So thank you.

There are a lot of people already excited about it. And I think, in talking to even the Europeans, there are people now that are interested in it, but there’s not enough activity. So I think if we can amplify that, that would be great.

Yeah, leaving no one behind. And I think we can maybe, because what I want to do is I want to reset the sort of global agenda around this, to be focused more on the social impact and less on just… I think it’s important, the payment rails and the ...

So Japan Blockchain week, it’s end of June, beginning of July. So that might be a good time to come. There’ll be a lot of things going on. And I think that, you know, with your work, and also if we get lucky and we are able to move forward ...

Very interesting. Are you going to be visiting Japan again sometime?

One interesting thing I realized, we gave away, I think, two or three hundred certificates for the two classes that we did. And I think in Japan right now, people, it’s like, wallets is like three and a half, four percent. But every single student created a wallet to receive ...

Or just always say “IC”.

That’s fascinating. Thank you very much. That’s a good name, Impact Certificates. We should do that.

Very interesting. Daum, do you want to…

Oh, interesting.

Yes, exactly. So it would be interesting. So let me, I’ll look this up as well because then maybe we can, because I think publishing to IPFS is interesting. We haven’t thought of that. So I’ll suggest that.

Well, and it takes the whole meeting. And so what they do is they say, okay, if we start spending too much time on stupid point, they call it bike shed pattern, and everybody knows what it means. So what they did was they write it out, and then they ...

So there’s like some of the ones that I like, there was one called the bike shed pattern and the bike shed pattern was complicated things like let’s build a nuclear reactor. Most people don’t understand, so they don’t have an opinion. But when they’re arguing about the color of ...

You know, I don’t know if they still do it, but there were these hacker clubs and I think it was called hackerspaces.org and the heads of these hackerspaces would meet. They’re all like pirates, they’re all independent. But what they did was they had meetings and they shared patterns.

That’s very cool. Interesting. And that’s consistent with what I’m trying to do with this credentialing process where you just write it to the blockchain. We just have brainstorming meetings, not regulatory meetings.

Yeah. I think that we are actually starting to talk about helping with visa application using this credentialing. Do you have an e-credentialing system? I’m sure you do. And what’s, where does that live and what’s the protocol?

And this becomes an important area.

That’s very interesting. Okay, well, I’ll poke Hal and we’ll see if we can, because I know the DID thing is also very important in Japan and it’s not exactly the same, but we have also the My Number card that’s rolling out and trying to figure out the international ...

I see. That’s interesting. Yeah, we should get Hal to become the head of digital agency, then he can have a mirror organization.

There you go.

And this is also, is this the g0v people that are working on this, or is it…?

Interesting. That’s really interesting.

Yeah.

Interesting. And so are you using some blockchain-based ID system for the federated network of quadratic funding?

That would be great. In terms of local governments, are you doing any DAO-like support for co-ops and things like that?

That’s really interesting. And maybe we should look at doing something similar in Japan, and maybe we should try to put that in the upcoming DAO law. Because what we’re trying to do, they, the liberal democratic party team that’s going to do a politicians’ law of proposal. They’re trying ...

Democracy Network.

So anyway, that’s the experiment and Hal is very central to this. And we’re trying to figure out who else to bring in and who else we can learn from. So it’s a multi-pronged thing. So we’re trying to make an example for DAOs. We’re trying to create a new ...

We’re trying to get individuals from the different ministries to join but we’re trying to make it a very DAO-like association that’s going to have opinions about digital policy and we’re trying to connect it out internationally as well.

We’re trying to make that an example because I think what will be neat because it’s a DAO will bring in a consensus building process. A lot of it will be modeled around the work that you’ve done. It will hopefully have some credibility because we have all these people ...

And so we now have a DAO and Hal and me and some of the other board members are doing it. What we’re thinking about is opening this up. And we’re thinking of having the things like this digital certificate discussion in the DAO and inviting the other ministries as ...

Exactly. And it’s a centralized thing. So what’s neat about this NFT based one is that everyone can do it without permission. It’s all open source. And as long as we keep interoperability, we don’t force anybody to do one thing or the other. And so at the digital agency, ...

You have to have, you end up with a committee and a chairman and a blah blah blah…

And so what we’re trying to do is to build this and I’m trying very hard to keep it unofficial. So one of the things is we’re trying not to force standardization around the idea or anything just to try to create interoperability. And one of the things that I’m ...

Yeah, it’s using the DIDs and it’s doing the verifiable credentials and then Hal wanted to do certificates at the digital agency so we just gave him the code and we’ve made it all open source and now we went to Nepal and the education minister of Nepal signed a ...

So at my university, Chiba Institute of Technology, we made an NFT-based, what’s it called, certificate of completion of my class and then we did it on the blockchain and the reason we did that and we used the blockcerts which my team created at Media Lab, it’s an open ...

So it’s a little chicken and egg. So what I’m trying to do with the Japanese government is to come up with good examples of social benefit from web3. So you know Hal Seki even better than I do. So he and I are working on this quite a bit.

We do, yes. But we have to prove it. And the chicken and egg we have now is that most of the governments don’t want to make a law unless they’re good examples. But the people who are trying to make good examples don’t want to break the law, so ...

We are in the process of trying to pass a DAO law, and we’re trying to change our regulations so that for things like NFTs and DAOs, we can focus more on the social benefit. I think what’s important globally, so like for instance, the reason, as you know, that ...

That’s right. And it’s because we only saw Bitcoin. And it was good at the beginning because it was clear, but it’s now clear in the wrong way. You have to pay tax on digital assets as if it’s cash, which is bad. So anyway, but the government got so ...

So as a new way to coordinate non-profit efforts, research, local governments and trying to shift away from the crypto trader to the normal people. One of the challenges is that the regulations were created before we had smart contracts. So it treats digital currency as assets.

So after FTX and Terra Luna happened, very few Japanese were exposed to that risk. So the way I’ve been describing it is that Japan was sitting in a penalty box while everybody else was skating around and now they’re all on the floor and they were just opening the ...

That’s right. which then unlocked the ability for people to make exchanges. So it took off in Japan, but then in 2018 we had the Coincheck hack and I was a senior independent advisor to the JFSA helping them at the time. They tightened it so much that you couldn’t ...

But interestingly, what happened after that discussion was Japan passed one of the first, I think the first sort of federal level payment systems digital asset law.

And interestingly, last year, towards the end of the year, we were all talking about web3, even the opposition party campaigned in support of web3. So Japan became very pro web3 and then Japan, just to give a little bit of history, so like 2013-14 when Mt. Gox was hacked, ...

And there’s a small group of politicians working on this, that web3 was a good way to connect all these things together. We can do DAOs and local governments, it’s a new kind of capitalism and it can help startups. So the team and I helped them put together a ...

Obviously, there’s a political reason to do that. And the third one was they felt they needed to help startups. So they had all these committees. And last year, as NFTs were growing and web3 was growing, I started to talk to people about it. And I think that the ...

So they created sort of three different clusters of discussion in the government. One was a new kind of capitalism because the young people were reading communist books and they were thinking that capitalism was the cause of many of the problems, which is part of what this book is ...

She’s wonderful. So I enjoyed your comments yesterday and it connects very much with what we’re doing in Japan. So just to give you an update, so Prime Minister Kishida took power last year and as he was coming into office, they were trying to figure out what to do.

She wanted to reach out to you. Can I connect you?