At the GBA Blockchain Panel, moderated by Amelia Powers Gardner, a Utah County Commissioner, experts discussed the integration of blockchain in government systems. Dr. Adel Missi emphasized choosing the right blockchain for specific needs, cautioning against inappropriate applications. Jiri Kobelka spoke about the challenges in building blockchain solutions and selecting suitable frameworks.

Silona Bonewald, an open-source and blockchain specialist, highlighted the importance of understanding the community and governance behind blockchain solutions, focusing on aspects like sustainability and financing for government projects.

Key topics covered included the necessity and suitability of blockchain for various projects, security and privacy considerations, governance, scalability, performance, and interoperability with existing systems. The panel emphasized the complexity of blockchain integration in government, underlining the need for careful evaluation of technology, governance, and community support.

Moderator - Amelia Powers Gardner

As we start to talk about selecting blockchain solutions in government, I just have a quick question. How many of you are here from a government agency. Can we get a raise a hands? Fantastic! And how many of you are providers that are selling to government agencies? Okay. We looks like we have more folks from government agencies, which is fantastic. We'll lean a little more heavily on that. I'm going to start by introducing myself. My name is Amelia Powers Gardner. I'm currently a county commissioner in Utah County, Utah. And prior to that, I was the county clerk auditor implemented to blockchain solutions as the county clerk that was voting on a blockchain. I was the second person in the country to do that for overseas and military members and the first to do it for domestic population people with disabilities.

We did marriage licenses on a blockchain. We launched that in 2019 and had that fully functional through Covid and we've done over 50,000 of them. Yes. You heard me correctly 50,000. I currently am on the Utah blockchain task force, the National Association of Counties Telecommunications and Technology board, their blockchain advisory committee and their AI advisory committee and I'm a co-founder of the Utah blockchain Coalition and gov-tech SAS company, called Inogo.

So, blockchain and government is my jam. We're going to give you each of our panelists. I'm going to ask them to take about 2 minutes to introduce themselves and tell us a little about who you are and how you're going to, how your background is going to help us pick a blockchain solution.

Guest - Dr. Adel Missi

So I am Dr. Adel Missi. I already introduced myself earlier on, so I'm gonna give my time to my colleagues here. I'm just gonna add one more thing is that I had the pleasure of having lunch with Amelia last time when we were here before. Great to see you again. Thank you.

Guest - Jiri Kobelka

Thank you very much. My name is Jiri. My background is banking. I spent 15 years in banking as a core banking expert when I was younger and smarter. Then, about seven years ago, I moved to the blockchain space, as a technical person, I learned that it's very difficult to build something in blockchain. So I started a company and we built open source. We built open source framework for developers so they can build easily blockchain solutions.

If you think about the banking the way how it works, you have developers in the bank. They are using dozens of technologies. They can't be experts at the and they shouldn't be and they just use frameworks to make things happen. So, we build this, we have now 170,000 project actually using us. We raised 50 million dollars last year after the market meltdown. So, still good. We have most customers in the US, most non-paying developers using open source are coming from South America and Asia. So, my focus is here, since there is most of the paying customers for us.

Guest - Silona Bonewald

I'll take one hat off and put another hat on. I wear many hats and if you go and look at my LinkedIn profile, you'll see there's a lot on there. But for this one, first of all, I've been involved in open source for over two decades and I actually started off. The reason I went to open source was because of open government and I started working on a project with Bill Bradley and Jimmy Wales from Wikipedia called the transparent federal budget project where we actually created a DLT using Mercurial which kind of lost to get it still out there, but most people use Git and Merkle trees. So, that's the starting off point since then. I've done a lot of stuff along those lines everything from working with nonprofits and doing things of that, doing different types of technologies. I was a VP of hyperledger, I worked at PayPal doing enterprise search and most recently, I helped IEEE launch their open standards program for doing open data, open source, and open hardware. Currently, right now, I'm in the process of launching this new nonprofit. And I'm also working on the business side of it, which is the sideable AI portion. So a lot of stuff.

