into I wasn't done yeah you walked into the joke how am I sexualizing anything anyway go on I have there and one I also really enjoy is when I get home from work after a long day and I'm already like what are we going to eat I don't feel like cooking and this doesn't happen often but it does happen sometimes then he already started cooking because that gives me so much space to breathe for the most part I probably already you go to the office on specific days and the days when you do go to the office and I know that this might be the situation I often try and put something together before you come yeah but that really helps I feel if I look for the women around me that we're always walking around with the grocery list or at least I am and I also look a lot in the fridge of what do we still have you know you have this meme when you open the door you see I see if something will change yeah like you only see stuff I think women take a lot of mental space I don't know maybe also men maybe what I see with my friends is in the household often women keep track of what is there, what is not there so it takes up a lot of space sometimes I'm not even wondering what I could do what else I could do with that space because it's quite a big amount of my time thinking about what to eat next I'm also a foodie so that also I don't function if I don't eat so that's why it's also a priority for me but that helps there's a gesture in that process so like he picked already something up or he's already cooking or he's like let's just order because we have a lot of discussions about the like I'm like oh I want to cook and you're like oh no you're too tired so we do that so those are also little gestures that are maybe look more practical but I can still really appreciate it last but not least introduce me to people immediately if he knows them it's always hi this is Elaine my wife my wife and I or if we're both new to somebody like hi I'm Kwame this is Elaine yeah I can relate to this one because you know a lot of people so anywhere we go I don't know a lot of people okay but you have to understand that compared to me because I'm relatively new in Accra you have worked in media people know you even if you don't know them so anywhere we go we at least run into one person or two that know him or he knows them and then he runs off and he's like I'm going to see my friend and he always says my friend my Quentin's friend for whatever I go to actually I think that's one conversation we should have using that term okay but that's maybe interesting a bit away so it's nice when he makes me part of the conversation and even though I probably won't say much anyway it's nice that you're introduced and yeah included and like contributing to the conversation that's you don't stand there like I'm just there I think that's very nice it's important otherwise you just leave the other person hanging like I don't know what to do so those were on my list I think I forgot two things so I think about the compliments it's nice when you compliment on the look but I think what a lot of men don't understand is that we don't dress up for you we dress up for ourselves especially with the makeup and stuff I dress up because I want to feel good or I feel a certain way I want to express that I don't dress up for you so when you compliment I acknowledge that you received the look or you have seen it and you appreciate it that's fine so it's like a cherry on top but I already have bought the whole cake for myself like I dressed up for myself so that's a nice one I think with the little gestures so the main difference there are a lot of differences between men and women but for women every month we go to our cycle and I think what sometimes men underestimate or at least maybe other bodies than women bodies is that half of the time half of the month at least for myself I don't feel like myself because my cycles at a point that I either feel super tired I feel very stressed I feel overwhelmed all these things so I know people especially men joke about oh periods is it your periods why you're cranky but it does have a huge effect do I do that? no good because I would kill you but can you imagine that every month half of the month because before it starts you're already affected by it your own body is betraying you you feel tired for no reason you feel overwhelmed you feel cranky and I know that in like the society there's not much space for women to talk about it but it is something that is very devastating sometimes because you're like this and this and this and my body won't allow it sometimes it feels like your own body is betraying you and that's half of the month all the time all the time so sometimes I'm really jealous of him because he can get so much done without those obstacles that are there and I love my body I love what it can do all these things don't get me wrong but sometimes I'm just so jealous that you have all this capacity and it's not blocked by a monthly thing that comes back every month and every month you never know what to expect and you have to take a step back or you have to change things and yes it makes us strong because we're dealing with pain on a regular basis and all these things we know how to listen to our bodies because we have to but sometimes it's so tiring so in the little gestures it's also nice that a partner keeps that in mind like okay she's acting a bit like on the edge maybe our body is not doing what she wants it to do and then that's enough so that was the last little thing not the little thing that was the little one I'm just looking at you like it's a struggle for me I'm not like believing it so I'm also curious if not only about this topic but about all the things I said if women can relate to this or not at all I'm very curious and also maybe how partners deal with a few of these things because we are different it doesn't mean it's a no-go area we have our differences and we try to find a way yeah that's about it okay so actually guys how do you feel that's a lot of like I like that you're speaking a lot and I yeah because it's about me yeah I know I'm happy about it I was just looking at you going about it's nice to listen to did you learn something or you already knew everything I don't know everything but most of the stuff were familiar yeah we talk about things a lot yeah okay thank you so much for watching okay so you guys if you like this video that's how you do it click the subscribe button we're going to be bringing you much more videos together as and when we can yeah so that's basically it my name is Kwame again and this is Elaine see you next time we'll catch you in the next video bye


