27/5/2022 Artist: stuz0r The notorious, white-belly, poisonous Psilocybe

"You call that a blockchain? This is a blockchain" Crocodile Gramoli

Team

The Tech

Slithering through the undergrowth

With that considered what will RBBC do?

Risk

I have looked at the tech but I have mainly focussed on the connections with which RBBC’s team are involved in as well as the wider frame work it sits within. “Slithering through the undergrowth” meanders through the network that RBBC is within, accompanied with a rudimentary connection map created in the noble, loyal Microsoft Paint.

The Team

26 engineering, 2 MKT & Sales, 3 Deliveries, 2 Human resources.

Board:

Alan Burt – Executive Chairman. Beachhead VC, Block8, Synthetix

Vincent Gramoli – Executive Director. Inventor and Professor of University of Sydney

Cathryn Lyall – Non-Executive Director. Wisr, Fintech Australia, Deutsche Bank, CME Group

Nicola Burgess – Non-Executive Director. Data Action, Australia Post, BT, Deloitte

Mark Kay – Non-Executive Director. University of Sydney, PWC, APN Media, Accenture

Vidya Krishnakumar – Non-Executive Director. Bank of Queensland, News Corp, Lion Co, Macquarie Bank

Leadership Team:

David Raper – Chief Executive Officer. EGM, ASX, JP Morgan, Yieldbroker, BTC Markets

Vincent Gramoli – Founder and Chief Technology Officer. INRIA, Cornell, EPFL, CSIRO

Fracois Latouche – General Manager. Rich, Block8, TEIMS Tech

Leighlah Ashmore – Head of Partnerships and Community. Block8, VMware, Superloop

Tim Bass – Chief Investment Officer. CEO & Founder Block8, Superloop

Kim Bartlett – Chief Operating Officer. Founder Block8, Superloop, Inspire IT.

What jumps out to me is we have an Accenture connection. Block8 have worked with R3 and Australia’s New Payment Platform. JP and Deutsche Bank are connected. Vincent Gramoli is a pillar to the tech side of things. Superloop is the leading broadband provider in Australia and prominent in South-East Asia.

Kim Bartlett has a background in Australian Mortgages before going to form Block8. No coincidence then in 2020, Block8 made a partnership with the former workplace of Mr Bartlett, Australian Mortgage Marketplace.

“Block8 joint ventures with founders, domain leading companies and experts to incubate innovative applications that transform business models and disrupt industries using the unique qualities of blockchain distributed ledger technology.

“We use our deep expertise in economics, network effects, crypto currencies, blockchain and smart contracts combined with our partners’ business domain knowledge to architect the best platform and apps to create a new digital business model.”

Block8 have a partnership with Digital Asset, who themselves work with Hyperledger Foundation, Accenture, ASX, VM Ware, Ey and more. Block8, with its connection to mortgages, is applying Digital Assets contract language, Daml, to businesses.

Alan Burt, executive chairman at RedBelly Network, comments, “Transactions on our blockchain are accountable and enforceable by law, and I think this makes Redbelly significantly more attractive for applications where cyber security and data sovereignty are important.”

Burt is the Non-Executive Director at Hutly. This is a smart contract platform for the residential tenancy market. He has been at Uneeq and Synthenix,Burt comes from Beachhead Venture Capital, which invests in high-growth assets, where is still prominent personnel. Beachhead’s portfolio consists of, but not exclusive to, Hutly, Block8, and Uneeq, which is an AI company where you can interact with Digital Humans such as Einstein. I broke Einstein by asking him, “why do you stay with problems longer?”

Tim Bass has experience at Superloop and is the co-founder of Boulevard.

On the board of Boulevard is Peter Devine and Alan Burt, who both are at Beachhead Venture Capital. Peter Devine had an early career in planning and delivering major infrastructure projects and programs, he now has direct investment in and mentorship of early-stage ventures commercializing leading edge technologies. Block8 have worked with Boulevard.

Cathryn Lyall also comes from Boulevard and Hutly. She has an impressive list of experience: at Colonial State Bank she held the position of Head of Futures; GM at the Australian Derivatives Exchange; Managing Director at the European office of Chicago Board of Trade, whilst in Europe she became the Managing Director of CME Group’s European office; she was on the board of advisors at the London Capital Club. At Deutsche Bank, she was the Independent Non-Executive Director in the UK bank. There she dealt with regulations, executives, developed and evolved business strategies, amongst other responsibilities that come with this stressful position. She works with fintech and is the non-executive director of Australia’s first neo-lender, Wisr.

Furthermore, she a partner at Seed Space Venture Capital. Her fellow partners include: Will Lawson – was a trader at UBS, and worked at Westpac Institutional Bank.Dirk Stellar – worked at Interpol, Unitaid, worked with health initiatives such as the WHO, co-founded Seed Money Australia with Lyall, he is also a member of the Australian Institute of Company Directors and the Financial Services Institute of Australasia.

David Raper comes from ASX. In Raper’s own words, “My superpower is an ability to synthesize, craft and execute in complex environments. I have a unique combination of deep finanical markets knowledge and emerging technologies.