Moderator - Amelia Powers Gardner

That's great. Sounds like we have a fantastic panel to help us and government pick a blockchain provider for any solution. Well, jump right in. My first question that I would like your guys' help finding solutions for those of us in government, when we look at a problem, how do we determine, is blockchain even necessary? So basically, what type of projects need blockchain? And what are the advantages and disadvantages of utilizing blockchain for projects?

Guest - Dr. Adel Missi

So, let me take a shot on that. I teach students, just graduated students and the very first question every year is what's blockchain good for. Absolutely nothing. If you have to pick the right tool for the right problem, if you want something likd storage a data, like a database. Blockchain is much slower than a database, blockchain is not going to perform the same way and it is more expensive than it. So, you have to identify the problem that you want to solve first and then identify the gap between it and the current solutions that exist out there and then and only then you can pick blockchain in general and then go into like which blockchain.

So, for example, one big thing that you should be considering is do you need to be immutable? Do you need it to be decentralized? Do you need to have access to it in different areas without one controlling gate? Are you going to put some into incentivisation? Are you trying to create some utility tokens for example on top of it? And so for things like with those nature are more blockchain things that are storage of data or stuff like that. I'm sorry, but you cannot create the new blockchain tea Company. Because it does not work.

Moderator - Amelia Powers Gardner

It was a quite a list. Did anyone take a note of all of those things? That was a fantastic list of parameters that we should judge it against. Jiri, do you have any insight on that?

Guest - Jiri Kobelka

No, I think I have nothing to it. I mean that was pretty much it. You know, that's a good point. Blockchain is database, we have databases, we have smart contracts, in normal databases we have procedures, so it's pretty much the same thing, just you can't change it. So it actually brings additional issues, like in life a lot of things are changing, and if you code something in blockchain you can't really change that, unless you break some rules. So then what? You have to think about that as well, not many people think about that actually. So, we have seen a lot of failures technically, and in the architecture of the applications. I agree, that's pretty much, you have to think about it if you really need it, because it's slower, it's going to be more expensive.

Unless, if you have a very good reason why you use that. I don't know, if you guys remember that, but we had and we have SQL databases and then we had noSQL databases and guess what. NoSQL databases, 15 years ago, we had them, no one cared about them. Today, everyone is using a noSQL, even don't question why, they just use them blindly. No one is using SQL anymore except in analytical companies.

So I guess we will get there at some point. But again, it's a data storage. You don't have I mean if you want to store data, that's it. You have to think if you need something immutable.

Guest - Silona Bonewald

I agree that you definitely go and need to look at the features and need to look all of those different aspects before you choose your individual blockchain. There are certain so many elements of the technology. As Bryant was saying earlier, you know, blockchain 91 79, you know 2008, it all depends on like what piece of the technology you decided to focus in on for determining when blockchains arrived to the ethos or whatever, but all of those technologies have existed for a while and different usages and it's sort of the same thing. You just go back to a lot of that and you sit there and you evaluate it based off of that but I say that you have to do a lot more than that in the open source world. You need to do your research. You need to check on the communities. You need to sit there and see what the diversity looks like. You know, if you are choosing to do one of that if you choose to go and attach yourself to an existing blockchain, you need to really research to make sure that that blockchain is going in the direction that you would like for. 

Some of them are focusing on Defi, some of them are focusing on the data like Filecoin, there's a lot of different focuses that are out there and you need to sit there and figure out which of those works for your feature-wise, but you also need to look at their community because that's how you're going to understand whether or not it's sustainable. There's a lot of stuff going on with the Digital Public Goods Alliance where they've done a standard for their digital public goods where they look at a lot of that different thing. Then there's also the digital principles where they look at that as well. I think you really need to look at where the financing is coming through. There's so many different aspects in regards to that, that I have a checklist, but I don't feel like I can outline it here, but you do need to sit there and say how deployable is it, how usable is it, how much do you see other people writing new stuff on it. There's all these different pieces that you need to actually go and look at before you actually adopt that one. 

