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good afternoon everyone my name is Sam
Chadwick and I am in the innovation team
at Thomson Reuters and I am accompanied
by Tim Nugent who is in our research and
development team and we thought we'd
spend today talking about some of the
things that Thomson Reuters has been
doing over the last two years in the
etherium space but we thought we'd start
because over the last couple of days
I've realized that not a lot of you know
what or who Thomson Reuters are we are
famous for our Reuters news agency that
delivers news to over a billion people
around the planet every day but what you
may not be aware of is that the majority
of our business comes from three
business units where we are a trusted
information provider for professional
services across financial and risk tax
and accounting and legal so our journey
here started a couple of years ago
because I'm based in zhuge which as you
port mentioned has been coined as Krypto
Valley now and I'd gone back to study a
degree at Oxford and was hunting for a
dissertation topic and Vitalik paper
came out and a lot of the people or
media were picking it up saying well
this is going to disrupt the financial
services tremendously and given that a
large proportion of our revenue comes
from the financial services business the
question was well how's that going to
impact us so of course not knowing where
aetherium was based I reached out to
vitalic these were the days before he
was famous so he was very happy to
answer my email fortunately and we met
up for a coffee and Zook I had no idea
that he lived two kilometers down the
road
from me he more or less said very
quickly you guys need to be an Oracle
the financial services industry trusts
you you're an information provider and
we need to bring those capabilities to
aetherium so the journey really started
there and as I was looking at the space
the question became so what part of
financial services is like me to get
impacted first so we put together a
model that we call the three V's model
volume value and venue you can't see the
venue axis that's going in and out of
the page but it's essentially the
difference between centralized and
decentralized venues but on the axis
that I've decided to talk about today
you've got value on the y-axis and
volume of transactions on the x-axis so
if you look at the top right corner so
this is the global capital segment for
an exchange public equity exchanges
government bonds these are incredibly
sophisticated markets today decade's
worth of improvements yes people point
at them and say they work inefficiently
but actually the time and effort it's
going to take to migrate those
industries and those markets is quite
considerable so we're not saying it
won't happen we're just saying that
probably that won't be the place where
it starts first so if you go to the
opposite end this is the retail space
peer-to-peer lending music royalties
gambling you've seen a lot of startups
that's starting to attack this space
it's really interesting there's a lot of
activity here it's not really a space
for Thomson Reuters it's not one that we
play in today so in the bottom right
you've got the Machine age and this I
think will be a huge opportunity for
blockchain technologies Internet of
Things we're already seeing companies
like Gollum with distributed computation
and I expect downstairs so for us we
felt this was a bit early we started
doing this analysis as I mentioned most
two years ago
so the question became what about this
last segment these are the big-ticket
items
high value low volume transactions
venture capital private equity
over-the-counter derivatives syndicated
loans this was where we decided to focus
our effort
this was the markets these are the
markets that we believed were going to
move first
so having sat down with Vitalik and him
having told me well we really need an
Oracle I thought that rather than just
believe him outright let's have a think
about what data would be needed from an
off chain provider like us so looking at
the conditional transaction dependencies
you can obviously create lots of smart
contract opportunities using on chain
data doesn't really need an Oracle the
data is already there that you can
reference but as we looked more and more
we realized that he was indeed right
which I probably shouldn't have doubted
him and the majority of opportunities
are actually those that require off
chain data and I think in the last two
years since we did this that hypothesis
has been validated over and over so we
looked at all of these and thought you
know the probably the space to start is
benchmarks and values for derivatives
given that that fell squarely into that
top left quadrant from the previous
slide so we created a capability that
we've called block 1 IQ block 1 IQ is an
Oracle it's in beta but it's live and it
works and it's compatible with both
quarter and aetherium we've been talking
with the JP Morgan guys about making
extending compatibility to quorum as
well but that shouldn't be very much
effort at all and the data sets we've
started with that share prices so
exchange public exchange equity data for
an exchange data corporate actions which
are things like mergers buybacks stock
splits dividends coupons anything where
there's a change
cryptocurrency rates from our partner
company crypto compare financial
benchmarks so these are things like
Libor rates that a lot of the
derivatives around the world today