“I get the power of tech change and deeply understand markets. I’m an expert that communicates complex ideas simply, and a professional that develops successful commercial strategies, generates broad support and successfully executes.” I cannot wait for his Marvel movie.

One of things about Raper that has captured my heart simply with the name of one of the company’s he advises, Mycelium.

“Mycelium is an ever-growing collection of engineers, economists and creatives operating on the cutting edge of decentralised finance and blockchain-based technology, whose ventures seek to change the way we interact with financial systems and technology by making them accessible for all.”

Mycelium appear to be active amongst fintech and Australian defi conferences.

Vidya Krishnakumar not only has experience in the Australian finance and banking sector, where he held various roles around data analysis, he also has experience with News Corp Australia. A crucial media link within the RedBelly team, “News Corp Australia is trusted by over 18 million Australians a month to provide the information and inspiration they seek across multiple print, video, audio and digital platforms.”

Mark Kay has experience as a business analyst with Accenture in the late 90s, with PwC he was Management Consultant in New Zealand. Whilst in New Zealand, for eight years he worked for APN News & Media.

RedBelly has found its baby steps with the assistance of the public funds of the Australian Government, it is now passing over to the private sector. With experienced people such as Lyall, Burt and Bartlett, they aim to commercialise the invention and work of Gramoli. Team has experience with big names Deloitte, PwC, Accenture as well as coming from the residential/property sector, AI, digital derivatives. This tech is now connected closely with elite people from important financial sectors of Australia.

The Tech

The Red Belly Blockchain is being developed as a solution to issues that dog current-generation blockchains such as scalability, double-spending, forks and energy consumption. They achieved this by introducing a unique consensus model called deterministic byzantine consensus.

This consensus model allows for confirmation when a threshold for the number of messages have been received, allowing for slow nodes to be excluded from consensus. These slow nodes are called “weak coordinators” and are vital to the function of the new algorithm.

Previous tests of the Red Belly Blockchain, which involved 300 machines localised in a single data centre, reached speeds of 660,000 transactions per second.

The blockchain is intended to function somewhere between a public and private blockchain, with its intended use-case being aimed at the financial sector, as well as exploring its use in industries such as agriculture and education.

The 30 000 transactions were reportedly transmitted across 14 of 18 geographic regions covered by Amazon Web Services, including North America, South America, Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Europe, with an average latency of 3 seconds per transaction.

“Our goal is to implement a censorship-resistance replicated state machine (RSM). By censorship-resistance, we mean that any transaction issued properly by a requester gets committed by the system, hence preventing censorship. By replicated state machine, we refer to a way of totally ordering sets of transactions in the form of a blockchain, starting from the genesis block, so that all transactions are provisioned and linearizable. To this end, we require to solve a variant of the BFT consensus problem to agree on an enumerable valid subset of the union of the proposed values as follows” p 4/18 Red Belly: A Secure, Fair and Scalable Open Blockchain

Still a man with a basic amateur understanding of the tech, I appreciate what RBBC can do, that it set itself apart from others.

The short and sweet of it is Vincent Gramoli et al have developed a blockchain that boasts a fast transaction speed by current standards and this said blockchain does not double spend.

There is the DBFT Consensus Algorithm + Polygraph. Polygraph is a proof-of-fraud protocol.

Redbelly does not fork, and if a participant attempts to fork the blockchain, Redbelly automatically constructs an undeniable proof-of-fraud. It is able to provide more TPS with 3 second latency due to it being a leaderless blockchain. Leader-based has to rely on the leader doing more and more work as the system grows.

Each node is equal, making the consensus not a competitive one. Every block presents a set of TX’s, the decision is the combination of what is proposed. No TX’s are committed if there is a partition, it favours consistency over availability. The DBFT waits for a threshold of messages and forms a superblock of transactions that reach the threshold, this strategy means the DBFT can execute a higher throughput the more people participate. By making it a collaborative consensus, it does not waste resources of participants.

The decided superblock orders all transactions it contains in the same order at all replicas. RBBC discards incorrectly signed transactions eagerly and the conflicting transactions lazily

From the whitepaper, “Polygraph requests dedicated messages to be signed by their sender to allow participants to cross-check these messages in order to detect liars that have sent conflicting information to different participants. As these conflicting messages are signed by their senders, they constitute an undeniable proof-of-fraud.”

Having onboards for Web2.0 business and fiat on-ramps for the fiat-users is great but increasing public trust is key for bringing people into the digital economy. Identity is protected by zkSnark and only what is needed is given to the verifier.

Ricardian Contracts with its legislation and compliance at the heart of it future proofs RBBC to the oncoming regulation. With RBBC working closely with the Australian government who are going to roll out legislation over the next few years.

From the “Evaluating The Red Belly Blockchain”, written by Tyler Crain, Christopher Natoli and Vincent Gramoli:

“Its main novelty is its novel sharding that minimises both computation and communication wastes that allows to achieve unprecedented throughput with a low latency when deployed world-wide. The Red Belly Blockchain appears as a platform of choice for obtaining the security needed to move blockchain use-cases from innovation labs to production without sacrificing performance.”

