[Music]
you have about you have a whole bunch of
school connectivity content coming up
for the next few presentations and the
reason that I'm so excited to be here um
is that we've had a long collaboration
with the ethereum foundation with the
community of Builders here um
and over the last six or seven years
we've come to a place where we're able
as a project to talk about some really
exciting things in deep in just want to
ask about my timer I think the timer's
off by a little bit um I wanted to show
you this picture this is a picture of
school connectivity this is a picture of
school connectivity in Panama um each
dot is a school on here the red dots are
schools that are not connected to the
internet the green dots are schools that
are connected to the internet and this
is the type of map and data that our
project generates about the world um
it's the first time that we've ever been
able to see the world through the map
map of digital infrastructure we have
this map now for about 40 countries um
and you're able to see in real time
whether or not human beings are
connected to the internet and that's
really important and I'll tell you why
it's important um about a third of
people in the world have no internet
connection at all that means that
they're not able we just heard in the
last presentation about the lack of
nodes in Africa for example um if you
don't have internet if you don't have
access to gigabytes uh you're not able
to be part of the economy that we're all
talking about over the last few
days and more than half of the world's
schools particularly don't have this
access our project is called Giga it's a
collaboration between UNICEF and the
international telecommunications Union
and we focus specifically on making sure
that schools are connected um we've been
around for about five years we've
connected in the last two years about
12,000 schools it's about 7 million kids
and we've helped to pull together about
$ 1.7 billion dollar in financing for
school connectivity
uh in the countries that we're working
in we've helped to reduce the cost of
connectivity by more than 50% and
increase the speed of connectivity in
schools because it's often very very low
where it even does exist and
interestingly we've mapped about 2.1
million schools nobody in the world
knows how many schools there
are total we think they're between five
and seven million but there is no
complete map so when we do map schools
in a country we're often the first point
of Truth for a government um because
they don't have an exact number of their
schools
and since we're working with
connectivity with trying to get people
online and young people online and give
them access to opportunity and choice
our unit of measure our commodity is the
gigabyte which is interesting because
it's one of the few G you know
Commodities assets that's fully digital
uh from end to end uh this is what I'm
going to talk about in the next part of
the presentation which is that we
can if if something is digital because
something is digital we can talk about
it in a very different way than when
we're talking about physical uh assets
real world assets and we're very very
excited to be launching a new piece of
Giga a new piece of our architecture in
the next year and that pieces our
connectivity credits Marketplace um I'll
spend just a few minutes talking about
what that means for us but essentially
it means wrapping the gigabyte in a way
that we can start to create price
transparency if you look at the price
for the gigabyte in Zimbabwe for example
it's about 70 times the price of a
gigabyte in Kenya um and that massive
price disparity creates huge pockets of
unfairness it's not true just between
countries it's also true within
countries poor people always end up
paying more for the things that wealthy
people either pay very little for or
don't even think about at all and so I'm
going to just walk through what we're
doing in the space of of building a
system to tokenize gigabytes uh the
exciting thing is that this platform is
now up and running in its prototype
stages in four different places so I'll
talk about that a little bit too um as
we're going through this process of of
building and our team is about 30 people
working on the tech and Engineering side
in Barcelona and another 40 people in
Geneva so it's a fairly sizable group
working on Giga um with a real focus of
about five or six of us on on this
particular Marketplace so when you
purchase connectivity for schools when
you purchase connectivity for health
centers we also work with with
governments for hospitals and health
centers we're working because the prime
minister or the head of state or the
Minister of Finance or education has
asked us to be there and to help them
create this connectivity that allows us
to have access on the buy side and
governments spend a lot of money doing
this anyway it's just often not very
well spent we also have a lot of
sell-side companies the people who are
actually providing that connectivity
these are mobile network operators
internet service providers and
others and so what we've created as Giga
is a way to connect the buyers and
sellers of this commodity this digital
commodity and we're doing this in
various ways in various countries but an
example of that um is that you have a
government like Rwanda one of our
champion governments and herban will be
talking a little bit about the work
we're doing there uh later who is
procuring gigabytes from a variety of of
