Giga: How Can Blockchain Help Connect the Next Billion | Devcon Bogotá

foreign [Music] to close out the day we have an interesting panel how can blockchain help connect the next billion I'd like to welcome our panelists Anda salima gabin and Rajesh along with naroa as moderator just a couple of quick words on naroa naroa zuratula it leads the mapping and Tech work for Giga UNICEF prior to UNICEF neroa lived and worked in various company lived and worked in various companies in Kenya from a startup that is trying to change the world understanding agriculture to a non-profit empowering local entrepreneurs through access to finance neural holds in Masters in electrical engineering from Stanford University and a masters in telecommunications engineering from ehu upv Nara is also a proud EF fellow please join me in welcoming our panelists and naroa hi hi everyone can you hear me yeah perfect thanks thanks so much for joining us today especially I know it's the last session of the day so we appreciate you being here and we actually have a quiet interesting and diverse panel here so I'm sure that you'll enjoy the time as as a title says we'll be talking about Giga and about how blockchain can help connect the next billion but what's what's Giga it's a partnership between genius of an itu to connect every school to the internet and every young person to information opportunity and choice by connecting schools we in one hand equip young people with the skills they need for the future and at the same time we build digital economies for the communities that are around are around these schools there are many connectivity initiatives out there I always say that what's different and unique how Giga compared to others it's that we use data and Technology to make the whole process more efficient and more transparent in particular blockchain Technologies and that's that's why we are here today the the panelists will have a discussion about the blockchain applications they are building and that they are implementing and deploying in different countries the applications go all the way from staking nfts tokens smart contracts and others and with further Ado I'm Gonna Let each of them introduce themselves okay great uh hi everyone my name is andang NABA I serve of the chief of operations at the UCT Financial Innovation Hub where we translate the latest academic research into novel blockchain applications before this I served as an analyst at convergence Partners a TMT focused private Equity Firm uh focused on sub-Saharan Africa and great to be here thanks thanks and great to be here also thanks for inviting me I'm Rajesh I'm one of the founders of launch nodes and our whole reason for being is to help people become self-sufficient ethereum stakers so um it's great to be here and we're looking forward to sharing more um hello everybody my name is Salim Abba I'm a state Council um from the directorate of science technology and Innovation which sits within the office of the presidents of Sierra Leone I mainly well over the past two or so years I've been leading the project coordinator coordination as well as some of our policy work thank you and my name is harvankana I work as the blockchain lead for Giga at UNICEF uh thank you so much nice to be here um so Herman let's start with you you work at UNICEF and UNICEF is not the type of organization that people would think of that's working on blockchain that's building Tech products and can you tell us a little bit about gigas the team uh how it works what type of work you do sure so um Giga sets uh inside the office of innovation at uh at UNICEF and we're a kind of small team of like 40 people approximately and we operate kind of like a startup within a UNICEF itself um are there any like blockchain developers in the room maybe could you guys stick your hands up yeah so uh we're we're growing our Tech Team uh we actually have a position open right now uh if you wanna come talk to me afterwards um but uh basically so far we have uh connected approximately a million students to the internet uh and the challenge that we really face is how to connect the next the next billion so to do that we see uh blockchain sort of adding value in a couple of different ways uh the first one is uh we estimate uh needing approximately 428 billion dollars to connect the world schools so our biggest sort of uh well our first sort of use case is moving all this money around and getting it to the right places in a way that's transparent and efficient and uh and affordable um the second option that we see uh value in is uh automating payments for connectivity so using smart contracts and monitoring connectivity in schools to automate payments to internet service providers um then we also focus on nfts so at the beginning of this year we launched uh the un's largest nft collection called Petra kingdoms um where all of the royalty uh goes to uh fund Giga goes to help support Giga uh so that's that's that's kind of a neat thing uh and we're also working on follow-up projects uh for that uh that particular project um and we're also investigating um if like Innovative financing uh solutions to pay for the operational expenses of connectivity so uh one of them is connectivity credits uh another one is where we're looking at uh using staking to allow people to uh to stake their their eth and generate uh returns for uh for paying for connectivity um but basically we work with governments um to try to convince them to give us like a regulatory sandbox to try these things out try them for