reference and then the knowledge graph
which I won't discuss now but I'll come
back to you later
so the problem facing us was slightly
different to some of the other Oracle
players that are following us later
today in that they needed to create
trust first but customers already trust
us we're the trusted information
provider for the majority of the
financial services industry so our
problem was slightly different
it's been around enabling the etherium
community with high quality trusted data
so this is the place we've chosen to
start we can only support today
non-production POCs run on private
ledgers I know this is a limitation
we're working on this but a majority of
the problems for us reside around
content licensing barriers so when you
look at block 1 IQ we asked for you to
think about creating a consortium a
group of organizations that are going to
use this as opposed to just reaching out
to try and kick the tires and I should
add that it's free we're not charging
anything for this we want to enable you
guys to see what you can do with them so
with that I'm going to hand over to Tim
who's going to show you a bit more about
the capabilities
right thank you Sam
so this is essentially the landing page
for block 1 IQ at the moment so if you
visit this site you couldn't download
some architectural schemes api's
documentation and some other downloads
and actually and so this is the the
thomson reuters develop a convenient
community website and if you click
around actually there's some links to
some other api's that we offer so last
year i demonstrated and are there
offering something called block 1a ID
which is essentially an identity
resolution system which connects
aetherium addresses with OAuth 2
credentials so if you click around you
can also find that so have a look around
this website when you're ready to sign
up you'll be faced with this page we ask
that you sign up to certain terms and
conditions most of the data that you
will have access to is proprietary and
in many cases we license it from third
parties so fill in all the all the
details tell us a little bit about your
project and your your your plans and
when you click Submit I think Sam will
get a notification there'll be some
legal documentation that may need to be
attended to if everything goes through
you will receive access and they login
to our self-service system so this is
our self-service system it's very much a
work in progress but this allows us to
do some sort of onboarding and
whitelisting of your contracts so very
simply just add a few users you can do
that here by adding names emails and
setting whether they are a user or an
admin for example do that and then you
you click through you get to this bit
where you can configure your deployment
so I think as Sam mentioned this service
is only available for private chains at
the moment so put in your deployment
name are the details for example our PC
host our PC port a default account click
through and you can see what the
configuration looks like now from this
page it gets a bit more interesting if
you hit the orange button this allows
you to add a contract to say you have a
trade contract you couldn't click
that button putting the address of that
contract and what essentially happens
here is is that address is being
whitelisted with our service so our
Oracle contract will see that the
request for data has come from a white
listed contract and as long as it's on
that white list we will be able to send
data back to you you can also click on
the contracts button and you can see the
list of the contracts you've added and
you can edit that once you've set a lot
set that up the Oracle contract address
will also be visible so you will know
the address to hit with your requests
there's also a little test interface so
you can test requesting and receiving
data so we've got a very small sample of
the of the different requests you can
make so end-of-day prices intraday
interest rates cryptocurrency rates so
select your your symbol from the Joc
from the drop down hit submit and a
block later that the data will come back
and here it's simply represented as a
JSON object if you go and look at our
API you can you can be quite selective
with with exactly what you request and
exactly what is returned and you can
tailor tailor that to the needs of your
smart contract so that's pretty much the
self-serve it's quite straightforward on
our roadmap is to provide an API which
will expose most of this functionality
such the registering smart contracts and
with our will be done quickly off chain
so just to make this a little bit more
tangible a couple of examples of some
some assets that we've modeled to
demonstrate interactivity with our
Oracle so this is this is an equity swap
contract it essentially has two legs an
interest rate leg in an equity leg so
there are two sort of streams of payment
here one is based on the performance of
an equity so here the S&P 500 or in
equity index as the case may be and on
the other leg it's typically based on an
interest rate which in this case is
LIBOR so when the contract is
instantiated by either party a or party
B at the moment the request to the
oracle was made on chain but we're
adapting our functionality so that could
be made by a signed message off chain
but at the point of instantiation a
request is
sent to our or record in this case it
will request two symbols the sp500 SPX
and also LIBOR and you can configure how