They were making jokes on Solana earlier and it's like, well, if there's certain things where you notice that they do make those kinds of, they're not as methodical, say, like Cardano, then it's like okay. Well, maybe I want methodical and I want you know, they're focused on academian research so I'm going to go that direction or you go. I want to make sure that I can you know, make lots of money with a whole bunch of different people. So I'm going to go over, and do etherium so I can be over here or you know, there's just all these different reasons for it and you need to know who they are.

Moderator - Amelia Powers Gardner

I think you made a great point especially when it comes to the funding behind it as government entities, we have to be very careful about who we attach ourselves to. Right? Even if we ourselves have not made a misstep, if someone at the organization or the funders of the organization have a compromised reputation than that can reflect on us as a government in the solution we're using. The next question that I wanted to talk about was when we look at a blockchain. How do we judge or what are maybe some of the risks involved with security and privacy data governance and ownership?

Guest - Silona Bonewald

Governance is huge. And that's one reason why I've been participating so much with GBA and other different groups is to talk about the standardization of the governance because if you don't know how that's taking place, you know, bad things can happen - negative takeovers can happen, all sorts of different things can happen. And so, for me, you really do have to make sure that the governance is done correctly and openly and transparently and you can determine whether or not it's going to be safe for you in that matter.

Guest - Dr. Adel Missi

So, you touched on a very good point which is kinda like, who are the people that actually created this blockchain because blockchain did not like exist proof without people actually creating them. So, you wanna know their background, you wanna know if they have been involved with any previous projects before or not, which is very important for government, very important for organizations of big scales. And blockchains, when you come to that, they are different ones. So there are ones that are purely created and then evolved by the community versus one that are more private options like ledger, for example. You can create that and install your private version of it locally in it. And there are blockchains that are geared towards speed and becoming public facing. You have Polygon, you have Solana. There are ones that are designed for institutional access like, for example, Casper.

So, Casper has CTO and CEO that can be held accountable in case of something that needs, you know, where they live, you know all the history about them while you don't know the rest of the public. Cardano has an academic focus. So, if you are thus inclined and you see the record of the academia, then that's your cup of tea to go with it. I'll also conclude with another thing, I am a PhD so, I study different blockchains on how they behave and when you try to study something you have to create some criteria around it. So, besides one that we've spoken about there are other things like TPS, transactions per seconds, and number of transactions that happen on it and then is it upgradeable or not? 

So, for example on all EVMS, normal contracts are not upgraded but if you want to upgrade them, you need to use a proxy contract or a diamond proxy standard to use it. Casper, for example, built with upgradability from the beginning. So, it depends like start with the end at mind. If you are doing something that will always evolve and change and you want to upgrade it all the time. You have to pick something in that can either be architected for upgradability or is upgradable for the beginning.

Moderator - Amelia Powers Gardner

Yeah, that's great point and that actually leads us into the next point that I was going to talk about in that, what types of questions should we be asking when it comes to scalability and performance. I know speed of transaction is a big deal in a lot of the private sector, but in the public sector, if we're not dealing in financial transactions, if we're dealing in maybe records, speed isn't nearly as important as some of the other things. So what types of questions should we be asking around scalability and performance when we're determining what blockchain solution is best for our use case?

Guest - Jiri Kobelka

So, scaling, honestly, we have over those 170,000 projects. We have seen a lot of them failed. Surprisingly, my lesson learned from that is that most of those projects were great as long as no one were using them. That was pretty much what happened. And there's multiple layers of why there was performance or scalability issues. Not that much about the actual blockchain and it was also because they had very wrong architecture of the whole application and the whole design was basically wrong. So, in most cases, it goes this way, but when you are talking about the actual blockchain, the first thing is, you should never bet performance of your app and scalability on one chain. It's pretty much stupid. If anything you will take from this conference, take this, please. This is not about being religious. Oh, I go with Solana or with Polygon or whatever it is. It doesn't matter. They will all at some point crash. Polygon crached couple times last year. So, this is for fact, it's not kind of question if it will happen. It happens all the time. And if you build your solution never build it on just one chain. Because it will not last.

