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[Music] the world stands at the brink of the technological revolution that will fundamentally transform the way we live work play and relate to one another this change is referred to as the fourth Industrial Revolution and is characterized by the exponential growth of the technology and systems that support modern society blockchain or decentralized ledger technology is recognized as one of the key building blocks of the fourth Industrial Revolution although blockchain is still inocent technology it is expected to become a powerful tool in shaping the digital future it is an enabler for decentralized and secure storage and transfer of information supports tracking and transactions that can minimize friction reduce corruption increase trust and empower users revolutionary cases are being explored around the world in almost every sector from finance energy shipping health digital identity land registries and trusted credentialing to the fight against fate news Africa faces unique challenges that are not largely encountered in the Western world and as such requires specific solutions to move the continent forward having one of the most sizable populations which are under or unbanked and completely excluded from the financial services sector makes Financial Inclusion one of the top priorities in Africa covering solutions such as digital identity payments savings and credit blockchain is poised to form the underlying foundation for these solutions which also spend into Tetley news cases such as corruption voting title deeds resource mining and many more there is an urgent need to develop national skills and expertise in blockchain technology in order to leverage this technology to take South Africa forward the Department of Science and Innovation D si6 to boost social economic development in South Africa through research and innovation to achieve its goals the department provides leadership an enabling environment and resources for science technology and innovation a few years ago the DSi developed a roadmap for information and communication technology research development and innovation that is the ICT RTI roadmap the roadmap provides a coherent set of actionable plans for investment in ICT RTI the office of digital advantage was established to drive the implementation of the ICT RTI roamin the deputy director-general of social economic innovation partnerships at the department mister Imran Patel talks about the ICT RTI roadmap and its importance to South Africa ICT RDI roadmap was developed by the DST in partnership of the CSR and in consultation with a lot of private sector partners and the university sector etcetera to identify strategically where South Africa should invest its resources when it comes to research development and innovation ICT is at the heart of the fourth Industrial Revolution if you talk about Internet of Things artificial intelligence or data science and all of these areas were identified in the ICT RTI roadmap however there is a need for example to take account of new developments new technologies for example blockchain is a new technology area that may not have been adequately identified during the the roadmap and also the fact that there's a lot more opportunities for implementing the ICT based technologies in production or in service delivery so like all technology roadmaps it needs to be improved but broadly the ICT roadmap is making a valuable contribution to the development of the fourth Industrial Revolution 2018 the Department of Science and Innovation contracted the Council for scientific and industrial research CSIR and the office of digital advantage Oda to investigate strategies that will support blockchain research development and innovation in South Africa the following issues emerged a lack of technical blockchain resources the lack of support for example knowledgeable supervisors for master's and PhD students the difficulty of making inroads in traditional private sector environments for use cases beyond those of cryptocurrencies lack of access to opportunities and funding the fragmented nature of the blockchain ecosystem in South Africa in order to address these problems the South African National blockchain Alliance Samba was created the DSi is providing seed funding to samba and it is hosted at the office of digital advantage Samba is an ecosystem and federated strategy bringing together government industry startups academia and civil society to drive blockchain forward in South Africa the South African National blockchain Alliance has four main objectives one connecting academia civil society business and government into a pre-competitive collaboration space to support research development and innovation in blockchain technology and is application in these sectors to facilitating skills development advocacy and education on all things blockchain 3 catalyzing blockchain adoption in all sectors of South Africa for leveraging the blockchain ecosystem as a lobbying platform to tackle issues blocking the adoption of blockchain in the country the body helping to drive Sanders objectives is called the consensus forum made up of approximately 15 nominated blockchain experts and enthusiasts within South Africa for a period of two years these members represent a cross-section of the blockchain ecosystem startups industry academia business government and civil society the South African blockchain ecosystem is small but growing and there is a tremendous amount of energy and enthusiasm South Africans have already made names for themselves in this space vini lingham one of South Africa's most successful international entrepreneurs has developed a digital identity blockchain solution called Civic the inspiration behind data come was that we felt that it needed to be