Greetings, everybody. Thanks for having me.

Yeah. Sure. Well, I began my career in design and software development. And, in '23 2010, I built my company, mostly doing product development and management. And around, 2016, I learned about the the DAO, initial, DAO experiment in the like, it made me really curious about the whole blockchain space, and that's where our company is also starting to develop more. And it was so noble, like, I started to research it and participate in the global conferences, organize meetups. But in, 2020, the COVID struck. Right? And, all the global travel stopped. And, I was really worried about what gonna happen, you know, in my country and so on. And I tried to apply the ideas I learned from this distributed DAO movement to the Ukraine situation, mostly to the coordination of online volunteering and helping hospitals and so on. And, that's when I understood that in the time of crisis, only the, you know, trusted connections work, only the established processes work, because everybody everybody shut down and try to, you know, just to survive. And, when we try to, you know, we applied some innovation with some success. But what I really felt is if we want to make this impact more scalable, we need to integrate into the governance, into the government, in the municipalities, and so on. So just around the time, also, the new ministry was formed and the team that was leading the development of the regulation for crypto and virtual assets. So I joined the team as an adviser and, for, like, my first big project was in developing the, like, strategy. And I couldn't develop strategy just by my own. So we invited, like, different ministries, types of businesses, NGOs, and so on to form a strategy. And one of the key pillars of the strategy was, education that we need to prepare people for, you know, like government wants customer protection, consumer protection, businesses needs users, you know, so we all needed to spread the knowledge. And, that's how the Web3 Institute came to be. You know, we, gathered all these volunteers and businesses. And, with the support from the Mindich, ministry, we formed this entity that is, now, focusing on developing the field. And our vision, in in in the strategy, we, have a metaphor of digital Venice in the terms of, like, both democracy and prosperity that Venice that was, like, on the on the peak at some moment, but also was like really interesting, like, organization. So, more specifically, especially in the time of war, we focus on the, all the projects and ideas that can support recovery, security. We strive towards interoperability, like, with European Union in terms of documents and so on, economic social governance impact, so not forget about that as well. So that's briefly what we do. And so just to to go back there, you said MINDIT,

Transformation. Of Ukraine. Yes. Yes. It's how we shorten it.

Yeah. Sure. And I agree that, building strong defenses is our first priority. Also for the ministry, a lot of projects have moved there. And even what we do is virtual assets, like fundraising for Ukraine in crypto or restricting access to, you know, like, to exchanges from, like, terrorist groups and so on. But to give a wider context, like, when I was born, the population of Ukraine was 52,000,000, and now it's closer to 37 millions reside in Ukraine, and it's declining almost, like, 1% every year. And, just with, in the last years, like, 6,000,000 people were forcefully moved abroad. And I know it like my my I'm was born in Lugansk, and my parents had to leave back in 2014. You know? So it's a huge problem for sure. But now there is, like, almost 25,000,000 of Ukrainians are outside of Ukraine, like, the broad diaspora. It's almost, you know, it's soon to be as as, same level as in Ukraine. And, also, the war times, they put more pressure on the democracy. Of course, there are reasons for that, but, I mean, lots of things are restricted and harder to do. And, how do we engage this those who are reside abroad and deal overall with economic, hardships and aging population. So, basically, this is, not just to survive the war, but to build a country desirable for the young to stay or for, like, others to return. And, in my view, sustainable future should include measures on better coordination, integration, new institution where I believe Web3 is contributing to. Ukraine has, you know, absolutely,

Yeah. I guess it mostly comes out of the first necessity. You know, it wasn't just about building innovation, you know, for for the sake of it. We, went through, like, a serious surprises from the revolution of dignity, then the COVID, then, like, this full scale war. And, that, also was a big factor, was a technical talent we had as Ukraine had a lot of, and has a lot of technical universities and is a powerhouse for development that combined together also with a vision for digitalization. So when Zelensky became a president, he stated that as the key priority of his program and significantly reformed and basically created a new ministry for digital transformation, which is recognized as the most efficient, both by the population in support and donors. I think together, all that factors and the international experience, brought together created a lot of great products. One of the most known of them is DIA, which is, like, identification application, which holds all the documents and is is quite known. And after that, it was also the Prosoro, the public procurement platform. So there was a huge demand for transparency after the revolution, you know, to to fight corruption. And later on, on the basis of the reform or decentralization with the help of, like, Swiss and UK, USAID, UNDP, a program called a governance for accountability and participation started, which created a lot of the services like e petitions and so on and services inside of regions. Now during, like, with the full scale war, another platform, which is getting traction is called Dream, which tracks restoration projects. So every, like, city can publish what, what what do they need to restore, you know, what was the proofs and so on of rebuilding. So it helps donors to, you know, coordinate better around that and to recognize priorities. And, overall, I think the ministry practice digital diplomacy, first of all, collaborating with countries like Estonia, taking some of their their open source development and now building on top of it and scaling to other countries all of that best experience.

