The Power of the Hedera ESG Ecosystem, with TYMLEZ

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 future. My name is Zenobia Gottschalk and I am the SVP of communications at swirl labs supporting Hedera. Welcome We are here with the latest episode of gossip about gossip. And today I am joined by Owen Flynn from timeless. Hi, Owen. How are you? And good. And yourself? Good Thank you. Thank you for coming on with us today. I'm happy to be on air. Thanks for the invite. Absolutely so. Timeless is a newer story for the Hedera community. Can you just share with us a little bit about your mission and vision and how you came to the company? Yeah, of course. So our mission here is to sort of accelerate companies transition towards the decarbonized future. So, you know, the projects we have in Netherlands and over here in Australia are all aimed at helping companies become carbon neutral. And we've been doing a pretty good job of that so far. So so it's about this time last year, actually, I was contacted by a recruiter saying, hey, do you want to come work for a company focusing on sustainability using blockchain? And you know, my first question was, well, why would you use blockchain for that? You know, energy intensive doesn't really make a whole lot of sense. And I guess that sort of segues into the whole why we went with a story, you know, down the line. So recently when I first joined the company, we were sort of in the process of transitioning away from our own blockchain. So originally Thomas was set up to develop its own blockchain solution. So the timeless blockchain solution platform or tablespoon for short, and that was an Ethereum and set up. So it was setting up nodes, having customers in the set of their own nodes and all that type of stuff. And you know, we began the process really when Dan Boyce, our CTO, came on in July last year was and we began the process of looking for that sort of new blockchain provider to underpin all our solutions, and that we ended up coming across the Hedera of course. And I'm sure you took a look at a lot of different solutions. Without naming any names, can you just share what compelled you to go with haddara? So there was a few things sort of, I suppose from the development side and also the business side really that made us really saddle a Haidara from the development side, which just a great open source community out there. We're already entrenched in the hadero community right now. We're working with some great companies like envision and MECO. You know, they're doing great work in the community. So from a development standpoint, it was a no brainer really. You know, the speed of the transactions process and country Hedera is it's unmatched really. And then from a business side, I suppose the biggest thing and I guess, is really what they'd make of settle on Hedera well, so just two things. First of all, it's definitely like the fees being pegged to the US dollar. You know, being able to have stable fees for us is huge. I personally, I don't understand how any other companies are working with any other blockchain for business applications. It doesn't make sense. You know, we've all seen the volatility in cryptocurrencies. You know, one day your token can be worth $100, the next day can be worth 200. So how can you go out to a client and price the solution this mental after five years when you have no idea what the fees are going to be in five years. So having that stability of Hedera is huge. And then obviously the second big thing for us, it was the whole greenness of Hedera being a carbon neutral network for us in the ESG sustainability space, it's a no brainer. You know, as I was talking about before when I first came on board, you know, the whole thing around cryptocurrencies and blockchain was to huge energy consumption. And we're still seeing that on blockchain, such as Bitcoin obviously is one the current. The atrium set up as well. No, it's just huge energy consumers. But, you know, we're looking at Hedera and correct me if I'm wrong, it's 0.00017 kilowatts per my new number. And it's like, how can you go with anything else in this space, right? So yeah, you're having a conversation with a client and they're trying to present this to their CFO. I can see how being able to say, here is your estimated cost and having a much more tight band of what that will be versus here's your estimated cost, cost. And fingers crossed, the price of the cryptocurrency does not fluctuate wildly. Exactly we've signed a contract with somebody and we're like, well, this week is going to cost, you know, $100 to run the solution next week. And like 152 week after that, it might be 90. You're not going to sell anything. So you cannot offer your customer a fixed price. And then you have to deal with hedging. You have to deal with all those complexities, or you can just come to Hedera and it's all sort of for you. It's a no brainer for us. Yeah, Yeah. I don't know. A single CFO who would not scratch their head at that kind of volatility in pricing. Not at all. Not at all. And so how is the process of moving from your own blockchain to hedera? Oh, it was simple. Like I say, simple. I'm not in the development team. I'm sure for stock is. He might give me a different answer, but like from what I understand, it was, you know, it was such an easy process for the guys. Like