High-throughput, cannot fork, proof-of-fraud, Ricardian Contracts, superblock optimisation, SEVM, EVM interface, sharded verification. These are the selling points of RBBC.

It has been through an AWS experiment, this was conducted on hundreds of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) VMs running consensus located on different continents and replicating the blockchain state to up to 1000 machines in 14 separate regions (Australia, Canada, UK, US, Germany, Brazil, Japan, India, South Korea and Singapore). This was tested against CONS1, which is a leader-based protocol, and Honey Badger BFT (HBBFT), which is randomised BFT. CONS1 is the classic 3-step leader-based Byzantine consensus implementation similar to PBFT, the Tendermint consensus, and including the concurrency optimizations of BFT-SMaRt.

Each blockchain is tested with variations. RBBC was stress-tested in a single datacentre with up to 300 high-end VMs and a fixed fault tolerance to measure how fast it could go in a consortium setting.

They fixed it to the largest possible fault tolerance with n = 20 nodes and increase the number of nodes from 20 to 300 permissioned nodes in steps of 20. The throughput scales up to n = 260 nodes to reach 660,000 TPS while the latency remains lower than 4 seconds. At n = 280 throughput drops slightly.

When variations are introduced RBBC falls the most compared to the other but that is due to how high it can reach. It fell to 33,000 TPS.

Here reads the conclusion from “Red Belly: A Secure, Fair and Scalable Open Blockchain”, written by Gramoli, Crain and Natoli, for IEEE:

“Blockchains tend to adopt an open permissioned model where a subset of the nodes with some permissions (e.g., PoS) can decide upon the next block. RBBC is the first of these that does not need synchrony to scale to hundreds of geodistributed permissioned nodes. To this end, it solves the Set Byzantine Consensus problem, adopts a leaderless design that offers censorship-resistance and introduces sharded verification. World-wide experiments demonstrate that it triples the performance of its closest competitor.”

Slithering through the undergrowth

The International Organization for Standardization develops and publishes international standards. The ISO has created a Technical Committee, ISO/TC 307, for Standardizing Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technologies, whose Secretariat is led by Standards Australia.

Standards Australia is a non-government, non-proﬁt Standards organization who is responsible in the development and adoption of standards in Australia by forming technical committees bringing together relevant parties and stakeholders to reach consensus.

Mark Staples is a member of Standards Australia, representing Australia in TC307 on terminology, reference architecture, smart contracts, governance, and digital currencies.

Who is this Mark Staples fellow?

Mark Staples is a long-standing important academic and senior researcher at Data61. From focussing on geomechanics to healthcare, supply chains and economic uses for blockchain as well as being on the OECD's Blockchain Expert Policy Advisory Board.

Interestingly, in December 2021, he has another role, which is CTO of Digital Finance CRC, he is their tech and research lead. The purpose of CRC is to pioneer the commercialisation of the digital finance sector.

CRC is chaired by a veteran of Australian politics, Neville Stevens. He has been prominent in the IT and telecommunication development of Australia. He has been the chairman of NICTA. The rest of the board have experience in the Australian wine sector, accounting, backgrounds in JP Morgan,

Staples and Gramoli wrote a paper called, “Blockchain Standards: Can We Reach a Consensus?” In this paper they bring up ISO/TC 307, which is also working closely with ISO/TC 68, the standardisation of the field of banking.

Australia themselves have The RegTech Association, which was established in 2017 as an independent, non-profit organisation that now has 130+ member organisations, including global companies and major banks and technology firms. Compare to UK, who do not have focussed association for Reg Tech.

A key project for interoperability and standardisation is Quant. The CEO of Quant, Gilbert Verdian, was a part of NWS Government Security Council, later made Quant, after a stint at Vocalink. Vocalink process 90% of UK salaries. Quant Network partnered with AUCloud provider to Australian Government, Defence and Healthcare creating greater productivity and security for Australian citizens.

Data61, together with law firm Herbert Smith Freehills and IBM, formed a consortium to build a blockchain-based smart contracts platform dubbed the Australian National Blockchain (ANB). In 2016, Data61, CSIRO and IBM hosted the ADC blockchain hackathon, which was sponsored by Overledger (Quant’s interoperable OS).

In 2019, Quant did a joint submission with Data61 for GFIN Cross-Border Payments. A fact worth knowing, the person who co-authored the ISO/TC 307 with Standards Australia was Gilbert Verdian in 2015. He has brought up Red Belly in an interview in 2020, he says to a stoner youtuber by the name of Crypto Finder, who appears as if he does not get enough REM sleep, “You don’t just use Bitcoin, you use other blockchains for different purposes. If you want to do something fast you don’t use bitcoin you use Hadera Hashgraph, for example. And there is another blockchain that’s come out of Australia called Red Belly, out of a university, which the government has taken on, that has 600,000 transactions a second. That’s Red Belly Blockchain.”

