from the Center for Digital development within the u.s. global development lab my name is Galen Amole I work at Management Systems International and where MSI MSI provides capacity building and training support to the global development lab I will be the moderator of this webinar please be aware that we will be recording this webinar beginning with the next slide this is the agenda for today's webinar the webinar will last for one hour after this five-minute welcome and introduction Craig our first speaker will introduce you to distributed ledger technology or DLT blockchain is an example of DLT and will be the main focus of this section of the webinar during the presentation you may type any questions you have for Craig into the chat box which you'll find in the lower part of your screen at the end of the presentation Craig will have ten minutes to address as many of your questions as possible during QA I will then introduce Paul our second speaker who will lead an exploration of DLT in international development again you are invited to type any questions you may have for the speaker into the chat box while he is speaking Paul will answer of many as many of your questions as possible during the ten-minute Q&A; period I will let you know where to find the recording of the webinar during the wrap-up and closing all right I'd like to turn things over to Craig all right fantastic thank you so much Gayle I'm really excited to get started with the webinar so there are two challenges that we often face in our work in international development one of these is this endemic and pervasive lack of trust this can manifest in governance it can manifest in markets this comes up in a lot of different places the other thing we run into that's related is that there are a symmetries in information some people know more about what's happening than others and that can give them more power than other people do and these might seem like really sort of abstract high-level political political economy sorts of things but they are exactly the kind of issues that blockchain is designed to address that's why I like to think of blockchain as an inherently political technology and so we're going to get to some specific applications of blockchain and development but I want to set the stage first a bit by saying more about what blockchain is and how it works and so there are a few basic questions that we always like to ask ourselves about any new technology that we're presenting and this is you know what is it what can it be used for what are some of the implications and what are the questions we need to ask to approach intelligently I'm going to be going after the the first one of these and Paul will be telling you a bit more about the rest so as Gail mentioned earlier blockchain is a type of distributed ledger technology or DLT for short and so the the first example of a distributed ledger to be invented was the Bitcoin blockchain and it's complicated but compared to others I find it to be the least complicated and the easiest to explain and so our ultimate goal is to help you understand whether blockchain is right for your programs and we want to start by explaining how the Bitcoin blockchain works and so some of the ideas that I'm going to be talking about are gonna be a little bit new and complicated but I'd ask you to please stay with me and don't hesitate to ask any questions as Gail mentioned before you can type them into the chat box and my colleagues will help me manage the incoming questions so let's get started this is Mary and Mary has a dollar and Mary would like to give her dollar to her friend Samuel so the question that we have is how Samuel can trust the value of what he's being given the actual piece of paper on which a dollar bill is printed is probably worth less than a dollar and it only has value because he trusts it it's a physical token that represents $1 worth of value and it represents a shared understanding of what one dollar means and part of the reason that this works is because this token is difficult to copy people have invested a lot of effort and a lot of technology in making currency difficult to copy because if people can copy it that undermines the basis for that understanding of its value so cash is easy let's imagine that instead Mary wants to give Samuel a digital coin this might be more convenient for her than using cash for example and so in this case how does Samuel trust the value of what he is being given by Mary so after all this is no longer a physical token it's now a computer file and what makes a computer file really different from a physical piece of currency is that they're very very easy to copy and no one can actually tell a copy apart from the original they look exactly the same so one way that Mary and Samuel could resolve their trust issues is to bring in a neutral third party let's say they have a friend named joy and they trust joy to keep track of their transactions for them and joy keeps a ledger with balances for Mary and Samuel so in row number 1 Mary's got five coins and Samuels got two in row number two we're seeing a transaction where Mary transfers one of her coins to Samuel so that now she has four and he has three a new ledger is going to be added every time her sorry a new Row is going to be added to the ledger with each new transaction and the total number of coins should never change so the question here is what happens if joy makes a mistake or what happens if maybe joy is dishonest is there a way for a Marion Samuel to exchange digital assets without having to rely on a central authority to keep track of everything so one way Marion Samuel could do this is if they have a lot of friends and each of their friends means it maintains a copy of the ledger and so when Mary wants to send a coin to Samuel she announces it to all of her friends she makes it public and all of them would be able to update their Ledger's and so that would make it really hard for one of the friends to cheat or if one of the friends made a mistake it would be obvious because their ledger would be different from everyone else's so this solution isn't quite perfect though because you could have a situation where some of the friends disagree with each other and you need some kind of process for getting everyone back on the same page again so one way of