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 Hedera community. Welcome My name is Zenobia Gods talk and I am the SVP of communications at Hedera. I am delighted today to be joined by Stefan dace, who is the co-founder of the Swiss digital asset institute, and Kamal Yousef, who is also a co-founder and President of the Swiss Hashgraph association. Welcome, gentlemen. Thank you, Zenobia. Thank you for having us. Great so, kamal, you have a great history with Hedera. For those who are newer to the Hedera story, can you give us a little bit of background on your journey with hadera? Sure first of all, Thank you very much, zenobia, for hosting us and having us here in this podcast session. It's much appreciated indeed. My journey with Hedera Hashgraph actually goes back to the beginning of 2018 when I first started working and engaging with Hedera Hashgraph executives to identify viable use cases, develop enterprise grade applications and decentralized solutions. In the summer of 2018, there was a vision of creating the Hedera governing council, which is basically a group of up to 39, highly diversified, global trusted organizations to steer the development and the governance, the stability of Hedera network back at that time for a public protocol in the DLT space. This was unique and exceptional. A few months later, we found that Hedera governing council, and I'm proud and honored to be one of the first members of the governing council where I represented swisscom blockchain. I remember the initial co-founders were the Deutsche Telekom and Luisa. No more holding, and in addition, Swartz as the creator of Hedera Hashgraph. These organizations have taken a big step with hedera, Hashgraph and together enabled the third generation public ledger, which combines both decentralization and governance. In addition to that, during my term as a council member, I was also part of the technical steering, the technical steering and product committee of Adena hashgraph, where I had the pleasure of interacting with pioneers and visionaries in the field of DLT, such as and Burt and Harmon and other senior global leaders representing top organizations around the globe. Yes and you have since left swisscom. Can you tell us what you have been doing in the years in between? Yes, I left swisscom in June 2020, and following my entrepreneurial spirit and realizing my global ambitions, I decided to start my own blockchain and digital assets ventures. So I co-founded and invested in technology startups that implement the LTE solutions. So in the last two years, I have had the opportunity to work on international projects, visiting New countries, meeting new people and learning more about their cultures and their projects. I have also worked with governments entities in the Middle East and North Africa to structure and execute digital transformation initiatives, focusing on emerging technologies such as blockchain, IoT and smart cities. So this experience expanded my professional horizon and had an overall positive impact on shaping me as an entrepreneur, as a leader, and as a human being. So it was a very inspiring and transformational journey that enabled me to further expand my professional perspectives, unleash my global leadership potential, and boost my capabilities to drive business transformations in the area of my responsibilities. Wonderful and stephane, can you share with us what is the Swiss digital asset institute? First of all, Thank you very much for being on the call. Swiss digital assets Institute is focused really on enabling startups, enterprises and governments to adapt and be able to compete in the new era of digital assets and decentralized finance. Of course, my background has been in it for the last 20 years, and during that time, especially in the last five years, we've seen a lot of different startups moving to the space of digital assets and be able to leverage this game. Changing technology like DLT. Infrastructure and of course, as part of that journey, what we're trying to do within this digital assets Institute is be able to share that best practice as well as enable startups and enterprises, use this technology to be able to adapt and be able to provide enterprise grade solutions within the space. And kamal, how did you all decide to establish the Swiss Hashgraph association within the Institute and what are its goals? Yes when I reached out to Hedera team, I first presented the idea of establishing a Hedera Hashgraph innovation hub here in Switzerland to support the broad adoption of Hedera network in line with the core values of the governing council and in line with strategic directions of Hedera Hashgraph. I received huge support from the leadership team and also from the governing council. For sure, the idea has been further developed and then at the end, we decided to fight to establish the Hashgraph association or the Swiss Hashgraph association. So we founded the Swiss Hashgraph association with the mission to proactively empower the community, promote the growth of Hedera ecosystem projects, and also confirm our commitment towards enabling the build up of a vibrant ecosystem for DLT transformations here within Switzerland but also around the globe. Yeah, and as per our strategic goals, our goals can be summarized as follows. First of all, we would like to equip Hedera Hashgraph with the community, with the functional and technical know how to drive Hedera projects and deploy viable solutions, leveraging their Hashgraph capabilities. Second goal is