You have to go, if you want to, you should basically go multichain, by design. That would be my advice and we learned that the hardway in past 5-6 years. I mean projects, we have seen.

Guest - Silona Bonewald

In regards to scalability, that's a hard one for me because I'm a nerd and I've done a lot of scalability and so I want to go like super into it. But I know that not everybody here is into that. I would look at just production readiness in general because that's going to tell you more than just scalability because like he brought up the interoperability. You want to sit there and figure out like how do they recover? What does recovery look like? What does it look like for all of those different pieces and all that's kind of like, you know, getting ready for production readiness, you know, like for anything that goes on PayPal it's 90 different steps that you have to do to make sure that everything is there so that you do not take paypal.com down.

And so, you have to go through and look at it from that kind of perspective, and I don't think that everyone's always qualified to do so, which is why I like standards. It's because then I can go and nerd out and nobody hates me, while everyone else thinks I'm too pedantic. But scalability can be important, it doesn't have to be. I think once again, it's the application. If you're looking at something like global supply chain, for example, you need to make sure that you can abstract out your cryptography, right?

Because if you want to start off in China or Russia, you're gonna have to go use theirs, and then you're gonna bring yourself over and you don't want to keep using theirs because you don't want them to continue spying on all of your commodities. So, you have to put yours in, and then you want to abstract out the identity portions, right? So, that way you can do the dids and you can work over here. And then you want to do the interoperability portions with some of the other chains, and oh hey, could we do a side chain where we could then go and optimize for speed and make sure that we have all the security protocols there with verification applications. You know, it's just, do you see what I'm saying? There's a lot. 

A lot of pieces there and I think for a lot of it go back to some of your old school software production readiness people and make sure that all those pieces are crossed.

Guest - Jiri Kobelka

If I can add just one thing. Also what happens a lot what we are seeing very very often is that people are testing scalability. They just do few operations, few transactions surprisingly when you scale out it is going to start behave differently. We had a client, they were minting 1000 NFTs per minute. And then that's very different case when you mint 1 NFT per hour.

So, when they started to mint 1000 actually, they become collisions, they had a lot of issues. They never anticipate it and then they actually couldn't catch up right and so a lot of other issues and that goes with work. Production readiness is huge topic and I think we should be using back to mindset when we build that free projects it just another technology in our stack. It will change the world hopefully, but I mean it's not changing the way in the process, the way how we are building things. We should still think about what we are doing and I don't see that very often in free space.

Guest - Silona Bonewald

I think that there's a lot of different applications where speed isn't an issue. If you wanted to do confidential documentation. Databases weren't actually made for security to be inherent to it. Instead, while blockchains were. So, now you can encrypt everything and then use the blockchain itself. Instead of all these other applications, you use it for chain of custody, permissioning, and providence. And then suddenly, OK, now you've got a better way of doing that. And what's the speed hit? Well, the speed hit is entering that to the database, which isn't significant. You should have been tracing that already on your other existing database systems. And if you weren't, shame on you. And then, which is probably going to be the same. And then the encryption. And once again, if you're not doing that, also shame on you.

So, you know, I think that there's there's a lot of different things and that's why sometimes I get nervous about saying blockchain because I never know what piece of the technology it is that you're talking about and why. That's why as he said at the very beginning you have to start off knowing what it is you want to do and why you want to do it that way and then a good technologists should be able to tell you what those different pieces on what those options are. You know, like I said in 2004, I did did Mercurial with Merkle trees because Merkle trees have existed since 1979 and I learned about them in the 80s. 