doing this would be to make it possible for the friends to audit each other's Ledger's to make sure that all of the transactions are valid and correct and so here's a case where we've got two Ledger's that don't quite match up they agree on the first two rows but on the third row the friend on the Left thinks that Samuel transferred two of his coins to Mary and the friend on the right thinks that Samuel transferred one of his coins to Mary so both of these Ledger's look perfectly valid on their own terms but they still disagree about what it was that actually happened and so if all of the friends are equals there's no good way to resolve a discrepancy like this and so Mary and Samuel can improve their system a little bit by instead of making the friends completely independent they're going to have their friends take turns adding to the ledger so here Mary is going to ask to have a transfer made to Samuel and one of the friends it's this friends turn and they're saying all right everyone I just added row number four and he's asking everyone else to check and make sure that this transaction is still valid and so for the moment we're not going to worry about how the friends decide whose turn is that's a really important topic and we're gonna get back to it but the important thing right now is that there is some process for people to decide whose turn it is to make additions to the ledger so I mentioned a minute ago that all of the friends are equals so that means that they are connected in what we call a peer-to-peer network so one disadvantage to appear to peer network is that not everyone is going to receive messages in the same order and if they receive messages in a different order they may disagree about whether a transaction is valid or who has what balances at what time and so in order to get this to work we need a way to make a chain of transactions so that everyone knows in what order those transactions have been added to the ledger okay now here's the part where that starts to get really interesting we're going to do this this chaining of transactions using something that's called a cryptographic hash or a hash for short so what a hash does is it takes a data input so in this case it's the sentence meri sent Samuel $1 and it turns this input into a message that has a fixed length and so if we make a really small change in the input say if we say it's two dollars instead of $1 the output is gonna change in a way that's large and unpredictable so here's another example where Mary is becoming Maria and the message is again changing in a pretty dramatic way so the important thing about hashes is that they only work in one direction it's really easy to calculate a hash but there's no known way to reverse one it's a bit like a combination lock if you know the combination it's really easy to open it and if you don't know the combination there's no way to open it except through trial and error so here is how we can use hashes to connect transactions like links in a chain so that there's only one ordering that makes sense so in row number one we've got this thing here which is the hash of the previous entry that it depends on whatever row zero was and so the actual ledger entry is going to have that same hash followed by whatever transaction is happening in that row so that's saying that meri is sending $1 to Samuel we then take this entire ledger entry and put it through a hash function so that we get that hash that gets copied into Row 2 and becomes the beginning of the ledger entry for Row 2 which is saying that Samuel sends $1 to no Co this produces a new hash which is new and unique and that in turn gets carried over into the next row and becomes whoops and becomes part of the next ledger entry so the great thing about this system is that it makes it really easy to detect when someone's trying to do something funny so imagine that one of the friends is dishonest and they want to change Row 2 so that now instead of Naoko receiving two dollars it is Mary receiving two dollars so the hash that is produced in row two and carried over to Row 3 now no longer matches the ledger entry for Row 3 the chain isn't intact anymore and anyone who can check these hashes can see that the transaction is valid and so if our dishonest friend wanted to really forge this transaction they would have to replace every subsequent row so that the hashes agree again but if the friends take turns updating the ledger no one will have the power to make a lot of changes all at once and as long as most of the friends are honest and reject illegal edits then the ledger is immutable so instead of adding transactions one at a time it's often more efficient to group them together into blocks and so here one of the friends is announcing a block that contains 1,000 reactions sorry 1,000 transactions and asking everyone to add that entry to their Ledger's each of these blocks is chained to the ones before and after it using hashes and that's why we call it a blockchain so there's one more detail that I kind of skimmed over and that I should probably come back to and that's how the friends decide whose turn it is there's a lot of ways of doing this but in the Bitcoin blockchain the method that's used is that the friends are known as miners and what they need to do is they need to solve a difficult computational puzzle in order to be able to add to the blockchain what they're actually doing is inverting a hash and so like I mentioned before this is like guessing a combination to a lock and it depends a lot on luck and not everyone finishes it at the same time so whoever solves it first gets to propose the next set of entries now not all blockchain to use this method there are other ones out there and the really important thing is that all block chains need to have an established process for deciding who gets to add the next block to the chain so the first successful application of blockchain was the Bitcoin cryptocurrency and a host of other cryptocurrency is now that use a ledger of financial transactions but blockchain is about a lot more than just money because those transactions don't have to be just the movement of an asset from one person to another they could be anything that needs to be recorded securely that could be things like additions to a birth registry it could be changes to a Land