Yeah, I'm here if they've been, did you want me to go ahead and get started? Give me one minute because I have to do two things before we start. One is we have to say that we are operating under the Linux Foundation, so we have to conform to anti-trust policy of the Linux Foundation. The second is that there is a code of conduct which basically says that we have to be able to disagree without being disagreeable in short. So after those two things are done, now I think Marvin will present for a short while, maybe five minutes, and then we can go ahead and start the regular presentation with Graham who's also on the call. Okay, thank you, Vipin. Thank you to everyone for joining us and also another extra thanks for Vipin and all of your efforts. We do really appreciate the openness and just the community that Vipin and the Hyperledger and the Capital Markets Group community presents, so thank you to everyone for that. This is really only going to take a couple minutes, but I wanted to give everyone an update on the mortgage subgroup since the mortgage subgroup has joined the Capital Market SIG. We've done a couple of things. First off, we've completed the mortgage subgroup Wiki that was released on October 1st, so we encourage everyone to go ahead and take a look at that, take a look at our charter, and if you're interested then please join us. The intent of the mortgage subgroup is to gather an open community very similar and underneath the umbrella to Capital Markets to try and identify some common problems and common solutions using Hyperledger specifically for the mortgage subgroup. So we invite everyone that's in the mortgage industry or has an interest in it to join us and to help us come up with some of those solutions. The group was started by myself and Angel Alban is the president of the Ventus and I think he may be joining us later, but since we released the Wiki on October 1st, we've also been working on a couple things. We've been reaching out to the different SIGs and groups within the Hyperledger community to let them know about us, to invite them to join, and also to see if there are any common use cases or sample use cases that we can use as a starting point for the mortgage subgroup. In addition to that, we've been working with the Hyperledger fabric team to come up with a couple proof of concepts. We've been able to utilize some of the test cases that the Hyperledger community provides and have gotten a couple use cases off the POCs off the ground and with the fabric and Hyperledger community we've been able to get those going. So now that we have a couple POCs off the ground we're starting to tweak them to make them more applicable to the mortgage subgroup and we're also reaching out to our business partners within the mortgage community to come up with some mortgage specific use cases. For example, just over the past couple days Angel and I attended the Mortgage Bankers Association Conference for 2021 in San Diego, California. That's probably the biggest industry group meeting for mortgage. We told them about what the Hyperledger community is doing. We told them about the applicability of blockchain and specifically Hyperledger to the mortgage community and there was a lot of excitement around it. So I think we're really starting to pick up our momentum and again if you guys are interested please join our subgroup. We're now just getting our calendar together for the rest of the year and we'll have a mortgage specific meeting. We still don't know the cadence of that yet but hopefully we'll get that over within the next couple weeks. We're starting together a panel of vendors and speakers that are interested in speaking specifically on blockchain within the mortgage community or the interest around it. So a lot of exciting things. That's it. If there are any questions please reach out to me and again thank you to everyone. Thanks Marvin. Anybody wants to join the mortgage subgroup? Of course you're welcome to. A couple of things. One is the next speaker. Graham has worked in mortgages. If you look at his bio carefully you will see that he was instrumental in a mortgage related application but right now he's going to talk about the exciting new new application of digital assets on polymesh which is a project of polymath. And welcome Graham. You've read his bio. Everybody knows what well some of us know what polymesh and polymath can do. So please Graham welcome and thanks for showing up. Thanks Bipin. I think I can probably just jump in. So I have a few slides prepared probably maybe 10 maybe 20 minutes and then we can kind of go from there and I think Bipin wanted to open the floor for questions afterwards so we can do that as well. And so I think Bipin circulated my bio but just a brief background on me. I'm the head of tokenization at polymath where we focus on all things security tokens. A bit more about me. I wrote the first ever ABC book about Bitcoin. It's called B is for Bitcoin. So if anyone has any two or three year olds about to learn their alphabet I highly recommend going and checking that out. And then I'm also on the advisory board of Red Swan which is a company that's tokenized 2.5 billion dollars of commercial real estate. So that's the largest tokenization by a single entity to date in the whole space. And so I'll go ahead and share my screen and I think we can just jump right into the presentation that I have prepared. So everyone should be able to see my screen and I'll jump into it. So today we're talking about polymesh which I believe is the blockchain for capital markets and of course I realize now I'm coming into a hyper ledger group which talks about all things hyper ledger and I'm saying hey check out this other blockchain that is not Ethereum based. But you know hopefully people can learn something today and I'm by no means bashing Ethereum or hyper ledger in the presentation but I think it's important to talk about you know why we made the design decisions that we chose when we were looking to build infrastructure for capital markets. And so just a brief background on polymath. So our vision everyone has equal access to economic growth our mission right. So how do we do that? We automate and simplify regulated markets through blockchain and then more specifically we're contributing to a dependable compliance focused blockchain. We're connecting market participants and we're growing the security token market. And if anybody is unfamiliar I'm sure 90 plus percent of people on the call are familiar but just in case there's anybody who's not. What is the security token? It's a digital representation of a financial asset. So equity, debt, real estate, commodities, structured products, investment fund shares, etc etc. And then I would kind of group security tokens into two different categories. So one would be asset tokenization. So there's an asset that exists in the world. It's off chain and you represent that on chain. So some a lot of people are doing this now. So you take an apple share for example you tokenize the apple share. I have an apple share that exists on a blockchain. The more interesting thing in my opinion and what we focus on a bit more at polymath is asset origination. So taking a financial asset that originates directly on the blockchain and exists only on the blockchain. So it's natively digital. And so we hear a lot of people in the tech space talk about the progression of technology over time. And so one way to think about it is you have a physical letter that you mail to someone and that's how you communicate. And then you take that physical letter and instead you fax it to someone. So you're digitizing the real world thing which is a little bit better of course and a little bit faster. But then you have an email which is natively digital. And so that's what we see with technology over time is there are things in the real world that then get digitized and then you have natively digital representations. And so that's what we focus a lot on polymath is making it really easy for the issuers of financial products and their partners. So broker dealers, banks, custodians, transfer agents, KYC providers, advisors, etc. etc. for them to actually create natively digital assets and then having compliance functionality so they can trade on a secondary market in a compliant manner. And so I'd ask a question. Which blockchain would you choose to build tokenization software connected to an ecosystem of regulated service providers? I think probably everyone on this meeting would say Hyperledger or maybe some version of public or private Ethereum. And that's what we started doing. So back in 2017 polymath was formed and we started building technology on Ethereum. It was really the only place to do so. That's where all of the developers were. That's where all the interest was. That's where all the investment was. And it was really the only place where you could build on top of the existing functionality. So what we did on polymath is we said how can we have actual financial securities on a blockchain? And one of the first things you see when you look at a blockchain, especially back in 2017, is there's no concept of compliance. So you have ERC20 tokens that are starting to take off these utility token things. And people are starting to try to use them for securities. We saw a few brave companies like Blockchain Capital and Science. And they said, okay, yeah, we can use these tokens for securities. And then you realize, okay, well, actually you can't because you can't control who has access to them. Anyone can trade an ERC20 token from anyone to anyone, anywhere, any time of day, no sense of compliance, no ability to freeze transactions, no ability to freeze wallets, no abilities for an issuer to force transfer if perhaps someone loses their private key. Or there's a court order for a divorce or God forbid a shareholder dies and the issuer needs to force transfer assets to their beneficiaries. There's no way to do that with ERC20. So what we did is we said, okay, we need to build a new standard for security tokens. And so we started building ERC1400. So ERC1400 is a backwards compatible standard with ERC20. So if your wallet can hold the ERC20 tokens, your wallet can hold the ERC1400 tokens. And how we started building ERC1400 is we got every single person in a room that we could think of, including Fabian Bogelsteller, who's the author of ERC20. And then we also got KYC providers, transfer agents, lawyers that were formerly at the SEC, broker dealers, custodians, everyone we could think of in the capital market ecosystem. And we said, what is a standard for security tokens need to look like? And we came up with the ERC1400. So that was something that we spearheaded back in 2018. And it's now the most widely used standard for security tokens. So Consensus has their own implementation, which I believe they called the DOREO protocol. And I think that's what Codify is using to build on. So their own implementation of ERC1400. The government of Norway has experimented with ERC1400. And then we've talked about this recently. There is a top 10 worldwide bank in terms of assets under management that is likely going to talk about the ERC1400 tokens. They've