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. Welcome to gossip about gossip. My name is Zenobia Gods chalk and I am the SVP of communications at Hedera Hashgraph. I am excited to be joined by Katrina daou, who is the founder and CEO of Miko. Katrina, welcome back. It's great to talk to you again. Hi, Zenobia. It's really lovely to be with you as well. Thank you for inviting me. Absolutely so I know that a number of members of our community are familiar with miko, but for those who aren't. Can you tell us a little bit about the company and why you started it? I was inspired by science fiction, which I think is a great place for any technology company to start. I saw the film Minority reports almost 20 years ago now when it first came out, and it had promises of an exciting, data driven, identity enabled future, and it also had some pretty dystopian, scary suggestions of what society could look like. And I remember coming out of the cinema thinking someone should do something about that. And it bothered me for about a decade. And then one day I woke up and wrote a manifesto around a future state where we each have a digital twin. And if we had access to the data that we generate each day, the data about us and the data that we create, that we could possibly make better decisions, better decisions about our health, our financial life, maybe our children's education and the planet. But that would all start with having some agency, some digital agency over our identity and our data. And that was the birth of the company, right? Yes I remember that movie well. So we are here in April. It's been Earth week, Earth month. And we talk a lot about what being green or being sustainable or energy efficient means to different folks. What does it mean to you? I think we should be talking about maybe Earth decade or Earth century, because we are the generation that have inherited the responsibility right now about doing something about the sustainability for future generations. And so it is a heavy responsibility that each of us have. And I think that technology can play a big part in contributing towards some of the amazing solutions. I think what's great about humankind is that we can't even imagine the incredible things that we will invent. So I'm optimistic that we will continue to address this. But specifically for me, I think one of the problems we have right now is we have a lot of greenwashing, we have a lot of marketing speak around offsetting carbon as a means of being able to appear to be addressing problems. And one of the issues we have from a community, a consumer perspective, is how do we to trust that those initiatives are actually real or making a difference? And this is for me absolutely where Hedera comes in and specifically a project that we've just recently kicked off with support from the Bar Foundation called trust together with guardian, to be able to provide a visualization layer of the provenance of tokens and NFTs so that we can start to provide confidence to any actors. It may be somebody that is minting a token. It may be somebody that wants to check the provenance. It may be an auditor. It may be a consumer that wants to be able to trace back a product or service back to source and know that there is a chain of trust and provenance that they can understand in a beautiful way. I have to say, the UX is really lovely. It's lovely to interact with. And I think what's really important is we need to be helping our community, consumers, people to understand how to discover and trace how to trust, but to do that in simple ways. And so I think if we want to be efficient, we have to be able to prove that the things that we're doing are real and sustainable. And I can't think of a better underlying capability than Hedera Hashgraph to enable that. And you know, it's so interesting because I think a lot of the conversation around NFTs to date has been how much they. How much energy they consume, right, and how much they can potentially be detrimental to the environment. And so it sounds like you're really flipping that model on its head and saying they can actually obviously minted on a green platform that can be used to provide accountability and they can be used to enable things like carbon credits where you're actually going to use them to serve for the benefit of the environment. And look, we have a philosophy that everything will end up being tokenized. And one of the amazing things about that perspective is that if you can attribute a unique unit of identification to something, it also means that it can have a unique unit of value. And we're moving into this combination of a tokenized and fractionalized world. We are able to do things together as a cohort and all our fractions add up to a combined transaction. That might mean that we can buy everything from art to make a difference around a sustainability, a project, or even buy a home or invest. And so one of the important things in terms of tokenization and this fractional world is that it's going to mean a lot of minting, creating, tracking. And I think this comes back to your point right now in terms of that underlying technology being both carbon negative, but also addressing that issue because we're actually going to have we're going to see more forms of unique identification such as an NFT or some type of token. It will be the way, everything will be created, tracked, identified. And therefore, we've got to be able to find ways to do this that are both sustainable and scalable. And so going back a little bit between when you first saw Minority Report and today, how did you discover Hedera and how did you decide that was the right platform for you to build your solutions on? I have to give all credit to Rob Allen and many listeners may know Rob is based in Australia with foundation. I've known Rob for many years in across a number of roles, but he was a couple of years ago working as the Entrepreneur in Residence for eftpos in Australia. Now part of Australian payments plus and eftpos at the time were looking at doing some groundbreaking work with Hedera around micropayments and for those that are listening, eftpos went on to become Hedera governing council member. And there's some information around the experiments and proof of technologies that we did to specifically address the ability to do these fractional micropayments. So we had at that previously we were using we'd been using hyperledger, ethereum, we've done some work on bitcoin, a couple of different versions of R3 quarter, we've done some zero knowledge proofs. We'd had things in R&D and we had. Being invited to consider making a switch to Hedera on Rob's invitation, and to do this proof of concept, proof of technology around micropayments. And as soon as we started to dive in, it became really obvious that there were many additional incentives to making that switch, not just about the sustainable scalability, not just about the security, not just the sustainability from a carbon negative perspective, but also the flexibility for us to combine a unit of data together with a payment or a token with data that may enable you to do something like self-sovereign identity. And so this ability to wrap payments around data, data around tokens, tokens around payments, the flexibility and extensibility into Web3 world made it a really simple choice. That's great to hear. Katrina, you mentioned Treasury. Can you walk us through the development of that? How is the buildout going? Any lessons that you've been learning along the way? So we've just started and the aim is to deliver certainly MVP into the wild, probably by summer, summertime, northern hemisphere rather than Southern hemisphere, where the team were working furiously in Australia. So we have our team in Australia working together with our team here in Belgium. The lesson so far I would say are around how do you make things, how do you make complex things simple? So how do you start to think about UX patterns that can be familiar for an auditor or somebody that wants to discover how to trust or trace a product or a service? So take it back to a solar panel. Take it back to a farm to a device that may be measuring something in soil quality or some building materials. So how do you make that interactive? How do you make that simple enough from a discovery point of view to understand that whole chain of custody? But how do you make it sufficiently complex and informative from an audit point of view and a cryptographic trust point of view to know that every part of that audit trail is something that can be trusted and verified. And so I think the lessons for us right now is, how do you bring in a fantastic user experience without taking anything away from what is under the Bonnet, which needs to be technically sound, and more importantly, can stand up to any kind of form of audit and traceability right with a rich amount of data that can be provided. Absolutely and without overwhelming people. This this is part of this UX challenge. Yeah I want to be able to see when a token was minted. I want to understand the provenance of it. I want to understand how that may have moved. I may want to be able to do that at a superficial layer and then decide if I want to drill down. And so it's this I guess what we're focusing on this Zoom out, Zoom in kind of experience. You know, I want a picture of the chain of trust. And I and at the same time, if there's some aspect of that I want to be able to drill down into. If I do that, I want to know where that data is coming from, if that's coming from the Guardian platform, if that is information that I can independently verify, or if it's information that I want to be able to reconcile, I want to know that I can get as much detail within permissions. So some of the other things we're working on right now is security rights management. We're looking at how we can incorporate things like zero knowledge proofs. So I may want to be able to prove the location of a particular asset without saying exactly where it is. That would put my privacy or safety at risk in some way. So you may have a farmer that wants to be able to say here. Here is the. Here is this asset which can be verified without having to specifically say exactly where it is, but for that trust to be established. Well, Katrina, Thank you so much for joining us today. We really appreciate you sharing some more information about trust. And we look forward to keeping everyone updated on your progress. Thank you so much.
