The following year is a conversation between Dr. Shaun Conway, the Founder and President of the ixo Foundation and Denver Frederick, the Host of The Business of Giving.


Dr. Shaun Conway, Founder and resident of the ixo Foundation

Denver: As philanthropists and impact investors pour money into social and environmentally-focused businesses and projects, a nagging question often hovers over their efforts: Is the capital actually ending up where it’s intended? And is it delivering impact in a measurable, tangible manner? The ixo Foundation based in South Africa believes blockchain technology could help us assure that the answer to that is: Yes.

And here to tell us how, it’s a pleasure to have Dr. Shaun Conway, the founder and president of the ixo Foundation

Welcome to the Business of Giving, Shaun!

Shaun: Thank you, Denver. It’s great to be here, and greetings from Cape Town. I look forward to the conversation. 

Denver: Likewise. So how would you describe the genesis of ixo and how did you discover these unmet needs of social impact that the blockchain can uniquely solve?

Shaun: So, the story actually goes back quite a number of years. I was working in global health – I’m a medical doctor, a physician – and international development. I was working at the UK Department for International Development around the time of the 2008 global financial crisis, and was, at the same time, implementing projects on the ground in places around South Africa and Southern Africa.

With the financial crisis, capital dried up. And I think we’re seeing a very similar dynamic right now. And we were sitting sort of on both sides. I had projects on the ground, and I was also sitting in London at a policy level. And this disconnect was something that I recognized as being a huge problem in the system: the disconnect between capital coming from central sources flowing down to where it’s supposed to be utilized; and the disconnect between information coming back from the front line, back up to the policymakers and the capital allocators. 

And it’s a disconnect that involves problems with the supply chains of capital as well as the supply chains of data, but also fundamentally, how we were really thinking about data and about capital, really having them on separate ledgers, separate systems for flowing funds, separate systems for flowing information.

And so back in 2008, I gave a presentation. I was asked to speak about what web 2.0 could do to transform the space. Web 2.0 was still in its infancy, and unfortunately, those technologies couldn’t. But when I discovered blockchain and I read the Bitcoin whitepaper by Satoshi Nakamoto around 2013, it was  suddenly a huge “aha!” moment where I said, “We can bring these things onto the same ledger, and we can do really powerful things with this technology.” 

And so that was really kind of where the ixo idea was born. And then in the years subsequent to that, we’ve done huge amounts of research and development and testing and blood, sweat, and tears. And here we are today. 

Denver: That is really interesting because I don’t think I would have ever suspected that you had this idea before the technology came. And you’re just sitting around with an idea you can’t do anything with, and then as you say, “Aha!” You finally had some tools to be able to do it. 

Shaun: Well, one of the early technology approaches that I took to this, it wasn’t like a separate idea and said, “Well, we can’t do anything with it.” We did try out some local currency ledger systems. So, really it’s a ledger, a banking ledger that’s run at a local level. And that didn’t work because of all of the problems of: Who has legitimacy to run the ledger? All of the regulatory issues. Essentially, it’s still centralized even though it’s a localized solution in terms of governance and control and so on. And so that attempt didn’t really work.

With blockchain technology, of course, we have an entirely different paradigm. And coming at this from a medical perspective, I like to see the analogies from a biomimetic design perspective between what these technologies provide us as humanity and what nature does to protect us as living beings, particularly in the context of our immune systems.

And so, the really big idea behind this was: Could we use these technologies which enable decentralized sensing and responding to serve as a kind of digital immune system for humanity? And I had that idea floating around in my head. I didn’t speak to too many people about it until since the global pandemic of COVID. Now everyone understands the importance of immunity, and they have the lingo to understand about immune systems and about epidemics and so on, and how things spread, and so now it’s a lot easier. So now I feel confident talking about ixo. It’s really building some parts of this global digital immune system for humanity. 

Denver: I love analogous research. We tend to stay in our field and look at our field. And sometimes when you get outside those lanes and you look at something else, like at nature, and you begin to try to take some lessons there and apply it to what you’re doing – that’s where breakthroughs come from. 

Shaun: Absolutely!

When we’re talking about any development process, it’s changed over time. And if we have a trusted record, a verifiable record of those changes, then we can see how we’ve progressed. We can look back, and we can look at what we can attribute the changes to. We can look back, and we can look at contributions to that so we can reward the contributors to those changes.

Denver: Briefly walk us through the ixo protocol – from impact identification through to impact verification and ultimately impact tokenization.