created sort of any day now, probably in a month, maybe two months. And we started building on Ethereum. Most widely used standard in the world is what we were able to spearhead with ERC1400. Tons of people are implementing it. But there's a problem that we kept running into. And especially when we talked to very large financial institutions. And there were five main things that we kept hearing over and over again. Those were governance, identity, confidentiality, compliance, and settlement. And so I'll dig into these a little bit deeper. So for governance, specifically relating to forks. So let's say there's an Ethereum, Ethereum classic fork, and you have a security token on the blockchain before the fork. Well, now you have two security tokens after the fork. Which one has the real claim to the underlying assets? The split them in half? Does the company decide we're going to go with whichever chain has the most hash power? Does the company decide, oh, well, we've heard this influencer in the Ethereum space say that this chain is going to win out eventually, actually let's just freeze trading for six months and wait until there's a clear winner. You know, it's a really big problem when you start talking about issuing 100 million dollar assets on blockchains. And you say, oh, well, there's this problem where at some point you're not going to know which one's the real asset. You know, it's just untenable for any large financial institution. So on Polymesh, which is the blockchain that we've built for capital markets, Polymesh, it's impossible for forks to take place, and we'll probably touch on a bit of the architecture a little bit later in the presentation. So identity was another huge one. So how can you ensure that only the people who you want to interact with are the people you're interacting with? And so again, on Ethereum and other public blockchains, when you look at identity, there's no concept, right? So 0x123 ABC. And what we built with ERC 1400 was the concept of whitelisting, where the issuer can say, okay, I only want 0x123 ABC and 0x453827 to be able to hold tokens. And that's because they've KYCed them. And I know that's Alice and Bob kind of off chain. Well, on Polymesh, we have a concept where every single actor to get on the chain must pass a KYC process. And then on top of that, all the node operators are regulated financial entities. So that was another thing we kept hearing when we were talking to especially large banks is, well, what if I make a transaction and pay $10 of gas? And that gas goes to a miner in Iran, or a miner in North Korea. There's no way that those firms are allowed to interact with those folks and just a really big question mark for them. So having node operators as regulated financial entities was a really big one for them when dealing with regulated assets. Then confidentiality. So this is one that everyone's working on right now. And so we have a white paper that we've put out that's called Mercat. If anybody wants to go searching for it, M-E-R-C-A-T. And we also have a patent pending on how we deal with confidentiality with Mercat. So how can you have a $100 million position in your portfolio on chain that's publicly viewable generally, but then you can actually obfuscate that and have it be private? So you can move $20 million of your $100 million position without alerting the market and letting people know. So when you talk to JPMorgan, when you talk to Goldman Sachs and you say anyone can see your positions and anyone can see when you're exiting your positions, they just won't use that blockchain for regulated assets. It just does not work for them. Compliance, obviously a huge one. That's really why Polymath was invented. How can you have compliance on blockchains specifically for regulated assets? And so as we started building on Ethereum, every single compliance functionality because it's not baked into the base layer of the chain and the base layer of the chain has no concept of assets other than Ethereum itself, you end up deploying all of these smart contracts for the compliance criteria. And so when you have a scenario where you want to make sure that only party A can transact with party B and they can only transact a certain amount of tokens over a certain period of time, we started hitting the gas limits of Ethereum sort of in year one of development. And so you can only imagine what's going to happen in year two, year three. And so what people are doing right now and I'm sure people on the call are familiar with the concept of whitelisting where you say, I want this address to be able to transact with my token. Updating your whitelist right now on Ethereum, if you don't want to wait a week, it is around $50 to $100. And Ethereum was marketed as this way to do those transactions for pennies or maybe a dollar. And so it's not working. And of course, there are layer two solutions coming. And we're very excited about those and we're keeping it close eye on all things layer two and how to bring down those costs and competition. Well, ultimately, the blockchain not having any sense of tokens at the base layer is a really big architectural challenge when you're dealing with regulated assets. And so that's a huge thing for us. Polymath as we build a polymath is employing more of this specialized use case specific logic into the chain itself so that you can get the computation costs down and you can have a much more elegant scalable solution specifically for regulated assets. And then finally, settlement is a huge one. So on blockchains like Ethereum, Hyperlegger, et cetera, et cetera, there is no concept of what most financial institutions would think of as real settlements. And so what I mean by that is if I find out your Ethereum wallet, I can send you tokens at any time. You can't say no. And so that doesn't really work for a lot of financial institutions when what they're used to in the world of settlement is having this concept where seller must affirm settlement instructions and buyer must affirm settlement instructions. And so that's how all assets exist, except for the native PolyX token on polymath. If I want to send you something, you must affirm that you want to receive that asset as well. And so you can, of course, build those things off-chain with certain solutions and that's how exchanges work. But on-chain, that's how settlement works on polymath. And so we found a lot of interest with both financial institutions and also with even other blockchains. So the potential for trading tokens on separate blockchains and then having them actually settle every hour or every day or every week back to polymath to be sort of the golden source of truth for settlement. And so that's probably the most exciting area, at least in my opinion, where PolyMesh really shines as our settlement engine that we've built, specifically talking to these regulated entities. And so this is sort of the progression that we had and I touched on this a bit. So we went live in 2018 with our market solution. So the PolyMath Token Studio where anybody could create managed security tokens. We noticed there was a lack of standardization. So we proposed the RC-1400. We found pretty good product market fit in 2019 and we started growing the ecosystem. So getting as many KYC providers interested in security tokens and using our technology as we could, transfer agents, broker dealers, custodians, et cetera. But we noticed public Ethereum was not the best solution for capital markets, at least in our eyes. And so we transitioned from this general purpose infrastructure like Ethereum to this very purpose-built use case specific infrastructure like PolyMesh. So we started building PolyMesh in 2019. So what we focused on all 2020 and we're very, very close to going live now in 2021. So you could call it days away, weeks away potentially for our PolyMesh mainnet to go live. And if anybody is familiar with what we're talking about, we're talking about internet speeds on the slide. So you can keep using phone lines if you want for internet speeds and you can try to juice out a little bit more KBs per second. But ultimately what you need to do is you need to build purpose infrastructure. So you can keep using the existing infrastructure that exists or you can try to build something that's specific to your use case. That functions a lot better. And so now we have 300 megabytes per second. We have gigabit speeds per second for internet speeds. Whereas if we kept building on phone lines, maybe we could get to 28 KBs and then 33 KBs. Maybe we could or we can start building fiber optic cable instead of phone lines and start using those. And so that's what we've seen in the blockchain space as well. We start to see NFT companies building their own blockchain. Dapper Labs has built Flow because all they need to do is NFTs. They don't need to do supply chain logistics. They don't need to engage in, they don't need to build farming infrastructure for tokens. They don't need to build decentralized exchanges like Uniswap. All Dapper Labs needs to do is make the best blockchain for NFTs. So they built their own blockchain called Flow. Remains to be seen if that is the best way to go about things. But that's what we think in terms of regulated assets is there needs to be a purpose-built infrastructure specifically for these regulated assets for capital markets. And decisions that we made early on, do we want to fork Ethereum? Do we want to make this a completely public blockchain? Do we want to make it private? Is it permissioned? What kind of finality do we have? You need to think of, can you get dev talent? What kind of licenses do you want to do as a completely open source? How is the ecosystem?  