to deploy resources to achieve long term success and sustained transformational impact. And last but not least, is fostering business growth and promoting collaboration within Hedera ecosystem. In this context, the Swiss Hashgraph association will identify initiatives with the highest potential and enable the development of the most promising projects by offering sizable grants to empower pioneers, support innovators and entrepreneurs, as well as startups and enterprises here in Europe, but also around the globe. Very exciting. And stephane, can you walk us through the process for getting buy in from the CIA or sorry, sdi? Yes, it's been a lengthy process that we started back, I think it was back in February, March in 2021, where we then designed and custom designed the program for Hedera Hashgraph. The program is based on, let's call it, a three phased approach where we begin with education, learn and discover to discover what the Hedera Hashgraph protocol looks like. And of course all the capabilities that it brings with. Once we go through that first phase, we move into the design and visualization of an actual solution. And that basically means enabling projects to build a proof of concept and be able to visualize the actual functionality of building an enterprise grade or decentralized application on the Hedera network. The third phase is focused on the whole area around develop and deploy, actually putting into place a real end state solution that is basically developed and deployed within an organization. So it's been a lengthy process and throughout that process, we've been able to engage with various stakeholders within our organization, but also externally, including the Swiss government, who have been also very much supportive of the innovation program we've custom designed. So it's been an exciting journey. We're happy to actually get started with the real work now that we've got the approval behind us. Very exciting. So you've talked a little bit about what the programs will look like. How will you measure success? Well, from a program perspective, and I'll allow Kamal to then provide a perspective from the Association. From a program perspective, we're looking at enabling projects to develop enterprise grade solutions. So the success is in terms of things like the number of transactions generated over the network, the number of accounts created, total value locked and various other metrics that are so relevant in this industry today. But what's most important is that we're able to take projects throughout the entire journey, from the initial stages of ideation, all the way to building a proof of concept to an MVP. And at some point in time, hopefully even be able to monetize the solutions that they've developed over the network. So I would say there's a broad range of success factors and depending on the perspective from a startup or an enterprise perspective, is to be able to develop a fantastic solution that they're able to monetize and from the Hedera perspective is also be able to create that significant transactions, account created and total value locked, for example, over the network. I can speak from the Hashgraph association perspective. We apply a comprehensive metric to measure the success of our strategic objectives, which can be then further specified, depending on the nature of each use case project or even the initiative that we are launching. Because let's keep in mind, we are not just for sure, we're supporting projects, we are enabling new use cases and business cases, but we are run also programs and initiatives for each category. There will be different kind of performance metric depending on the nature of the project itself. But the key dimensions of our performance metric are pretty much three pillars that we are looking at. The very first one is the overall community growth and active members of the Hashgraph association at the board levels, individuals, but also corporates or institutions. The second dimension that we are looking at is the number of certified hedera, Hashgraph engineers and business analysts, as well as the number of onboarded universities and business schools for the accreditation and certification program. And the third key element that we are looking at when it comes to performance review is the number of enabled projects and deployed solutions. With major focus on total value locked, active accounts and transactions per second does more or less the key elements or the key dimensions that we are looking at for our performance metric. Very exciting. So as we wrap up here, tell our audience, when will the first trainings happen? Well, we already have the first information workshops performed over the last couple of weeks. So we've been traveling not only in Europe, but also in the Middle East promoting the Hedera innovation program. And we've also had various, let's call it informal workshops, but the first training will be taking place in May when we are on board the first project to take them through the innovation program. And we excited to look forward to that moment. Very exciting. Well, Thank you, gentlemen. If people have are interested, want to know more information? Where should they go? I mean, for more information, I recommend visiting our website or simply reach out to the association at Hashgraph dash association or visit the website, which is a Hashgraph dash association. Great Stephan karmel, Thank you so much for your time. We appreciate it. And we look forward to following you on your journey.
