Drilling into the HBAR Foundation Privacy Market Development Fund

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, Herrera community. Welcome to the latest episode of gossip about gossip. My name is Zenobia Gottschalk and I am the SVP of communications at Hedera Hashgraph. I am delighted to be joined by a long time community member contributor developer Jim Nasser, who is the CEO and founder of Accor. Hi, Jim, how are you? Hi, Zenobia. I'm doing well. Great to reconnect as always. Yes, beautiful sunny day here in Georgia. So, Jim, you are a beloved member of the Hedera community. For those who are newer to the story, can you share a little bit of your journey, how you found hadera, how you've been working with both the platform and the team over the years? Yeah Yeah. Thank you. appreciate you saying that. I'm not sure if I am a beloved member, but certainly enthusiastic and hopefully contributing. The story really goes back to the very beginning. To be honest to, I think, the fall of 2017. I think that's when, if I recall correctly, that's when the TechCrunch video came out and really the first public sighting of Lehman and Manson talking about elseworlds at the time. And it just so happened at that moment during that period we were doing I was at the CDC and I was the chief architect there, and we were actively looking at various blockchain type solutions. And we had built our own Ethereum network. We were doing a project there, and so it was on my radar to be looking at what options are out there. And we had investigated a number of other alternatives. But really my feeling all along was that for the kind of problems that we're trying to solve in public health, health care, in general life sciences later on, what was needed was technology that was scalable. It was fast and near real time economically affordable. It could be abstracted as plumbing and kind of part of the infrastructure. And without that, it would really not move the needle in health care. That that was my premise. I think as time went on that I certainly kind of voiced that, that premise and that opinion. And we went through a whole phase with enterprise, blockchain and things like this. But I think now five years on, five years or more, it's quite evident that really kind of a public DLT is if you're going to go down a blockchain path and you have transparency in mind and you have a large group of entities or players in mind, then a public solution is what's required to move the needle. So that's the story. And we have been at it since, since the very first days of my era in 2018 and 18 and all of that. And yeah, it's been a really interesting journey. Well, and I think you have come at a time where there is an increasing need for. You've talked to me about the concept of computational trust. Right and especially in health care, especially as things have evolved over the course of the pandemic, I think we see sort of that trust at potentially an all time low, whereas we also see the need for an evolution of our health care systems and processes and demand for that like you've never seen before. Yeah, no doubt. I think this concept of trust is one that's becoming a little bit more understood by different factions. I think people are understanding the role of the individual within this, you know, and I think certainly this web 3.0 movement and this idea of systems of truth, you know, is echoing that and resonating a little bit more, but more so than ever. There's so much fake news, there's so much noise that there are so many scams that to so many kind of provocateurs just driving their own agenda, you know? I mean, who knows what to trust? So so this idea that if you can impute computational trust, where you relying on an infrastructure as vetted, proven cryptography and mathematical computation, that's proven, software that's proven, it can be investigated. Now you're beginning to improve the process. I mean, in and of itself isn't going to solve things. You still have to build good software. You still have to have good practices. You have to have governance. I mean, all of that. I mean, you know this within the world of hardware, of course, but having a way to impute computational trust is huge. So we suddenly believe it. You know, we're long in this story and hope to continue. Yeah and the most recent announcement the other side of the coin in terms of trust is also privacy. Right and ensuring that you. Can keep that privacy, while also having transparency. So the foundation recently announced the privacy market development fund, which you are spearheading. Why do you think there's a need for a specific initiative focused on privacy right now? And can you tell us a little bit about how the fund came about and also your involvement in it? Yeah, certainly. So I think firstly, to be clear, some people think it's an oxymoron to talk about public ledgers and privacy. Right and that was the position and the pauser that was taken with enterprise blockchains. And that really isn't true. Right we know this being an industry, you can certainly use public ledgers in a manner that can be privacy preserving. And to be clear, nobody I'm certainly not advocating putting people's personal health records or ID credentials and things like this out there in public DLT without any kind of clear text or without any kind of additional protections or privacy measures. And that's really, I think, where the crux of the solution is, which is that you can be transparent in some ways. You can know I think of it as breadcrumbs. You can provide breadcrumbs. So you can see the trail of transactions. You can see the trail of, of, of, of actions that are supposed to be happening. And whether or not you're compliant. You know, there's this concept called the Hawthorne effect, which which goes that if, you know, you're being observed and monitored, you