And now we're very, very close to our mainnet launch. As I mentioned, days, maybe weeks away. If there's anybody listening to this from the polymath community, I know they're watching my words very, very closely for how long away mainnet is because they've been waiting for a while. But so why mainnet? Right? Like why do we build a blockchain? And we talk about that a lot. But in terms of our success, we spearheaded ERC 1400. As I mentioned, the most wildly standard in the world, there had been 225 tokens created. Now more than that, actually, since I created this a couple of weeks ago. And we've made the first ever self-serve product on Ethereum to create managed security tokens. But ultimately, it was all about creating a blockchain specifically for regulated assets. And so in terms of our mainnet launch, and a little bit more information about how polymesh is structured, polymesh is launched by the Polymesh Association, which is a not-for-profit, member-based association where polymath is just one member of many. And so the Polymesh Association provides resources to support the advancement and adoption of a diverse polymesh community. And the Polymesh Association will control 250 million PolyX. And so the PolyX is the native token of the Polymesh blockchain. And so we're actually really excited. The Polymesh Association was formed this week. So I believe it was made public at some point late last night. And we actually tweeted that out. So the Polymesh Association was live, so mainnet is coming any day now. As I mentioned, one of the interesting things about Polymesh is all the node operators are regulated financial entities. So a few of you may know some of these firms. So some of those to start are Intoro, Oasis Pro Markets, DigiVault, the Gibraltar Stock Exchange, Blockson, and Atonic custody. So there's 14 that we have to start. We're looking to grow that number to 20, 25, 50, 100 as time goes on. Obviously more node operators is better. And so we've been talking to a number of financial institutions over the last few years. And we have potentially a few very exciting ones coming soon that we're really looking forward to announcing. But I can't say anything on this presentation. And so what we had to do before mainnet launch as well is we wanted to launch an incentivized testnet. We need actual people testing a blockchain before you go live with it. Worst thing you could do would be to launch on mainnet and then realize that you have some catastrophic bugs or that it can't handle the load of 1,000 people or that the buttons aren't working on some UIs. And we found a ton of those that we were very happy to fix. And so we had 4,300 unique users on board to the chain. And so that's a big shout out to Ethel Brian, one of our amazing bugs, watchers and community members. So there were 7,400 key staking polyx on the testnet, which we thought was a really big success. So people were very excited about staking. People love proof of stake blockchains. They love the ability to contribute to the security of the network without having to create a football field sized mining operation. And then also we had the successful completion of two independent code audits. So those have both come back both with green lights. So mainnet coming very, very soon. A bit about polyx. So I mentioned polyx is the native protocol token of the PolyMesh blockchain. If you have poly, you can upgrade that from Ethereum today. So poly is an ERC20 token on Ethereum. And you can actually bridge that one to one between Ethereum and PolyMesh for poly to polyx. And so there is a bridge between Ethereum. Another interesting thing if anybody's interested, PolyMesh is built using Substrate. So Substrate is the framework that Polkadot uses, Kusama, Edge, a number of these other blockchains. So interoperability is a potential exciting thing in the future. Whereas I mentioned some blockchains we're talking to are excited about having tokens trading on that blockchain, but then actually settlement occurring on a hourly, daily, weekly basis on PolyMesh. So connections between Hyperledger, connections between Ethereum, connections between Polkadot and these other Substrate-based chains is something that could be very exciting in the future. The other really interesting thing about PolyX is it's a FINMA regulated utility token. So FINMA is, you can think of them as the SEC in Switzerland. So FINMA buckets assets into three categories. One is asset, aka security. The other one is payment token, aka currency. And the third one is utility token. So PolyX has actually received the utility token designation from them, which is obviously very, very exciting, especially in terms of regulatory compliance and making sure we check all the boxes and that we're doing things that a regulator is on board with. So maintenance coming soon. I mentioned a few times, you know, days, weeks away, very, very soon. And if anyone is a developer on the call, I encourage you to check out our SDK. So a lot of what we do at PolyMesh is making sure that financial intermediaries can easily plug into this new world of blockchains for regulated assets. So if you want to create an asset, if you want to act as a transfer agent for an asset, if you want to provide KYC services for securities, if you want to be a custodian, you shouldn't have to build your own blockchain. We've done that. We've done that. We've done all the research. We've done all the heavy lifting. We've hired all of the tens of devs to make sure that we can build a blockchain that we think works for capital markets. And so all you have to do is plug into our SDK. So you don't necessarily have to know how the blockchain works. You just need to know how your application works and you can plug directly into our SDK. And you don't necessarily have to get so deep into the weeds of how blockchains function in order to provide services on blockchain. So that's one thing that we're very, very excited about. If anybody wants to get in touch with me, if you have questions, you don't feel like asking right after this. There's my email, also my Twitter that I'm on all day and just how to follow along with all things. Polymath is our Reddit, Twitter, our Medium, and our Telegram group as well. So I think we'll open the floor for questions. I think we've been, if we have time, I believe we do. And thank you, everybody, for tuning in. Yeah, please, raise your hand or ask a question directly. Thank you. Hi, Graham. This is Kirti here. Thank you for the presentation. Great overview. Could you tell us a little more about the kind of smart contracts that PolyMesh supports today? So today, nothing. So substrate actually doesn't have smart contract functionality yet. And so I actually think that's one of the interesting things is you can create tokens today on PolyMesh. You can engage and you can implement compliance criteria. You can create attestations for certain addresses and say Alice is from the United States and she's under a buy lockup with regard to the specific token for one year. So there is no smart contract yet. And still you can do all of this functionality with regulated assets that works for financial institutions. So of course, there will be functionality for smart contracts at some point, but substrate is not there yet. It's pretty much waiting on the Web3 Foundation and Gavin Wood and that team until they can build that out. And partly why we've done that as well as we get to piggyback off their infrastructure. So we've worked pretty closely with the Web3 Foundation throughout our entire architecture of PolyMesh. And we really like their team. We really like what they've done. But yeah, ultimately waiting on Web3 to implement smart contract functionality and substrate, which I think they projected for 2022, but I'm not 100% sure on that someone could possibly correct me. Brilliant. Thanks. So there are a couple of questions. One is of course, whether you would share your slides with us because a lot of people are asking about your contact. And obviously, they can get that from our wiki page. Any other questions, guys? There was one more question, obviously all about how far away is the release? That's always the question. Yeah. So days are maybe weeks away. I see Brendan's question there is that the first block for public access, let's call that the first block.  So you wouldn't want to push all the UIs live the same day that Genesis Block launches. What if there is a bug that you didn't really realize on testnet and you have to reset the chain? So of course, we don't foresee that happening, but it's best practice to go live with Genesis Block, have some internal testing for a couple of days and then have UIs go live. And so really what we were waiting on primarily was the formation of the PolyMesh Association. So that's now done. There's final Ts to be crossed, Is to be dotted, documents to be signed, and then going live as soon as possible. No one wants PolyMesh to go live as badly as me and the rest of the team. So we're making sure that we do that as quickly as possible. Any more, guys? Someone has raised their hand. Let me see who that is. Yeah, I see in the chat, what do you see happening on PolyMath for investment funds? Chris, could you elaborate on that a bit?  Thanks, Graham. Thanks for the presentation. I'm a multi-asset alternative investment manager and we've been looking at alternative ways to distribute shares and get assets into more hands. So PolyMath is one of those things we've been keeping an eye on. So in that regard, we're an investment fund essentially looking for a broader base and is PolyMath one of those functions? Or is it an infrastructure that we could use to distribute a compliant fund beyond that of a traditional alternative asset manager, hedge fund, VC, that sort of thing, if that adds any color? Yeah, no, that makes no more sense. Thank you. Yeah, so that is largely what we see PolyMath as. So anyone can onboard to PolyMath and provide you're not on an OFAC blacklist, even though I mentioned identity is a key component. And so what you could do is you could have some potential investors, but then there could also be some potential investors that you don't know that live on PolyMath. And I will be very, very careful by saying we are not a broker dealer.  But that is the idea, right? It is maybe you have a network that you're aware of, but then perhaps there are some more that exist on this PolyMath blockchain thing. And they might be interested more in token based investments than they would be with a piece of paper. So yeah, we do not help you find investors, but potentially that could be one thing. That could be one way that you use to get wider distribution. Yeah, no, thank you. Yeah, we're not looking for you guys to help in terms of new investors or anything. We'd be actively pushing people on chain, I guess, to utilize the network and infrastructure to add alternative assets into their wallets, into their portfolios. Because right now it's essentially a paper based system. And we're looking to modernize that with something like PolyMath and the PolyMesh system. Cool. Yeah, I mean, I would love if you could send me an email and we could talk further about this and perhaps get some more folks from our team on the call. Yeah, I think that sounds very exciting. And this is largely who we speak to mostly as folks like yourselves. Great, I'll certainly be able to, I'll certainly reach out, Graham, for sure. Cool, thanks, I appreciate it. Guru, looks like you're unmuted. Thank you. Graham, Gurvinder, thank you so much. PolyMath has done great work. I'm glad to see the work by PolyMesh as well. Two-part question related. One is if you look at the broad space of assets and securities, where are you seeing kind of most maturity, like some of the examples you were talking about, bonds, equities, real estate and so on, where are you seeing the most kind of adoption and maturity? And relatedly, are you familiar with the work that society in general has done on the issuance of bonds and any comments you have on the infrastructure that they are using? Yeah, so in terms of maturity, I think real estate and debt, at least for us, that's been the largest one. So real estate, I mentioned Red Swan, tokenizing $2.5 billion. There's been a few other REITs. There's Realty, which is tokenizing hoses kind of all across America now, I think. And so we've seen real estate as a really big kind of early leader. What we're seeing now, especially as we talk to more banks and more large financial institutions, is structured products in debt specifically. So especially when you have something like a syndicated loan, for example, and yeah, Red Swan. So the website's redswan.io. And so what we've seen recently