Registry it could be the transfer of goods in a supply chain or it could be votes cast an election in an election for example and so regardless of what goes into the blocks all distributed Ledger's have a few really key features one is that they're all decentralized access and control are shared among the participants they all use some kind of consensus mechanism so that even if the friends don't trust each other they can agree on what's in the ledger they're all tamper resistant in the sense that it's extremely difficult to change or remove ledger entries they're all resilient which means that there's no single point of failure and they're flexible which means that you can keep track of anything that needs a permanent wreck and so that is what I've got for this section of the presentation and I'm open for questions thank you it looks like like Paul has already sent me a few here one of these is coming from Amanda DiNardo Amanda is asking so once a transaction has taken place the new hash is created and it will remain in a pending status until a new ledger entry is created so the way this works in practice is that again I'm there are other ways of doing this but the one I'm most familiar with is the Bitcoin blockchain that when you announce a new transaction it gets passed around as peer-to-peer network and you're right that it's in this sort of pending state until one of the friends one of the miners decides to include it in a block and so in in a system like Bitcoin the hashes aren't hashes of individual transactions they're hashes of entire blocks and so it's at the time that that transaction is incorporated into a block that they're calculating the hash of it and relating it to the ones to the ones that came before it I hope that answered your question Linda Hebert is asking how would this be used to move textbooks Ben Gregory is asking how this would work with non numerical information it seems like we're adding and subtracting values so okay so I I think Paul groups these two questions together because they're related how so if we're moving currency it's it's an asset that's divisible you know if I have a hundred dollars I don't have to send you a hundred dollars I could choose to send you three or four cents if I wanted to you can cut those things up as finely as you want to the same thing isn't true for textbooks necessarily and the where the numerical values or the numerical information comes in that then mentioned is that is that those balances only matter because they only matter at the step when you're trying to determine whether transaction is valid and you need to check to make sure someone has enough Bitcoin in their account so to speak to be able to make that transaction if you are trying to move textbooks in a supply chain for example you could have different you could have your transactions consist of the number of textbooks move move from one place to another if you want to account for things that way or you could even have a barcode on the back of each individual book and it just gets moved as a discrete unit from one place to another the important thing is that a transaction is recording that something happened and that you have some way of checking whether that transaction is real or not whether the person who is you know if person a is purporting to have handed off a textbook to person B you need some way of determining whether a person a had that textbook to begin with and then Paul or sorry Ben is sending me another question oh that's the one I just answered okay okay I've got a bunch more down here Brian Bentham is asking me so if someone does tamper what's the ledger resolution or rejection process so the way that works is that if you know if someone is proposing a ledger that is internally inconsistent and seems to contain a forged entry what happens is everyone else ignores it and so I could create a bad ledger where I am you know sending vast amounts of Bitcoin to myself from addresses that don't exist but no one is going to pay any attention to it and so that shared understanding of value isn't there and I'm not going to have assets that I can actually use for anything troy is asking me can you talk about the cost of entering blocks into the blockchain so III don't know Troy you might be talking about energy costs here so the way that I again I mentioned they need to solve this difficult computational puzzle and that basically requires burning through a lot of electricity and having a lot of cpu power on head and so what you know the cost is costs and hardware and costs and electricity and so there have been some pretty frightening proposals of what would happen if the world's financial system were running on Bitcoin because it's a very energy inefficient way of doing things and that's part of what has motivated these proposals for different kinds of consensus mechanisms that don't require on they don't rely on quite so much brute force computation I've let's see so I had a question from joy kay what is the difference between private versus public deities and the way that they were I think Paul is gonna get into a little bit of this probably but the major difference is that in a public distributed ledger like the blockchain network or the etherium network anyone who wants to participate can not only can anyone read it but anyone can write to it as well if you wanted to become a miner tomorrow you could just set things up on your computer and you'd be ready to go you might not be very competitive that you'd be able to do it in a private system you have someone who is acting as the gatekeeper and deciding who gets to be a trusted participant and so because you're working with a smaller group of people who are trusted in advance that allows you to make a lot of things less cumbersome you don't have to worry as much about security you don't have to do this expensive what they call proof-of-work mining process because everybody trusts each other already and you have some kind of existing social mechanism for getting everyone to work together um multiple attendees are typing I love this uh-oh nope John was answering someone else's question that's fantastic shravani oh no Shrieve Ani is okay using blockchain technology we built an application for an agency then who do we need to still have miners so this is this is probably getting back to