the first time so that we can scale them up later and deliver some impact um so far the most of the projects I mentioned are sort of in the MVP stage um and we're seeing some promising results so we're looking really forward to uh to making an impact in the coming years good perfect as you said I think for the ones that for people that are not familiar with UNICEF we operate in one 90 countries around 190 countries and something special or different about assets that we work very closely with governments that all the product solutions that Herman was describing we work closely with governments to implement them in country and that's where salima you come from the other side of the person where you see within the government of Sierra Leone and so I like to tell us a bit about this unique or different uh directorate of Science and Innovation that you have in your country our setup how it impacted the Innovation ecosystem in the country and the work you do sure so the directorates of science technology and Innovation was established by the current government in 2018 and the main mandate is really to leverage the use of science technology and Innovation to support the government deliver on its National development plan so by that we work across various sectors and we've all also developed a 10-year National Innovation and digital strategy which is our 10-year plan to digitally transform Sierra Leone and we focus on three key areas which is digital economy digital identity and digital governance and as I said because of where we sit we really in a space where we're in a position to work across various sectors that includes the private sector we work with various private sector Partners in Sierra Leone out of Sierra Leone to really support the development of our local ecosystem because one of our aims is to really establish civilian as an Innovation Hub one of the works that we've done is to kind of work with the private sector to develop an ecosystem mapping of the Innovation sector in Sierra Leone so being able to know what the different services and players are within the field or the place where we work is we work with our public sector partners that is all the different government Ministries departments and agencies basically supporting them in the different work that they're doing seeing how they can use Science Tech and Innovation to really achieve the government's agenda and also finally one of the key areas where we work is our International Development Partners we work with various International Development partners and one of our main Partnerships has been with UNICEF from the start the UNICEF Innovation office in Sierra Leone has been really key to the work that we've been trying to do in one area where we've really worked closely is to support the government in its educational agenda which the flagship of the government's human capital development agenda with um we so with that we've really worked on various projects um such as Giga which we're talking about today we've also worked on other um actually even before officially Giggle was announced we worked with UNICEF to map the geolocations of all the schools in Sierra Leone so that was really key to us in Lane that found the groundwork for the work that we're doing now with um Giga but then one of the other projects that we're really also proud of that we've worked with UNICEF Sierra Leone is on learning passports which is really a partnership with Giga they kind of go hand in hand so um that's kind of sort of the work that we do within the space in Sierra Leone and so we're really um happy and excited to be here and we'll be talking about some of this work in a little bit before that now we want to uh can you still hear me yeah and we want to announce an exciting project that we've been working on for the last year in partnership with the ethereum foundation under Rwandan government uh it's the first time that we are publicly speaking about this so we are quite excited about it and yeah they make it it's just fantastic thank you for that um so yes um we have a video coming up very shortly which kind of explains more about this project um so rather than kind of spoil that let me just give you the outcome and the outcome is that Rwanda now has a solo staking infrastructure which means that it can use staking rewards from staking ethereum to fund internet connectivity in schools and that's a world first and pretty exciting um so yeah that's that's been great um the other thing I'd like to say is we're really narrow at a stage where the proof of concept's been running for a year it's been successful we've seen the outcomes from that and we're inviting the broader ecosystem to get involved so we want our competitors to get involved we want um you know developers we want other people involved in the ethereum EK system to take up the Baton now and to move this forward um you know no one entity can do this gig has been fantastic in kind of capitalizing the whole program we've had support from the ethereum foundation and elsewhere but um you know 50 of schools in the developing world don't have internet connectivity right now there's thousands of there's billions of dollars staked on the ethereum network at the moment some small fraction of that could certainly help change change lives so that's really what we're what we're saying here um and I think the final piece really is to say the technological aspects of this were one part of the project but really the other challenge was um you know bringing people together bringing