is a lot of syndicated loan interest. So you have five parties. There's a lot of paper shuffling back and forth. There's companies that are now ensuring that all of that is digitized and documented. And now then you just take the paper, syndicated loan that you would have and you have a fully digitized version, where now you can perhaps have it be a little bit more liquid between the five parties that have created it and that are holding it. So anywhere where you have large origination costs and long times to get to market and to close deals, that's where we're seeing the biggest interest. And so initially, we thought it would be startups raising a million dollars and they want to tokenize their equity. But they already have pretty well-worn paths to do that that aren't that cumbersome. And ultimately, VCs, they just want to hold all the equity themselves and then they're going to maybe want to do one round pre-IPO and then they're going to want to go on an asset. So security tokens are helping a lot more in the private issuance market, where there's private actors, less liquidity, more confusion in terms of who owns what, large conversion criteria where if X happens, now you own 20% instead of 15%. Those types of things being able to automate all that criteria on chain is really exciting for them. So bringing origination costs down and bringing time down is really big for these banks that we're talking about. In terms of SOCGEN, it's amazing to see SOCGEN doing that make or doubt proposal was really, really cool to see. They're definitely at the forefront in terms of all things security tokens. And so I believe they're using Ethereum for something today. And then that is what I can comment in terms of SOCGEN. There's potential for SOCGEN to do a ton of different things in the future. And we definitely see them as the leaders. We've seen a few other banks coming out, but SOCGEN, BNP, lots of banks in Europe that are really at the forefront of this. And we think it's because the FCA and then BAPN as well. In the French regulator of the AMF, I believe, we see them as very forward thinking. And so one of the huge difference between Europe and America that we've noticed at least in recent times is in Europe, you can have a natively digital instrument be recognized and you can use the blockchain as the golden source of truth. Whereas in the States, you can't really do that yet, at least not with a public instrument.  Whereas in Europe, they're much more forward thinking. So yeah, we see really big things coming from SOCGEN and a few of these other European banks. So you saw the question on are there any financial entities lined up to be onboarded after Polymesh? Yeah, and the ability to stake. So in terms of financial entities, so we mentioned the 14 that are node operators. Then we also have a number of other firms, I believe over 50 that we've been working with for quite some time now with the RC 1400. And so what I would say about that is the entities don't really care about the technology generally. What they care about is making money in their business model. And so when you say, hey, can you onboard to this new technology? That sounds like a cost for them and not really very exciting. So really entities are onboarding onto new technology where there's a business case to be made. And so we've noticed that with custodians, the custodians will integrate as soon as there is a business who wants them to custody their tokens. They won't integrate before that because there's not really any case for them, unless they're a bank with a massive innovation department who wants to conduct some research. So yes, there are financial entities lined up. There's the 14 node operators that are running nodes. And then there's the 15 ecosystem providers that 50, 50 ecosystem providers we've been working with over the years who are going to be providing services for tokens that are soon to launch. And that's really where we see institutions come when there's a business case to be made, when there's an asset, when they can provide services, when they can earn their fees that they're generally typical that they typically make. And so then also the ability to stake available right after mainnet launch. Yeah, so staking for a general user will commence as soon as UIs turn on. So I mentioned mainnet launch, internal testing for a couple of days, public launch for all the user interfaces shortly after that. It's called maybe seven, 14 days, something like that. It is what we've heard from our tech team. And that's where staking would be made available. Any other questions? Otherwise, I'll start asking questions. I think two questions. One is, as you have mentioned before, it was the divergence of value for gas for Ethereum, which obviously costs everyone to rethink using Ethereum for everything. You know, used to be pennies. Now it's tens of dollars. And God knows what it's going to be later. So are you concerned about that same effect with the PolyX? Yeah. So first I'll say, gas is one thing that we noticed as being a reason to build different infrastructure. But ultimately, it was building everything as secondary smart contracts. I think that was the biggest one. And then identity was also the biggest one. So it was the compliance, it was the identity, and it was the settlement as well. So ensuring that both buyer and receiver must always affirm settlement instructions, sorry, buyer and seller affirming settlement instructions. And so I think those were the big three ones. Fees were sort of secondary. When you're talking to a small issuer, if he's issuing a $100,000 note, then the fees are very important, of course.  But then in terms of architecture for PolyMesh being built on substrate, there's no concept of paying more in fees to get ahead of the line. So that's just a fundamental difference between substrate and Ethereum-based chains where, you know, I have a certain amount of computation that I need to execute. I pay a specified amount, we can call it gas and PolyX. And there's no concept of me being able to pay more to get ahead of other transactions. So the transactions are ordered simply in the way that they come in. So that is a fundamental difference. So, you know, maybe that architecture doesn't work. You know, I like the Web3 Foundation. I think Gavin Wood has built some pretty good architecture with Ethereum and then also with Polkadot and with all things substrate. So that's how I would answer that. Yeah, I mean, I was focused purely on the value of PolyX. I mean, I know that there are other reasons for getting on to a purpose-built chain like PolyMesh. So unless you have some kind of control, I mean, even for transaction, forget about issuance, you know, what if I want to sell my holding to another person who's also been KYC'd or identified properly, do I pay a transaction fee? Or is it happened without, I mean, is that borne by the financial institution? Got it. So if you're transacting on chain, you do need to pay a PolyX fee. So, you know, same concept as Ethereum. When I pay, I need to pay a little bit of ease to make a transaction. When I make a transaction on PolyMesh, I pay a little bit of PolyX to make that transaction. What we're seeing, though, is we're seeing institutions want to make use of this piece of infrastructure that we call a relayer, where I can still hold keys that prove that I am, you know, 0x123, but someone else can pay a transaction fee for that transaction. And so we're seeing this as a really big potential use case for PolyMesh, but then also something that we can potentially use on other blockchains as well is this relayer service where I want to prove in a cryptographic way that I have the private key associated with 0x123 ABC. But I don't want to go buy this PolyX thing, or I don't want to go buy this ETH thing. And so the financial institution that I bank at, or that I custody at, or that I designated to be my gas payer, I just pay them $5 a month, $10 a month, or on the institutional side, I pay them $10,000 a month, and they pay all my gas fees for me. I still click sign, so I can sign the transaction proving that I want to do this and proving that in a cryptographic way, but someone else can pay those gas fees on my behalf. So that's what we're seeing a lot now is in the traditional world, I don't necessarily have to buy a different asset other than the one I want to transact with in order to make a transaction. When I'm in my bank account and I want to send a US dollar somewhere, I don't need to go buy Canadian dollars to pay the transaction fees, for example, that's me being a Canadian showing. But that's what we're seeing banks want to do on blockchains now is when I want to trade Apple stock, I shouldn't have to own Google stock and pay the transaction fees in Google stock. And that's what a lot of people think of it as, you know, of course, us being in the native blockchain world, we understand, no, you need the native token to pay the gas fees. But that's not how most users want to interact with blockchains. And so we see this three layer service as being a really big onboarding mechanism that helps more and more regular everyday users become comfortable with blockchains is some institution somewhere paying the on-chain gas fees for them, while they just pay their regular subscription fees per month via credit card or via wire transfer or whatever. I mean, coming back to the original question, it still holds that if the financial institution is going to have to pay more per transaction, then they will pass on the cost to me. And you know, this whole business with Robin Hood and order flow and everything else is related to this issue, which is the sort of siren song of having a free account in Robin Hood is actually being paid for with order flow. And they are going to tighten down on that. Now, if PolyX started starts diverging in cost, you know, because of demand or whatever. And the only way to issue PolyX is by staking. And by being part of the consensus mechanism, then it's possible that the gas prices may go up. So in a crypto economic sense, you know, unless if it is just scarcity built in like, let's say Bitcoin, it may not help make this more amenable to retail transactions. That's that's all I'm saying. No, I agree. And I think that's why, you know, we're seeing all these later to starting to pop up is people are smart people are dealing with this problem in different ways. And I think eventually we'll find a solution.  