open-source community led a marketplace that anyone in the world can use to drive down the cost of ID verification which opens up a whole bunch of new use cases that weren't previously possible the future digital journey is one way the world moves to the digital realm and we get rid of the relics of the past which are paper passports plastic driver's licenses it needs to be digital or these be instant needs to be online verified and trusted on the technical side the senior technical developer for one of the top security forecasts blockchains Manero is ricardo spunky he does all his work from plettenberg bay in this period of accelerated teleworking we can learn a lot from these blockchain techies because of the lack of worldwide technical skills in blockchain digital workspaces are the norm South Africa has always had a very strong banking and financial system in the FinTech space we have gained international recognition for the work done by the South African Reserve Bank as a RP on blockchain sa RP initiated project Kaka as a proof-of-concept interbank payment and settlement system that is based on the quorum blockchain technical skills were provided by the emerging multinational blockchain solutions company consensus based in New York the trial was undertaken over a 14 week period in partnership with South African commercial banks the results showed that the typical daily volume of the South African wholesales payments could be processed in less than two hours with full confidentiality of transactions and settlement finality transactions were processed within two seconds across a network of geographically distributed nodes with distributed consensus providing the requisite resilience sar P was able to view the detail of all the transactions to allow for regulatory oversight this project is the first blockchain initiative based in Africa to receive global recognition as the best distributed ledger initiative award from the central banking publications in Singapore there is a demo of how this works in San Baz digital showcase the South African financial blockchain consortium is a community of financial institutions including banks insurance companies and many smaller players the SAF BC have developed a digital identity proof of concept as a collaborative effort please have a look at the POC demo in sunburst Digital Showcase which shows self sovereign identity powering an all digital fika onboarding and account opening process imagine a world without having to provide your proof of address and identity to every single institution you interact with self sovereign identity is a way for people and businesses to store and update their digital identity information on their own devices and share it with those who need to validate it having your own self sovereign identity means that you can hold update and share your own verifiable credentials much the same way you currently do with paper documents like your passport or proof of residence but in a digital and privacy safe way in the financial services environment self sovereign identity solutions can be used by staff and customers whenever they engage with their bank for example in customer onboarding during the know your customer process for consent receipts bank statements and more the use of self sovereign identities can also lower transaction costs protect people's personal information and limit the opportunity for cyber crime more importantly they promotes Financial Inclusion by lowering the costs to banks of opening accounts financing becomes more profitable and therefore more accessible the following video clip is a technical demonstration of a proof of concept for a new open source based digital identity management app the demo aims to showcase the potential of self sovereign identity solutions as well as show how these tools connect to and use distributed ledger technology this proof of concept is designed for the south african environment and includes three main components a mobile application which has been built by Absa Group Limited a web application built by Bank South Africa and the sovereign network which is the world's first distributed ledger to be purpose-built for self sovereign identity work has been done in collaboration with the South African financial blockchain consortium and thanks go to the following project partners Absa Group Limited Bank South Africa and old mutual limits Odum we are also seeing top-quality blockchain development houses being established Lynam labs is a small South African company based in Cape Town not only are they doing amazing things in South Africa but their solutions are being used around the world for example they developed a blockchain solution in identity for the Swiss Federal Railways the application addresses the problems of certification for Swiss federal railway employees who work on railway tracks Yanam Labs is a product development house with a focus on blockchain technology we have been in the blockchain space developing enterprise solutions and running training and workshops since early 2016 at the gnome labs we believe in the power of decentralized products and open source nature of the blockchain space we have a keen focus on products that will power back in the hands of the end-user we strongly believe that these principles are the foundation of a sustainable future we are a small and agile team our core team is made up of developers entrepreneurs and change making individuals with a wide range of skills and domain knowledge we offer a variety of packages to suit the needs of our clients from corporate and developer training workshops to full stack development it integrates all data extensions feel free interesting products we have a solution for you over the years we have developed various Enterprise projects with top tier international