people along this journey two years ago there was no such concept as ethereum staking it hadn't been launched um and yet here we are um effectively two years on and the random government has done something which no other country has done so far and that didn't happen by accident you know it there's been a lot of kind of negotiation workshops working groups education sessions briefings um to bring us to this point and in particular um leadership on the ground from the leader of of Unicef in country and Rwanda Juliana has been amazing um Minister ingebora has also driven this project forward we've had support from the Ministry of Education Finance um a Central Bank of of Rwanda um and ICT and really everyone coming together and working collaboratively has made this happen and it's a model now that we hope we can um scale across the world can I ask a quick sort of follow-up question about that bcid so I'm I'm sure all of you guys are wondering like why is this so complicated like staking just makes sense right like why why aren't we doing this so maybe can we talk a little bit about like why why is it so complicated to do this in in a country like Rwanda yeah so so again two years ago staking wasn't even a thing and if you imagine the complexity of getting anything changed in a country it's it's pretty difficult I think salima's probably got more insight into you know how to make that happen than anyone else here but um you know it does take regulation and to change it does take people to really grasp the concept and you know you know we've been immersed in this for years no doubt a lot of people here will have been involved in ethereum and other blockchains I'm explaining that to people and taking them on this journey isn't a straightforward thing it takes a lot of Courage a lot of um you know bravery really to to kind of adopt this as a concept and to take it to government departments and say this is something we want to do so a lot of that time hasn't been um installing servers and putting software on on devices it's been around the table and and with your support and narrowers and others so that's that's really why it's been complicated and I'd say that it's also linked to the regulation around crypto whether a given country it's a lot to hold crypto or not um so link to that for this first payload and after many back and forth we decided that we're gonna have the node hosted on the cloud instead of locally the way of this decision and maybe elaborate also on the pros and cons of each of them like a locally hosted versus cloud yeah so that's a that's a great Point um along this journey there have been a range of kind of key decision points what um ethereum client that we use where do we want the infrastructure to be hosted should it be Cloud should it be um you know on-premise somewhere um and I'll start by saying our whole philosophy kind of aligns very closely with the ethereum foundations which is geographic diversity is key and having diversity of a kind of software client is is really important as well we don't want any like we don't want there to be too many people hosting in one particular place that's that's our strategy um and the reason I stress solo staking is so important is because it makes people self-sufficient which again is part of our our approach um so for practical reasons for Speed reasons um for resiliency reasons it made sense to use the cloud for the proof of concept effectively longer term we want every school to have a node we want everyone to be um you know communities being able to stake and and run their own infrastructure um and that would be a fantastic achievement when that happens long wait there but I agree with that and salima she's one of the first ones starting the journey towards that that goal where is Sierra Leone you are actually setting up or in the process of setting up a lot I know that's locally hosted um yeah so I think um we've gone um in terms of the proof of concept but I think we've started with looking at um a physical um hosting instead of cloud but I think um this is where collaboration and one of the things actually we've also tried to do is an engagement with some of our other government around who are also doing the same thing we've had a couple of engagements with the Rwanda government and the point is to really learn um learn and together learn lessons and making sure that you know we're all working towards the same goal um so for us as I said we've really looked at how we could um lay the initial groundwork for hosting a physical node as you she said obviously we will also want to be in the position where every school does have like a physical notebook also but we're not at that place yet um looking at um the different challenges that we face so one of the things which we wanted to do was looking at the possibility of Hosting notes with um specific um internet service providers so for the initial preparation for that we've kind of sourced um the hardware that will be required we have an agreement in place with one of our internet service providers who would also be one of the service providers actually providing connectivity um to the school um I think we're in the last stage of preparation and we're hoping I think would have been the very near future to officially launch uh um physical um node and yeah fantastic no that's great and another thing that we're hoping is going to be the norm moving forward is our internet service providers taking crypto as well as payment but because you know that what part of the hurdle right