Shaun: So what we really need at this time is a way of creating representations of the state of the world. So there’s so much false news and so much poor data information about what’s really going on in the world. And of course, there are central authorities that provide perspectives and sort of official views on things. And there are news agencies which provide, I guess, some form of subjective reporting on what is being observed in the world. 

But really, our systems of measurement and of observation that would enable us to say, “OK, this is the state of the world today as observed and as recorded using a trusted record, and then comparing the state’s changes over time – that’s really important. When we’re talking about any development process, it’s changed over time. And if we have a trusted record, a verifiable record of those changes, then we can see how we’ve progressed. We can look back, and we can look at what we can attribute the changes to. We can look back, and we can look at contributions to that so we can reward the contributors to those changes. 

But more important than even those dynamics is that we can set future states as desirable outcomes that we want to achieve. And we can link those into a system of records that is programmable and is linked directly to financial mechanisms. So very simply, one can think of this as creating some kind of an escrow on the future or some kind of future trigger that happens in a very simplistic way. Of course, we can put much more sophisticated financial mechanisms around this. 

But if we say we want to see a change, which we can define as being, let’s say, a certain coverage level of COVID immunization within a population, or a certain reduction in carbon emissions or whatever that desired future state is… if we can codify that, and we can put that into a sequential record, which is deterministic and which is verifiable, and enable those state changes to trigger changes in the world. 

So here’s the interesting concept. We have state changes that happen on a blockchain. So blockchain is essentially a chain of records laid down in time, and they are immutable. So, we progress forward one step at a time. And through each step, there’s a state change which may change the information in the blockchain. 

Now, the world also progresses through state changes and many different processes leading to that. Because the powerful idea is that if we can link those state changes of the real world to what’s changing on a blockchain in a way that the triggers that happen on the blockchain feed back into the real world because of the incentives that they create, we can bring about changes in the real world. And so now, we’ve got a cyber-physical feedback loop, and most natural systems and complex systems work on these feedback loops. So, this is a powerful engine for change if we can get these feedback loops right. 

So, at the protocol level, we now have the challenge of: OK, well how do we represent these states, and how do we verify these states? And it starts off by the ontologies and the identifiers that we use to be able to say, “All right, we can define an immunization as being the following thing with these definitions and with this identifier.” And until quite recently, really, until the work began around 2015, the internet didn’t really have a system of identifiers other than record numbers which were created in databases by central organizations. 

So, all of the identifiers that we carry around with us, our bank account details, our social security number, those kinds of things are provisioned to us by databases controlled by central authorities. They don’t really provide us with ways of identifying things from a self-sovereign perspective or identify things in a standardized way that are not held in those central repositories of records. 

And so, since 2015, the World Wide Web Consortium has been working on a set of standards around digital identity, and linked to that is standards around verifiable claims and verifiable credentials. So now, we can embed these identifiers into a new kind of data model, which uses cryptography to solidify the information and to enable the information to be verifiable at any point in the future. So, this gives us the trusted records, and it gives us the mechanisms that are linked to blockchain database type systems that can enable us to create these state records. 

Now, when we take a sequence of records together, which represent change that we’ve observed and we’ve verified as having happened, and that all gives us the evidence that gives us a prediction, that the outcome that has been achieved is real, then, we can say, “We now have a set of records, and we have a state that has been defined by all of this information that’s been collected.” 

If we take all of that information and we tokenize it in a non-fungible token– so we’re not talking about coins; we’re not talking about Bitcoins or anything; we’re talking about non-fungible digital records – and we embed all of the data, the proofs and the claims that have been verified into this non-fungible record, this becomes a valuable representation of an outcome state. 

Now, we can use very direct analogies with the certification systems that we’re already familiar with. So, most people are familiar with carbon credits, educational certificates, immunization certificates, biodiversity certificates. So, certificates tend to be a commonly used word for how we codify these outcomes in the analog systems. 

And what we’re now doing with tokenization is we’re creating digital representations of these certificates, but a whole lot more… because we can now embed verified, I call it high-definition data, into that asset. And of course, data is hugely valuable. And we can also embed executable rights into the token. And what I mean by executable rights is the rights that can be implemented by systems such as blockchain. 

So, if I have a right to get paid, for instance, or I have the right to receive the services from an outcome which has been delivered, let’s say a school has been built, and that investment into that outcome state which is codified as a non-fungible token provides me as a shareholder in that outcome with certain rights of usage, for instance. 