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DRj98hehzQ it is near 11.40 if interested, watch the comment just bounce off the stoners head like frisbee to a blind dog)

From 2015 to 2025 is an important chapter and layer to the history of blockchain/DLT and the economies around the world. This is the chapter for standardisation, testing and implementation for the financial world that our children and their children will be operating in.

2016, The Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Wells Fargo, and Brighann Cotton have claimed the first interbank trade transaction combining blockchain technology, smart contracts, and the Internet of Things (IoT).

The transaction, which took place between Brighann Cotton US and Brighann Cotton Marketing Australia, and their respective banks Wells Fargo and Commonwealth Bank, involved a shipment of 88 bales of cotton from Texas, USA to Qingdao, China.

The trade involved the letter of credit being executed through a digital smart contract stored on a private distributed ledger, using Skuchain's Brackets system.

2016-2017, Gramoli said Redbelly were talking with companies very active in the blockchain space. One being R3. R3 were running a private Ethereum network of 50 participants, where R3 owned 13% of the mining power. Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) were a part of this network and doing mining, UBS was a part of this.

Gramoli and his team at the time were to test this network, to see if they could demonstrate a double-spend attack, which they successfully did. They were able to prove that R3 could steal the other assets. They could do man-in-the-middle attacks. This is doable in private settings but not public settings.

At the time, they were working with CBA. They were mandated by World Bank to implement a blockchain bond. CBA were using an Ethereum Proof-of-Authority variant in their lab. The CBA have their own Innovation Lab established in 2014. To accompany this CommBank have x15 Ventures – the “x” is for exploration, the 15 is for their 15 million customers – this brings customers to the assets of CommBank, such as those from its Lab. X15 is partnered with KMPG and Microsoft, furthermore it has an Innovation Lab in London.

This important decade is key for those such as the UK to keep its financial position in the world and Australia are seizing the initiative too. To each other, they both represent important and prosperous markets to expand into.

Verdian is an important link to the UK and crypto for the Australia finance sector. He has spent time in council positions and helped pushed the Australian initiative into this burgeoning new technology. A key backer of Verdian is a Mr Tariq Khan, who holds a place on the Quant board.

Khan has a significant background in law, investing along with compliance and regulation. His current firm is Outrun Venture, which he started with Chris Adelsbach. Outrun invest in Banking APIs, Nigerian banking, neobanks, blockchain-based invoice exchanges, platforms for IT transitions, a trading app called Wombat – which has connections with Natwest and Facebook, it is invested in by Fuel Ventures, who also invest in Volt, furthermore, FV are apart of the Accord Project -, generally a lot of apps for phones that deal with point-of-payments and mortgages as well as other financial instruments. They invest in Everledger and Chris Adelsbach’s investments include quantum-resistance, blockchain applied to supply-chain management, education and health sectors.

People associated with Outrun are:

Andrea Cullen –

MD of Brightlink Ventures. Ex-Director of Research at Ares Management, oversight of $1.7 billion leveraged loan, bond and CDS portfolio. Advisory board member at Courtsdesk, ForwardLane and Parcelly.

Anthony Browne –

Chairman of UK Government’s Regulatory Policy Committee. Previously: CEO of British Bankers’ Association; Board member of the International Banking Federation and the European Banking Federation; Head of Government Relations EMEA at Morgan Stanley; Economic Development Policy Director for the Mayor of London.

Keith Saxton –

Ex-Director of Financial Services at IBM, Innovate Finance Ambassador, leading fintech, strategy and risk expert. Advisory board member at ForwardLane, Simudyne & Macrina Investment Management.

Martin Crass –

Director, Barclays Private Bank Ireland. 20 years' experience advising entrepreneurs, ultra-high net worth individuals and family offices. Irish fintech community leader. Advisory Board member of Courtsdesk and member of Barclays Private Bank & Overseas Services Innovation Forum.

It may seem a tangent to mention Tariq Khan but it is important to recognise that Australia is building its network to have its place at the elite table with blockchain tech coupled with the economy. Red Belly is at the forefront of Australia’s push and it is recognised by those that are creating the standards, with an enriched, extensive connections. The value of connections with people of experience and influence are vital to making it to the top of this booming industry, they can reveal great opportunity as well as competitive projects.

The UK-Australia FinTech Bridge Agreement, signed in March 2018, sets out the conditions to enable closer and stronger collaboration on FinTech between our governments, financial regulators and businesses. Each fintech bridge is unique, but they typically allow access to events, meetings and networking opportunities, referrals to streamline regulatory approval, introductions to buyers, investors, trade associations and institutions, advice and one-to-one mentoring from fintech specialists and discounted “soft-landing pads”, grants or subsidies.

Investment in Australian FinTech in 2016 defied the global trend, reaching over US$656 million with Australia being the second largest alternative finance market in the Asia Pacific. Australia’s supportive regulatory settings and high rate of FinTech adoption present an attractive market for the launch and expansion of FinTech products.