Originally, all you could do is send text on the internet. Then you could only send a photo and then you could only send a video and then you could only send a high death video and then you could only do VR. You know, so eventually the scaling solutions come about. I don't we don't know exactly what they look like today. But, you know, I have faith that at some point we'll be able to do all these things on blockchains for appropriate cost that everybody's happy with. Well, having worked with developers, I'm being a developer myself for more than 30 years, I don't have the same optimism. Maybe that's because, you know, that shows that I'm an old fart, but but it also could mean that, you know, certain things are built into our human psyche, certain ways of doing things. Anyway, there are a couple of more questions on the one is from Guru, which asks about whether it is built on substrate, which I think you said yes. Yep, that's a yes. Second is your guys already registered with SCC, but I don't think so. I think it was more FINMA, which was it's a Swiss SCC. That's me providing the answers to it right now because I'm doing a great job so far. SCC has, you know, have they, okay, so here's money asking about interoperability, which is, of course, one of my concerns as well, and you said something about bridges with PolyX, but, you know, we have to have more than PolyX bridges, we have to have a way to for the assets themselves to be interoperated. Yeah, so maybe I can provide a bit more color on that. So, you know, interoperability is not a day one focus for PolyMesh. We're very excited about interoperability and we obviously know that that's the future and building on substrate opens the door for easier interoperability with any substrate base chain. So whether we decide, you know, in the future PolyMesh becomes a para-thread or a para-chain and how interoperability works, you know, we haven't thought incredibly deeply about that today, to be honest. You know, we're building a blockchain for capital markets where people can issue financial securities and trade those financial securities and do that in a compliant manner. That's our day one focus. But of course, you know, we're keeping a really, really close eye on, okay, when's the right time to focus more on interoperability. You know, that may come in 2022. That would probably be my best guess. But yeah, keeping close eye on it, not a day one focus, but excited about the opportunities that will happen in the future. Well, I run the interoperability working group in DCGI, which is a digital currency global initiative in ITU. And we sort of have been looking at all this. Of course, we have been looking at substrate and para-chains and, you know, their standard for interoperability. But we believe that interoperability is a, let's say, primary capability. And the faster you look at it, the better it's going to be. Interoperability by design is one of the, you know, just like security by design or privacy by design, which you already seem to have handled. So I urge you to bump it up in your priority list. I will, I will let the dev team know. Definitely. Okay. So what, what, what next? Is there, are there any other questions for Grant? Otherwise, I'll continue my, my doesn't look like this more. We have five more minutes left. So I'll ask one or two more questions. Oh, there is Chris O'Connor raising his hand. So I guess I should yield to him. Thank you. It's me again, Graham. Public securities have been brought up a few times. But what is the depth of this? Is, are you looking to replace traditional capital markets with some sort of polymesh, polymath infrastructure? Or is it simply like a para market for public securities that already exists, you know, stock market sort of stuff? Yeah, I think either is appropriate, right? So I had that slide initially where you can take an Apple stock, you can tokenize it, and that Apple stock already exists. And now it exists in two places. So someone can trade it that potentially they didn't have access to before, but then you can also generate natively digital security tokens. And so I think both make sense. My personal opinion is security tokens start eating the private market first. So more and more private assets get issued on blockchains rather than not on blockchains. So we have called five billion of those today. That is nothing in the grand scheme of things. That's a drop in the bucket in terms of these securities world. But that's where things start being eaten. Because as I mentioned, you know, typical tech startup, you know, VC is going to want to do things, they've always done it, they're going to have the capital managed on Carta. And then they're going to go public on the NASDAQ. That is so tried and true and people make so much money that way that it's hard to see a different way of doing things. And the different way has to be 100x better. And personally, I don't think security tokens are 100x better for those public securities right now, just because the infrastructure is not there. But where security tokens are 100x better is in the private market. So syndicated loans, real estate, debt offering, private equity, you know, those things are 100x better in security tokens because you can get the cost down so much and you can get the time down so much for when people are negotiating any deals. And when you can automate any types of conversion process or redemption process or for stock options, for example, you can redeem those really easily and automate every single functionality on security tokens. That's where security tokens are going to be first. Private markets and then eventually NASDAQ will be built on a blockchain at some point in time. I don't know if that's five years from now, 10 years from now, but I believe that will happen at some point in time. Okay, thanks for adding some further color. Cool. Anything else? Okay, here goes another question, which is a staking. Staking is felt to be the solution, you know, in terms of proof of work, but staking has its own problems, which is the devolution of voting power to large holders, which, you know, has been proven in a democratic or decentralized system to be extremely harmful. What are the steps you guys are taking? Are you doing something similar to what, for example, Vitalik has said, quadratic voting, any kind of tamping down of the power of centralized actors who hold large quantities of tokens? Yeah, so the blockchain decentralization maximalists are not going to like my answer here, but we've almost done the opposite. So because we're building a blockchain for capital markets, the financial institutions don't really care if the PolyMesh Association has a lot of power, or if a few of us in the association have a lot of power, they don't mind that at all. What we've done today is there's no concept of quadratic voting, but we've definitely looked into that, and that might be something that we implement. You know, the Web3 Foundation might implement that on Polkadot. We have an idea at this point, and perhaps we just integrate that easily with sort of a few lines of code once that becomes available. Nothing to side on that front, but how functions work today, if let's say someone wants to make a parameter change or a code change to the base layer of PolyMesh, is a user, a holder of PolyX creates a bond with tokens. So let's call it 10,000 PolyX. They say, I want this change to be implemented. Other users can vote yes or no by showcasing their support via their PolyX amounts. And then ultimately that decision then goes to the governing council of PolyMesh. And so the governing council right now is a few small, small actors that are in the PolyMesh Association. And so, you know, that is by no means the decentralization of power that is almost kind of the increase in power. And it's because this is a blockchain with a very specific use case. We want to build something for the largest financial institutions in the world to be comfortable with blockchain and saying, yeah, these nameless faceless individuals that are perhaps in jurisdictions that you're not able to interact with are deciding the future of this blockchain. They don't like that. That's something that most of them don't like. And that's why we've taken the approach where today I have PolyX, I bond it, I want a change to be made, other users of the chain can say yes or no. And then if it says, if everyone says yes, then it goes, not if everyone says yes, but if there's majority, you know, when it seems like this is something that makes a lot of sense, it goes to the PolyMesh governing council, governing council says, you know, do we actually want to do this? Yes or no. And so ultimately, you know, that is not the decentralization of power, but we haven't noticed that as a huge concern from the institutions that we've been talking to. Of course, it's a concern in the general blockchain world, and we're going to decentralize that as much as possible as time goes on. But for day one, you know, the PolyMesh governing council sort of does have the authoritative power to direct the chain in the manner that they want, because, you know, it's going to be a new chain. It needs to potentially make life altering decisions and surgical decisions as quickly as possible. Yeah, I mean, it makes sense for specialists to make some of the decisions. But ultimately, you know, anyway, we are out of time, but we can go ahead for a couple of more minutes if you have the time. Otherwise, we can call it a day. But, you know, we can continue this conversation outside. You know, in the US, for example, I mean, forget about decentralization. Governance models often work well when there's broad consensus. And in the US, there used to be, you know, voting based on property held and so on and so forth. But it was maybe 150 years ago, but that fell by the wayside to be a registered voter. You had to have certain amount of property. I mean, same thing holds even in capital markets to be in an ICO to purchase or to trade certain things.  And that is cost regulatory capture and problems in that. So that's the only caveat. We have to have some way of governing. I mean, so obviously, you guys have chosen one way and it'll have problems and we'll have to look at the real world use cases to see what kind of destruction or problems it's going to cause before we decide to change that. But definitely have that in your mind. Yeah, it's a huge concern that we have the PolyMesh Association, you know, how should this thing run? How should people be able to direct the future of the chain? How should upgrades get made? How can we ensure that a bank is comfortable using this? How can we ensure that the security token users are comfortable using this? How can we ensure that stakers feel confident in placing their, you know, hard earned capital here to provide security to the network to try to earn rewards and PolyX? So yeah, it's something we think about all the time. What we've come up with today is what we've come up with for V1. That doesn't mean that that's how it will be in V2 or V3 or V4 or V5. And so the constant evolution is I think what we've seen with every blockchain this time goes on, perhaps except for Bitcoin, where things stay the same. Yeah, yeah, something we think about a lot. And then, yeah, Bippin, I do actually have to have to head out. But yeah, in closing comments, if anybody wants to reach out to me, please do. That's Graham at PolyMath.network is my email and then more grams on Twitter. And if anybody wants to ping me, ask more questions. If anybody wants to chat about anything, happy to do that anytime. And Bippin, thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it. Thank you, Graham, for showing up and doing this very interesting presentation on the future of capital markets. And that's it for now. And I'm going to close the call. Thanks to everyone for attending and asking interesting questions. Bye-bye. Thanks, everybody. Thanks.