now is you'll have to convert from ethereum to fiat currency to pay for a service you know we've we've had conversations with isps where they've said no we'll happily take payment in ethereum and that I think will be the future as well yeah not um I think same as sincerely under conversations we've had with our isps has been very um encouraging I think um where the conversations now is at is with our other government Partners public sector Partners looking at the national the bank of Sierra Leone who regulates that space and the ministries of finance and that kind of sort of thing just making sure I think um I think the initial conversations around the legislative framework to do this kind of sort of thing I think that's been the areas where we've been having the more conversations around but then also look making sure we have the infrastructure as well um ready for that yeah and another thing to mention I think is the road map for ethereum clients means that it will be a lot easier to host nodes you won't need you know the resiliency and and the you know to store full versions of the blockchain in the future so again it's going to get easier and easier for people to host their own notes which is fantastic what I find really interesting to to sort of hear is uh it seems like everybody's kind of on board with this uh everybody like thinks it's a good idea but still it's like so difficult so how do we how do we talk to governments and help them understand and help them shape their policy I don't know salima do you have any insights in in into that yeah as the government representative um I think it's it's a combination of several factors in terms of um why we currently don't have it and what can be done I think um for me where I see I think that it's about highlighting where the opportunities are um with this I think first of all the opportunities with regards to blockchain especially when we talk about um Giga and how that could be utilized for smart contracts and used to um improve the relationship with internet service providers provide better accountability and monitoring and transparency I think um highlighting those opportunities are great in terms of getting everybody on board but then I think also beyond that there's a bigger opportunity with regards to most of these emerging Technologies when you deal with um the government or traditional governments such as hours my thinking it's about opening up the space for learning I think it's about improving the local expertise within uh different nations and it's about improving awareness so one of the things we're excited at the SDI about Giga specifically is looking at because we we believe in leveraging the use of the most high-tech technology you can find as well as the most not low-tech but the most useful for our current situations looking at we also utilize things such as ussd and those kind of platforms because we consider our local context issues such as electricity and internet penetration rates so all those are important but with Giga and blockchain and possibly even looking at cryptocurrency to as payments the opportunity for this our government is to Pilot these Technologies within a very small space which will hope then raise awareness allow us to learn about the these emerging Technologies then use the data and evidence to really develop really effective legislative and Regulatory Frameworks that would better support and enhance this so we want to get ahead of the pace we know um these Technologies are coming whether we like it or not so the opportunity with this is really to provide a pilot where we can really use this as an opportunity to learn much more about it which would then enable us to better regulate regulate it so I think that's where the opportunities and the learnings and it's about really showcasing that to get everybody on board exactly and showing its value right and one of them telling to say I don't know if it's a challenge but usually face it that we have to communicate super technical and complex work to to people that are not technical or don't necessarily understand the technology and what happens sometimes it's that if you mention the word crypto smart contract to someone that doesn't understand it then they get scared and they just say no we are not on board so the moment you start proving it starting small and making small things and small steps then I think they understand the value and they start becoming more comfortable uh I guess from outside as well on your point coming from an emerging market like South Africa to drive cryptocurrency adoption you need to meet them halfway so one of our PhD candidates has actually developed a solution where you can send cryptocurrency via ussdn SMS we'll start looking for use cases we've spoken to one ISP who actually approached us saying oh this could actually work dating people and communities pay for for internet connectivity so those conversations are still ongoing but that whole project made us realize that we can't just ideate in silos and think you know people from South Africa from Sierra Leone whatever who made their software we need to go to them and bring the solutions to them you know be even with speaking about blockchain and everything they don't even have to necessarily know that it's a blockchain in the background I always have this argument with people they'll be like you have to educate everyone about blockchain and this and that but how many of us know how a light bulb works you know you just when you turn it on how many of us know