Recordsure is a UK regtech that claims to have vertically integrated into tier 1 banks in the UK and Australia. In PwC survey from 2018, 7% of global executives involved thought Australia were a leader in blockchain, which was 1% more than the UK. For the interested, in that survey, China reached 18% and USA ate 29% of the vote. IBM have been working closely with the Australian government.

The global research and advisory firm Gartner predict that by 2023, blockchain will support the global movement and tracking of $US2 trillion worth of goods and services annually.

One aside before we continue, know of a man called Phil Kenworthy. Highly influential and significant person in UK payment systems. He has started the first clearance bank in the UK for 250 years called Clear Bank. It is for fintech. They are finalists at Paytech 2022, and also there is the National Australia Bank as a finalist in the category Best Corporate Payments Initiative for the New Payments Platform Application.

He started the Payment Systems Consultancy Ltd and if you are intrigued, look at who he has consulted. He advised Accenture. A significant person in the rise of the UK CBDC.

Now, from the Kalifa Review on UK Fintech, p53/108, “The UK’s fintech sector is growing fast, representing £11bn in revenue in 2019, up from £6.6bn in 2015, which now equates to 8% of the country’s total financial services output. The high consumer fintech adoption rate, the supportive regulatory environment, and state aid schemes, have created a nurturing world-leading environment for UK fintechs to start-up, innovate, and promote competition. As a result, the UK currently accounts for approximately 9.5% of global fintech revenues…

“… In 2020, UK fintech raised $4.1bn in investment, more than the next five European countries combined,” Fintech adoption by UK consumers was over 70% in 2019, compared to 46% in the USA, 58% in Australia and 67% in Singapore.

The Next-gen methods – buy now, pay later (BNPL), invisible, biometric, and cryptocurrency – will drive digital payments growth and is providing incentive and great opportunity for innovation. The countries of a shared language have a lot to offer one another, both in capital and expertise. Red Belly’s titan, Cathryn Lyall, is optimistic about Australia’s drive in fintech but believes they are way behind places such as Britain. An example of some tech coming forth from Britain, that Lyall shared on her Linked In, is SETL’s Regulated Liability Network, it can do 30,000 TPS, and its highest comes in at 1 million transactions per second on a test with AWS. Trusted by Deloitte and Citi Group – which is not surprising as Deloitte were a Series A funder and the RLN was proposed by Citi Group’s Tony McLaughlin.

Citi Group also mutually own, along with 13 others, Australia’s New Payment Platform (NPP).

From 2010 to 2012 the Reserve Bank's Payments System Board (PSB) conducted a Strategic Review of Innovation in the Payments System, and identified for this system to make real-time payments. Instant payments and e-money are emerging as preferred methods and will account for more than 25% of global non-cash transactions by 2025, up from 14.5%. Non-cash transactions expected to reach 1.1 trillion by 2023.

By 2014, NPP was formed and went live in 2017. Its basic structure is operated by SWIFT and designed for different payment services to build on this infrastructure. Adrian Lovney, CEO of NPP, says that was a small part of it, a lot of work went into the back and notes NPP took wisdom from the Faster Payments system switch that happened in the UK 2008. There was an upsurge in financial fraud at the launch of Faster Payments. NPP reportedly did not experience this and to date there has been no system wide outage.

Between its public launch on 13th February 2018 and the end of January 2020, the NPP processed around 384 million payments, totalling $344 billion. Usage of NPP payments has grown significantly, with over 4.1 million PayIDs registered and an average of 1.1 million payments, whose total worth is $1 billion, made per day in January 2020. In 2020, NPP merged with Eftpos and BPAY to form Australia Payments Plus.

Eftpos (which started as Australia’s national debit payments system) acquired the digital payments app Beem It in late 2020. As part of its digital wallet expansion strategy, Eftpos began a phased launch of real-time peer-to-peer payments and QR payment capabilities in H1 2021. In June 2021, it launched ConnectID to allow users to authenticate their identity with merchants, hotels, hospitals, insurers, and governments.

From NPP’s website, 2019, Block8 is using the NPP to combine fast payments with blockchain to create new products and services. The company partnered with myStake — an equity management, compliance and share register platform that digitises assets on a blockchain — to develop a service that enables shareholders to trade between each other with immediate settlement over the NPP.

In late 2021, Zepto became both the first non-bank fintech approved to connect directly to the New Payments Platform (NPP) as a ‘connected institution’, and the first non-bank payments provider Accredited Data Recipient (ADR) under the ACCC’s Consumer Data Right (CDR). Zepto raised $25mm in a funding round.

The Australian government have identified early to upgrade their payment systems, funded university grants and brought industry leaders to form a blockchain roadmap. In their roadmap, they bring up Red Belly Blockchain:

“Red Belly Blockchain is a technology from the University Sydney and CSIRO’s Data61 that addresses key challenges for blockchain platforms, such as the slow responsiveness of blockchain transactions and the low rate at which blockchain-based transactions can be executed. Awarded an Australian Research Council grant of $855,000 in 2018, the Red Belly Blockchain has already demonstrated significant potential, achieving a transaction response time of about 3 seconds compared with Bitcoin’s 10 minutes, and a transaction rate of 30,000 per second in large-scale experiments, compared with Bitcoin’s seven. In doing so, Red Belly Blockchain has overcome one of the most notable obstacles to scaling the technology, opening the way to blockchain being applied more broadly within the finance sector and expanding into the agricultural and education sectors”

There is a steering committee that oversees the national roadmap for blockchain. A part of this committee is Katie Ford, who is an AI and Data Specialist, from Microsoft. Ford worked with the Australian Government, Intel (2014 – 2016), CSIRO’s Data61 (2016 – 2020), before moving over to Microsoft in 2020.