so we're working with the developer advocates as well and they just made it a breeze. We had any questions. We're able to hit them up on slack, on discord, and we got our questions answered. Anything we need to figure it out. And we're still in regular contact with them for getting solutions ready. Like the ecosystem that Hedera has is really is fantastic. So tell us a little bit about what your customers are doing with the platform today. And if you can share a little bit about how the piece plays a role there. Yeah, definitely. So one of our projects, we have currently running is with the Queensland government, so a major state government over here in Australia for anybody who is nowhere. And so we've come into one of our buildings in the Gold Coast health and knowledge precinct, which is our timeline's headquarters, and we're doing full energy monitoring, solar forecasting and ESG reporting solution for them. So we're coming in doing the whole carbon emissions reporting. At the end of the day, the state government are looking to host the first carbon neutral Olympics in 2032 and so they need solutions then that can actually be your crew have carbon neutral. These Olympics are. So we're coming in we're doing a demonstration project for them down here on the Gold Coast. And so we have the full suite. So we're doing granular energy monitoring. So every five minutes we're reporting on our energy usage. All that data is then being log to the blockchain and verified using the full trust chain that we have in there as well. And so we're providing them the energy footprint so they can monitor all the different nine tenancies, 1010 tenancies that they have on site all individually. It's granularity they've never had before. And we're also able to plug into some solar forecasting APIs. So we've done some geospatial mapping into roof space. We have solar panels information in there so they don't have any solar producing assets. What we've done is we said, hey, look, if you have these solar producing assets based on your energy uses which are currently capturing, here's what your carbon footprint would look like. So we're able to come to them and say, look, based on what you're going to have installed, we can say that this building will very likely be carbon neutral or this building needs more solar. This building needs less solar depending on what they want to do. And it really gives them insights that they've never had before, like they want to have buildings across Queensland carbon neutral. So it's like, hey, do you install extra solar on this building so that it offsets building B or do we just go and buy solar farm so it offsets building a, B and c, it's all data and granularity insights that they've really never, ever had before. So we're providing that today. And of course, on the back end of that, we're using the Hedera consensus service to validate all those energy readings and then also the token service to mint, those carbon offset and carbon emissions tokens. So if they want them, they can use their network to go off and purchase carbon offsets if they're not actually carbon neutral or sell their excess carbon offsets if they are carbon neutral and they want to gain some extra revenue from that. So being able to plug into that network, you know, we're starting to see places like Dover come online where they can go and buy their tokens. You know, it really makes our lives a whole lot more simple. I was just going to ask if you're working with other projects like Dover on that piece of it, because it does feel like a lot of these sustainability parts of the ecosystem have been attracted to Hedera and are starting to complement one another. Yeah, definitely. The ecosystem is really starting to build out. Like even since we've come into the ecosystem, we're starting to see more companies, other companies like mecha who are actually located down in Melbourne as well. Do you want to see moving to the same office building as us down there? You know, just being able to work with them, send them a message on Slack saying, hey, do you guys have this already? So we don't have to build it? And they're saying to us, hey, you have this. And it really is that sharing of ideas in the community, you know, it really accelerates our go to market. And, you know, it's going to be great for the whole ecosystem and it does feel like there is a lot happening in Australia as sort of a leader in this space and we certainly are seeing the same kinds of things in terms of the desire for reporting and accountability, especially for public companies in the United States. But why do you think Australia has been such a pioneer in this space or was there so much innovation there? I think it's because of the sort of renewable energy economy we have over here, like Australia is or has the largest amount of solar PVS in the world, or has the highest generation capacity of rooftop solar, residential, rooftop solar. So I think it's a lot of these companies now who have these green assets in place now actually want to see the returns on them. So whether that's being able to go to market and say, hey, we're carbon neutral or hey, we want to sell our carbon offsets, companies want to really start seeing the value in the generation assets that they have or the people that they've entered into to go out to their clients and