You can see how this pattern of packaging these outcome states that people want to invest in, want to buy, what to work towards, have some value in, how this becomes a very powerful new set of assets around which we can build impacts and systems and coordination and incentives. 

Denver: That’s a good explanation. So you get the baseline. You have the interventions. You have a system where transparency and trust are at the very heart of it. You see what works. You see what doesn’t work, and then you allocate the capital to what works. 

Shaun: Absolutely. And another dimension of this is that we know that single interventions generally are not effective in bringing about state changes.

So when we talk about outcomes, outcomes are due to many different complex interactions. And so, we also need ways of linking these interventions and processes together from a graph perspective. So this gets a little bit technical, but a graph connects nodes of information. 

And we’re familiar with this in the context of social media, for instance. So the social graph, if we use Facebook, we get recommended information in our news feed, and we get recommended friends. And there’s a whole graph of interconnected information, and this is what makes these systems so powerful.

And if we look at the internet companies that have become the huge leaders in terms of the internet economies – Facebook with its social graph, Amazon with its trust graph around products, Google with the information graph. And so, we need a graph which represents impact where everything is linked together – the agents who are producing the impact, the sources of capital that are financing impact, the measures that are assessing whether the impact has been achieved, or not. 

And so, with these linked data capabilities that we now have which are new web specifications, we’re able to create these kinds of graphs. And so, when we have a token, it’s not just an object sitting on its own. It’s an object in the context of a graph. 

If we can start to codify and value and create exchanges around, and all the innovation around forms of value, which are hugely abundant but also are intrinsically incredibly valuable because they’re the life- sustaining forces that are going to ensure our prosperity as humanity and are going to ensure that our planet continues to exist in terms of the ecological state of the planet.

Denver: And I think, Shaun, that’s another thing that’s come out of COVID as well. We understand the interconnections now in terms of trying to address issues. We always try to do it in a fixed, single, siloed way and recognize that doesn’t work. There are too many other things that are going on and they’re all linked together. 

So, that I think is part of the evolution that’s occurred that, again, is consistent with the way you’ve been looking at that –where I think it’s easier for you to have explained that today than it would have been two years ago…because we know it doesn’t work when you try to do it. 

So this leads to something it’s called the impact economy, correct?

Shaun: Yes, that’s right. So, when we start to create representations of value that have previously been excluded from our financial valuation of goods and services. So, when we start to value – a state of being immunized against COVID, for instance – how much would you pay for that? How much would a country pay for that? I think this is very prescient under the current circumstances. 

If we can extend that into pretty much any of the Sustainable Development Goal areas where we can start to put a value on things that previously were not part of the economy, mostly the economy will, in terms of domestic product, for instance, GDP, will measure both the good and the bad. So, it’s good to build cars, and it’s also good to crash cars because they all contribute to the economy. 

And so, our ways of defining capital and only focusing on financial capital, really in terms of what gets traded through markets and so on, has been part of the big problem that has brought us to where we are now. So, if we can start to codify and value and create exchanges around, and all the innovation around forms of value, which are hugely abundant but also are intrinsically incredibly valuable because they’re the life-sustaining forces that are going to ensure our prosperity as humanity and are going to ensure that our planet continues to exist in terms of the ecological state of the planet.

Denver: Talking about our planet continuing to exist, because you just mentioned a moment ago the Sustainable Development Goals. Are you using this protocol in connection with them? 

Shaun: Absolutely, yes. So, the Sustainable Development Goals are important because they give us a shared set of global goals that enable us to act in ways that have already, to some degree, achieved consensus. 

So, we may not necessarily agree with all of the specifics, and we may think that some of the goals are not incredibly well-defined, or miss out on certain important things for different specific communities, but generally, it’s a large consensus. I think it’s the largest, most important consensus that humanity has ever reached if you think about the numbers and the scale of it and the inclusiveness. 

Denver: To a certain degree.

Shaun: And so, it does give us the framework and, of course, it has measures, and it has indicators, and it has a lot of supports and activity related to the SDGs.

I think one of the perils that we have is that we have set ourselves these goals that are unlikely to be achieved. And so, the faith that humanity has in goal setting and in political processes that lead to the establishment of goals but then kind of accept when goals are not really achieved… and I know the experience of this was around the Millennium Development Goals, which preceded the SDGs, and most of my work early on in my career was focused on the MDGs. 

And so, we mustn’t lose faith. So, there’s huge amounts of work to be done, and there’s very little time to do it, but we need to really credibly demonstrate that the goals do take us down a path where we’re better off in 2030 than we are today.