from Silicon Valley. It's theCUBE, covering Google Cloud Next 17. Welcome back to theCUBE. We're doing two days of live coverage here of the Google Next 2017. Here, we're in the center of the Silicon Valley from our 4,500 square foot Palo Alto studio. Happy to bring back to the program a multi-time guest but first time in his new role, Praveen Akharaju. Now the CEO of Viptela, thank you for joining us. Thanks, Stu. Real pleasure to be here. Yeah, Praveen, we were joking.  You've been on the program at many of our shows but now you're at our place here. We've got the nice studio here so. Yeah, it's really impressive. You guys have come a long way and this has been like an awesome show when I was at VCE and really excited to be back here with you. Awesome, thank you so much. So why don't you give our audience, why Viptela, what was exciting to you about the opportunity? We've had the pleasure of interviewing some of your folks over the last couple of years that chose like VMworld and the like. Yeah, absolutely. I think it's interesting, right? When you think about sort of what's going on in the IT industry as a whole, there's a revolution going on in the cloud. The show that you guys are covering as well as what's been happening over the past couple of years. Applications are basically migrating out of the data center, whether it's into the public cloud, into Paz platforms, SAS platforms and such like. Similarly, at the edge, users have been migrating away from their desktops. Mobility is unleashed to essentially the user to be wherever they need to be and be able to still be productive. In addition to that, you have a whole bunch of things happening at the edge in terms of devices and things coming on board. Now, if you think about these two worlds and the revolution that's happening there, the actual connectivity between those two has been frozen in time. Majority of the enterprises today are still connected using MPLS VPN technology, which is invented 20 years ago to solve the problem of ATM-like emulation over IP. So I think what was really interesting to me about Viptela is it is truly about redefining the network connectivity between users and applications for the cloud era. And that's really what our mission is and that's what we're really excited about. Yeah, Praveen, it reminds me a lot of what we saw in the data centers when it came to networking. There was that big shift for a number of years in saying, well, it was the client to server and then that machine to machine, everything that happened with virtualization. We went from North-South traffic to East-West traffic. We talked forever now as cloud pulls in, those connectivity, we're reinventing what's happening in WAN. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, think of it, right?  Well, if you're sitting in a branch office, do you want to go back to the data center and then head out to the cloud or do you want to be able to take the best path out? Most branches today have internet connections that are faster than anything MPLS VP can provide. In fact, there's a data point one of our customers gave us. The per megabit cost for MPLS VPN is about $200, right? The per megabit cost for internet is about $2, right? And you think about the speed asymmetry, obviously the SLAs are different, right? So you want to be able to make sure that you can leverage the best connectivity, but also make sure the applications are mapped to the appropriate SLA transport. So what we do is essentially, we think of ourselves as the next generation overlay, right? So we can, the Reptile of Fabric essentially encompasses MPLS VPN, internet, LTE connectivity, and we're able to understand what happens in the underlay, but enterprises can just focus on how they want their users to connect to their applications without having to understand what's happening underneath, so that's truly the power of the software defined world, if you will, right? Yeah, so we've been talking for a few years that whole SDN wave that came out, Google talks about themselves as the largest SDN company out there, but most of the discussion seems to have moved on beyond SDN, your area of SD-WAN is definitely one of the hot conversations. Where are customers in kind of understanding this transition and where the things fit? Yeah, it's a great point. I mean, the first wave of software defined networking was essentially sort of about solving the data center connectivity problem, right? So how do you connect machines more dynamically? How do you connect capacity more dynamically so applications can kind of migrate this notion of machine to machine communication in a dynamic fashion and being able to potentially even stripe it out to the cloud, right? But the first wave did not address how users connect to their applications. So we think of ourselves from an SD-WAN perspective as kind of leading that second wave of software defined networking, which truly is about user experience and application experience. Connecting users wherever they are to applications wherever they are, right? In a scalable, secure and dynamic fashion. Yeah, and very different discussion from what I think of the guys from my Sierra that turned into the NSX, that seems very tied into how VMware talks about that hybrid environment when you talk about when VMware on AWS goes in, you know, I need that NSX in there. You know, you worked at Cisco for a number of years, what they're doing with ACI now is talking more about that as opposed to you're at the client, the application layer. Exactly, right? And I think at the end of the day, we optimized how applications can migrate and move, right? And how they can get the best capacity. But the whole purpose is to really deliver those applications to the users. And the WAN has been kind of this, it's been frozen in time for 20 years, primarily because it's hard, right? It is really hard to be able to figure out what the underlay actually looks like. I mean, some of our customers are global. I mean, we have sites in Vietnam, right? In India, in the US, obviously, but it's a global footprint and being able to overlay something on top that still gives you the predictable performance and is secure is something that has been a hard problem to solve, right? And that's what's really exciting about what we're doing at Viptela. Yeah, that's really interesting stuff. Talk about how you guys partner with, interact with the public cloud environments. Yeah, so we're obviously, most of our controllers are hosted in AWS as well as Verizon, which is another, which is our key partner, right? These are the two big, two big sort of partners for us in terms of our controllers. But we partner with AWS, we've partnered with Microsoft from an open, from an Office 365 perspective. And there's a lot of our customers who wanna have a much more predictable, high, low latency access to Office 365, right? A lot of our customers have workloads in AWS. So we're able to actually spin up a version of our device to frontend VPCs in AWS so you can then terminate, essentially, we treat the cloud as a node in the fabric, right? So it inherits all the policies, inherits all the security aspects of it day one. So it's really super simple to set up, right? We don't treat the cloud separately, we just say, well, here's another branch or a head end and let's just kind of connect it in and let the customer define the policies that they see fit. That's great. So AWS and Office 365 leaders in their categories, we've got the Google show going on this week. What do you hear from your customers when it comes to G Suite and Google Cloud? Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of customers who use the G Suite, I mean, Google Docs, particularly in the context of sort of some of the small and medium businesses that we work with. So again, our job is to really bring users to the applications with the lowest latency and the best experience possible, right? So a lot of the cloud providers, essentially, don't necessarily worry about how customers get there, they just assume the customer shows up at the door but it's a SaaS platform or infrastructure as a service platform. So our partnerships with a lot of these providers are about ensuring that we can collectively guarantee that their users get the best path forward and that creates more stickiness for them in terms of their service. Okay, Praveen, let's talk about Viptela for a second. What's on your plate this year, those industry watchers, what should we be expecting to see from you coming forward? I know what's interesting about Viptela is, I mean, we talk about, obviously, software-defined WAN as a category and clearly, as I mentioned, right, there's a huge latent requirement to evolve the WAN connectivity. And I would think of what Viptela does is sort of the next generation overlay. And we talk about sort of the different forms of connectivity which we give the control back to the enterprise to say, all you need to worry about, Mr. Customers, is to say, how can I define a segment or policy per user, per application? So that's been sort of the focus of our initial use case for our fabric and we've been tremendously successful. Most of what we focus primarily on the global fortune 1,000-type customers. So we have some pretty much every verticals represented in our customer base, large financials, industrial companies, car companies, retailers, healthcare and such like. But we think about this fabric as essentially solving the problem of connectivity. So the next phase of our solution is really about how do we make the cloud connectivity really simple and secure, right? So we're going to launch something in that space where we make connectivity to infrastructure. So it's SaaS platforms really seamless as part of our platform. So if you're a user in a branch or at the edge, you should be able to connect to your data center at the same level of experience and security as you would go to your cloud. So we want to make that super seamless. So that's, I think, we call that cloud on ramps and something that we're going to be in announcing pretty soon. When I think about the longer term evolution of this, because of the platform is fundamentally grounded in routing, in understanding how scale happens. What we've taken is we've taken the traditional routing stack and disaggregated it. There's a data plane that's on site, right? There's a control plane, which is essentially your routing and a management orchestration plane that sits in the cloud. So this allows us to solve many problems, right? So you can extrapolate forward and say, well, there's a whole problem of internet of things, right? What is the internet of things problem? It is a whole bunch of devices at the edge which need to be connected to end points, whether it's a data center or a collection point, dynamically, right, depending on the phase of theirs. So those are the kind of problems we think we can solve. So Viptela is interesting because it's not just about SD-WAN, it's really about the next generation overlay between the users and the cloud and being able to address multiple use cases. Okay, and there are a number of companies, plenty of startups, some of the big guys there in the market, what really differentiates you guys? What do your customers come to you for that the other guys can't do? Yeah, I think it's, I would say really, so we're all routing geeks, right? I pretty much spent 19 years at Cisco, built every platform that Cisco ships today, and so are most of the members and the teams. We have, I think, one of the strongest collection of networking talent in the industry. And what we're able to do with that is, as I mentioned, reimagine what the network connectivity needs to look like in the era of cloud, in the era of Internet of Things. So our architecture fundamentally is modular. As I mentioned, right, there's a data plane, there's a control plane, management orchestration plane. We are cloud managed and cloud delivered. So we solve for scale very elegantly because we inherently use the properties of routing that has allowed the internet to scale to what it is as part of the core of our solution, right? That's one thing that's unique. The second aspect of this is, for us, security is a day zero thing, right? When we bring up a box with zero touch provisioning, it comes up with an IP sector tunnel that's encrypted. And we do it without having to exchange keys, so it's inherently secure, right? So that is a very significant issue because if you're using the internet as your pipe for your mission critical traffic, how do you assure yourself that you're not going to be hacked, right? And your traffic's not going to be intercepted. So that's some of the largest financial institutions have bet on our architecture because they trust that, right? So that's the second piece. The third piece is from an application and a policy perspective, we have the ability with our controllers to be able to push policies and create segmentations for different use cases on a dynamic basis. So I'll give you an example. So if you have a user in a branch, right? And you have basically another user comes in, they have a different set of requirements. You can dynamically stitch up a tunnel from your cloud controller to enable that to happen without ever having to touch or configure any of the end boxes, right? So our cloud platform gives us tremendous amount of scale and flexibility. So that's the way I think about scalability, security, application policy and the different use cases that we're able to bring to bear. Right. So final question I have for you, Praveen. The networking world is changing faster than it used to. But I think back to, for many years, I would do slides on networking and we talk about decade scale. It's like, okay, here's how the standard comes, here's how it rolls out, here's how adoption. The enterprise is risk averse, slow to change, not doing anything. Why are things so exciting now in the networking space? What's different, what's driving that movement? Are customers moving faster? Yeah, it's a great question. And I think you put it differently. I think networking enjoyed architectural consistency and stability for almost two decades, which is not the case when you think about the data center or some of the other environments where there's constant change, right? Now having said that, when we think about what's driving this change, it's really that these two revolutions that are going on, one in the edge where users are evolving really rapidly, whether it's connectivity or devices and such like, and one in the data center in the cloud where applications are fundamentally changing. They're ephemeral, they're able to migrate between locations. So that's putting a lot of pressure back onto the network to say, hey, we need the network to be a lot more dynamic. We need the network to be a lot more flexible, a lot more cost effective. And that is the fundamental driver, right? Which we see as driving the customer's willingness to say, I need to re-look at the network. Now the other aspect of this is, as I said, we've re-imagined networking ground up. Clean sheet of paper, learn the lessons from the past and say, how do you make this painless for the customer? The reason why the network, particularly the WAN, has been stagnant is it is painful, right?  It's not something that most enterprises want to deal with. By abstracting all that complexity away, right? We allow customers to focus on what they care about, is how do I connect, you know, enable user connectivity to applications and we take care of the underlay, right? So, I think that's, those are the key things. I mean, it's essentially the last leg of the stool, if you will, in terms of moving truly, moving to the cloud era. All right, well, Praveen Akharaju, thank you so much for joining us again. You're watching the worldwide leader in live enterprise tech coverage, The Cube.


