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 the latest episode of gossip about gossip. My name is Zenobia Gottschalk and I am the SVP of communications at Hedera Hashgraph. I am joined by Daniel norkin, who is one of the co-founders of envision blockchain. Daniel, welcome. Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it. So tell our audience a little bit about the company and your role there. Sure so the name of the company is envision blockchain. And I'm one of the co-founders here and we are a system integration organization. I like to tell people that we just build custom applications solely in the Web3 space. So if it deals something with web3, whether it's front end, whether it's backend building applications, that's where we have a good fit. All right. When and why did you all decide to start the company? We opened up the business back in 2018, come from a wide array of different industries, some from supply chain areas, some from the project management consulting spaces. And we first entered in 2018, didn't want to build the next blockchain. We didn't want to build the next era. There was already smart people that were doing that, and we didn't want to come with a very specific application in the market and pigeonhole ourselves in that. And besides, there was already what we like to joke around the ICO boom and bust at the time. So there was already those Sas applications, if you will, the vertical applications. So there was a need for there was a need for these companies to be able to partner with organizations like envision blockchain to help enterprise organizations and other companies build and implement those, those specific solutions. So, so we kind of found ourselves as a really good intermediary in an industry where there's supposed to be no intermediaries. Yes, but people always need help building on new technologies, right? Exactly and that's what keeps our lights on. Great so you all have been building a lot of applications around sustainability and there's been a lot of discussion in this space about what being green or being energy efficient means. What does that mean to you? Yeah, I mean, some of our first production applications came in the later part of 2018 where we built a sustainability directory for a publicly traded company out in the UK, and they wanted to showcase their quality assurance testing of different conformance levels to zero waste, to landfill, clean air, those kind of certifications, because the consumer has kind of a prerogative to put their money and investment into organizations that are looking to kind of keep the planet, so to say, healthy. And it's good to have that kind of an obligation with an organization where it's not just we're just building fun things. It's nice to build things that have an impact on the world. So with regards to sustainability, we know that right now there's a lot of organizations that are making pledges to be carbon neutral by 2050. And such. And right now they're doing their due diligence and they're planning and they're architecting and they're building different solutions that will help them get there. So it's really good to have a place in that industry. And when you talk to these organizations, how does the conversation go when you try to encourage them to use a public ledger as part of their sustainability solutions? Why why do they need to do that? It's it's a funny question. It's a good one at that. It's one that all of us kind of joke on. When we opened up in 2018, actually, there was no talk about public blockchain. We were strictly talking private blockchain because it was taboo at the time to talk about anything public blockchain. It was so closely tied with the volatile speculation of the market where if you came into an enterprise organization talking about public blockchain, the CEOs and CEOs of the world would try to deny the whole thing. I came to learn over the course of time that private blockchains have failed through different consortiums and things like that. So there is a need specifically within sustainability with some of the solutions that we put out with regards to creating ESG assets is those assets need to be publicly discoverable. They need to be traceable. They need to be immutable. So we talk about this concept of the trust chain with the guardian, which is what the envision blockchain team has been working on within the Hedera ecosystem over the past year. And with that guardian where you create the ESG assets, the interesting point about it is that you wouldn't be able to get something like this on a private blockchain where the ESG assets that you create, that they're sitting on the public ledger, you can literally track everything that happened that led up to that ESG asset to be created. It's a complicated process that has been kind of hidden behind paper certificates for ten, 15 plus years right now. So carbon offsets and carbon credits is nothing new. Everybody has been talking about them for quite some time. But when companies are investing big money into these carbon offsets because they want to reach their pledges to be carbon neutral, they want to have confidence in the assets that they're buying. And the only way to do that is to have some sort of auditable trust chain link to that asset that they're buying. So they can then verify that and they can turn around and demonstrate to whether that's their auditors or their shareholders or whoever else. Look, not only have we committed to doing this, but there's a provable way that is more transparent than paper to demonstrate what we've done. That's that's 100% right. So it's not just to the auditors or to their investors. I mean, it's to if they're a BDC company, then even the consumers can go and take a look at it as well. And what have you learned throughout the process of building guardian that you might want to share in terms of other folks who are building applications on top of herrera? I think that a really interesting point is that we're still early, like we're early in the blockchain space for sure, but we're still early in the sustainability space because when you take a look at it, all the pledges that are being made in 2050, you know, we're talking that's like 30 years from now. So companies right now are just laying the foundations for how things are supposed to be in the future. And when we're talking with customers, when we're talking to partners in the ecosystem, what we're finding out is we're kind of all saying the same thing, but we're using different terminology. So the need for creating standards within the space is really critical. And like I said, we're all very early in that space, so there's a lot of opportunity for that. Fantastic and Daniel, you have some exciting things coming up. Are you able to share some of that with us? Sure so on Earth day, we're going to be launching the guardian 2.0. We've been working on the guardian for quite some time right now. And I believe October 14, 2021 was when we first originally open sourced it as version 1.0 beta 1 where it was just it was just a concept of proof of concept that work for sure. And you can create your tokens. It was all on a testnet, but there was very little done for decentralization. There was very little done for immutability, there was very little done for the traceability aspect. So right now, some of our big themes and topics for The Guardian 2.0 is essentially that. So it's, it's, it's around the, the integration of IPFS to be able to back up some of your ESG assets, the mapping between IPFS and the Hedera topic messages so that someone that's using the Hedera network and they want to restore ESG assets, all they have to do is just use the Hedera topics as opposed to going anywhere else. So kind of all staying within the Hedera network in order to get to certain things. We've been creating a few demos of policies. So again, policies are how you create these ESG assets. There's a lot of different policies out there. So we took two to begin with. One was the International Renewable Energy credit standard I rec for short, which we redid that one and we made it completely end to end. And we also put a new demo step by step guide of how people can use that into the book as well as the read policy, which is a really popular policy for creating ESG assets, carbon offsets as opposed to the credits, which was the previous one. And that one that we did focused around avoidance of deforestation, and that one was a pretty complicated process to implement. But we have a demo in there for everyone to check out. And also we included a step by step guide and a ton of bug fixes and stability features as well. Very exciting. Well, Daniel, like you said, we are very early in this journey, but there is quite a bit to be done every single day. So we appreciate you sharing with us your journey so far. And we look forward to keeping up with you and hearing more from you as you continue onwards. Thank you so much. Thanks so much. Appreciate it.