how our Acorn works you just turn it on so I think this this uh you know this view that you have to educate people about everything you want to blockchain and this and that for them to be on board it is incorrect and we should rethink that we've been around we need them to be on board to to make everything work and we all know that ISP is usually for the mitc to go to cities to to run areas and it's harder harder to convince them to go to more remote Community Schools from your experience working with the private sector what type of incentives business models would need to to make them also go to places that maybe are not as easy to connect yeah I think you know there's obviously tax incentives that South Africa is now put into place but one thing we looked at is the tokenization of the Lost mile infrastructure so maybe you could have a big private sector player private Equity Firm put the capital expenditure at the beginning and then resell that after three or four years when they find life cycles now coming to an end to local communities you know and then the uh Raven was able to get in the interim can then sort of subsidize the resale price so they may not need the large multiples that you need in terms of a general sale and why something like that would also work very well I know we once invested in a fiber asset in Ghana and a few other countries and we're struggling to know but we were struggling to sell it now to a third party because we could only set it in the sort of the 25 we owned it but if we could tokenize that 25 we decided to local isps we could sell it to people you know with who have extra money we're not just want to help other people but because the I guess the framework wasn't there yet we weren't able to do that so you know on your point as well how much was it 428 billion and I know in Africa alone it's 100 billion dollars we can't look to the financing mechanisms that we've done in the past to sort of solve future issues we have to completely rethink how we do it and things like blockchain and tokenization I think will be you know the the key to doing that I mean absolutely like nobody likes making Banks even richer right so nope not me no no definitely not anyone at this conference either and that's something that egg itself is experience as well this organization and be Lina token system that aware schools are granted a certain amount of tokens based on how difficult it is to connect them and then providers if they decide to go to schools that are harder to connect a daily get these tokens and they'll be able to exchange these tokens for a set of incentives um maybe one thing there is that again for these incentives we have to work with the public sector so I guess highlighting the necessity to work with all the players in in the in the market all the way from the private sector to the public and have them have conversations together good yeah I think as well Academia so from I now work at the University of Cape Town and it's uh often there's a place that we don't consider so we really now translate this sort of academic research on my PhD Masters level to blockchain applications and I think we also need to come to the table now because you need a new way of thinking like I was saying a private sector company that's been making huge margins from selling connectivity for 10 to 20 years they're not going to change how they do it you know you need new people now to come to the table and challenge the status quo which is what we're trying to do at the Hub yeah I think I think that but I think that's a really interesting um sort of contradiction because on one hand we have to like rethink all these things and on the other hand if you want people to sort of join you on that Journey you have to work with their systems and you have to you know make them understand that way and I don't say it as um Old World versus New World in a second wait it sounds like you do I think you know big corporates are coming along for the journey now increasingly they're understanding what blockchain's about they're looking at their own proof of Concepts and Pilots um and and yes you know they've got other motivations potentially but um you know this is this is an opportunity for everyone the way we see it and and that you you work again closely with startups in the region more in general what are some of the trends around blockchain and around startups that you see in the African region uh so around blockchain we're now seeing less uh Financial sort of use cases so we're now looking at a decentralized data marketplace where data creators can actually sell their daughter to other people that could now be used maybe final connectivity for example we also have an nft startup that is working with content creators to let them share Revenue based on their contribution to a work so he's particularly working with uh authors and wants to work with illustrators now so I write a chapter for a book you write a chapter four book and my tree gets more views will get remunerated more so those are some of the interesting use cases we're seeing the Manda money one I explained earlier about the ussd cryptocurrency payments as well it's on the financial side so it's quite an exciting space and I mean our hubs only been operational for about 18 months and we have six spindle startups now let's just come from academic research which has been really beautiful to see maybe some people that are in the universe some of these startups none you could share we I'll connect you guys yeah her when following