internal revenue service IRS tax news October FBI our extension deadline nears for foreign bank and financial account holders the deadline nears honestly I always thought the deadline was standing still and we were the ones going towards it but no apparently the deadline is the one coming after us well we're just standing here minding our own business which is strange because I didn't think lines could move on their own especially lines that were dead oh no the IRS has sent a stalking slow-moving deadline after me to eat my brains and steal my money or maybe the other way round deadlines being the perfect collection goon because you can't kill something that's already dead just ask my libido after being forced to watch the movie bros just kidding I don't actually know much about the baby it's just a joke here's another one there's a reason the hippie movement failed they tried to speak truth to power I suppose you think you're brave don't you only compared to some and I mean even assuming they knew truth you're that smart let me put it this way have you ever heard of Plato Aristotle Socrates yes morons really speaking truth the powers not how it's done you need to speak truth to the people you mock my pain life is pain highness anyone who says differently is selling something about the lies of power but I do not think it would accept my help since I am only waiting around to kill you that does put a damper on our relationship speaking truth the powers like speaking truth to a slimy lawyer who doesn't believe in truth but only in power we are men of action lies do not become us power through manipulative word games it's a waste of time this is noble sir his wife is crippled children are in the brink of starvation you are a rotten liar before arguing about truth you need to be talking to somebody who agrees with the baseline that truth is actually like a thing we're not just doing this for money we're doing it for a s**t load of money IR 2022-17 for October 6 2022 Washington the internal revenue service today reminds US citizens resident aliens and domestic legal entities that the extension deadline to file their annual report of foreign bank and financial accounts that's the FRFBAR is October 15th for additional information about filing deadlines filers should look to financial crimes enforcement networks that's the FNCEN website there's a link to that here filers who missed the April 15th annual due date earlier this year received an automatic extension until October 15th 2022 to file the FRFBAR they did not need to request the extension who needs to file the bank secrecy act requires us persons to file an FRFBAR if number one they have a financial interest in or signature or other authority over one or more accounts such as a bank account brokerage account mutual fund or other financial account located outside of the United States and I believe this should be number two even though it says number one but I believe this would be number two the aggregate value of all foreign financial accounts exceeds ten thousand dollars fairly low threshold at any time during the calendar year 2021 because of this threshold the IRS encourages US persons with foreign accounts even relatively small ones to check if this filing requirement applies to them so again that is a relatively small line to limit there so might have a lot of people that would need to be filing here so a US person is a citizen or resident of the United States or a domestic legal entity such as a partnership corporation limited liability company estate or trust how to file filers did not filers do not file the FRBAR with their federal income tax return so it's not part of the income tax filing process generally the 2021 FR must be filed electronically with thin sin and is online available through the bsae filing system there's a link to that here website individuals who are unable to e-file their FR must contact thin sin at<PHONE_NUMBER> and there's an email address here as well I won't say those a hundred times because there will be a link to this in the description you can check them out on your own you could do that to request an alternative filing method if you can't do the e-filing but the e-filing is probably the easiest thing to do callers from outside the US can contact the helpline at<PHONE_NUMBER> again there'll be a link to this in the description so you could check that out on your own avoid penalties that's our goal here we don't like when the iris hits us with the penalty stick so those who don't file an accurate FRBAR when required may be subject to significant civil and criminal penalties that can result in a fine and or imprisonment depending on the facts and circumstances okay okay okay a file a file FRBAR resources on irs.gov there's more links to those resources here you've got the report of foreign bank and financial accounts the FRBAR link details on reporting foreign bank and financial accounts there's a link to that here publication 5569 report of foreign bank and financial accounts that's the FRBAR reference guide there's links to all that stuff here and there'll be a link to this in the description


Thank you, Joan. Hi, everybody. I hope you can see the screen clearly and hear me well. Thank you, Katie, for that amazing talk just now. It's incredible. We're really pleased to be here to talk to you with you about open access and cultural heritage and about how Andrea and I in recent years have put together a global survey of what we call Open Glam. So without further ado, let's briefly introduce ourselves. Andrea, over to you. Who are you? Who am I? I ask it every day. I'm Andrea Wallace. I'm a senior lecturer in law at the University of Exeter. A lot of my research focuses on how cultural heritage institutions make their collections available online and the intellectual property issues around that. Over to you, Doug. I've been working in cultural heritage and museums that focus on copyright and licensing for almost 20 years now. I'm currently working at the European Foundation based here, speaking to you from the Netherlands. Open access to cultural heritage is a real passion and interest of mine. It's something that Andrea and I share. So Glam, you've seen it in the title, but in case you're not aware, not sure what it means. Glam stands for galleries, libraries, archives and museums. It's a useful shorthand and encompass is really the whole world of cultural heritage. So if there are cultural collections, museum type collections that are held in non strictly Glam institutions, maybe like libraries, sorry, like universities, then those can also be encompassed and fall into the definition. So what is Open Glam? We, there's actually two parts of this question. Open Glam is a movement that stands for Open Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums and it's looking at digital collections and how those are made available online, particularly for reuse by the public. And the second part of that is what does open mean? Because there are often a lot of understandings around open access and open data or open Glam that don't necessarily match onto the international standards, which require materials to be freely accessible, usable and that can be modified and shared for any purpose, including commercial purposes. And so that's usually the kicker right there. It hasn't been made available for commercial reuse. And if it's not, then it doesn't meet the international standards for open access, which means Open Glam in this instance is digital collections that are made available online for any purpose whatsoever, including commercial reuse. Just over three years ago, our mutual friend, Simon Tan, who's based in London, put out this tweet asking for a quick, short list, a few examples of why CC0, so that's the legal tool from Creative Commons for full liberal open access, is great, you know, it's good for museums because he wanted to convince the museum to go open access. So simple question and there was a longer answer, which has taken over three years since. So in the Twitter thread that followed Andrea and I and a few other kind of Open Glam activists and interested people shared a few examples, but we quickly realized that actually a list of any sort that was even reasonably like that, you know, that encyclopedic or representative actually didn't, didn't exist. So we thought, well, no, maybe, maybe we should make one. So why did we start what we call the Open Glam survey? Well, first of all, there was no, there was a lack of up to date information on the topic. I mean, there had been a couple of surveys, I think we've been working media projects around open access a few years before, but as with, often with projects, people move on, the data gets old really, really quickly. So yeah, there was nothing up to date. There's also no shared place to kind of see and particularly to add relevant data in this field. And I think Andrea and I shared a sense that there was a perceived very Anglophone European and North American bias in the field that Open Glam was totally dominated by national or massive museums. So we really want to discover the global picture of Open Glam. Who is the survey for? Well, it's for people who want to find and use open content or data. And of course, you know, open data in the Glam space is incredibly varied. And also, we wanted something, a resource for Glam's who were thinking about open access, maybe starting it, dipping the toe in the water or going further with open access, open data, and to really understand what their peers were doing around this topic. So those are the key motivations. So what our survey actually collects is we kind of start and think about how Glam's make this data available, whether it's digital objects, metadata or text, and available for reuse. And so we kind of start with that idea that obviously there's a lot of objects that are held by cultural institutions. Many of those objects have passed into the public domain, which means there's no copyright on them. There's no copyright restrictions and making reproductions. And there may be other restrictions that we need to think about. But of course, cultural institutions have been digitizing those and making them available. So then the question becomes whether or not that reproduction, that digital copy, however we want to refer to it, is in fact, original enough to receive its own copyright protection. So this is where that kind of dynamic of how our institutions making their collections available online centers. So if institutions with public domain objects digitize those and make those available under open standards, that's the entry point for the survey. After that, we end up looking into see what the right statements are for the metadata or any other text around some of the content that's made available online. And we also track the specific license or label that the materials are made available under. So kind of going back to Simon's tweet, he wanted to know specifically what institutions are making things available under the CC0 public domain dedication. So even though we kept coming up with, oh no, but that institution uses CCBuy or this institution uses a public domain mark, these are the types of data points that we find to be useful for people who are starting to think about doing this either with their own collection, doing research on Open Glam, even users trying to find collections located close to them that they can reuse for any purpose whatsoever. So how do we go about putting the survey together? So the data focus really is Glam, it's data that focuses on Glam's data made available either on their own websites, typically collections online and or a variety of external platforms. And as Andrea said, the focus is on digital surrogates of objects in the public domain where any tone of copyright for the material object has expired or actually never existed in the first place. And the information from the survey is gathered via extensive desk research and importantly, outreach to the wonderful global Glam community. So thank you again to them. And that can be via Twitter, via email, a variety of ways that there is an Open Glam community out there who put their hand up and let us know when we've missed something or something has changed. So they're incredibly important part of the whole process. Key data points in the survey, which at its heart is a large Google sheet. We have institution name that's always recorded in the original language, country of the institution type. So is it a gallery, is it a library, is it a university, for example? There are always direct links to the Open Glam content and the data, including GitHub's and API services. As Andrea mentioned, that we specify the licenses or the right states for both the digital surrogates and metadata. And wherever possible, we link to the Glam's terms of use and their copyright policies. And finally, there are Wicked Data and QIDs for every institution in the survey. So one of the things that also helps us with this is going to places that collect this information and doing some searches within that or going straight to data aggregators like Hirakiana, Japan Search, Trove, and Digital New Zealand. But we also look at the Committee of Commons, Flickr Commons, CC Search, Sketchfab. Of course, institutions have been uploading 3D collections under open licenses or public domain dedications. And then hackathons, where institutions are often digitizing or releasing a small set or a sample of data that they've been able to prepare for the purpose of a hackathon, that then becomes part of, for example, the coding DaVinci initiative, where that data set isn't available. And then of course, there's other open data portals. But the fact that these things are maintained allow us to sort by the license or the label and kind of look at the different areas where institutions are trying to make things available, whether that's because there's an aggregator geographically in the area or because Wikimedia Commons provides a platform that they can use where their own institutional website wouldn't be able to support that kind of functionality. The survey has its own, actually more than one ID in Wikidata. So it's fairly extensively referenced now in Wikidata, which of course, and I know this audience, there's this back to front, enables a very sophisticated, kind of sparkle queries and other forms of data interrogation of open ground.  