Peter Hiom is a part of the committee and he is also the Deputy Chief Officer of the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX).

Dr Chris Berg is the co-director of the roadmap. He comes from RMIT (the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) and he co-founded the RMIT Blockchain Innovation Hub. In October 2021, Stanford and Coin Desk had nothing better to do and decided to survey 230 institutions that provided higher education courses and offerings and where academic research has impacted the development of blockchain technology.

RMIT came second in their survey. National University of Singapore came top, Berkley third, Zurich fourth, with MIT fifth.

Australia wants to expand blockchain literacy and ACS has aimed to bring 300,00 skilled professionals into this digital sector over the next 5 years. CSIRO’s Data61 is one of the world’s top blockchain research organisations and has authored five of the 30 most-cited blockchain research papers globally. The RMIT Blockchain Innovation Hub (BIH) is the world’s first research centre on the social science of blockchain.

The Next Generation AI Graduates Program will attract and train up to 234 home-grown, job-ready AI specialists through competitive national scholarships. The scholarships will be co-funded with universities and industry for study at Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF) Levels 8 (Honours) to 10 (Doctoral). As part of the scholarship, students will also participate in industry-led research projects and placements to build job‑ready skills. These graduates will help backfill the shortage of AI specialists which businesses report as the most pressing challenge to adapting and developing AI technologies.

In addition to the AI Action Plan initiatives, a further investment in the Next Generation Emerging Technology Graduates Program will attract and train 234 specialists in other emerging technologies, such as robotics, cyber security, quantum computing, blockchain and data through competitive national scholarships.

The roadmap recognises the agricultural sector, health, education and supply chains can great benefit from blockchain tech.

Leading Australian banks – Australia and New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ), the CBA, National Australia, and Westpac – took in AUD1.7bn in revenue from payments and credit cards, according to a 2020 report from Australia-based investment bank Macquarie Group. However, they face a threat from providers such as Apple Pay and Google Pay, who are favoured by Gen Z and digital-enthusiasts due to the frictionless experience.

The Commonwealth Bank of Australia and CSIRO’s Data61 conducted a trial for smart money (also known as programmable money), motivated by the context of Australia’s National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). The proof-of-concept trial demonstrated that smart money would, if scaled and applied across the NDIS ecosystem, result in annual economic benefits equating to hundreds of millions of dollars.

In 2018, new laws for digital currency exchange providers were implemented by the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (AUSTRAC), the financial intelligence agency and AML/CTF regulator. Firms are required to register and implement KYC policies, report suspicious transactions and comply with AML legislation.

In December 2021, Australia said it will create a licencing framework for cryptocurrency exchanges and consider launching a retail CBDC as part of an overhaul of its payment industry.

Josh Frydenberg, the Treasurer, said the government would begin consultation in early 2022 on establishing a licensing framework for digital exchanges, allowing the purchase and sale of crypto-assets by consumers in a regulated environment. The government would also consult on regulating businesses that hold crypto-assets on behalf of consumers, and on the feasibility of a central bank digital currency, Frydenberg said.

March 2022, the Australian Government is strengthening Australia’s capabilities through the $124.1 million Artificial Intelligence Action Plan to position Australia as a global leader in AI technology.

April 2022, the Australian Government is supporting international collaboration through the $60.2 million Global Science and Technology Diplomacy Fund (GSTDF). It is to fund research, form research partnerships; data, AI and quantum computing are some of the priorities.

Australia is making it strides ahead. Block8 has built on R3’s Corda blockchain, speaking of R3, they are involved with BISIH’s (Bank for International Settlements Innovation Hub) Project Dunbar. The Reserve Bank of Australia is a part of the BISIH, along with Bank Negara Malaysia, the Monetary Authority of Singapore and the South African Reserve Bank.

Dunbar is a multi-CBDC system tried on 2 blockchains: Quorum, the famous ETH chain developed by Consensys, and implemented by Partior, and Corda. The Partior nodes need its API gateways to the bank systems and this is something Quant provides. Quant often appears in conferences with SDX and flirt with one another on Twitter.

In Project Jura, a consortium of Accenture, R3, SDX, UBS, Natixis working with BISIH, Swiss Centre, and the Swiss National Bank.

Project Helvetia is in phase 2; SDX, BIS and SNB are working together on issuance of wholesale CBDC as well as the interoperability between the SDX tokenised assets and the Swiss RTGS system.