Yeah. It's definitely still a long way to go. Like, we proceed now with, different conferences, education, and promotion for wider, like, awareness and recognition. And we have a good number of supporters, as well, like, in the government or in the public sector, like, some zealous of decentralization and even Web three. But for the general government, I think our ideas are, like, still radical. I think we share here some of the, like, similarity. And most people don't think about it as a web three, only cryptocurrencies, I could say, which usually has not the best reputation among white audiences. But adoption is growing and the crisis only fueling this. You know, like, so Ukraine, the different ratings is usually ranked like in around top five in adoption per capita. And even if you look a huge number of parliamentarians and officials declare crypto in in their, you know, declarations. So it's hard to ignore. But most people still confuse crypto with blockchain, for example, or like think Web3 is like marketing buzz and cons like, we're yet to show them the full potential of the community building power and concepts, not just technological, but also economical, organizational. And, for us, the best way to go is working directly with more people, giving them more practical experience. And, we sometimes speak about the minimum viable consortia so that we always have, representative from business or industry leader, like the academy and the government to help scale real, knowledge about this. So so much of,

Yeah. So, I I think I should start with, this organization. We call it IEEE, which is, like, the biggest, engineering organization in the world, you know, all around. And, there is this sections on blockchain and Deepgram and so on. So this is the second forum we hold. Previous was in the 2023. Unlike, typical blockchain business conferences, it has a bigger focus on academy and the governance. So it has a healthy mix of, like, three of those sectors we intend to connect together. And, the topic of this year, is, some people ask you if we write it. It was a mistake. I was like, it's not rebuilt. It's like a rebuttal. Like, we have in crypto this, jokes like Huddl, and so on. So, we intend to have it like, we we we don't focus purely just, like, only blockchain. So we invite you to speak, you know, about democracy and so on. So there are many topics we feel adjusting to Web three or the future of institutions, but, with this flavor of, Web three community organizing it. That's where the topic comes from. And, the event would consist like, it's all gonna be online because, you know, it's it's really hard to travel in Ukraine, and it's dangerous to gather many great minds in one place as well, because of the bombings. But, yeah, there would be three days, full of, speeches, and we're just, keynotes. And then there there are three meetups, one on the digital democracy, one on the web three education, and one on the identity specifically with the Linux Foundation decentralized trust. So there would be some cases of European identity projects with Web three, maybe, Bhutan. So we'll see.

Well, I learned, that I'm gonna be an IT person pretty early, like, as a kid, you know, having a computer since, you know, 10 or something. And then I developed my business and mostly I developed my business sense logic, you know, and and some experience with that. But, overall, I didn't expect to work with the government. The perception Ukraine of government back then was not very high, you know, in in my family as well. But, yeah, it was also a bit of a necessity to understand how that works. But I'm very happy that, I started to do that. Of course, like, like, my strive to volunteer in technology led me to this public goods funding and and so on. But, also, I really enjoy my work with the ministry because of of, how my team is. I remember when I, first came to the office, you know, it's, like, old building of of the, cabinet of ministers. It's like looks like a very old Soviet library or something. But then there was this, floor of, of, of our ministry with, like, a big carpet and this, sitting bags. And, also, there were, like, posters of DC superheroes. And I was like, why why do you have DC superheroes? And there were two reasons. First of all, there is this project DSCT, which is like a, like, digital jurisdiction, which is also one of the innovations. But also one person told me that, there is a feeling that maybe, like, heroes in DC, our work won't be too visible. You know, many people won't be on the forefront, somewhere in the shadow, but doing the really important big things. And such cultural, learnings really supported my strife, you know, to continue to work, with these people. Yeah. Now after some time, I understand that, you know, whatever makes sense overall makes sense in the government. And, you know, it's, I'm trying to be this connector now for people who are looking to do something with the government and trying to share this experience with them.

With a pleasure, and, looking forward to speak more during the events.