Who have we been tracking? According to, of course, that open standard in March of 2018. And today we now have 1200 cultural institutions, but also even like government archives or online repositories and other types of organizations that aren't maybe traditional cultural institution, universities, but make cultural heritage available in, you know, within the parameters of what we're collecting, which is like an incredible amount. And I think we just got very close to 16 million openly licensed digital objects linked to from the surveys sheet. So, okay, that's enough to keep most people going, right? Andrea, over to you. And so also some of what we are doing is using the Wikidata and Wikimaps to be able to run a query so that we can trace the locations of each of the institutions that are represented on the datasheet. So you'll see that there are large clusters and areas that have an aggregator. So we have representation in Japan, also New Zealand, Europe with your piano, the United States with DPLA. And so there's obviously a benefit to having these aggregators in terms of like the representation and what it can capture. And we know that we're missing things too. But outside of that there are institutions doing really creative things in India, in different countries in South America, where they're starting to dip their toes in and take smaller approaches to specific datasets or initiatives on a collections by collections basis. And I would say this is across the board with what we typically see. Some institutions are adopting an all eligible data approach, where basically everything that they can make available because they have either the rights to do that, or they know that there are no underlying rights in the material is made available for anyone to use. And the majority of institutions, I would say at least 75% of the list make things available on a collections by collections basis, which is often because of technology or funding or even grant obligations that come attached to the money that supports the digitization of some of these objects. So there's some very different and diverse approaches being taken all around the world. And yes, so you can also see of course, if we zoom in that where we have Digital Trove and also New Zealand that the representation is there as well. And in the US, particularly in areas where there are some of the larger institutions or really kind of metropolitan areas that release information either according to their website or also through DPLA, which is Digital Public Libraries of America. And then of course in Europe with the Europeana being a data aggregator and Doug working there, we always have the latest information from new additions to Europeana. So of course, there are many possibilities of querying filtering interrogating the data that I mentioned. After the Google Sheet itself, the Open Glam Survey, you can of course really easily output things like this, pie charts showing country distribution. So the number of Open Glam institutions per country, of course, it's a global survey with their role numbers and all the percentages. You can slice and dice the data by institution type, which I mentioned earlier. So here you can see that there's around or just over a third of the institutions are museums, libraries are also significant institution type in the survey. So it's really easy and very much encourage you all when you get to the survey to to output and play around with it and dig into the data and see what you find. And from a copyright licensing perspective, you can interrogate the data to look at, say, how many institutions are using the public domain mark versus CC0 or the known copyright flavors, a right statement versus CCBuy. So yeah, from a licensing practitioner copyright research perspective, I think it's useful. Andrea. So what we've also been learning from this is some really interesting things about the sector, which we all know, but it's allowed us to kind of reduce into things that are quantifiable and in a way that we can demonstrate some of the socioeconomic, technical and human infrastructures that are required and very expensive to support digitization, even access, how people are accessing and the quality of data that's made available. Of course, the metrics themselves are designed by areas of the world who see this as a priority. And those metrics then control how we are able to kind of capture different examples and represent them within the spreadsheet itself. Again, the aggregator distortion effect, because these are large datasets that come forward, evil with Wikimedia Commons being able to find examples that exist that then allow us to enter that data into the spreadsheet. And then of course, copyright and culture and the culture of copyright, which what that kind of relates to is thinking about areas where maybe copyright is actually kind of important to retain because it restricts access and reuse around materials that necessarily aren't appropriate. But at the same time, copyright is not always the best way to restrict access to these materials. And we need to be thinking about other ways where we don't use copyright as such a blunt tool to kind of tell users what they can and can't do with it. So this culture of copyright is something that, you know, often people say, oh, well, let's let's just claim copyright and then people won't be able to do these things with it. But it's not necessarily the best answer because copyright has an expiration date. And then of course, there's a very high barrier to entry for open access around this and open glam, because it requires having someone within the institution or access to someone with the legal knowledge around copyright, which is highly specific according to every country, even changes depending on, you know, the subject matter, whether, you know, it can be film material versus a painting. And so having an awareness of all of these things to be able to even do the copyright clearance in order to digitize is a huge barrier to entry for cultural institutions, because most most people often don't have that knowledge in house. You just can I just jump in to say you've got two minutes left. Thanks, Joe. So close to wrapping up just some notes on a crowdsourced approach. If you are taking this approach yourself and thinking about it, here are some of Andrea and I's reflections. The advantage, of course, to this agile and very low tech, you know, we just made a spreadsheet and we started filling it and making it bigger. We didn't need an IT department, any kind of permissions culture. It allows you to make incremental updates. The survey is updated most weeks. So most people can get around to spreadsheet. So it's a reasonably accessible way to store and manage data. The survey has been community powered, as I mentioned, and it also avoids this thing of survey fatigue, like who really needs to be to get another survey, you know, the response rate is usually super low. So we can dodge that bullet, I hope. And also, this is independent and inclusive. It's not owned by an institution. Andrea and I are hopefully can reasonably trusted positive actors in this space. And it's very much a community driven initiative rather than being owned by anybody. And it's easy to ask for expert help. So I've definitely got a little bit better at wiki data from all this zero knowledge over the last three years. There are lots of people out there who will help you out with any queries and help that you might need. The challenge is, of course, is that this approach lies in the discoverability of open data. We know, for example, that search engines generally don't do a great job of surfacing open access cultural heritage. And it does require commitment from the lead actors of Andrea and I in this case, mostly, to keep it going and to keep it active. So to read more about the survey, I've written a few articles on medium. Here's a link to open glam survey, if you want to dig in a bit deeper. And we would like to thank you very, very much for listening and joining us today.


As part of activities to mark Student Visa Day, the United States Consulate General in Nigeria has gathered to celebrate students across Nigeria. At the event held in Lagos, the U.S. Consulate says that the United States government is dedicated to supporting international students who wish to study in the United States through their Education USA program. Plus, the Africa's correspondent, Ngozika, or HAC, has more. They and friends, including students, gathered at the U.S. Consulate Office in Lagos to celebrate Student Visa Day. This year, the U.S. Consulate is excited about these international students who will soon believe in the country to study in the United States of America. The U.S. Mission Country Consul, Susan Tula, spoke on how the COVID-19 pandemic has reduced the number of students visa worldwide. She also gave advice to intended students that want to apply and study in the United States. Although the pandemic has really affected our ability to provide visa appointments, Mission Nigeria continues to prioritize our students, and we're on track to be able to offer interviews to every single Nigerian who's been accepted at a U.S. university or college so that they can interview for a visa in time to start school later in the summer. For students who haven't yet applied for their student visa, if you've already been accepted and you intend to start this fall in the United States, it's super important that you go online right now, like today, to ustraveldocs.com and make an appointment for your student visa. The Education Advisor of the U.S. Consulate in Lagos spoke on the most important thing they do in the Education USA. She also advised the students to be focused as they leave to study in the U.S. We do some career counseling in case a student is undecided about what they want to study or confused about where to focus on. The beauty about the American education system is that no student has to focus on only the scientists or only the arts or only the humanities. You can mix and match. Some of the students shared how excited they are and their plans to impact Nigeria after their study in the U.S. I am very excited to pursue my voice and opera and computer science program. I've had a passion for music since I was young and I was very glad I was able to apply to a school like Northwestern because they have a fantastic schedule and plan for the dual degree program. Well, when I finish my studies as an health science major, I'm going to pursue a degree in medicine and then I'm going to come back as a medical doctor and work in any reputable hospitals and help the safe. According to the U.S. Mission Country Consular, she said that those students who have been accepted at a U.S. university will have not applied for a student visa yet are encouraged to do so as soon as possible. For Plus TV Africa, Ngoziqa, Ohio HSC. Hello, hope you enjoyed the news. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.