different companies in Rwanda we also
have a set of sellers uh that are
everything from a small ISP to Large
mobile network operators that Pro are
providing this and because we have a
privileged Place through the United
Nations because we're part of Unicef
we're able to negotiate on behalf of the
government for aggregated purchasing um
of of gigabytes of this commodity and
kind of create that
market the second part after kind of
identified what the what the need is is
to figure out what the commodity is
itself because of this map which I
described at the beginning and we've now
we've built the open source stack to
find schools from outer space so we use
high resolution satellite imagery we've
built our own ML on top of that to
figure out what a school building is
we're able to tell you in real time if
the school is connected based on both uh
some Appliance stuff that we've we've
built and uh and and things that we can
install behind the router in the school
as well as connecting with network
operators through their apis and and and
other kind of larger systems we're able
to actually um talk about a gigabyte in
situ in as it's being used and see
whether or not a school is connected you
can imagine uh already we're working
with governments to when a school turns
green to issue payment automatically if
it turns red you issue a warning that's
a sort of smart contract based under
layer that we've built as well um but we
can start to do things with this digital
asset and if you grab that the QR code
you can go and search and look on the
map you can see all of the countries
that we're in you can try to find the
school that you went to it should be
there if it's in one of the 34 countries
that we've already started working in um
and if you want to tokenize a commodity
you also have to think about that market
cycle where the where the commodity sits
in it um we stole this from the carbon
credits Market carbon credits sort of
work uh they don't work all the way but
they uh they give you an idea of how you
can create a sort of recirculation one
of the reasons carbon credits don't work
that well is it's very hard to um figure
out where they're being used and where
they're being you know where where trees
are absorbing carbon the the asset
itself the metric ton equivalent of
metric carbon uh equivalent is not a
real thing it's a kind of synthetic
thing that we've created um but with a
gigabyte we can actually talk about the
asset and we can do this whole cycle
which goes from somebody saying they
want to to do something they want to
give gigabytes out or deploy gigabytes
to somebody purchasing that and we can
watch that whole cycle happen uh through
the marketplace so that's a sort of
second step is figuring out how to
tokenize the
thing the third part of building a
Marketplace is actually building the
tooling itself um and so we're pretty
excited that we are setting this up
right now in
Geneva um we picked Geneva for a variety
of reasons but uh it has allowed us to
really be based in this very structured
very regulated system that is respected
around the world um for certification so
we know that if you want to certify a
farm for pulling carbon in from the from
the air uh you need to go through a
certain process same thing for a
gigabyte you need to know that a school
has has been connected a Health Center's
been connected and somebody needs to
stamp that in in our system we have the
United Nations and all of our partner
governments who are able to provide that
certification we're also building this
in various countries with their own
National Credit Systems if you work with
connectivity at all you've heard of
something called a universal service
fund or universal access fund those are
ways that governments uh are ready pay
for school connectivity uh in poor areas
they just don't work very well because
they're sort of black boxes and you
can't see inside to what's been done
whether the money that gets taxed from
Network operators actually goes and gets
deployed or not um we also have this
Marketplace that we're starting to
launch we've actually just sold a few
weeks ago we sold our first credits
which is very exciting it's a very small
amount of credits in one country um but
we're starting to see Buyers work with
us uh sort of offline right now but it's
but it's beginning um and then we're
looking at what the protocol and the
governance can be for all of
that um the other thing you have to do
if you're building a Marketplace is you
also have to you also have to figure out
who's going to be who's going to take
part of it we've identified in this
whole system um a set of of of actors
that's everything from the government
Ministries who are already buying
connectivity for their schools and
health centers um to the sellers the
isps new new new isps or network
operators coming in groups like starlink
to old ones the incumbent operators um
as well as investors who would want to
be part of a kind of marketplace
environment and we've already started
stacking these up in four countries um
five countries which is really exciting
so in each of these countries we're
building a small prototype of this
Marketplace which is really a onetoone
relationship between a seller and a
buyer in that country for school
connectivity and what we're saying is
essentially this if you are somebody
who's going to connect schools you're a
small ISP internet service provider or
not Network operator and you want to
connect those schools all the way over