Trends before you spoke about some of the past work or work that Giga has been doing could you give us a sneak peek of what's coming next or what's next and some of the things that we are excited about for the next year yeah for sure so um the last year has really been about like building MVPs and talking with governments and getting them to allow us to do things um and I think we've made like a lot of Headway with that so uh for example uh we're now starting to roll out uh a product called gig accounts which will allow um payers for internet connectivity to monitor contracts get sort of real-time data about the performance of the connectivity at schools and then uh register payments for that so we're quite Keen to roll that out and what we're hoping to achieve over the next year for that is to start issuing our first sort of smart contract contracts I suppose so the the idea will be that an internet service provider would connect to school and then automatically receive payments if on internet connectivity is detected so that way we can make it way easier for internet service providers to to receive payments and reduce a lot of a lot of overheads so that's one of the projects that were we're quite excited about about progressing another one is we're building a sort of collection on top of our uh existing nft collection the the original nft collection Petra kingdoms that we that we launched was all about fundraising so you know you you purchase these these tokens you get a really cool sort of data-driven uh art piece uh and the and the funds go to Giga to uh to to help Giga connect schools what we're building next is um a collection where we will create an nft for every single uh School in the world um and really not put the focus on uh fundraising or raising as much money as possible but instead sell these to people who care about the school communities get them in the hands of the people who actually support these schools and create a sort of gamified platform where we will reward uh rewards people for contributing data about these schools so we'll create a crowdsourced data system for collecting School data and the idea is to make the the largest sort of decentralized School database in the world yeah and that raises many interesting questions such as if your crowdsourcing this data what's the consensus mechanism that you'll be using to approve or to ensure quality of the data that you are gathering and this type of like interesting new questions that we even have before yeah absolutely and I've I've learned a lot at this conference about uh about ideas like that so it's been super useful uh to uh to to join this conference and and learn more about that uh yeah and there have been a follow-up we we've been saying that sometimes it's like it takes a lot of work to to make changes within the government or make a government bodies to to innovate UNICEF it's not a government but it's also a huge organization that has many many processes in place how is it to work in this type of things within UNICEF um yeah you're you're right uh it's it's a very big organization I think um I come from sort of the world of startups where things go super fast and You Break Stuff uh and you try again so that's certainly that's certainly big difference but I I always like to sort of compare the the progress UNICEF makes as like glacial so it's like super slow but it's Unstoppable so I think UNICEF uh opens a lot of doors um yeah we're we're talking with central banks and Ministries about implementing some some real change in the in countries and we're finding it really difficult to do that so imagine being uh being a startup and trying to get a get a meeting with a central bank uh Governor to to approve your well-intended sort of crypto project so um yeah so I think UNICEF has an important role to play there in sort of opening the doors for these kinds of things opening the minds of uh of governments and um yeah and allowing a lot of other startups to to then make some real progress and selling any advice on how to yeah maybe interact or get that difficult meeting that everyone was talking about and yeah um yeah sure and I think um one of the things I'll say looking at the model that we have in Sierra Leone is I think uh not it's not just because I work there but I think having uh institutions such as like the directorates of science second innovation in Syrian has been really key um I think especially when you work within uh developing countries such as Sierra Leone where science second innovation has not been a big player and the local expertise is not there I think one of the if I would advise I think one of the key things would be for each government to have um its version of a dsdi as we call it because I think it really um cuts across and really enables that partnership um to develop um I think we're lucky within the SDI to sit to us we call play with various different individuals we have lawyers we have our developers we have our data scientists who have our policy advisors and all of these individuals that and enable us to do what we do and I think that's why we were able to really form an effective partnership with UNICEF Sierra Leone and The Innovation office I think in terms of having one of the few like Innovation work plans and work plans out there with UNICEF I think that's been really key and I think we kind of play the role with UNICEF off we develop our projects together we establish our goals and then our dsdi plays the role of fronting with the government on behalf of USF so we would