say, hey, look, we're carbon neutral. And, you know, as you say, the US is sort of really leading the way in terms of regulations. So it's only a matter of time now that we see the rest of the world start to implement things like this. And I think a lot of Australian companies recognize this and are going, hey look, I think we should really do something about this now. So we're not doing something about it two years from now. What companies don't realise? You know, we're starting to see it now, but a lot of companies didn't realize 20, 30 is 8 years away. And if you have a huge company and multibillion dollar company, you know, becoming carbon neutral isn't an overnight thing. All right. They need to have plans in place for how to get there and to sort of baseline their plans. They need to know what their carbon or current carbon emissions are. So they need solutions like what we're offering with time lists. We have to go, OK, look, we're currently producing, you know, a million tons of CO2 a year. Now let's put a roadmap in place how to reduce that over the next eight years, because, you know, you cannot leave this to 2029. You're not going to hit your 2030 targets. Right? right. So what is the typical rollout look like for you with a client? I would imagine some of it is certainly bespoke, but are there kind of a typical set of steps that you go through with your clients? Yes so, look, we have the core timeless platform so that the majority of our components are already built in. And then it's just that edge customization for what we're really implementing for clients. So like in ideal work scenario, we'd go into a workshop with them, fully understand what they're looking for, the parameters they're looking to gather, the metrics they're looking to have in the reports are looking to produce. And then we go from there and we'll go, OK, look, this is the workshop we've had now. This is what we're going to go and build and implement concept client feedback along the way, incorporate all of that in there. You know, we try to be as light touch as possible by the end of day. We don't want to be interrupting, you know, regular business activities. You know, customers, clients don't want that. They just want someone to come in, do all the work, get it all there, and they have it all set up. So we just like to come in, do that workshop, get everything we need, and then come and have that really light touch approach to everything and get ourselves embedded in the system. And as you and the team have now been working with Hedera for a little while and been rolling out the solutions, anything, any lessons learned or other things that you would share with developers and companies as they are evaluating the various blockchain and DLT solutions? Yeah, look, I would say take a look into the ecosystem, right? Because there are a lot of great blockchains out there that really are like there isn't the only one. There is a great blockchain, let's make that clear. So don't get booted out here. But you know, go have a look if you need us there just no other ESG community lectures on the Hedera network. There's no other stable fees like there are on the Hedera network. There's no other green blockchain like there is with Ara. You know, you have to look at it from a business perspective and not just looking at, you know, oh, look, this is a popular blockchain. That's great, right? If you don't have fixed fees, how are you going to approach your solution. If you don't have an ecosystem there that you can rely on? And who are you going to go to when you run into a roadblock, or is it features that have already been developed by the community? You know, just really going to go and talk to one of the developer advocates for hedera, you know, have a real sit down and have a chat with them and understand what's out there. Yep they are certainly lovely and hardworking people. I feel like around the clock. What is what is next for time? Liz, as we look 6 to 12 months down the road, what are you guys hoping to achieve or if we can take a sneak peek at anything you're willing to share? That is a great question. I would love to tell you absolutely everything. But being a publicly listed company over here, we have to be very careful about what we say. Look, what we really want to do is we want to start bringing on more customers onto the timeless platform I was seeing, really building out and proving out the technology and showing what we're capable of over here and also over. We have projects in Europe as well. It's a truth consortium over there are making great progress with that. And we want to really see some commercial outcomes out of that offer some more pilots and test cases come out of that project over there. We're already seeing some great use cases being developed by the team, so we want to really start building those out and proving us technology when I hope you will come back and keep sharing with us all of your updates. Anything else you'd like to share with the community before we sign off? Covering off everything that I have, I Thank you. Have well, Thank you so much. We really appreciate it. We appreciate you being part of the community and everything that you do. And we look forward to hearing more about your progress really well. Thank you for that. And definitely look forward to coming back. Take care. Thanks Bye bye.