there but they're really far away it's
expensive and you don't maybe have the
money to outlay the capital at first
we'll give you a credit for connecting
the school and the further away it is
the more credits you're going to get
it's up in a mountain more credits
there's no electricity more credits and
so on so you as a small ISP can go and
do all of that hard work knowing that
you're at some point going to get repaid
at the same time we go to the government
we go to the Minister of Finance others
in the government and we say if we bring
you these credits at the end of the year
and if a company brings them to you you
will go and give that company a tax
break you'll reduce their corporate tax
you'll give them some kind of incentive
for doing that and the government says
okay
and so between those two we create a
system where we're able to fairly Mark
that the commodity has been delivered
even before all of the work has been
done and the service provider knows that
by the time they connect that school or
that Health Center that's so far away
that nobody wants to connect it they'll
actually get paid back so we put up here
just a few of the different use cases uh
that we have for and and sort of those
those pairing of users that we're that
we're building for in in different
countries um some of them use the
universal service fund as the backing
some of them use corporate tax
and some of them use uh things that are
already in place like National fiber as
the asset that gets paid off so for
example you could say if you connect
those schools far away your credit will
buy you access will buy you free access
to the National fiber backbone or a
place on somebody's cell tower or their
Mast and this is pretty exciting so
these four or five Pilots are getting
getting instantiated now built out now
we're going to learn of over the next
year what works and what doesn't and
then we get to start to bring in a much
larger group of players because a
Marketplace doesn't work with just one
buyer and one seller that's not a very
good Market um the idea is that these
credits can really become digital
infrastructure credits they can become
um used by anybody who wants to start to
connect new communities we just heard
about node bias against poor places um
if you have an interest in connecting
something and getting it on the network
and creating a node in any sense whether
it's a data center or if you're trying
to do Edge AI or if you're trying to put
an ethereum node up you need to have
connectivity and so we can start to
create a dynamic in that um which
rewards people for connecting and allows
for the things the people that need to
be connected uh to be connected cheaper
and I just want to just I'll tell you a
quick story about why that's so
important so this is a school in Kenya
this is a school in a place called nun
kapir which is actually it's only about
15 kilometers so that's that's not quite
that far from from Nairobi it's a it's a
school that we help to connect we help
the Kenyan government connected last
year so this is the school if you're
looking at this if you're kind of if the
school is in back of you and you look
across the road there are power cables
there's fiber somewhere a little bit
over there but it was never connected to
the internet it was never connected to
to electricity um and one of the reasons
schools often in warm places and sunny
places aren't connected to electricity
is that you don't you don't need it
because you're in school during the day
when the sun is out and you just have
the windows open and it was never a
thing before but with these with this
ability of ours to work with the
government we were able to help the
government create locate this school
create the financing for it um and do
something pretty pretty incredible so
there is a server there it has the Giga
logo on it it also has liquid telcoms
logo on it liquid is one of those
infrastructure providers who I mentioned
and in order for them to connect the
school they needed to borrow space on
somebody else's cell tower and they were
able to do an internal swap of resources
with that other service provider the
ones who made the cell tower so liquid
could put up their long-distance Wi-Fi
radio on the tower and that's a a
version of connectivity credits that
happen sort of organically um in the
school itself and we see this across the
world as we're connecting Schools
attendance goes up once you start
connecting because if you're in a school
if you're a 14-year-old in a school and
you're learning nothing and the teacher
as is the case in many countries the
teacher can't even really read a
paragraph of the you know of of a text
in the language of instruction well you
know that you're being ripped off you
know that your time is being used
unfairly and you are angry so you know
you shouldn't be there um as soon as
there's connectivity you're able to do
something you're able to borrow
somebody's phone do something a little
bit on it and you know there's a
potential for a future we've also seen
School results increase by mean this
school is about 10% even without the
full digital curriculum being put in
place and we don't do anything inside
the school so Giga does not do any of
the work withed edtech or teacher
training that's all other parts of
Unicef that do that there are experts
who do that type of work but we just
bring the kind of connectivity in and
the the last thing that's really
interesting in this story is that this