tend to behave the way you're supposed to behave. So I kind of believe in that. And so to me, that's the element of transparency. However, there's also a number of different ways is in cryptography, encryption and other ways of conventional security, frankly, to retain privacy and just expose enough of the breadcrumbs that you do accomplish transparency, do accomplish things like, say, proofs where you're proving computationally as something did happen, you are compliant, you are a good actor without divulging privacy, you and I think the intention behind the privacy market development fund is really to, one, educate around this, but also to drive initiatives. You know, and there's across really almost any industry, this is not an industry specific kind of concept. It could apply in everything. I was talking to a gentleman in construction last week. You know, I've talked to folks at Nasa and in aviation, of course, health care, you name it. So that's really the idea was behind the fun. And I think really how it came about was our foundation. I think seeing the need, you know, and then looking around to see who was already maybe working in this area. I think what we had announced, rice hash, you know, our technology for protecting rights of individuals in data rights specifically and starting with the idea of consent for medical transactions. So that's really where it all kind of came about. And I think we're obviously delighted to be able to drive more of these initiatives and help both mentor and, you know, kind of, I guess, really lead some entrepreneurs in this space that there are a lot of really interesting projects. So it sounds like it may be both development of obviously education, but development of privacy solutions, but also sort of cross industries education or specific privacy solutions per industry. I mean, I don't think we're going to limit it to or have some kind of a checkbox that says per industry or for this these specific industries is really on the merit of the individual applications and the grantees, the team. I mean, it's like the basics of any kind of a team or a project, right. You know, and I think that's one of the things that one of the areas I believe we bring in a fair amount of discipline is having built a lot of big software and lots of projects and lots of heavy compliance work and all of this government work really understanding what it takes to deliver projects because I mean, we all have brilliant ideas, really good ideas that does not a project make right. You really have to have discipline to deliver. And ultimately, if you don't deliver or the grantees don't deliver, it's not going to move the needle. It's going to have a negative impact. So my objective is to really kind of, I guess, Institute some discipline and delivery discipline to make sure that these ideas come to life once they come to life is going to help the community and all of us will benefit. Great And Jim, so if projects are interested in getting in touch with you, do they apply through the air foundation? Definitely, Yes. There's a form and there's a under categories as a privacy category. And that would channel things towards us. And I would be remiss if I didn't ask you what is the latest with a core? I feel like you are always developing. Amazing new solutions every time we speak. You have something else that has come to market. Can you share a little bit about what's the latest and also maybe what might be on the horizon? Yeah, Yeah. Thank you so much. I appreciate words. You know, I think the latest is we are know, you may have heard me say this before. You know, we kind of consider ourselves as if you like the movement makers, you know, for like a high fidelity watchmaker. So like, like the ETA of of, if you like, the Swiss watchmaking world. So so really, our job, we see it as building high fidelity, high scale, you know, antifragile gears that you can put into all kinds of different machines. Right that's the way we look at it. Of course, we are very focused on health care because our mission is really to do human centric work and/or at least accelerate human centric work. And I'm excited with someone to work with. You may have heard of collaboration, we're doing around kind of democratizing clinical research with cure chain, really excited about that. And that's a public project, you know. So I think more of the same, but at a higher scale and much more of a building antifragile. Things that people can just plug and play, you know, are thinking is, you know, we want to accelerate the community to do so. You know, certainly people like Lehman and Mintz and yourselves, obviously building the infrastructure, building specific utilities and and functions and all of these things that become maybe the share world. And we see ourselves as building some of those kind of key gears. Right that's really kind of what's happening. I mean, obviously, we're tweaking a few things that you'll see. I don't want to put any kind of cart before a horse, but you'll see some new things coming from us, particularly around the smart contract world. We've been, you know, it's interesting, you know, as much as we're not by any means DeFi people or whatever, you certainly cannot be in this space and not understand the economics, which is very, very big. And we have more and more clients, honestly, coming to us and, you know, asking us advice on talking economics and various ways to manifest it. So we've done some interesting work around area, but, you know, I guess we'll wait and see on that one. Yes well, Thank you, Jim. We really hope that you will come back and share with us when you have more updates. It's always exciting to see what you have going on. So thank you so much for taking the time to join us today and we look forward to hearing more from you going forward. Sounds great. Always great to talk to you.