Strategic Telecom Advisor Announcement

All right, we'll be starting in around two minutes time. David, can you, can you hear me? I can, I think Parker, you need to be on as a speaker, you're currently a listener. So just spotted that on the thing. But yeah, I'm here, we're ready to go to your rest. And, sick. All right, I think in good Swiss tradition, let's talk about it. I think it's a plan association, X-paces. I think it's a special one as well. You've all seen the news, managing partners, storm partners on the New York host today, known David for quite some time now. It's been a great pleasure working within the telecoin ecosystem for a bit of time as well. So it's been a pleasure to unite the two worlds together. So as you saw on Tuesday, we introduced David Palmer as strategic telecommunications advisor. I was going to be here with Parker, Span founder of the telecoin association to talk a little bit over the next 30, 30, 40 minutes about a little bit of everything starting with David's 25 year telco experience. Why he's chosen this network. His thoughts around what blockchain actually solves for mobile operators. And yeah, I guess what David is really here to do. We're going to be answering some community questions throughout the spaces, probably most likely towards the end. I think the community asked so many different questions already on a few of the previous exposed. So we actually will be probably answering some of those first but feel free to get in there in the comments. And we'll try to answer some extra ones too if we have a little bit of time. So yeah, David, I mean, nice to have you here with us. First of all, it's an absolute pleasure. I've been working in the background for a while. So I've been seeing things from the other side so to speak. But absolute pleasure. I've been overwhelmed by the response to the announcement on Tuesday by the community, my new family. And, you know, rearing to go, you know, rearing to start you know, moving forwards with some of the things we've been working on. But, you know, I think in this forum, you know, just hoping to share a bit about myself, about the experience I have. But also more importantly about the direction that we've discussed and how we move forward. So really excited. And yeah, let's go. Fantastic. I mean, David, you're quite a unique person. I mean, you spent over 25 years now inside the telecommunications industry and quite some time. I think what is the past like five, 10 years now within the blockchain industry too. Maybe let's take a step back. I mean, how did the two worlds kind of find you that's looked at maybe about your curiosity in the two. And I mean, the moment I guess you realized that blockchain was a solution for operators. Yes, so personally, I think my stories are well documented. I managed to get some interest myself and a colleague in Bitcoin. We managed to sort of mine one. I was really interested in this new money and this sort of project became even more interested with Ethereum and the concept of smart contracts and the sort of trust that it could bring about. But yeah, when I looked at the use cases and who was sort of looking at blockchain and business outside of Ethereum and Bitcoin, it was all finance. It was all about payments and tokens and money and coins. And part of the question I asked myself is, okay, how could this apply to my industry? What are the use cases for telecoms? And they weren't then. So I said about in the in Vodafone looking at, I prepared a paper actually was myself and the CTO at that time of IoT George Benton. And we put a paper together really exploring blockchain for Vodafone. And there was a few things we looked at. One was you may have heard of it, the Vodafone. This is way way back in 2016-17, the Vodafone. And how that could be used for internal settlements because Vodafone is a group and has different operating companies. So that was one of the things we looked at. The other one was roaming carrier services, all of these where you have parties who have to do business but don't necessarily trust each other and there's a settlement. And then the one I pushed forwards was IoT. And IoT was interesting because essentially you have a lot of devices and a lot of data. And for the IoT economy to take off, you needed trust, you needed some sort of business rules and intelligence and programmability to any payments made. And you needed an ecosystem where these devices could interoperate and identify each other securely for that. So that's sort of where I learned about the ecosystem and tried it. And that was it. And luckily in Vodafone we had a very enterprising culture. So we were allowed to do the paper presented at a very high level. And then Guy called Nidium Wilson, who is the director of VPC, really championed it and we were allowed to take four of these POCs that we carried out before I mentioned to MVP. And then that's where the whole PowerPoint thing came from. But one of the sort of background, but one of the key reasons why only one of those MVPs came to pass, came to actually be a business was because at the earliest sort of level of this, the CTO of Vodafone that time was a guy called Johann Weiberg. And I used to Pesta Yolan about blockchain, blockchain, blockchain, I was fascinated with the technology. And he said, look Dave, if you know, if we've got a database and this is maybe something for Telcoin, but if you've got a database, somebody doesn't come to you and say, what a wonderful database, they talk about the use case, right? They talk about the monetization. And that's sort of stuck with me. So from the very beginning, when we were looking at blockchain and IoT, there was a big focus on revenues, right? How can we use this to make money? How can we use this to bring revenues? How can this solve business problems? How can we not make this a technology looking for a problem? But how can we actually use this to address real business opportunities and increase revenues? And that was, I believe the reason why the IoT use case, the economy of things, a PowerPoint we called it digital asset broker back in the day, Vodafone Digital asset broker came to pass. So, I believe that that is going to be very relevant on the Telcoin journey. As we'll cover, as we go through the questions, but just preempting the questions, monetization, revenue, utility, commercial viability, not being a technology looking for a problem, but really offering a value proposition are all of the things that will attract MNOs, like Paypoint did, attract investors and the revenues and sound business fundamentals. That's quite a great process, I can agree, more of the data management and systems side of things. If I take another question, the way you're it's like, well, it's a great Excel sheet that you have there. Yeah, nobody ever monetized that. But yeah, I think deep dive deeper into one of the elements that we've been discussing for quite some time, right? It's like the part where our money moves today is rather broken, right? And I mean, why should a mobile operator care about that? Because those are two very distinct things in certain people's minds, but it's true that in certain errors around the world, they coincide quite significantly. Do you want to speak to that a little bit? Yeah, I think it's a big area, right? Money is a big area. And what we saw a few years ago was which was interesting. And I got caught up in this with some of the discussions with Impessa, was about the super apps, right? So we saw super apps, big keywords in industry back then, super applications. So super application being an application where you can pay, you can do amounting of things in the application. And then there was another buzzword called embedded finance. And that's where you can embed payments in your applications and it's all seamless. And of course, the telecoms industry is on the pinning all of this, right? They're providing the connectivity for this. But what you saw and one of the problems that telecommunications have is that the over the top players, right? You know, are the ones taking all of the value. So if you look at the value trade, mobile network operators have 10% of the value trade. Certainly this was the same for IoT and 90% is going to the guys who are providing.