regularly you want the the response data
to come back it could be an end-of-day
or it could be a single point in the
future so when this data is delivered by
our Oracle the two values the SPX and
LIBOR are updated and these values are
used to calculate the value of the two
legs so with the equity leg this will be
based on the notional which is a trade
parameter you can see in the bottom left
hand corner and it will be the notional
multiplied by the percentage change in
the S&P 500 for the interest rate leg
that is essentially LIBOR plus basis
points which is another one of these
trade parameters and the ten or here is
essentially the duration of the trade so
using the values from our Oracle the
value of these two legs can be
calculated and here we have a very
simple ERC 20 settlement so you can see
how the prices that arrived from our
Oracle further down the line drive the
movement of these tokens to set all
these two legs slightly more elaborate
one here so this is a a RC 20 token
basket so this might be an actively
managed contract or basket of ERC 20
tokens so the bottom left you have a
manager the manager will assign weights
to the tokens held within the basket at
the point of assigning these weights
this request is sent on chain or off
chain to our Oracle saying essentially
this this contract requests the price
the values of the specific tokens so
these tokens and other cryptocurrency
values come from crypto compare us our
mentioned when those values arrive they
are those those values are used in
combination with the allocations that
are currently held to call this
evaluation function and using this
valuation function we can we can come up
with a we can calculate a value for the
overall token basket depending on
performance whether things go well or go
badly investors who are these parties
ABC down at the bottom can either invest
or withdraw ether and depending on on
that investment using a hook out to your
favorite decentralized exchange protocol
tokens can either be purchased or sold
to keep the allocation in check right so
that's it from me
I will pass back to Sam who will talk
about some of our learnings from these
experience experiences and also a little
bit about our future roadmap great
thanks Tim so as you mentioned I think
going through this over the last couple
of years Tim was here this time last
year or in Shanghai rather talking about
block one ID and this was one of the
biggest learning points as we set
forward into looking at how we make our
content available and for those of you
that weren't here last year this is
block 1 ID it was a capability that we
had to create in order to honor the
content licensing and permissioning
arrangements that we're responsible for
as we distribute content that we
aggregate through to the ultimate
consumer block 1 ID is essentially an
address mapping service so slightly
different to some of the other identity
capabilities that you've heard from but
it means that we can take an OAuth
address like Google Twitter Linkedin and
map it to an aetherium address and
therefore we know and DAP developers
know when a user is returning there they
are
through a pop-up asked to authenticate
themselves and then you know that that's
the same user coming back even if they
have different aetherium addresses that
they're using so this was the first step
it was around identity of users in order
to honor content licensing the second
learning point was around identifiers so
if I asked you what the ticker symbol C
stands for today then you would be right
if you answered Citigroup but if I dance
Q that same question in 1998 the answer
would have been Chrysler
and the problem is that these tickers
across the financial services industry
get recycled and if you're writing small
contracts using these that's an absolute
nightmare because you can't change your
smart contract so we created an open
capability it's called a perm ID and you
can all access it today at perm ID org
it essentially creates permanent
identifiers for entities which means you
could always reference that number and
always have confidence that it's going
to return the information that you
require even if the industry symbols are
recycled so take a look at perm ID or
--g doesn't have to be blockchain
related this is open and works for
everything and it's available under a
Creative Commons license so I'll finish
in the last minute with what's next so
firstly we're looking to expand data
coverage I mentioned a few earlier but
we're already having organizations come
to us now and saying can you please add
electricity prices natural gas prices
are the commodities information we've
had interest in supply chain in general
and so is my request out to you or my
first request out to you is if you have
needs for other content sets then do
come and talk to us it's not limited to
what we've shown in this first beta that
was just a place to start and secondly
we have a capability called kyc as a
service we do this for all the banks
already and one of our hypotheses is can
we be a kyc service for investors for
initial coin offerings for advisors for
law firms can you take advantage of the
capabilities that we have that we would
traditionally use in banks and use those
same capabilities and data and
information in your identity activities
so if you think that's appealing please
come and talk to me because that's
something that we're thinking about
working on right now
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