this question of public versus private again if you are if you're building a private system then you probably don't need to be relying on these proof of work methods you can you can do something much simpler there are things called proof of stake and proof of elapsed time and a variety of other consensus mechanisms most of which I don't actually understand very well that are helpful for doing things more efficiently in a system where you already trust each other so in a lot of systems that we might build in the context of US aid projects we're only working with our implementers are only working with other donors or trusted parties and so we don't need to worry quite so much about that security aspect of it we've got let's see we've got a question from Amin and Bangladesh is there any regulations or policy developed on blockchain how will it operate so there are I think the approach that most countries are taking as far as I can tell is not to regulate blockchain per se but to regulate particular applications and to apply the kinds of regulations that were there before and so for example you know crypto currencies are often being led regulated like assets or like securities and there's some debate as to what kind of financial instrument they actually are but rather than regulating the blockchain technology it's specific applications that are being regulated sometimes those regulations don't fit very well and so there's there's gonna need to be some work that's done going forward to adapt existing regulations to this new technologies Ben is asking governments models change once made what if the needs of a blockchain change time how can the rules of the blockchain change that depends a bit on your architecture so lately I've been learning a bit about some of the hyper ledger tools like hyper ledger Sawtooth for example allows you to change things like the consensus mechanism once it's already running which is really really interesting because it lets you change your governance on the sly to some extent but in a lot of cases your governance is sort of baked in at the beginning and it can be very difficult to change it especially as a network scales up you need buy-in from more and more people to be able to change that and so that's part of what makes intentionality of design so important in blockchain applications because you need to think about a lot of things in advance you can't just get it started and expect that you'll figure out the details once it's up and running because once it's up and running it might be too late to make some kind of important changes Craig time is up for this Q&A; segment okay I need to hand the microphone I know it's wonderful to see all this interests and perhaps at the end if we have a little extra time we can you vote you and Paul can both respond some more but I want to hand the microphone over to Paul who is going to talk about some uses for DLT blockchain before I do I'm just going to make one transition here so all blockchains are distributed Ledger's but not all distributed Ledger's are blockchains so we just wanted to share with you a couple of names aetherium blockchain Bitcoin blockchain or both public I know Bitcoin has certainly come up but there's also a private hyper ledger fab fabric blockchain and there some of you may have heard scuse me some of you may have heard of some of the distributed Ledger's like our 3/4 hash tag graph and tangle we already done the QA for Craig section so let me hand it over to you Paul number one endemic and pervasive lack of trust among people and across institutions and number two asymmetries and information which often has a consequence in our dynamics so what could block chains or DLTS be used for well many of you may have heard I think some people on this webinar are already somewhat familiar with the technology that DLT solves all manner of problems that it can be a solution in supply chains it can be a solution to improve public public financial management or data regarding public records for achieving universal financial inclusion or achieving real-time cross-border payments or improving trust in food where there's often risks of miss labeling the applications in other words are many and the promise that people see is all around but fundamentally we want to underscore the reality that distributed ledger technology is about managing data differently about managing transactions differently and about managing relationships among parties who do not fully trust one another in different ways applications are being tested in a variety of different areas and in the primer that we recently released in April we go through a long list of them in many different sectors what we cover in the primer and what we cover also here are are just illustrative we don't make any claim that the particular applications are the ones that will ultimately yield the most value or or be the best use of the technology but just to give you a sense of where people think that it could be useful number one there are many applications that relate to exchanging assets or documentation associated with assets so for example in trade finance there are companies and things that are explained exploring ways to facilitate the secure transmission of documentation along lengthy supply chains we've also seen similar tests and proofs of concept in diamond tracking which is itself a very valuable commodity that often struggles with reducing the purchase and sale of diamonds from conflict effective sources and then finally there's interesting efforts to we use this technology to improve the confidence that people can have in certifications and so there's been researchers that are developing applications that would enable you to ensure that a diploma that or a credential that someone presents is indeed the valid one in the area of disclosing and sharing data from multiple sources a couple of examples that we've come across number one I in infrastructure projects we've seen an example where a firm worked with a construction company to develop a platform for transparently tracking progress as the public infrastructure project was completed we've also seen a lot of effort on public asset manager registries and in this case the focus for the most part as related to land titling but the types of registries could involve many types of