St. Lucia's tourism sector continues to show strong signs of rebound, with a reopening of a number of industry establishments coupled with the re-employment of hundreds of industry workers. Tourism officials remain optimistic as visitor arrivals to St. Lucia for the month of June have exceeded expectations by 34%. We'll learn more in this report. 21,357 visitors have been recorded for June, surpassing me's figure of over 7,000. Public Relations Manager at the St. Lucia Tourism Authority, Jarene Georges, explains the trends in source markets. We're seeing the U.S. market back at 92%, growth on the U.K. market, 4% for the month of June 2021 as well as the year to date, so far as we're really optimistic. The Caribbean market as well is opening up very nicely and projecting nicely. We saw the return of the inter-fairy service on the 8th. It was a sight to see when the ferry pulled into the port because we've not seen a ferry in so long and with airlift, there's several of them contributing to our arrivals for the summer period. Air Sunshine is one of them with direct routes from St. Croix and St. Kitts. So all of these are adding to our growth and our continued rebound amid the pandemic. Tourism Minister Hon. Dominic Vede indicates that hotel occupancy levels on the island are benefiting as a result, with favourable projections going into winter. The recovery is happening so quickly. There's such pent-up demand that the hotels are seeing record-breaking bookings. A lot of them are doing very well and there's just a lot of confidence in the marketplace. Projections for the winter are through the roof in terms of the bookings. We had a situation a few weeks ago where one of the American Airlines flights were cancelled but we had no place to put the guests because all of the hotels that are open were full and that really is something else when you see that our hotels have such very strong occupancy. The two officials were speaking during the welcome ceremony for Celebrity Millennium on Tuesday, July 13, 2021, from the Government Information Service, Helmeti Mok reporting.


Dear students, in this module, we shall discuss the voltage-gated potassium channels in detail. The potassium channels are slightly smaller in size than the sodium channels. The potassium channel gates are on the intracellular ends. The opening of these gates results in an outflow of potassium ions. Potassium ions come out of the cells due to the opening of the channels. These channels remain closed in the resting neuron and they open during the action potential when the inside of the membrane has become positively charged due to depolarization, that is, at the peak phase of action potential. Dear students, the potassium channels are known as delayed rectifiers. They respond more slowly to depolarization as compared to the fast-acting sodium channels. They start opening when the action potential has reached its peak phase. That is why they are called delayed rectifiers. The opening of potassium channels results in an increase in the conductance of potassium across the membrane. The potassium conductance begins to increase when action potential is near its peak and it remains high in the falling phase. The outward flow of potassium ions results in decreasing the membrane potential to potassium equilibrium potential, that is, about minus 90 millivolts. Dear students, the actual role of potassium channels is not to generate action potential but actually they are involved in the acceleration of membrane repolarization that is a step towards ending the action potential. Activation of more potassium channel in a membrane means that action potential will be shortened. That is why more potassium channels open when membrane is producing action potentials of short duration. This helps the neurons to generate action potentials at higher frequency. Dear students, the number of potassium channels in different types of neurons also varies. They occur abundantly in those membranes which are involved in generating action potentials of shorter duration while they are present in lower number in the neurons that generate action potentials of longer duration. They are even absent in some myelinated mammalian neurons that produce action potentials of very long duration.


The launch of this revolutionary effort in digital learning in November of 2023 represented a turning point in the educational trajectory of the country, bringing it in line with the needs of the digital age. In order for the digital content to become effective, head of the Curriculum and Materials Development Unit, Kamdu Giannetti George, says the significance of incorporating digital content into the educational framework of St. Lucia will only be felt when teachers and students become better acquainted with the content and how to make the best use of it. The teacher training workshop held recently at the conference room of the University of the West Indies on the Mon focuses mainly on the areas of mathematics, physical education, geography and music, piloted in forms one to three of secondary schools on the island. Ms. George says Kamdu officers are very excited about incorporating technology in a structured manner. It is expected that this pilot of our phase one will run during the second and third term. During the implementation of the pilot, there will be close monitoring, support will be provided by the curriculum officers out of Kamdu and at the end of the pilot period there will be a post pilot survey. Kamdu has also been engaging kindergarten teachers in the use of Jollyphonics to enhance learning through a recent training seminar. Education consultant and facilitator of the recent Jollyphonics training, Joy Sharon says the multisensory teaching approach is highly engaging for kids and introduces them to 44 letter sounds parallel to their learning of 26 letters in the English alphabet. The feedback has been absolutely amazing. So the teachers have been using the Jollyphonic program, however without the training. And so there are some misconceptions and that sense of the program directs that you deliver at least a sound a day, so five sounds a day for the program to be effective. However, the teachers have been bringing their prior knowledge alongside the new knowledge that they've picked up themselves and found it a bit overwhelming. And so for them to receive the direct instruction and explicit instruction on how to deliver the program, they're very receptive to it. And that's been lovely to see. Whilst training for this new set of kindergarten teachers who are ongoing, the first cohort of Jollyphonics training conducted in July of 2023 was reflecting on the experience utilizing the method within the classroom. The sharing with each other, the best practices, what did they learn, the successes, what are the challenges and the opportunities for improvement. The Jollyphonics program is systematic. It is enjoyable. It is hands-on. So there is an aspect of the program for every student in the class. So we are reaching the needs of all our students, the learning styles of our students and it's just beautiful. Teachers are expected to employ the new knowledge and skill in their classrooms following the training and will be supervised by trained literacy coaches in order to monitor and evaluate that the approach is being administered to standard. From the communications unit of the Department of Education, Innovation and Vocational Training, I am Chris Saffi reporting.