BIS over 2022 want to expand CBDC experiments and implementation, they want more cross-border payments between the G20 nations. From the Financial Stability Board, “Enhancing Cross Border Payments”, the BISIH is testing the API payments framework from April 2022 to June 2023. Then the BIS in collaboration with the IMF and World Bank will organise a conference to share information for collaboration across planned CBDC implementations.

This next wreath of information is courtesy of King Solomon from Youtube. European Union’s Markets in Crypto Assets Regulation (MiCAR) proposes provisions on stablecoins would start to apply in early 2024 with more coming in 2025. European Parliament have a report from 3.2022, on proposing crypto-asset regulation for 2024. South Korea plans legislation on crypto in 2024. FedNow Service is the title to the Federal Reserve for an interbank RTGS system clearing system, expected to be available in 2023 or 2024. The Fed have hoped to develop a CBDC by 2024. The IIJA – Infrastructure Investments and Jobs Act – signed in 2021 by Biden, is implementing a comprehensive set of financial account reporting rules, applying to persons, including digital asset exchanges and custodians. These rules will require digital asset exchanges and custodians to report digital asset transactions, rules coming into effect 2024. Gartner is predicting criminal crypto transactions will drop 30% by 2024. CFTC from USA is developing a framework for digital assets for 2024. Accenture sees 2025 as the beginning of blockchain maturity. Nomura is setting up a crypto subsidiary in 2024, Central Bank of Mexico is planning to launch a digital currency by 2024. The Bank of England RTGS is going to transition state 3 in spring 2024.

The goal for ISO20022 to be fully implemented in 2024. Additionally, 2024 is the next Bitcoin halvening. 2024 and 2025 will be big for digital assets, SDX suggest two important affairs in DLT and finance. Firstly, in 2025 – 2027, approximately USD 24TN of financial assets are expected to be tokenized – as Digital Financial Assets with roughly 10% of global GDP being stored and or transacted on blockchain/ DLT up from about 1.3% in 2021. The WEF predict blockchain will store 10% of the world’s GDP by 2027. Deutsche Bank believe the same too. A pattern is emerging here.

Secondly, the implied Digital Financial Asset growth is impressive, in particular in the context of the still evolving nature of the blockchain/ DLT industry which has neither undergone consolidation i.e.,converged towards a dominant industry standard nor has a meaningful number of players dropped out of the market.

With onboarding, KYC will be important and Red Belly’s partner Frankieone provides the API for and tech for fraud detection and prevention. Frankieone has received US$16mm in a round of funding. Red Belly strategically positioned well for what SDX sees as substantial onboarding of wealth onto DLT and finance.

Red Belly’s API’s allow Web 2.0 access to the blockchain and is providing a payment gateway for fiat currencies, along with a longer ambition of having CBDC’s issued with Red Belly.

Here is an extract straight from Red Belly whitepaper, “Redbelly is not a blockchain for institutions. We are empowering everyday people with access to institutional tools at incredibly low cost in order to level the playing field by eliminating information asymmetry. In order to build this future, we must start from a place of accountability.”

There is an acceleration to a tokenised future. Australia represents a vibrant, diverse and thriving FinTech ecosystem – with approximately 400 FinTech companies based across all Australian State and Territory capitals, supported by a deep financial services pedigree and a strong and stable financial regulatory environment.

Members on board are connected and highly experienced in finance, mortgages and exchanges, influence Australian government policies, connected with the wider movement in the finance industry: the move to instant payments, real-world assets tokenised and CBDCs.

Private blockchains can provide fantastic TPS with high-profile clients but due to the enclosed nature, retail cannot invest. RBBC places itself with the private and public domain. From now to 2025, we will see blockchain really go mainstream, then from 2026-2030 there will be the ongoing major adoption to the point the tech will be so proliferous people will take it for granted.

I have touched upon how Gramoli has worked with private blockchain from significant R3, demonstrated the connections and network this is resides within, Australia is utilising sharp elbows to keep itself at the trough, with a Red Belly tucked under its armpit. Australia have been close to the formation of the system that will support payments for the next 50-100 years.

With that considered what will RBBC do?

The executive team that is brought in around the engineer team

To start with the immediate links, neo-banks will utilise RBBC. Volt is the immediate one as it is a use case already. Neobanks will be able to onboard quicker than most traditional banks due to their technological edge.

Hutly being another use case, Lyall and Burt will bring Hutly’s real estate contracts into the fold. Their purchase of PropertyData platform from the Real Estate Institute of Victoria (REIV) provides Hutly with 15 years’ worth of historical property data in Victoria, Australia. Here is the bragging list of estate agents that use Hutly.

For some healthy speculation that would be in the realms of safe and near certain, partner Frankieone has traditional banks for clients as well as neo-banks, such as Westpac and NZ BNPL. The connections here will onboard companies to RBBC. Block8 are apart of Blockchain Australia, where connections and partnerships can be made.

If the people behind RBBC can tap into the Australian/New Zealand fintech market, they can onboard a lot of money. Zepto is a promising, Till Payments raised US$80mm in a Series C round, it has Peter Slater, former Divisional CFO of Mastercard, as CFO, Fady Daher, former GM & VP Global Commercial at American Express, and and Independent Directors John Banfield, Group CEO BPAY. BPay a successful Australian company that focusses on making bill payments easy and accessible. It was the world's first single bill payment service adopted across the banking sector. It is a strong market RBBC can tap into.