Denver: To your point, I had somebody on the show the other day, and we were talking about the SDGs and what it looks like right now. And the current projections are 2094, that we will hit the SDGs by 2030. 

And I know what you’re talking about. You don’t want to have everybody be so deflated that there’s no goals after this because they say, “This is a fool’s errand, so why do I even want to get involved in something like that?” 

I look at the cost of evaluation. I don’t know if I know all that much about it, but at least from my experience, Shaun, it runs about 5% to 7% of the overall budget. And I do know about social impact bonds. That can be as high as 30%. How does this protocol compare in terms of the cost of evaluation, aside from the fact in giving you a far better evaluation, in addition? 

Shaun: So, most evaluation processes tend to be quite top-down. And I know this having done a lot of evaluations myself and flying around for agencies like the World Health Organization, flying into countries and doing missions and doing evaluations, and so on.

And most evaluations have not really leveraged technology. And so, the first thing that we’re doing here is leveraging a range of the technologies that have become second nature to us – using mobile devices, remotes, communications, and so on. But more important than that are the other data technologies. So, how we can take data and use that to become smarter and smarter, and use machine learning to be able to make the predictions? 

Because essentially, evaluations already are prediction science, whether those predictions are based on intuitive prediction or more kind of rigorous statistical predictions. And so, most evaluation processes are still very manual and quite opaque. The information that’s collected tends to end up in a written report, which ends up on a shelf or in a waste bin. 

So, just opening up that data and making the data available for analysis and for machine learning across multiple evaluations, if you have got the right data model, the right data governance and the privacy mechanisms, which are now all, of course, recognized as really important and are being acted on. 

So, we’ve seen how in the past couple of years, Apple has made privacy sort of a core part of its value proposition because the technologies are now available. So, because cryptography has become so commonplace and being applied in pretty much every part of the data systems, we now have ways of ensuring that data is privately shared in ways that can collectively be analyzed in order to give us much greater insights and predictive power than what was ever possible before. 

So, that’s all great in theory, but what’s the practice around it? How do we actually get the data into the systems in ways that it’s accessible, that there are marketplaces around it, that there are incentives to collect good quality data? And that’s really what we focus on with ixo. 

For one thing, bringing data collection very much on the same ledger and in the same process as service delivery, for instance. So, when you give an immunization or you teach a child, and you collect the data and you make a claim; you’re both collecting data about the intervention, but you’re also making a claim about the results of the intervention. All of that contributes to an analysis of the results and a prediction on where the progress has been achieved and ultimately, where the outcomes have been met.

And so, if you’re getting paid to deliver the service and you’re getting paid to make a claim, of course, then the incentives change. The timeframes and the synchronicity of service delivery and data collection completely changes. 

And so, the analogy I used, going back to the early days of ixo, was how every time we swipe the credit cards, there’s information about the financial transaction, but there’s a whole lot of metadata about what you purchased, the vendor location, all kinds of things – many things we don’t want to have collected. But why couldn’t we bring this similar kind of paradigm into the impact financing and impact creation space? 

Denver: Well, I mean, I can see this as being a big fundraising tool as well, where people are beginning to see what’s working and then putting their capital towards all that. 

You’ve worked with a lot of nonprofit organizations such as UNICEF and others. Give us an example where you’ve put this into practice and how it has helped those institutions. 

Shaun: So, we have two projects right now, which I think are really interesting because they’re quite different. 

So, the first is in Hong Kong. We are working with the Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship Fund, which is the government fund which supports the social sector in Hong Kong. And a group of the organizations, which are intermediaries for the funding between the funders and the organizations delivering social services and so on, have come together to form a data consortium.

And the data consortium is data for Hong Kong by Hong Kong, So pretty much as a sovereignty kind of mission. And we’re now, I guess, around eight months into the program of onboarding the 500 organizations thereabouts who all deliver social services of many different types within Hong Kong. 

So, the first step is to get the organizations onto the system to get identified, to create their projects and start making claims. Firstly, about their theories of change. And then getting into very specific claims around specific services that are being delivered and the opinions and impacts on beneficiaries. So, it’s a really very inclusive process, and anyone can contribute data into the system. 

The next steps around that will be to enable the data sharing. So of course, the data is coming in in standardized formats and all the good stuff that we’ve already spoken about, which now enables data sharing and sharing of intelligence and sharing of data models, claiming formats or methodologies, et cetera, all the rubrics around this. 