Guest - Dr. Adel Missi

So I want to like switch the question a little bit is you don't ask what but actually ask whom. So, if I were you and you are trying to pick a blockchain don't go and consider the marketing materials just to look at the most active developers in that space invite him or her to a nice dinner have some chats on a and just by the time they had a couple drinks they going to start telling you and spilling the beans and you know, what's happening in that ecosystem and then repeat with the other ones and then out of those determine which one you want to go with because even with any blockchain they do upgrades they do changes and all of a sudden all your code is broken and fires everywhere. So we want to know like how the upgrade how do you work with this? And what would be your upgrade strategy plan to do this?

Moderator - Amelia Powers Gardner

Well, this is a fantastic advice as a government official do it within the bounds of your of your gift policy for your government entity.

Guest - Silona Bonewald

Well, and that's why I brought up governance, right? I mean, if you don't have some form of governance in regards to that, where the community is making a decision, and if your community is not diverse, you're gonna be leaving a lot of people out. And there's gonna be a lot of different things that happen in regards to that. Way too often, I see a community where it's just too much tech dudes, and you don't have any minorities, you don't have any people that are disenfranchised, you don't have any of that going on, and guess what? They invent some dangerous systems, because they can handle that risk.

So you need to look more deeper at it, and that's why I sit there and say, you really have to look at the community, and you really need to look at the governance, because those are the people who are gonna make the decisions about that application.

You know, like the Linux Foundation with Hyperledger, what it did is it brought a whole bunch of different companies together to make those decisions. And that's how they go forward and then they also have you know, a marketing steering committee which then helps with the features and the differentiations and things of that nature. When I was at IEEE, I created a community one where the nonprofit's could actually come in and have their say as well and it's just kind of like you have to go and look and sit there and seat for government are your people actually being represented and will it fit for your people?

Moderator - Amelia Powers Gardner

Yeah, and I think you make a great point when we talk about risk tolerance. It's kind of a joke in my state. That my risk tolerance is significantly higher than most elected officials risk tolerance and it is infinitely greater than my lawyers risk tolerance, right? My risk tolerance is a little bit worse. I am an engineer and so I make more money in the private sector than I do in the public sector. So I'm a little I'm willing to be a little more Cavaliers like challenge me on elect me and I'll go back to the private sector and make money again.

But but when you're looking at your solutions in your government, look at those who are the ones that the news is going to call if things fail and see what their risk tolerance is, right? There might be times that you see a blockchain that is looks really sexy to you but it's a little bit too risky for that government application. That was a great point.

I want to move into our next topic and that is interoperability and typically in the tech world when we talk about interoperability. We're looking at other tech systems that we need that interoperability with but in the government space we need to think of not only other tech systems, but we need to look at interoperability with their existing systems.

So, when I implemented blockchain solutions into voting and into the marriage license process for my county, we had to do it in a way that had interoperability with paper ballots. We had to do it in the voting space. We had to do it in a way that had interoperability with the antiquated database that tracked all marriage certificates for the state of Utah. And so, as we're looking at these solutions, can we talk a little bit about interoperability and the types of things I would like you to address are things like other systems, other government entities, implementation, but also future compatibility as the world becomes more tech and more metaverse.

Guest - Silona Bonewald

So I spend a lot of my time in Europe because they want to hear what I have to say about blockchain the most because the European nations are realizing that this is what they're having to do right because they want to sit there and have the European commission, you know identity becomes a huge piece on that and we have it in the United States to between state and federal and things of that nature. And what do we have all of that look like? In fact right now? I'm going to out myself. I have one birth date on my passport because I messed up and one birth date on my driver's license because Texas actually has my correct birthday that the systems are not intertwined. So nobody knows that right and so I have to like juggle with the airplane industry and everything else to like figure out which birthday I'm going to be using today and in which context and by the way in Europe I got bit on that big because Europe went ahead and did everything off the passport. And then when I tried to use my driver's license, they're like, nope. You can't board the plane. 