is the main teacher her name is Paris
she said that she's able to save about 4
hours a month because she doesn't have
to go to an internet cafe to enter in
the grades and the attendance and all
that kind of stuff that she had to do
before there was connectivity in her
school um and so that's all important
that's why we're why we're doing this
work from a technical point of view the
ability to tokenize gigabytes proves a
few things that tokenizing other
traditional real world assets doesn't I
think um one is that we can talk about
standards because in this particular
case unlike carbon credits it's very
easy there's one agency that does
Internet it's the international
telecommunications Union there's another
that looks at school connectivity that's
UNICEF so together there's really only
two groups that do the standard setting
for it um often real world assets it's
hard to figure out like the user
interest of the real world asset itself
you know there are a few of us who want
to buy a very small percentage of a
physical painting and think that's
important or a part of an apartment
building uh in general that hasn't hit
retail yet but a gigabyte is broken down
into a megabyte and down to a kilobyte
those things already kind of work um and
you can validate this stuff in real time
you can see it on the map that I showed
all of you um so you can see whether or
not this asset is moving which is nice
for an investor um somebody who's
looking at getting their infrastructure
built out and that you know that ability
to see things in real time is pretty
important and finally as I said in
earlier in the presentation having this
backing from the Swiss government is
very very helpful so we're hosted by the
government of Spain Catalonia and
Barcelona to build our technology and by
the government of Switzerland and the
Canton of Geneva to set up this
particular piece of work the
connectivity credits Marketplace um
we've been we've been having the
meetings that we need with all the
regulators and legal folks um and
Switzerland is very very good at
structuring regulation which is why
there's so many folks in zoo already um
we believe that Geneva has a unique
place as a center of international um
Commerce in in Switzerland as well and
uh and so it's really a delight to be
there I wanted to leave a few minutes
for questions um before that I would
just say there are a variety of ways for
this community to be involved one of
them obviously is uh just being a
contributor to the different
repositories that we have um we are
delighted to to be working with the open
source community and on a variety of
levels the second is that as we talk
about impact and impact tokens and
others who are doing that type of work
they they find this layer that we're
building something that they can build
on top of so people working on
environmental tokens can use schools as
monitoring hubs and so on um the third
is you may know
um folks in countries who want to be
part of this there may be infrastructure
providers that you work with um who are
interested in in being part of this or
there may be governments who would like
to experiment with a new way to connect
their populations so really delighted to
have spent that time um sharing this
project with you harbin's going to talk
a little bit more about how we've been
working with the ethereum community on
staking in a little bit but we have a
few minutes for questions as well thank
you so much for listening this afternoon
so we have 3 minutes left or question
for this one I see one hand over there
oh that's a long distance for
me oh don't s you want to do
it I hit somebody in the head with one
of these boxes once and it was really I
know if you want me to throw it okay do
it I'll throw the microphone that
gentleman over there in the back
yeah wow you're so
good thank you for the introduction so I
think digital Marketplace it works when
uh we don't know who will be the seller
and buyer and and Marketplace work as
interface between the seller and boy but
in this case uh I think you already know
who will be the buyer buyer will be the
government and seller will be the
telecom companies but if do you have any
other reason that you're introducing the
marketplace here it's a great question
so if I'm just if I just want to sell my
goats to you we can start off that way
and at least we know that the goat is
worth something right and before I sell
you my first goat and you give me the
money we have no idea that the goat is
actually worth anything
but after that we've established that
there is some transaction we're at that
stage now so we want to just see and
know that this commodity can be moved
digitally because right now the way it's
accounted for is terrible but the idea
is to open that up and to have a lot of
different goats and a lot of different
buyers in the next phase it's just you
can't start by building that unless we
at least price out the goat and know
that that trans first transaction can
work and so that is the government and
the and the ISP but later on it becomes
the people around the ISP the other the
folks doing data centers all of that who
can be on the buy and on the sell side
probably sorry but we're on a super
tight schedule uh and that's it for our
question for this session uh the next
sharing will will also be about Giga so
after the two sharing maybe you can
gather your questions together and then
go to Chris over there let's give Chris
another round of applause thank you
Chris uh