On top of that, we will just be kicking off very shortly, a community currencies capability, which is built on top of the stateful records of these organizations, beginning with the time banks. So, there’s some well-established cooperative time banks within Hong Kong who operate paper ledgers, most of them. And so, this is now creating a mechanism whereby through tokenized local currencies, these time banking and community local, socio-economic development initiatives can really now flourish and create economies that are interconnected with each other. 

Denver: That’s great. It also reminds me maybe a little bit of collective impact because, again, everything is being brought together for everybody to see. It goes back to what you said before about the ecosystem and not dealing with a single thing. Because if every organization knows what’s happening with other organizations having to do with that individual, it’s a fuller picture.  

And then I guess the final aspect of that would be wisdom of crowds when everybody can look at the same data, you get more people saying, “Oh, what about this?” And you start to share it, and that can just accelerate things at such a level.

Shaun: So, I’ll give you an example then, which leads into then the second implementation. So we’re working with a large global financial institution on a Development Impact Bond model in India for financing primary education.

And, of course, this is more important now than ever with a whole generation of kids having lost out on their primary education due to COVID. And so, this focuses on grade one and grade two. The grade twos probably didn’t even have any education in grade one, using tablet devices, which are handed out to households.

And so, it’s a financing mechanism using a crypto-economic module or mechanism, which we’ve created, which is called Alpha Bonds. So, Alpha Bonds provides risk-adjusted financing. And I’ll explain a little bit about that because it speaks to your wisdom of the crowds analogy as well. 

And so, whereas traditional impact bonds like social impact bonds or green bonds are really quite costly instruments to implement because they involve a lot of lawyers to create all the contractual agreements between the adversarial actors in the system… so the service providers are adversarial to the funders… 

Denver: That’s where the tension is and that’s what you need. 

Shaun: Exactly. But it’s usually costly to implement. And as you mentioned earlier, the verification costs for these can typically run into the 10%, 20%, 30% and higher level. And so, it’s not particularly scalable. So, they tend to be then implemented as large-scale instruments to try and get economies of scale. But of course, then they lose fidelity. And there’s a lot of abstraction. 

And so, what we’re doing with the blockchain technology and with Alpha Bonds is creating small-scale bonds which are very localized. They have their own combinations of investors, implementers, and other stakeholders. And information that gets collected into the system feeds back. I spoke about that cyber-physical connection between the real world and the blockchain states changes. 

And so, the mechanism which we’ve researched and developed and done a lot of engineering validation on enables a signal to come from the real world, which adjusts the pricing of the bond on the blockchain. 

And so, you get a real-time feedback loop, which is informing the investors of changes in the prediction on the outcome of the underlying project. Is this project going to achieve its outcomes, such that an outcomes payment, a results-based payment will be made? And then, that feeds incentives and information back into the real world where the implementers are and encourages them to do things differently.

Of course, it has a whole bunch of other benefits as well, but I think in terms of that wisdom of the crowd, information feedback – if everyone who has a stake in the system is able to exert some effect over how the system evolves and how it moves forward, then that’s very powerful. 

We now have a whole new set of tools, and I think particularly important for the development sector and nonprofit sector is that these are the kinds of tools which don’t create lock-in, like vendor lock-in or data extraction…These are sovereign technologies. So, they’re open source 

You can now have essentially a sort of kryptonite kind of capabilities of the blockchain to be able to do a range of things from coordinating groups of people in new kinds of ways around specific incentives or specific outcomes and the things you want to create.

Denver: That’s exponential change, instead of this incremental wisdom that we’ve been living with …or just status quo. 

So, Shaun, there are probably a lot of nonprofits and NGOs listening, and they’re not maybe in the international aid or humanitarian space …they’re working in some local community. And they’re probably saying, “What is this guy saying, talking about, and does it apply to me? Or will it apply to me sometime in the near future?” What would you tell them?

Shaun: Well, I would say that we now have a set of tools available to us that really changed the game. And we only need to think back to not so long ago when the tools that we take for granted on an everyday basis, the ability to have a Zoom call, or our phones in our pockets that can show us the directions to anywhere… when those tools weren’t available. 

And so, we now have a whole new set of tools, and I think particularly important for the development sector and nonprofit sector is that these are the kinds of tools which don’t create lock-in, like vendor lock-in or data extraction in the ways that we have seen technologies operating – the big tech giants. 

These are sovereign technologies. So, they’re open source. Anybody can go, either themselves or get someone they know who’s a little computer savvy spin up a node, spin up a software, or use this as a service and offer it as a service to others. Where you can now have essentially a sort of kryptonite kind of capabilities of the blockchain to be able to do a range of things, from coordinating groups of people in new kinds of ways around specific incentives or specific outcomes and the things you want to create.