corporations from building decentralized applications and perfect concepts to c-suite consulting to bespoke enterprise and benefit training workshops in 2018 we created one of the first working implementations of a blockchain solution in Switzerland this project was made entity management solution for SBB the swiss federal railway one of our most recent large-scale events was the eath Kazon hackathon in collaboration with eath global and the etherium foundation it was the first and at the time the largest East hackathon event on the continent of Africa bringing innovation home to our roots the event drew in high-profile international speakers instructors and sponsors to the city during this three-day hackathon only 200 hackers created over 33 unique solutions to South African problems one of our favorite projects we have created is molecule cameras catalyst is a decentralized funding platform for the research and development pharmaceutical IP catalyst is a major full-stack dot product developed and launched by minimise it has moved to take orders to Berlin to continue building out to North it's logical which is fractional izing IP ownership of the chemical compounds we have kept up and changed with the times both are new platforms and now we aim to accelerate change we are building the decentralized future we want to see open-source is our philosophy evidence is our foundation and people are our reasons Linum labs bridging the gap between people and web 3 technology [Music] in his State of the Nation Address to a joint sitting of Parliament on 7 February 20 19 % Cyril Ramaphosa said South Africa had chosen to be a country of the future at a time when the world was changing at a fast pace and in a manner that was unprecedented in human history he announced the establishment of the Presidential Commission on the fourth Industrial Revolution it is about developing the technology and capabilities that will build a dynamic competitive economy that creates decent and sustainable jobs it is about enhanced food security better disease management and cheaper cleaner and more efficient energy it is about smart human settlements and Social Development solutions built around people's needs and preferences it is about smarter more responsive and more effective governance to ensure that we effectively end with great urgency hon as these technologies I have appointed a Presidential Commission on the fourth Industrial Revolution comprise this commission is comprised of eminent persons drawn from different sectors of society the Commission will serve as a national overarching advisory mechanism on digital transformation now this is about preparing our country for the future it will identify this commission and recommend policies and strategies and plans that will position South Africa as a global competitive player within the digital revolution space the Commission is tasked with advising the president and government as a whole on relevant policies strategies and action plans to position South Africa as a smart connected and competitive global player blockchain is at the forefront of the technologies that are being explored Samba is happy to announce that two of the commissioners serve on the Samba consensus forum we can only truly make an impact if we work together the World Economic Forum established the center for the fourth Industrial Revolution based in San Francisco in 2017 the c-4 ir is a network for global multi-stakeholder cooperation to develop policy frameworks and advanced collaborations that accelerate the benefits of Science and Technology the South African presidency through the Department of Science and Innovation has established an affiliate Center here in South Africa the centre will be hosted at the CSIR blockchain and distributed ledger technology will be one of the focus areas of the centre in South Africa academia has been relatively slow to embrace blockchain technology however the University of Cape Town created a master of philosophy degree in financial technology that focuses on blockchain at the CSIR we are also investigating various research development and innovation solutions by combining biometrics particularly face recognition and the blockchain this technology is used as an automated access control system to highly secured premises and keeps a secure distributed ledger system about the movement of users who are entering and exiting the building [Music] welcome to the CSI archives I am you Isha Guren and I will be talking to you about our awesome facial recognition access system so I'm gonna give you a little bit more insight to the system the system here as you approach the door it will detect your face if you are recognized it will unlock the door for you and then you will be able to exit or enter the system is a block chain enable system every face is recorded on the block tape as part of access control so we will know who has entered or exited this room see you at all so the aspect of the blockchain comes into play where we have immutable data that is stored on the team so in terms of a security aspect no one can actually go and change the data on the tail so it's in the terms of disaster recovery you have this you have this mechanism so if someone enters this building with malicious intent you have a record of its store on the chain and we have multiple nodes so if one node goes down the rest of the nodes have the chain stored on them so that you have this redundancy layer in place where it's not in one central space that could be compromised so how do you actually know that the blockchain is doing anything I mean you could just take my word for it but I really want to know is it actually storing images what else is being started it so this is a block on the chain for example it means absolutely nothing to the naked