Oh welcome to gossip about gossip. Powered by Hedera Hashgraph. And each episode will cut through the hype of blockchain promises and explore real world examples of organizations creating the next generation of decentralized applications, which will bring trust back to the internet for us all. Hello everyone, and welcome to the latest episode of gossip about gossip. The podcast where we talk about real world applications for distributed ledger technology. My name is Zenobia Gottschalk and I'm the SVP of communications here at squirrel's labs, helping to grow the Hedera ecosystem. I am delighted to be joined by Ian potter, who is one of the new members of the board of the Hedera governing council. Hi Ian, how are you? Listen we are fighting you. Good Thank you. Now, Ian, we. We know you are not a floating head, but can you share with our audience why you are doing this podcast. In the dark today? Yes, I'm in South Africa. And we've got what we refer to in South Africa as load shedding. It means that the init of the electricity service provider is shutting down to save on electricity across the country to protect the grid. So for two hours every night, sometimes we get warned, but we weren't warned tonight. And we've got load shedding from 6:00 to 8:00 South African time. My goodness. Well, we really appreciate you still joining us for the broadcast. And we hope that everyone is staying safe over there. And after this, maybe you'll get to bed a little bit early. So let's get down to it. Tell us about your new role on the board of directors of the governing council and why you decided to run. Well, I need to answer it the other way around. I'm very excited to be on the board, and I decided to run based on a few factors. We've been part of the Council for two years. Now, at standard bank, and I've made a lot of the other council members and I made some of the board members historically when we spoke about use cases and new opportunities. So it is a very collaborative environment and for the first time in my life I experience lots of people really trying to make things work on this distributed ledger and people sharing knowledge. I made a lot of the developers that's physically working on it and we've experimented with quite a few use cases. And we're making significant progress on our use cases, two or three of them going live this month. We got regulatory approval for them and the journey with the Yarra council members and the board members was very, very exciting and that's why I decided to run. And to make decisions, to be part of the growth. I think A is going into a fantastic growth space at the moment as blockchain, distributed ledger technology and cryptos across the world. This regulatory awareness very long winded answer, but that's why there's a lot of factors that I considered. And I want to make a difference. I want to contribute to this distributed ledger that brings trust and enables lots of people to participate. Bridging the gap between the old and the new world, the zero carbon credit progress made in Africa. So I can keep on talking for hours, telling you why I ran, and then obviously I hope to make a contribution, you know, to bring I've been a CFO of full many roles in my life. And when I look at the board members, they are fantastic knowledge they which I could never be. But I think some of my exposure and experiences and my work on blockchains, private and public, will help me to contribute to the draw board and to make a valid contribution. And I think that's an excellent point. And, you know, the board members come from a wide range of industries. They have such great experience, you know, everything from legal and finance and application development and building and all of those things are required. If you are really trying to change, have the shift in how people do computing and how people build these systems of trust. You know, you've talked a little bit about how long it takes to build some of those systems. Can you share any more about what that progress looks like for an enterprise at scale? Well, if you look at a text, as you said, it takes a long time because if you think about blockchain and distributed ledger ecosystems, there's always a community. There's people that want to participate. But in some cases, if you want to scale, you've got to assist people to understand what the capabilities are that DLT bring or blockchain. And then how does that match? It doesn't look like legacy technology, where you're going to spend a lot of money and then you build something and everybody utilizes that. This is where you've got to match capability with needs if it makes sense. And I think for us as one of the council members, for us, what scale means is to drive Africa's growth. We are on the African continent. We want to make a difference. A lot of people talk about banking, the unbanked. There's a lot of people that have access to logistics. These people, if you think about Africa and you think about economic, environmental, social and governance issues, clean drinking water scale means to enable solutions that track beehives and help to change those behaviors over time and then to validate that things that's happening. I'm talking very philosophically, but things that's happening on the ground actually contributes to a large number of people getting clean access to water and access to clean drinking water. And then the other important thing in Africa linked to their successes on carbon verification, to enable people to validate that if something was done to contribute to the environment or reduce carbon credits, that it's really so that it's not someone that didn't chop down a wood and say, we didn't kill the trees, therefore we claiming a carbon credit, but that there's real effort that was put in to make these things available. And that's what you always what we've seen with our use cases with the drought is that starts slowly. But the thing that Leonardo da Vinci said many, many hundreds of years ago is that he likes that. It's not about knowledge. It's about doing. It's about mobilizing. And I think that's the things that attracted me to the network simplicity. You can scale very secure, but you can help lots of people to make a difference in their lives by utilizing this platform or this technology. And I think it's incredible to see all of this coming together. You could easily just talk about, for example, banking use cases, right. That's that is your bread and butter. But coming together, the council seems to have talked a lot about things like sustainability and carbon marketplaces and some of those things that can only happen. Those discussions that can only happen when you are bringing together people from a variety of different industries and trying to learn from them and figure out what does that flywheel look like and how do you benefit from that collective knowledge? Exactly and I think what another thing that I didn't mention, I'm sitting at the dog, so I cannot look at any of the bullet points that I made because it's so dark. It's not even like a candle. I can't see this is coming directly from me. So this is raw, but it's not prepared. It's not looking at those quickly and answering a question from the heart and from the heart. From the heart so you can get. But I think when I meet the council members, they excitement. And when I look at these days new potentially new council members that I'm also talking to. And if I look at the excitement and what they've already done on a dare, you know, before even becoming council members and even in South Africa and Africa, when we launch the first when we did the first press release, when we joined the idea network, the excitement from big institutions, agricultural companies that contacted me personally and said, you know, we're very excited that we've been following a very powerful and I want to thought it's always about partnerships to your point. And I and that's what excites me. I think you're not going to do your point. You're not going to be successful in this space. If you don't want to collaborate. It's not about euros, but it's about lots of people that has different views and enables things to happen a lot quicker through partnerships. Absolutely well, Ian, before we let you go to find some light, any last words of wisdom or things that you'd like to share for what you see on your role on the council over the next 6 to 12 months? Well, I see that things are moving at a fast pace. I like that. I've already got a lot of things in my inbox. There was a few comments made. There's a lot of documents, a lot of preparation, a lot of reading. But I know there's good guidance, good. There's going to be great conversations. I like fast pace. It's great to be prepared. I met Brett in Canada, physically met him in Canada in April at the braai. At the braai. And I must be honest, I was very impressed the way he spoke at that meeting. Obviously, a man with a huge IQ and he fully understands this new world. So I'm very excited to work with him, to meet the others. I've met Scott. I've made quite a few guys. I'm not going to mention all the guys names, but everybody had fantastic supportive comments whenever I needed to get some, some advice. So I'm very excited to work with the board members. And what's happening in Africa is that I can see lots of things happening from a carbon sustainability perspective on Madeira. It's amazing to track all the use cases that's happening in Kenya, Uganda, Uganda, Ghana. Things are really the conversations even in the bank and some of our big customers is that these are hunger to really utilize the technology to make a difference. And one thing that differentiates Africa, people innovate out of Mississippi. Yep and the big thing here is that brings fantastic creativity and remarkable energy because people really want to make a difference in their own lives and also in communities lives. So that's what I want to complete with that. I'm very excited and I think it's going to be a fantastic year. That's wonderful. Ian, Thank you so much for sharing and we are so grateful for your service. I think we are seeing the last lights of e! In there. So again, we appreciate you taking the time, and we look forward to what the council is going to do and the board is going to do in the coming year. Thank you so much, Ian. Take care. Excellent Thanks. And bye bye.