Boulevard’s partners Upsure is for business insurance, Paytron is for automated bookkeeping and an Australian legal technology company. Boulevard help people invest and are connected in the DLT world, the executives can pull in business from their links.

Boulevard’s members on RBBC’s board will make use of their connection with ASX. ASX have developed a DLT called Synfini, which Boulevard are an early adopter of. In 2021, Boulevard shared a stage with the Victorian Government, Vocus (telecoms), Swyftx (an ANZAC cryptocurrency exchange), Hutly, were at the Australia Fintech awards called The Finnies. Of course, it is called the Finnies, it is Australian. Seed Space sponsored the event and Boulevard were a part of the EXCELLENCE IN BLOCKCHAIN/DISTRIBUTED LEDGER finalists.

In the same award at 2022, Hutly and FrankieOne are finalists. FrankieOne also made finalists for the RegTech award as well as “Fintech Organisation of the Year”, sponsored by ASX.

The finalists of the “Female Fintech Leader of the Year” includes Caroline Bowler, BTC Markets (David Raper from BTC is on the RBBC board). These events are great for recognition but more pertinently, great for networking, making connections and onboarding business. 2022 Finnies is sponsored by Till Payments, Mastercard, After Pay and Global Processing Services (GPS). GPS raised $300mm is 2021 and a further $100mm in 2022. It is an API-first tech platform that provides for fintech, digital banks, remittance, BNPL, and anything next-gen payment centred. After the start of the Finnies, Mastercard and GPS announced a partnership.

To digress for a moment, GPS are worthwhile to keep on your radar, Temasek invest in them along with MissonOG, Advent International (who have recently invested in Certik) and Viking Global. Michael Buchanan, former Goldman Sachs Co-Director, Global Macro and Markets Research and Goldman Sachs Chief Asia-Pacific Economist, former WEF Economist is at GPS as the Head, Portfolio Strategy & Risk Group; Head, Macro Strategy; Head, Australia & New Zealand.

Back to RBBC. The tech itself is compatible with EVM, which is essential for any project that wants success. This can onboard Ethereum projects. Further speculation would be British fintech companies utilising RBBC further down the line.

Here is a list of Competitors’ Market Cap:

Stellar, $3,323,090,269

EOS, $1,348,226,967

Cardano, $18,179,218,635

Concordium $ 46,018,420

Qanx, $22,454,362

Risk

Being tied to the Government means the project can be at risk from policy changes. The direction of finance to DLT/blockchain is entrenched and to reverse any policy now would be economic suicide for Australia. However, volatility of the crypto-sphere spooks governments and regulators. Government linked projects move slow.

On top of waiting our unlocks, where can these coins exit? Volt will be a ramp off but this involves making a bank account. This will be no problem for some and an issue for others. There is the ethical situation of it being centralised?

Even on blockchain that are relatively young they have reasonable market caps. Qanx and Concordium are two examples of a public-private blockchain. Adoption by developers and network users is key to a protocol. Near protocol has seen a great number of developers go towards its protocol, the number of transactions and wallets is rising. The future for Near is healthy. For now, Near reports just over 16,000 active users in April. Over the course of 30 days from 12/5/2022, Solana with 15.4 million active addresses had 15.3 million transactions. A risk is development is too hard or developers are already elsewhere. This is why connections are important, they may fund hackathons and bring their interests to the protocol thus producing products and activity.

A succinct outlook for RBBC potential, these market caps are in a bear market 2022, Qanx and Concordium with low adoption ranging between $20-50mm. Near with growing development has $3,721,956,569, and Solana, with a much higher number of users, is at $15,108,663,899. By 2024, where a potential to have 1bn active crypto users, what could the market cap reach for RBBC? Block8 has a lot of developers and the project is tied to CSIRO, the cream of ingenious minds in Australia. With Ricardian Contracts, compliance entwined smart contracts, RBBC leans more towards incorporating real-world assets onto blockchain. This should prove highly profitable.

Also, there is the risk of the protocol failing in some manner, for example, Solana has had faults in exchange for speed.

Does the protocol market itself effectively? Gramoli is active at conferences and the more academic end of the protocol, time will tell who will rise as the mouthpiece. Take Radix as an example, Dan Hughes is the mind behind the coding whilst they have Piers Ridyard as the mouth of the protocol. Piers has a disarming, engaging manner, selling the protocol whilst also engaging conferences and other protocol leaders. RBBC have key people close to the standard’s creators and regulation authorities with engineers in elite positions in the blockchain tech industry of Australia.

Geo-Political events apply to any investment. If tensions between USA, China and Taiwan exacerbated then that would sink the world economy. We are going through quite dramatic economic events that will have repercussions, expect famine in Africa; Powell et al actually said they did not consider the consequences of printing so much money and laughed. Play with your money wisely.