So, you know, you have to like figure out those on the interoperability, but also with the system's itself. I feel like for some of those different pieces you really do have to crack that identity nut on that for government. That's when that I see that comes up very often and how do you do that abstraction when I was at Hyperledger, that's one reason why I talked to India about abstracting out Aires was so that you could have the dids being abstracted and they could come to and now we have now they have another group foundation, I don't know, at the Linux Foundation that is also working on the dids and the identity aspects for standardization on that, so that you can be interoperable. Because we are talking about global supply chain now, right? And we are talking about being global citizens and what that looks like. And so if we want to do things like address CO2 or if we want to do things like, you know, where my car was made or any of those different pieces, we have to figure out what those portions are going to be. 

Guest - Jiri Kobelka

So, I can comment on the technical side of interoperability. Of course, when it comes to interoperability, this is, as I mentioned before, multi-chain, that kind of goes with cross-chain as well. That means for us, what we see the interoperability is one of the most important topics.

Again, you should not bet on one chain. Anyway, so the best way how to move forward from my perspective is basically not to write for one specific your app or project or for one specific chain. You should be actually abstracted. You should be abstracted from that one chain. You should be able to work on any chain you would like to in the future because you don't know what will happen with that chain in time. You cannot bet on them even hyper logic and you know kind of maybe die.

Moderator - Amelia Powers Gardner

Even if it doesn't die, we started our marriage licenses and our marriage certificates on the Ethereum blockchain and where it's very stable. It's also gotten incredibly expensive and so we buy our seals in batches of 10,000 when we get to the end of this batch of 10,000. We have to switch to a new blockchain because in the government world we can't afford to be charging those gas fees for a basic identity document, right?

Guest - Silona Bonewald

And so I was just going to say, you know, as he was saying make never put data on the blockchain, please abstract your data. You can do what he's talking about eventually and yes definitely evaluate the blockchains on their ability to do things like cross inside and things of that nature but yeah, just yeah don't do that. 

Moderator - Amelia Powers Gardner

Especially PI, I don't ever put personally identifiable information on a blockchain never even if it's a private blockchain, put a hash.

Guest - Silona Bonewald

Always put hash and always if you can like I said try to abstract in regards to it so that when you if you do need to port it you will be able to port.

Guest - Jiri Kobelka

Except. One day, once we will have zero knowledge protocols in place on those chains, and it will be actually viable which is not because in most cases what chains are doing and I'm furious about it is trying to use zero knowledge for hiding transactions which is quite opposite I would like to see actually. I'm all about transparency and hiding transaction is against transparency, but if you think about zero knowledge in terms of disclosing the data is this person in the bar me over 21. Yes. No, that's good. That's good enough. That would change the world I think zero knowledge if you are not into that check it out. It's going to be much bigger than anything else we have seen so far.

Moderator - Amelia Powers Gardner

Absolutely to get into a bar, they to know  your 21. They don't need to know your birth date and your address and your eye color. All right, we will good in about two minutes. We'll go to questions if that's okay. 

Guest - Dr. Adel Missi

So, I just want to come with a little bit of a different point of view because I grew up across the globe. So, I was born in the Middle East, grew up in Europe and then half of my life is spent here in the US. So, if you think that we have problems here with government agencies and all that stuff. You haven't the faintest clue. I mean, I would say there are places where you would spend months trying to get your driving license or a replacement or stuff like that. So, everyday I tell my kids you are lucky that you've been born in this country. Not anywhere else. That's number one, number two is, that was yesterday and today unfortunately, there are areas now that are moving better. So for example, Estonian all the entire government is electronic and they are moving very quickly, Dubai, Middle East. So everything there is moving into blockchain and everything is electronic as well. So, it's true that we have it good. It's true that we have really advanced systems, but those have been built by our grand fathers not by us. So, we need to update our infrastructure for our kids and grandkids and that starts with interoperability and utilization of cutting-edge technologies. Like what the media is doing.

Moderator - Amelia Powers Gardner

All right, we're going to move into our question and answer period I do ask that when you ask a question that you ask a quick question and not tell us a story after 30 seconds. We will cut you off and we will bring it to our experts for an answer. So do we have a quick question myself at the back?

