Proof of Time

Transcript

It's my pleasure to introduce to you the final um keynote of the day uh when we are talking about method style timestamps and how they can be used to reinforce trust in crypto. And we have Richard Hopro from Hopra Smart Timing. Okay. Well, hi there. Um as just said, my name is Richard Hopro. I started this company um 10 years ago to address the timestamping requirements of mainstream uh finance. So let's take a look at that and why uh I believe that it's going to be necessary for uh crypto as well. So I'll um I'll just start with a video

back in 2015. Do we have any sound? Partners and I decided to tackle sound which isn't talked about very much but that causes million pound headaches for financial institutions worldwide every day and that's verifiable accurate time. Simply put, the clocks on millions of servers in thousands of data centers don't agree. Computers clocks can vary by up to a second every 24 hours. That's huge when you compare it to the microscond scale of financial transactions today. Banks process billions of transactions every day. Thousands of those go missing in action. If it's serious, a regulator gets involved and it soon becomes apparent that financial institutions

can't decide between them what order the events happened in or sometimes whether they happened at all. So um to go into more detail on that, the um in on the 6th of May 19 uh 2010 um the uh the New York Stock Exchange started back to behave very oddly. Uh it was because there were lots of automatic trading um algorithms trading um and suddenly for example um Accenture's share price went to 1 cent uh and for one for a couple of glorious minutes Huelet Packard was worth had a market capitalization of I think it was $114

trillion dollars. Um and then this chaos continued for about um about half an hour and then it suddenly went back to normal again. And to this day nobody knows what happened. The regulator strikes had analyze uh what was going on but because people's clocks didn't agree um there there was no sense could be made of it at all. Um even to this day we don't know what caused that. Um a consequence of it though is that uh the method to consolidated audit trails uh regulations required all time stamp sorry all transactions to be timestamped uh timestamped to UTC so that you could establish a sequence of events to

understand what's happening in the markets to spot things to spot fraudulent behavior and so on. So I believe that crypto is going to need this as well if it's going to be uh become mainstream finance. It's it's got to adopt the same behaviors as mainstream finance. And again it's for the same sort of um applications. The most important one being trust uh to make sure that uh people will trust uh uh blockchain uh because they've got a good record of what's going on. Um it's also important for compliance and reporting as as we heard a couple of uh presentations ago that um when we're doing reporting the good time stamps are used and um it's also used for example

to optimize trade execution. Um we've got over 50 enterprise customers worldwide. Um and five of those are high frequency traders and they they're not interested in compliance. They just want to be able to trade uh as profitably as possible. Interestingly, we've also got um five crypto clients as well. Uh and they want to just adopt good behavior to build trust in in their products. Now, the challenge with uh time synchronization is knowing exactly what the time is. Um and we make sure that uh banks clocks are correct.

Now how do we do that? Well, we have a global network of um of highly accurate clocks that are synchronized to scientific uh measurement institutes and uh we distribute these via hubs in New York, London and Tokyo to financial institutions and markets all around the world. And um and then we also have software which synchronizes the servers to make sure that when they generate timestamps those time stamps are correct. It does alerting reporting and monitoring to make sure that or to give you the assurance that the clocks are correct and gives you evidence for for regulators

and um how is it implemented? Well, we can one as I as I said if we are synchronizing the servers uh then when they actually create a time stamp we've got the record of the fact that that clock was correct at the time. So that that's the implementation. It means you don't have to modify anything that you um you currently do. Uh it it just gives you the assurance that um all the time stamps you create are correct. Uh we are also looking at uh using a distributed Oracle network uh implementation as well which we anticipate would be uh ready for um the end of this year. So um

I think I'll keep it at that. Um nice brief brief presentation. Uh I don't know if anybody's got any questions. pricing. Um it depends what you consume. Um we have two well we have three products. Uh one is just a time feed. We take the time uh as a PTP or NTP feed and implement the rest yourself. The second is the uh the sol the the whole time as a service um bundle. Uh so you would take the time feed and in addition you would have um you you would have the software as well. So you've got all of the record keeping uh full compliance

and so on. And then we have a third product which is um an NTP service but that's more for synchronizing things like firewalls and um and switches and so on. Yes, that's true. I mean, we've we've um we we've performed well with the challenge of uh synchronizing uh in the cloud uh which is very challenging because uh virtual machines can get put to sleep and wake up again. Uh you know, you got to deal with that because your clock has stopped for a while. uh they can even wake up in a different place um which additionally makes it challenging for for

timekeeping. Okay. Um security. Okay. All right. Sorry. I was thinking thinking you meant securities as in financial so Can this be the manual? Um, it it'd be very difficult to manipulate because we actually sends time from many sources over um over redundant networks.

So, you would have to manipulate a lot of clocks all at the same time. Um, we send a minimum of three time sources to to each server and it keeps a record of how closely they agree. So, it it would be very difficult. Look at the behavior. And if one starts up, it could be that

system isolate a cyber attack that's happening. So it's just another layer of security. So what we're saying is that people Think about cryptocurren.

Okay. Well, thank you very much everybody. Thank you. Oh, it's much better than that. Um, we guarant we guarantee the time accuracy to be 100 microsconds. uh because that's what the financial regulations require. Uh in practice, we're generally singledigit microsconds. Okay. Thank you. [Applause] Thank you very much. And I'm show