assets in the financial transactions context there of course has been a lot of effort looking at payment technology as we all know Bitcoin was a innovation originally designed specifically for facilitating financial transactions there's been work in the international payments context to facilitate real-time cross-border transactions or payments across currencies and there's also been efforts by some some actors including one donor in particular to use one aspect of distributed ledger technology to facilitate interoperability across different financial services providers so given all the opportunities that people are exploring there are there are a variety of implications and a while there are many potential opportunities there are also some important nuances that that you should be aware of in that it's important to be inquisitive about as you explore the technology and we'll just touch on a couple here in particular this sector which has a lot of hype in a lot of interest in it at the moment has led to some statements that you may hear and I just want to touch on a couple number one DLT eliminates the need for trust it does not rather it changes who you trust and how you establish trust you may also hear that DLT eliminates intermediaries this is often described as disintermediation cutting out the middleman and it really depends it depends on the use case that you are focused on what it will likely do is change how parties interact with one another it may remove or eliminate the need for some intermediaries or may just mean that the nature or form of those intermediaries change number three you might hear that DLT requires a native virtual currency or a crypto currency like Bitcoin or ether to incentivize the participants in that network to process transactions it does not Gregg mentioned one example with hyper ledger fabric that's an example of a distributed ledger technology platform that does not require people that build applications on top of it to incorporate a a virtual currency the the public or permissionless examples of these technologies do tend to have a cryptocurrency component to it that's their primary way to incentivize people to maintain the security of the network lastly the LT store data is immutable or permanent this is one that is very frequently said as as an absolute but it's an important one to add some nuance for not quite immutable not fully permanent it depends it's really a function of how stable the governance of the distributed ledger is and how participants manage transactions once they are at it while it is very true that once data is submitted to a blockchain or to a distributed ledger it is very difficult to change by design it in practical terms is very economically expensive to attempt to change what has been added or to censor someone from at attempting to add a transaction this discussion on over statements that you may hear CEG's nicely into a couple trade offs that you may also face when it comes to actually testing it this signa testing this technology in the field as any technology requires you may it may be good at some things it may be bad at others in the case of distributed ledger technology you may give up some efficiency in return for disintermediation this is because if you are in the in the permissionless blockchain context so in other words you're using a platform similar to the Bitcoin block chain or the etherium blockchain the way that you are maintaining security of the network is to make it computationally expensive or economically expensive to misuse or to make vulnerable the the network that's the price you pay if you want to disintermediate reliance on a centralized mechanism for securely transacting another trade off you may face is less data confidentiality in return for being able to distribute it to verify transactions on a distributed basis and this is simply because for participants in a network and appear to peer network to be able to verify that a transaction that someone proposes to the network is valid they typically need to have some visibility into what that transaction relates to in a fully public in a fully permissionless one this may mean that they are able to see the address the send address and the receive address as well as the information in the transaction and of course there are technologies that some of you may be aware of that are examining ways to reduce the need to disclose certain data that is considered private or perhaps business confidentiality on financial information while still taking advantage of the benefits of the technology next I trade up you may face is giving up some simplicity in return for broader access to the network and this is simply because I think typically having a centralized database managed by a single entity will require less complications than attempting to manage one that's spread across the world or spread across organizations and then one important trade-off that you should keep in mind is that by design lock chains are append-only in other words once you add information it's very difficult to remove it that's good if your objective is resilience or if your objective is to facilitate auditing for example of that transactions did india occur at a prior point in time but it means that you may not want to add data or add information that you consider sensitive in some way or that you consider really only useful for a short grade so what are some questions that we should all be asking at a high level there are three questions that you should ask and this is relevant for you whether you are a development agency employee like at USAID as a donor whether you're an implementing partner whether you're a startup that's wanting to work with a development agency or working in international development environments so number one how might the DLT based tool be better not just different this one is critical if you want to test an application it's important to understand what the status quo alternatives are what are you comparing it against to be able to answer this question means you have a firm handle on the problem that it is intended to solve number two how might a DLT base tool account for the host of practical obstacles on the ground which you anticipate encountering and if this as people in International Development are very well aware is something that