go to our government partners and I think also the fact that we sit within the Office of the President of Sierra Leone gives us a lot of Leverage in terms of when we go and knock on those doors like the National Bank of Sierra Leone to say together with UNICEF there's this great projects which we want to try out deals with blockchain and crypto could you please um you know engage with us with us on this and they're willing to do that so I think for me what's really important is having that very high government and political buy-in into these kind of things and then and even with us even though we do we have our challenges but I could just imagine having to do this or trying to do this in countries that don't have that high level government buy-in that could um potentially be very difficult so I think um one of the key things that have been useful to us or have enabled us have a lot of the progress that we have is having that um seat and being able to interface with UNICEF with our government development partners with the private sector with other International Development Partners so being like in the middle of all of that and being able to coordinate it I think that's been one of the key things so more than maybe to learn from and replicate in other places yeah it's interesting we met with the Colombia team earlier this week and we were talking about the types of things that we could do together how to start working in different aspects that we're discussing and what we're told is that here it's actually quite people because they don't have this type of coordinating body that you have in Sierra Leone what they were telling us is that there are Ministry of Education Bank Ministry of ICT that each of them work on their own and that it's difficult to coordinate the work across all of them and I think maybe just a quick nugget I think which would be interesting actually so the chief Innovation officer of Sierra Leone who effectively leads a dsdi is also the current minister of basic and Senior secondary education and a lot of our projects as I mentioned do deal with education so I think that gives us an added leverage in terms of really being in the critical space to be able to coordinate all of these activities so yeah yeah so I love to learn definitely and it's been we've been working with you for many years now and I think that the things that we've achieved it wouldn't have been possible otherwise um maybe as follow-up questions to both of you what would be the main opportunities that you see with blockchain in your context yeah from tokenization like I spoke about earlier we're also looking at blockchain actually for dynamic Spectrum sharing because in South Africa a lot of the spectrum it's owned by the large mnos but and the small players don't have enough Capital to obviously partake at the auction but there is sort of time during the the day where Spectrum isn't that used by the big mnos so we're looking at now using blockchain for dynamic Spectrum sharing with an ISP in a small town like grahamstown where I went to high school can now use Spectrum from 10 pm to 5 a.m you know at a lower cost than what the sort of use it during the day so that's one interesting use case we're looking at it I guess in this context yeah Thinking Out Loud everything be possible made to do something similar also with pricing for connectivity depending on apply something similar to that yes so the pricing now would uh be dependent on how much the ISP would get the Spectrum for and obviously when it's underutilized this pricing would be less so I guess that's the keyboard inside it's still very early stages the government announced it a few months back and we just now started writing a few concept papers to see what we could do but that would be the model but we're hoping we can move forward with it and yeah let's say from my side I'm very much kind of immersed in the world of staking and just the possibilities that every individual can be supporting this network and can gain rewards from doing that so whether it's a small community or a school or a project for climate change we just see the march of Technology enabling that more and more so we're working with a range of entities who want to use staking returns for different things the beauty of this model as opposed to traditional kind of philanthropy is that you can put your money on a node use that node for good and then take your money away later and put it do other things with it so it's not a case that you have to donate and your money's gone forever and I think that's quite appealing when the you know the need for capital for some of these projects is so vast so yeah there's lots of exciting uh kind of technological developments we're just excited to be part of it and then as you said maybe it's not huge values but you can start Distributing and decentralizing this hosting and each school could have one node where the the revenue maybe it's not huge but enough maybe to pay for internet in the room School absolutely and and like different models as well so we touched on liquid staking for example right now it doesn't have to be the case that every school needs 32 ethereum um for its own school or multiples thereof there could be liquid staking across Rwanda or um South Africa or Sierra Leone and different entities have different amounts but they all gain staking rewards so there's a lot of different avenues that this could progress through anything you'd like to add any of um yeah so I think the the biggest opportunity I see is in um