Question 1

It was discussed under the category of interoperability, but is that specific kind of problem more about the two agencies not speaking to each other or sharing data, or is it more of a technical roadblock or obstacle that needs to be overcome?

Guest - Silona Bonewald

I don't want it to be a technical aspect to be overcome because honestly, I don't want them all sharing all of my information all over the place. That's why I do want the zero knowledge proofs and I do want the verification mechanisms where the data is not, I don't want everybody passing around my information everywhere. I don't want the state of Texas coordinating with the federal government, which is also oh, hey look you went to California. So, now it's going to go to California now and oh look you were you flew on a plane to here. So, now it's going to be here now too. I really don't want that. I don't want that proliferation. And so that's why I'm so into the blockchain aspects because I've been involved in the identity world for a long time. I'm Silona Bonewald. My name has been a unique identifier since computer. So, I've got a history on the internet. I realized when all my dirty jokes went from usenet into the web that I was kind of screwed because I used my name. I was a teenager. I wasn't thinking about it yet. You know, I didn't think in the 80s we were thinking. You know this is going to happen. I just thought it was fun to sit there and trade dirty jokes with people. But yeah, I don't want the proliferation. And so that's why it's a bigger problem in what I said like the EU now does have my information because of me flying there and going through all of their visa processes. So, now basically all across Europe they think that my birth date and it's not. 

Question 2

So, I travel a lot also in years my follow-up question and especially now where it takes a year to get your passport renewed. I have to imagine that if the TSA has a different date of birth for you than your state driver's license. That is a logistical nightmare because if the TSA spot that this is not your birthday. I have to imagine that you get all kinds of special time in that side interview room.

Guest - Silona Bonewald

Yes. There's been multiple times where I just carry my passport with me so that I can just show it instead of my driver's license. At this point because of the fact that it's become so prevalent on so many of those internet work systems that now I have the wrong birthday and I don't know how to unwind it because I do international travel about every one or two months and there's no way I can do without my passport to fix it and not to mention. I still haven't figured out how I'm supposed to fix it. 

Moderator - Amelia Powers Gardner

Right. Do we have any other questions?

Question 3

This is for you Amelia. You mentioned the gas fees on the Ethereum blockchain, right? Why don't you just use the XRP Ledger instead?

Moderator - Amelia Powers Gardner

Right. The reason why is because when I developed this, I developed this in 2019. And so there really wasn't enough mature technology to be able to use for government systems. And so we're coming to the end of our seals the batch seals that we have for etherium. But thankfully I'm enough of a technologist that I did it walked a an agnostic so that it'll be an easy switch. And so we're in the process right now of analyzing other solutions and do they meet our criteria so that we can switch which really goes to Jiri's point, that's how you need to develop it so that you can have that mobility as a solution for government.

I think we have time for one more question.

Question 4

Question for Amelia, when it comes to when you change your blockchain technologies, how does that impact your customers experience as a validation method changed as a user experience change or is it all the same?

Moderator - Amelia Powers Gardner

No, it's all the same. So, I mean as your typical user on the back end like if you are a merchant and you're selling goods and you're taking a Visa card, nobody on the back end knows if you switch your bank from Bank of America to Wells Fargo, right? That's all behind the scenes. So, it's the same concept that when we give someone a digital marriage certificate the process that they go through to verify that will lead them to Etherium change that they can see this hash was registered by the county of by the government of Utah County.

And that this document is unchanged, our verifier tool will still do the same thing except for on a marriage certificate that is issued in 2024, it's gonna lead them to a different blockchain for verification. But they won't see that. As the individual, I actually did this with the beta was with my own marriage certificate. So, I could show people without giving other people's information. So, with mine, when people verify as a user, I still have the same digital document with the same QR code that brings them to the seal. So the user experience doesn't change but you can shift. 

Thank you so much to our panelists. This has been a great panel. If you guys have any questions, come up and ask us. The one topic we didn't get to was procurement rules, which is okay because it's after lunch and everybody would have fallen asleep anyway. But if you have questions on that, I can answer those later. Thank you so much everyone.