occasionally technologists overlook or they underestimate the difficulty in operate in rural communities with intermittent connectivity for example or there's not a great degree of awareness over the political economy environment that may dictate how certain actors interact with each other or there may be issues related to digital literacy and the ability of institutions or of people to people to understand how to use technology and do so securely finally how might a DLT based tool align with the principles for Digital development and the principles for Digital development are a set of principles that USAID and dozens of other international development organizations developed over the last five years and have endorsed these principles basically reflect the hard-won insights and lessons in how to effectively use technology and do so on a cost-effective and sustainable basis ideally a DLT based tool will reflect some of the ideas embedded in these principles just to give you an example one of the principles focuses on designing with the user and this basically gets to the importance of understanding what the operating environment what the cultural context what the infrastructure context is for where this technology will be used another one is designing for scale and this gets to the idea that something may be tested and developed at a proof-of-concept or a pilot level but ultimately if you expect this application to be usable by thousands of entities or thousands of people or even millions of people you need to use a technology application that is able to handle that level of volume in the primer which we released in April we developed a high level decision flow just to facilitate your people's understanding of when it might make sense to use a DLT based application for their development problem on the left hand side you see questions that get to what we call relevance in other words is a DLT based tool uniquely value-add to the problem you are trying to solve on the right hand side you have questions that are related to appropriateness and that gets to the contextual environment and all the things that may may make best intentions fall flat that's really where the principles for Digital development come in it's this slide obviously we're not going to walk through each of these boxes step by step but the important thing to note number one is that it's in the primer and number two that there are certain aspects that may make you realize that a non distributed ledger technology based solution would be better for the problem that you are attempting to address and I should note there at the bottom there what we are focusing on mostly today our applications using distributed ledger technology or blockchain we aren't talking so much about cryptocurrency or digital currency focused we should note that there are many decision tools out there I would really say there are more and more of these tools out there they predominantly focus on the question of relevance in other words do we need to use a deal tea based platform or not that's a really important starting point but what they focus less on is the question of appropriateness which is something that's especially important for international development contexts so just to give you a sense the tool on the far right the blockchain beyond the hype that's from the world economic the tool on the bottom center that's from the Department of Homeland Security based on some research that they've done over the last couple years and on the far right on the bottom is a decision flow from Georgetown University related to a blockchain ethical design framework that they recently released basically as I've been saying it's a matter of relevance and a matter of appropriateness in any case if you frame your inquiry with the three questions that I went through you are more likely to arrive at a place where you have a better informed basis for deciding whether it the LT based tool is worth pursuing ideally we would be able to point to many examples in the field of this technology being used at scale or in a commercially commercialized environment but because of the lack of maturity in the technology and the fact that most applications have been developed in developed markets means that we we have few concrete examples that we can point to that reflect as much that doesn't mean that it's not relevant it doesn't mean that it's not appropriate it just means that we need to refer back to some of our other guiding posts that we have as we interact with the technology most important how well does the current system work how does the current system work these are all questions that any development practitioner needs to ask for for their work and it's particularly important here thank you very much Paul it's now time for Paul to answer some of the questions you've been entering into the chat box Craig has been extracting them and Paul will start to address them one by one all right so I'm just looking over at the list of questions that have been submitted now so give me a moment let's see it sounds like I'm speaking a little bit quietly here are there guidelines Linda asks are there guidelines on how to set up DLT for a supply chain Linda I think that speaks to a broader question or reality which is that as a sector there are very few if any standards or guidelines related to how DLT might apply to any given sector there is among the areas where DLT could be useful their supply chain environments are probably among the most popular so even if there are no guidelines there are I think more insights that sector than others that could help you understand when it actually makes sense see here smart contracts maybe you could say a little bit about them in the queue a smart shot smart contracts are basically applications that run on top of a distributed ledger that includes some degree of automation sort of a sort of a thing where the ability to make a decision or to execute a transaction is removed from from a from a humans control the trigger for a transaction in a smart contract could be could be anything it could be after a certain amount of time passes it could be once two people sign a transaction for example if a husband and a wife need to both sign a sign a transaction to get a loan approved or something or it could be based on some data that is