moving all this money around uh so um paying for internet connectivity in countries that may uh have like a lot of corruption or something like that I think blockchain can really provide a little transparency in that and a lot of fairness in that uh so I think I think that's a that's a huge opportunity um yeah I think um going off especially with the smart contracts and the real-time connectivity monitoring I think for us those have been really exciting on both ends I am the private sector specifically also excited about the fact of having a smart contracts and there's no discrepancy of whether how much connectivity did I actually provide and that back and forth exchange so that's been exciting on the private sector space because actually so we have been in the process of connecting some of the schools which currently have connectivity to that platform to be able to monitor um in real time but then from a government perspective it's also very important for us being able to really hold isps accountable to their service contracts that they signed because before if you have no way of really monitoring the connectivity that they provided you're just really paying out without being absolutely sure that what you're paying for was um delivered so for government perspective that's been really important to one of the the areas which we're really looking forward to exploring a bit more yeah yeah absolutely because you usually what's the case is that for a lot of these schools the connectivity is paid for by a government or you know units of country offers or something like that and then one person is responsible for monitoring 150 schools or a thousand schools and it just becomes impossible to sort of check whether the connectivity is actually delivered and the schools themselves have no negotiation no negotiating power with their intern service providers so um yeah one of the products that we're offering to schools is this sort of application that they can install themselves on their Network that will provide us with real-time internet connectivity data so it's really a tool for them to sort of take control over that and allow a huge body like UNICEF to put their weight around making sure that internet service providers are providing the connectivity that schools deserve I hope that you learned as much as I did maybe if you can go to the yeah to the next slide too many times open yeah let's try the video now um yeah yes you say that if any of the things that we spoke about seemed interesting to you whether you are interested in joining our team working with us scan that QR code and sign up so that we keep you in our Network and we can count on you in case you need your help and yeah the last thing is that we have a video that we wanted to show it's not appearing here though so I don't know if someone would slivering sewer connectivity is a global initiative to connect every school to the internet and every young person to information opportunity and choice Giga is leading Innovative models and mechanisms to finance School internet connectivity over long periods of time working in partnership with governments to build the right capabilities for the future Giga and the ethereum foundation are collaborating on an exciting and Innovative approach to fund School connectivity Giga wants to use ethereum stating as a new sustainable model to generate income to fight the long-term social effect blockchains like ethereum allow individuals and organizations to contribute to network security availability and processing power by staking funds while running their own loads within the network in return for providing this service participants and staking Rewards ethereum is the most widely used smart contract capable blockchain and is now a proof of stake blockchain which effectively eliminated that energy usage that was associated with its former proof of work model anyone who commits 32 ether can benefit from staking new words this model of staking provides irregular rewards over many months and years enabling a wide range of different use cases that can deliver societal benefits and social impact from the money that is earned leader is working with the Ethereal foundation and the government of Rwanda to provide that fast example providing funding for school connectivity in Rwanda launch Notes is an Institutional provider of investment grade ethereum solo stating products and services and was the implementation partner for this pilot project in Rwanda how does it work number one people and organizations that are interested in supporting screen connectivity we call social stickers commit either number two Giga steak by running valid data nodes number three the rewards generated from the nodes are used to pay isps on an ongoing basis to enable School connectivity over the long term number four after the agreed taking period the original eater can be returned to your social sticker or continue to be staked for ongoing schools connectivity number five the value of a eater may rise or fall over the staking period Giga has donated the first 32 effect was taken enabling the rewards to pay for connectivity at Pilot schools in Rwanda in the future Gita plans to allow people to pledge less than 32 either which can be pulled and staked to support Giga this is a future functionality that is not live today data is setting up ethereum validator notes for schools in Rwanda in partnership with the Rwandan government thanks honey yeah with Pizza Plus we can wrap up the panel thanks thanks everyone thank you all thank you