And so, new types of groupings of individuals and organizations can come together. There’s new kinds of governance mechanisms that decentralized, autonomous organizations as a really powerful governance concept, which is based in blockchain technologies. You can fundraise. You can collect information in ways where you keep the information. It’s your information. It’s sovereign information. You can get to decide who to share it with. 

And you can participate in marketplaces that are virtualized and online. Whether that’s a marketplace to access capital, or skills and services, evaluation services for instance, knowledge. It’s an entirely new world of possibilities in the way that we know when the internet first became accessible to everybody, it really revolutionized the ways in which we work.

Denver: So, I guess what we’re saying to these NGOs is that it’s coming to your neighborhood sooner than you think. 

Shaun: And I’m sure that many people would actually want it to come to the neighborhood sooner. 

Looking into the future, I see a tokenized impact economy where…pretty much everyone can be a creator of impact. As individual citizens, the investment choices that we make through our purchasing choices, how we spend our money, how we make our money, how we pay our taxes and hold governments to account – all of these things are going to dramatically change because of these technologies and will enable all of us to become impact creators. And the market will be driven not by the funding coming in, but rather the marketplace around purchasing the outcomes as represented by tokens. 

Denver: I think they do! 

Let me close with this, Shaun. Because you’ve used the word predictive a couple of times during our conversation. So how do you think this technology will shape philanthropy and the ways international development and aid organizations operate over the next decade?

Shaun: So, the big vision here is about the impact economy, and it’s really a tokenized impact economy. And if we really want to put a stick in the ground, it is the economy.

We are going to see a transformation where what has been a kind of niche is going to become mainstream, where everything has got a value in terms of its impact on people, and the world, and the environment. 

And so, when we’ve got a tokenized impact economy, it means that we can have new forms and flows of capital and new forms of exchanges. And of course, exchanges of capital are also exchanges of information. It’s how we communicate with each other. And so, the kinds of signals that we can send and the kinds of ways in which we can coordinate our activities become completely different. 

And so, looking into the future, I see a tokenized impact economy where anyone who is a creator of impact, and this will apply to pretty much everyone, can be a creator of impact. As individual citizens, the investment choices that we make through our purchasing choices, how we spend our money, how we make our money, how we pay our taxes, and hold governments to account – all of these things are going to dramatically change because of these technologies, and will enable all of us to become impact creators. And the market will be driven not by the funding coming in, but rather the marketplace around purchasing the outcomes as represented by tokens. 

And so, when you’ve got this marketplace, a global marketplace, which is unstoppable, 24/7, 365 with very few barriers to entry and participation, and you have products that people really want. And when they have them, they become valuable and therefore can lead to growth in economic capital, and in information capital, and human capital. And so, it’s an entirely new kind of model of prosperity, which is based on creating these states that we want to see and we want to be part of, and we want to have some ownership in. 

Denver: So interesting! It seems like it moves from a push economy to a pull economy in very many ways. Tell us about the ixo Foundation website and some of the information visitors will find on it.

Shaun: So, I would encourage people really to visit our site ixo.world, where we talk about the protocols; we talk about the projects that are launching and provide links to the software as well. And we also have an assistant on there, an AI assistant, where you’re welcome to ping us a question.

We have a very small team, so please don’t inundate us too much. But we are in the process of now rolling out the network globally. So I’ve mentioned a couple of the project sites, India and Hong Kong. We have some amazing projects coming out of Africa as well around community currencies, around youth employments and job opportunities, around wildlife conservation. And so, there’s many, many of these organizations who are now joining the network and building their platforms to address their own marketplaces and their own sectors. 

And so, being part of that in terms of what you believe you can come and get from it, or what you can, more importantly, contribute to it is really what the invitation I would like to put out is about. Because this is for us all. This is for the future of humanity. This is our global digital immune system. These are technologies which are not only being built by ixo, but there’s a growing movement around this. 

And we’re also leading an exciting initiative to really bring all blockchain projects within the Cosmos ecosystem… which is one of the leading blockchain ecosystems… to align them all with this sustainability and regeneration mission. 

Denver: Maybe this has come along just in the nick of time. Well, thanks, Shaun for being here today and for a fascinating conversation. It was a real pleasure to have you on the program

Shaun: Thank you so much. This was great fun, and I hope that the listeners enjoy it.


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