submitted yet some external source so in the insurance context people have spoken about a smart contract that automatically makes payments based on a weather event and so the smart contract could have some input from official weather data sources let's see here omar is asking do we have an example where DLT has been used in food production or food being exported to another country there have been a few companies looking at that exact issue omar wal-mart received some press for using a blockchain platform to more quickly verify the source of some contaminated spinach their primary focus was on making it easier to understand where a particular batch of spinach aim from and it came from from a cross-border context and what would normally have taken over a week and potentially risk having to remove all spinach off of the shelves instead instead took if I recall correctly a couple hours and let's see here we have a question from Sarah if one of the USAID development goals is to strengthen a banking system in a country how does blockchain help or hinder that I Sarah it's a good question and it really depends on what the challenges are related to the banking system as I said there are some institutions that are exploring how to use a blockchain based system to improve the efficiency of payment systems that of course could be relevant for for countries that have antiquated or expensive to operate systems in other cases people are exploring how they could use the platform to facilitate cross-border payments which also is relevant there are also people that are exploring how to use blockchain to facilitate the identification of customers or to create a new way of extending access to to asset registries or information about assets that prospective borrowers have so in other words there are put a variety of different potential applications the question is what the problem in the financial sector is I know we have a few minutes and some of these questions also I think Craig might be able to answer so Craig if you can hear and if you're able to feel free to jump in and I'll continue to scroll through look at some of the questions here we have a question from from Arman asking is watching feasible for low-cost asset or product transfer management it's a it is an area that a lot of people are exploring a Armen the the issue that you may face with some of the blockchain systems out there is the scalability question if you were to use the Bitcoin blockchain for for something like that where you might have millions of devices or thousands of devices that frequently change hands it may be rather expensive to use a system like the Bitcoin blockchain to do that there might be a more what you would need to use is something that can manage a high volume of transactions without without it being too expensive it's a process and partly for that reason people are looking for missioned blockchain applications because you can typically process a higher volume of transactions let's see here Christine is asking if a payment could be triggered by a smart contract for X performance against a target with this prevents implementing partners from feeling perversely incentivized to report false data that is an interesting question Christine I think the idea of how do we incorporate this technology as a way to enable performance based I guess awards from an implementation standpoint I would say theoretically that is something that that makes sense I think as we go back to the high-level questions that I was posing the question is whether there is a non TLT based alternative and a key thing that I would underscore here is most of these applications require there to be a deficit of trust and so in an environment like that is the deficit of trust between the development agency like USAID and the implementing partner or is it between some other party it is conceivable that USAID could use its own system to do something and they could just tell it's implementing partners that data needs to be submitted to such-and-such a platform and that platform will well build in the mechanics that will trigger payments based on data submitted I think the one one issue that you are getting at and generally is the quality or the credibility of data and if you have a blockchain it doesn't mean that the data that is in it is an accurate reflection of what happened off the blockchain it does mean that the data that has been submitted and accepted on the blockchain complies with the rules for processing transactions on it in other words this isn't a tool that can solve forgery or falsely created data that occurs before it's submitted to the blockchain just FYI thanks for those questions and I know sorry we weren't able to get to to all of them fYI the primer is out it's been out since April there's a link to it it's also available if you google USAID and watch-chain primer and then in August or September we are going to release a DLT and agriculture guide which we'll do and do a survey of how the technology is being explored in agricultural environments although it will of course touch on things that might be relevant for you even if you're not in agriculture supply chain for example is something that's relevant in many sectors including agriculture but the focus also will be on understanding what are some of the prerequisites for the technology to be both relevant and appropriate for our our operating environments and with that I'd like to say thanks Craig's email is on the screen as is mine also we'd encourage you to sign up for the Digital development newsletter and don't hesitate to reach out by the judging by all the questions that we received in the chat box I think there's a lot of people that both are interested and also as it appears with the Byron haze your comments I appreciate it people that also have some familiarity as well so thank you I'd like to thank Paul and Craig very much for their great presentations or wonderful responses to all of the questions I just wanted to let everybody know we have been as we announced at the beginning recording this webinar and we will have the webinar up by the end of next week on Digital development org that's digital development org thank you very much we're just right at the end of our hour and we look forward to hearing from all of you again at the next webinar that we have