eye all the data is encrypted you have no idea what it means so we have created a cool little visualization tool so we can see who actually enters or leaves this room or building and this is the tool currently here so we can see John has entered and then we have super here as well so this is in between the time frame I would say ten minutes so there are probably tons of other applications on blockchain out there but for now this is all taken it thank you so much for watching with the widespread destruction around the world due to the Cova 19 virus is the anyway blockchain technology can help the answer is a resounding yes the World Health Organization has teamed up with IBM and Oracle to develop a blockchain based coronavirus data hub Algar and a public blockchain has launched the I report Kovac app to enable individuals to directly report their Kovac 19 information anonymously we are also proud to announce that a University of Capetown team with collaboration from multiple companies under the leadership of Professor Koch here at developing core vit co VI D enables medical professionals to attest a user's Kovac 19 status security officials to securely verify a user's Kovac 19 status upon presentation of a QR code and public health officials to trace who a user was in contact with once an infection is confirmed and all this while ensuring full privacy to the individuals concerned hi my name is Kavya and I'm one of the cofounders of Cobie ID Cobie ID is an app that allows users to securely store and verify that Kogut 19 status the problem that we are facing as we go through this crisis is that there are three phases of covert 19 and our ideas to use blockchain and self sovereign identity to help with all three phases in the first phase we have a few isolated cases so there's an initial outbreak we have sort of individual cases that are isolated and this is the most important phase because during this phase we can still stop the spread of the without initial national lockdown then fall in this phase when the virus spread cannot be containing while we have the hammer during this phase there's a critical mass of people that have been infected the virus can no longer be contained and it spreads through the entire population once we we have that phase and that's the phase we are currently and nothing but a nationwide lockdown helps to spread to curb the spread of the virus however once the the lockdown ends we enter the third phase which is called the dance during the dance we see outbreaks of the virus spreading again throughout the country and we need to be able to contain each new outbreak of the virus so there are several things that you can do in order to help during each phase of the outbreak so in the first place what we can do is we can use track and trains in order to test so far and trace where a user who has tested positive for kovat 19 has been who he has been in contact with and there are several approaches to this so once a patient shows symptoms she gets tested if she is tested positive for Cove at 19 it's crucial to track down all the contact she has been in contact with over the past two weeks and tell these people to self isolate and get tested as long as we only have a few outbreaks that are distant and not connected to one another this track and trace approach can help a lot in containing the spread of the virus now if that if that isn't possible anymore and we have to use the Hema a nationwide lockdown only this sort of very invasive policy will help to actually curb the spread of the virus and it's a known phenomenon in epidemiological models that if you have reached a critical threshold of connectivity and sort of spread of the virus you need to actually engage into this full lockdown in order to contain it afterwards however we will see several reoccurrences of the virus it's likely that the virus is going to mutate in fact it already has mutated luckily so far all the mutations have been more benign however even with our mutations the exact same virus strain will still spread through the population unless we have a vaccine available at scale and this at the best estimate six to twelve months out so during that time after the logged on but before we have a vaccine what we need is an application that allows users who already had the virus or who have recently been tested to verify that status as they enter public spaces this app is going to be a feature of everyday life think about going to an airport an area where there are so a lot of people and high transmissibility of the virus it would be much safer if you can prove that you have recently been tested and that you haven't had the virus for you and your fellow travelers so what is Cobie ID cobia it is an application that uses a secure decentralized take a store to allow users to verify verify that covert status a user can install the app on her phone and can go to a doctor get tested if the test is positive and the user has corona then the doctor issues a credential saying hey at this point in time I have tested the user she has contracted the virus I admitted her to self-isolation or she has been admitted to a hospital in a in a severe case so this information is stored on the user's phone and will never leave the phone and when the user has recovered she can go to a supermarket an airport or back to university and prove that she already had the virus so that she's no longer susceptible to it she can no longer transmit it to others and in that state she should be able to fully return to the normal life and and back into the economy so the issue that such a trek and trade system which has been deployed around the world has if it's not done in a decentralized way is that as soon as the government starts collecting everybody's geolocation data where everybody was whether or not the head this becomes a target for hackers it is an incredibly attractive very valuable data set that will attract great scrutiny from from hackers around the world and will act as a giant honeypot to which they are drawn in a decentralized application you don't have that issue don't have that cybersecurity risk what is more you can't protect users privacy you can make sure that users don't have an incentive to try to evade the geolocation and the contact tracing because if they start invading these measures the whole purpose would be defeated and we wouldn't be able to efficiently track and trace and therefore we would be much more likely to enter in as another phase of a national shutdown so what we do is we use a self sovereign identity application that interacts with an open standard on a decentralized network using the sovereign the sovereign network which is governed by an independent body to ensure that the standard that we are use is interoperable so that other users can build on the same on the same network and the app allows users to collect the information about their status and about all the contexts they had through Bluetooth contact tracing just as understand in Singapore and through tracking offs of where a user has shown a verification status this will provide an unparalleled picture where eye users have been and allowed track and trace in a much better granularity that any pure geolocation data could in addition the preserving of privacy is in our opinion a fundamental key feature that only blockchain technology can give us because only through the use of blockchain and the self sovereign identity yet we can ensure that users privacy isn't compromised by still delivering the exact same functionality that a centralized system but a centralized system would have we have also thought about users who don't have cell phones which is a large part of the particularly vulnerable populations of effort these users can go to one of our corporate partners flex on the standard bank and get what is called it was totally the wallet so they can go to the bank they can have that picture taken that is added to a wallet SSI wallet which is hosted at Standard Bank Senate bank will then print a laminated version of the QR code that the user can take home or it can be printed on a small ID card and whenever the user has to have to provide a state as she just shows this QR code that can be scanned from a piece of paper without any phone if necessary and will enable her to to prove her covert status even if she doesn't have a phone there's no other technology out there at the moment that allows the track and tracing and the verification of contacts for users without one only Cobie ID we will give you this functionality now using this decentralized data store enables us to eliminate cybersecurity risks that exist in any centralized system because data is not stored in a single place where it can be accessed by a hacker but rather distributed over a network where every user only has the data she needs we reduce the cybersecurity risk we enhance privacy and we greatly improve the efficiency of the track and trade system because if you collect everybody state and a centralized database and you have a single case where somebody has grown at 19 you need to go through the entire rest of the database to find all possible matches this is computationally extremely expensive especially for a system deployed at scale what our solution offers instead is that because we collect only actual contacts but not so continues to your location tracking our system offers the ability to simply go through this list of contacts if somebody has been tested positive for Corona and then inform each and every possible contact in a much better way than a centralized system put much more efficient with Cobie ID it's therefore possible ensure users privacy to provide the track and trace functionality that is key during the first and the third stage of the corona virus spread and by doing all this using the latest possible technology which is blockchain and self sovereign identity use the latest insights from academic research about how we can most efficiently fight the spread of this virus and build an infrastructure that allows us to leapfrog existing technology and make sure that we are ready for the fourth Industrial Revolution Samba is also happy to announce that there were 13 young people and entrepreneurs who underwent technical blockchain development training last Saturday on the 28th of March 2020 the courseware will be made widely available for anyone to access free of charge the number of confirmed attendees at the executive training blockchain event on the 1st and 2nd of April is already more than 60 stay tuned for the digital panel discussion after the launch we have the top blockchain thinkers in South Africa who will be more than happy to answer any questions you may have Samba will leverage some of the great work being done in the blockchain space in South Africa Samba will create an environment where South Africa is able to actively take advantage of blockchain technology and principles in multiple contexts Samba will connect each player to others in the wider ecosystem for the benefit of all this is the only beginning of blockchain in South Africa this is the opportunity to begin anew in a world that will have irrevocably changed when we emerge from the lockdown let's make it a good story the inimitable Bishop Desmond Tutu said hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness let's embrace technologies such as blockchain to make our country a better and fairer place together we can together we are stronger we are happy to officially launch the South African National blockchain alliance sandbar [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause]