N2 Help & Solutions & Service Now

In this weeks episode of the Hedera corner, King Solomon from Genfinity interviews N2 Help and Solutions, a group of Service Now experts building and leveraging Hedera. In this conversation, they speak about the importance of having ServiceNow as a governing council member, what N2 is doing with ServiceNow and what potentially could come in the future.

Transcription

King Solomon – Genfinity – Founder & CEO
Okay, great! Yeah, so, alright, guys, we're gonna get started here. So, if you guys aren't aware, Genfinity hosts these Twitter spaces. The Hedera Corner aspects on a weekly basis. We have interviewed Marc from HashPack. He would probably know better than I do. I think we've probably done close to 100 interviews at this point in time. Super excited today to say that we do have two contributors into the governing Council or one of the governing council members of Hedera, which is serviced now. And to help and solutions. So, I have tons and tons of questions to ask you guys. Think of a tiny bit of a background or at least an overview of ServiceNow. ServiceNow is the platform of platforms for the digital workflow Revolution. ServiceNow's platform has around 6,900 customers, about 85 percent of Fortune 500 penetration, 97 renewal rate. I actually watched the Q1 earnings call from ServiceNow. This morning of 2023, and they have like six to seven hundred applications. I believe they're live within the Now platform currently. Um, and there were some extremely heavy hitters as well. I think that ServiceNow just onboarded Netflix's VP of engineering. Which was mentioned in that call. Uh, Citibank came up and talked within that call in the Q&A section. JPMorgan KeyBank to kind of kick it off here. And again, we have Nicholas Delaby and Nicholas Hoffman both from N2 Help and Solutions that do a lot of work within the ServiceNow platform. You know, kind of considered resident experts within that platform as well. If you guys can maybe both give a background of yourself, um, that would be fantastic.

N2 Help & Solutions – Nicholas Delaby
Okay, so I will start. So, my name is Nicola Delaby. As you can hear from my lovely accent, I'm French. I'm based in Montreal, Canada, and my main job is to do consulting work in IT digital transformation. And I will give the mic to Nicola Hoffman, who will introduce himself as well.

‍N2 Help & Solutions – Nicholas Hoffman
Okay, so Nicola Hoffman speaking. I'm from Belgium. I live in Belgium, but my company is based in Luxembourg for those who know where it is. It's a very small country. And I've been working with ServiceNow for the past 12 years as an implementation consultant, mainly on ITSM and IT operation management projects. But, I've been touching to HR solutions as well and facility management and so on Asset Management. I'm more a technical guy on the ServiceNow platform. And we are very exciting because today we are in Las Vegas where it's the annual conference of ServiceNow, which is called Knowledge. So, we are going to have a full week of exploration with all the ServiceNow geeks and.

‍King Solomon – Genfinity – Founder & CEO
Yeah, I think I saw that when I was listening to the earnings call this morning. Yhat starts is that that's tomorrow, right? So, you guys flew down there, and I believe the conference begins tomorrow, correct?

‍N2 Help & Solutions – Nicholas Hoffman
Yes, tomorrow and until, Friday or Thursday.

‍King Solomon – Genfinity – Founder & CEO
Awesome, alright, so to kind of get into the meat and potatoes here, um, to give you guys a little bit of a background of ServiceNow and Hedera, you know, joining the Hedera governing Council. I believe that was November 16, 2021, or around that date. So, ServiceNow and Hedera enable cross-organization digital workflows. I find it really interesting digging into some of the use cases. That the Now platform can facilitate and onboard clients into the Hedera ecosystem or leverage Hedera services. Can either one of you gentlemen please just let us know? Because I mentioned it briefly at the beginning of this, how big ServiceNow is. Um, again, 6,900 customers, 85% of Fortune 500 penetration. Can you give a little bit of an overview of the Now platform and ServiceNow and some of the clients that work within the platform itself? Just so that the audience can kind of get a little bit of a precursor here.

‍N2 Help & Solutions – Nicholas Hoffman
Yes, so ServiceNow is a platform, which is a SaaS platform, so software as a service. So usually, it's implemented in large organizations, to enable the automation of their internal workflow, what we do call Enterprise Service Management. So you use ServiceNow as soon as you'd like to automate a process within your company. For example, the first use case was a service desk, IT service desk, where you have to manage an incident or request for an employee, and you need to make sure this is managed efficiently and properly. So this is kind of workload you do with ServiceNow. You can also manage facilities, like, I don't know, you have a hospital, and you need to manage your equipment to make sure they are maintained correctly. You do that with ServiceNow. You can manage your human resource workflow. So when you think about an internal process of a company, ServiceNow is a tool. It's a local platform which is coming with predefined processes which are quite standard for the industry. So that's the where there is no stand. It was funded in 2003, 20 years old, and it has a huge position on the market. It competes with Salesforce and with this kind of other platform. So I don't know if I answered your question.

‍King Solomon – Genfinity – Founder & CEO
Well, yeah, that's perfect. I mean, reading through kind of documentation here with the integration of Hedera and Hedera services within ServiceNow, um, it appears that ServiceNow, I've seen there's an image that's actually on servicenow.com/community/developer. So it looks like somebody within the ServiceNow site put together a really interesting image. But when I read the initial kind of release here, basically stating that ServiceNow believes there are four main opportunities for adopting distributed ledger technology and digital workflows. And those four main opportunities include data integrity and algorithmic trust, tokenization and digital assets, digital identity and privacy, and multi-party business processes. Within those workflows, there is a number of kind of subcategories. So, for example, when you get into data integrity and algorithmic trust, there are public registries, data notarization, trusted service level agreements, real-time auditing, fraud mitigation, data ingestion—that's just one out of the four. Can you talk, maybe potentially, a little bit about some of the aspects that you guys know that are being tested out within Hedera services within the ServiceNow platform? I'm sure there's some stuff you can't talk about, but which of those four ecosystems do you guys find most interesting for kind of utilizing some of the Hedera services, whether it be Hedera Token Server or Hedera Consensus Service, the File Service, Smart Contracts, and what that looks like from the ServiceNow standpoint?

‍N2 Help & Solutions – Nicholas Hoffman
So, the awesome use case about ESG, but we are not the expert on this topic, so I cannot elaborate. But anything related to carbon emission and so on in a company. Another example is when you talk about Incident Management. You usually have penalties between contractors and a customer and provider, and if you are able to track the resolution of your incident and maybe store the workflow steps into a distributed ledger, then you accelerate and make auditable the penalty management process. Basically, when, for example, you have not served the incident on time and so... These kinds of processes are usually based on trust and a lot of investigation in the traditional world, but if you can use a transparent and auditable ledger to make that fully transparent, this is a use case you may have. Also, in terms of process automation, looking at SLAs (Service Level Agreements) between provider and customer.

‍King Solomon – Genfinity – Founder & CEO
Marc, you have a question real quick?

‍HashPack Wallet – Marc Ugas – Director of Operations
Yeah, so, I just have a quick question because I know that you guys mentioned that you guys specialize mostly on the IT side of things with ServiceNow. I mean, obviously, ServiceNow is such a behemoth, and, you know, the entire platform covers so many different aspects. And for myself personally, I've actually used ServiceNow before on the IT side of things, and then I also know some people that use it to sort of,  some parts of their supply chain tracking. So, I guess, just building off what, you know, the question that Solomon asked and that you replied, in terms of, so, for example, for the IT tracking system, so, like, for example, like the one time that I used it was to track different hardware components that were set to be implemented into a different hardware setup. And I was just wondering how, how that really changes the way that ServiceNow would... I guess, like, the users would actually see this and use it. And then, obviously, I mean, you know, it's still a little bit of speculation, but how... What do you see as the potential ways of integrating this and what is the benefit? Because another thing that is kind of interesting to me is that as ServiceNow provides services to such large enterprises, a part of the DLT, you know, the way that DLTs are set up is that everything's, you know, completely transparent and everyone can access it. But I was just wondering, you know, about your thoughts on, you know, having some of these processes set on the graph or on chain and how does that really change the way that companies approach their either their IT services or their supply chain applications?

‍N2 Help & Solutions – Nicholas Hoffman
Right In a large company, you have an ecosystem of many companies and providers, which usually have their own ServiceNow instances. So, I don't know, let's say you have Customer A, Customer B, Customer C, and Provider ABC. So, this means six instances of ServiceNow with private databases and so on. The distributed ledger allows sharing part of information which are used in contractual mode or even in operational mode, like you mentioned the configuration items that are shared, which you can really back with a blockchain like Hedera. So, that's all the use cases which are emerging as soon as you have to build trust and make sure that you cannot change a record or you can prove that something was done properly. Then you think about Hedera regarding tokenization and so on. Personally, we have not been involved in such use case, so I will not answer. But then later, we can also explain what we try to build with N2 with ServiceNow and Hedera, and we have some ideas which we could share with you.

‍King Solomon – Genfinity – Founder & CEO
Yeah, no, 100%. And I think, just knowing that you guys have worked within the ecosystem for so long, Hedera put out a video with kind of a use case on September 18, 2022, which was called "ServiceNow Token Workflows for Customer Engagement and Loyalty." And one image I found really interesting was the wallet being at the heart of customer engagement. Knowing all the kind of, you know, the customers and the enterprise relationships that ServiceNow does have, it looks like this is very much so trying to take the current relationship that people have within Web 2 with brands that they may be fans of, whether it be a shoe brand or whatever it might be, and really increase that engagement through kind of wallet connectivity and reward connectivity. How big of a use case, you know, do you guys think that the customer engagement aspect is with a company like ServiceNow to leverage kind of DLT in a way that bolsters up the engagement aspects way more than what was capable before with kind of the Web 2 aspects?

‍N2 Help & Solutions – Nicholas Hoffman
Yeah, we do have some discussions about the human resource workflow, which is basically for employee recognition and contribution. We are working on some ideas where large customers say, "Oh, I would like to offer maybe an internal token, which is maybe private to a large organization, which is used to reward employee on some specific action and so on." And to make an ecosystem where this token can be used for training requests or for any kind of things you may imagine around an internal employee life, I would say. So, these are clear discussions we do have. And we also have, for some other customers, the idea of using NFT cards, for example, to build some let's say collectors or even a way to recognize your customer on their loyalty with you and to offer thanks to ServiceNow. You can easily mint an NFT on Hedera. And so, ServiceNow and the connectors they have, they have wheels, is making the access to Hedera much more simple for any guys who want to build something around the token or blockchain. So, basically, the potential is unlimited. It's just your imagination which will limit you. But concretely speaking, we have mainly seen some use cases around the human resource, and we are in discussion with some customers who would like to create a kind of internal token, I mean, I may say.

‍King Solomon – Genfinity – Founder & CEO
So, I mean, it seems like a lot of the aspects you guys are dealing with, and knowing that ServiceNow is kind of the ERP or enterprise resource planning aspect within multiple different companies, so when you're dealing with those portals that you use in professional life that manage HR and all sorts of other aspects, you guys find a lot of interest in what's going on in that regard for implementing DLT as well. Can you tell us a little bit from the N2 side what you guys are facilitating right now? I know you guys have some DAO aspects as well, and how do you guys directly kind of connect into the ServiceNow aspect at this point?

‍N2 Help & Solutions – Nicholas Hoffman
Yes, so what we have been doing is, N2 is a story of Nicola and Nicola, so that's why it's called N2. And basically, we were two freelancers, meaning independent, but sometimes lonely. And we have decided to help each other to say, "Okay, if we are two, we stay independent, but we start to share our contact list, our knowledge, and so we will be stronger." And from there, we have guest freelancers around us to create a community of people who share the same passion for technology, which is ServiceNow. And this was how N2 was born. At the beginning of the story, we were not thinking about blockchain. We were just thinking about having a WhatsApp group or a Discord place where we will just have people being linked together. And one year ago, when you know Alphago AI, I was discussing with Nikola and said, "Oh, it would be nice to create a membership card so we can really certify the people which are in our network to say they are part of our community, and they can pretend to be part of the community without any risk to have fakes, because we have a lot of people in our industry which pretend to have been working for some company and so on." So, we were trying to find a solution against, sorry for the word, and that's where it jumped into my mind the idea, "Oh, why not creating an NFT which would be a membership card which will prove that you're part of the N2 community?" So, that's how the story began. And as we were established now, guys, we just looked at how to connect ServiceNow to a blockchain, and we found an article on Google which said N2 is part of the Hedera Council, and that's how we got to know Hedera and the Hedera ecosystem. And we have built our NFT card on Hedera using ServiceNow to manage the NFT minting. And, so basically today, our freelancers, the ones they are joining our communities, the follow-up process, and at the end of the process, they get a membership card, which is N2 NFT, and we mint it and transfer it to the freelancer's wallet. I don't know if it's clear, but that's how the story starts.

‍King Solomon – Genfinity – Founder & CEO
Yeah, I mean, 100%. I mean, you talked briefly on it previously as well, where all the Enterprise clients within ServiceNow on the Now platform have ServiceNow or Now platform instances. So, I guess one of the questions that we're always interested in, being in the crypto community and the DLT community at large, is how far-reaching is that? When the Hedera integration occurred and knowing some of these cases, whether it be tokenization and digital assets or data integrity and digital identity and multi-party business processes, like when these instances occur for the multiple Enterprise clients, is it more on the Enterprise client to make the decision to leverage something like Hedera, or is that something that is seen on the back end, or not seen, just kind of exists on the back end where things seem to happen quicker, more efficiently? Can you talk to us a little bit about that from ServiceNow standpoint of what you think that looks like within the Now platform?

‍N2 Help & Solutions – Nicholas Hoffman
Yeah, it's more on the back side, and there is no reason, not today, making a big marketing around DLT. So, it's really like a technical component you can use, and you can request ServiceNow to manage your workflow. So, for example, on our side, we have our own ServiceNow instances which we have subscribed to ServiceNow, and they have offered us an API connector, which is the other application which we use to create our workflow. And so, what we have done is that we have today a recruitment process, and every step of the process creates a record on the topic on the Hedera blockchain, and it makes sure that the process is followed and so on. So, for our customer, what they see is a QR code on a CV of a consultant, which proves that the process was followed. And so, their view is more like, "Okay, there is a blockchain or there is a component which is like a blockchain which is used." But it's really like a technical component. It's not really what the customer would see. I don't know if Nicola, you would like to jump on what I said.

‍N2 Help & Solutions – Nicholas Delaby
No, well, just complete by saying that each of our members is linked to a topic, and everything they do within our community is traced on that topic. So, we write every step of each process on the topic. So, it's public. So, whenever we want to prove that one of our members is what he tells, he pretends to be, we can link the customer to the topic, and they can see that everything was followed, and that our processes are respected. So, basically It's handled on the back end, but whenever we would like to display it, we are able to thanks to Hedera.

‍HashPack Wallet – Marc Ugas – Director of Operations
Yeah, so I just have one question, and I think it was Nicholas Hoffman that you mentioned that you are more on the technical side of things. And I was just wondering how, you know, having worked with N2, how is it from the implementation in terms of the technical side of things, implementing Hedera into these workflows? Because it's definitely much different than the rest of ServiceNow services. And also, I mean, you know, having been in ServiceNow for, I think you mentioned 12 years, I'm sure that there's a learning curve, but I would just be interested in picking your brain a little bit about how implementing this technical side of things over there has been from your experience.

‍N2 Help & Solutions – Nicholas Hoffman
Well, actually, it hasn't been really different from any other implementation, as ServiceNow has built a direct connector. So it's an app that you can get. Well, it's not published yet. We are beta testers. But what this app provides is bricks that you can reuse to build your own workflow. So it integrates perfectly in what is called the Flow Designer in ServiceNow, which is the application that allows you to build any workflow, whether it's a manual task-based or automated task-based, whatever. So between each step of your workflow, you can have a step related to Hedera. So basically, I've been using my knowledge of ServiceNow and the Flow Designer to build our flow. So that whenever one of our users interacts with our platform, between two steps, ServiceNow interacts with Hedera to maybe write a message in a topic or to mint an NFT or to eventually send it directly to the wallet of someone. So basically, these are the use cases we have. But it's a low-code implementation. We did not code the application, but we are using elements that are pre-built by ServiceNow, and it works perfectly fine. And we really hope that ServiceNow will be able to go further and achieve the beta testing and publish it publicly so other customers could use it. And maybe we would be also happy to help customers implementing an integration between ServiceNow and Hedera because we are doing it ourselves for ourselves currently.

‍Genfinity – Carola – COO & Founder
I guess I have some questions around mass adoption in that regard of DLT. Like, as it becomes more widespread, do you think it's necessary or do you think that clients should know what the underlying technology is, or should it be a more seamless kind of experience to encourage that kind of adoption where it's just easy, it's simple, as you said, there's a QR code? Or do you see DLT or the Hedera face behind DLT, that's being utilized on the platform, is being an important component.

‍N2 Help & Solutions – Nicholas Delaby
So, I would say it's decreased. That I'll be answering, I would say, for more experience. So, first of all, we ourselves didn't know anything about Web3 one year ago, so we had to learn. With Hedera, especially with the service, now it was not too difficult to understand what could be the use case. So, now when we talk to people who don't have any clue what Web3, what blockchain are, for example, our freelancers because we have many of our freelancers who are not Web3 early adopters, they are just IT experts. So, when it comes to, for example, explaining what is a wallet, what is it used for, why do you need a wallet, how there are some difficulties, that, "Oh, it's again a password I need to remember," and so on. All this week, I think we can work really on the simplification of the wallet adoption. And so, then when it comes to what I will use for the fact that now you will earn your data, you will earn your NFT card, for example, and it's really your card. And, as soon as you show with a simple example like, "Oh, I give you an NFT card which proves that you are a member of N2," it's like I will give you a plastic card that you are a member of the football club. You know, when we come to a very trivial example to say the blockchain and the DLT is used to support use cases which are complicated to do in a virtual and decentralized world. So, start to be easy for our community to understand. Now, for a large customer, where they have seen the benefit is when we have shown them a CV, a resume of a consultant with a QR code that they could scan and say, "Oh, thanks to this QR code, you will see it's like you will have an automatic audit of a process." That was also easy for them to understand. So, I think the more we come to concrete examples, which are just not monkey the NFT card on which sometimes people do not understand why this is like some people say, "Oh, I finally see an NFT which is not used for monkey." You know, design. And so that was fun because you say, "Yeah, we have used concrete use cases from the industry." And that's something which helps the adoption. So, I want to answer your question. I would say we need to go into concrete life examples. And the more we go there, the more it will be easy for people to understand. Through this, they don't need to know there is a blockchain behind. They just need to understand the fact that we could decentralize and make the data owned by the people who are part of an ecosystem.

‍King Solomon – Genfinity – Founder & CEO
I think one thing that's interesting that you mentioned was there's a ServiceNow connector that's currently in beta that you guys are leveraging. Um, where each step of that connector or process or business flow can potentially reach out and touch into individual Hedera services and ways that make sense for each client. Um, did I, did I kind of, is that kind of the correct summation of what you mentioned a little earlier?

‍N2 Help & Solutions – Nicholas Delaby
Yes, yes, exactly. And just to give you examples, also example of use is we try to address. Um, in our industries, there are a lot of middlemen which try to make money on a freelancer, for example, and on the fact that we can say to our community, if you bring a customer to the community or if you bring a new player into the community, you will register it into a public ledger. That means a distributed blockchain. Then, it's, it's, we, we, we, we bring a lot of transparency in our relationship between people, and this is things which touch the value of the people even more than the tech. Say, "Oh yeah, fine." So, with N2, we know who is in the network. We know we bring business. We know who makes money. We know how the contracts are made, for example, when we have fees and when we share some maybe margin across number. We, with a smart contract, that's what we are working on. We can really make this first, fully transparent, auditable, and much more fast in the fact of the retribution of and so on. So, there are plenty of use cases we are currently working on since we have discovered the ecosystem.

‍King Solomon – Genfinity – Founder & CEO
I guess that's kind of where my question is leading. So, you know, the ServiceNow connector is in beta, which means, obviously, that there are certain organizations that have the opportunity to utilize it now. But it doesn't necessarily mean it's widespread. Each level of that connector, which I'm assuming connects into the Now platform at different tiers, you know, you have the option to leverage certain Hedera services at different points in a way that makes sense, like down to the programmability level for even enterprise clients. If this were to go live, the question that I would have is, you know, recently within Hedera, I would say at the beginning of 2023, we did see one enterprise use case go live, which was Avery Dennison's atma.io, the RFID tags, which essentially bolstered up the network. Real TPS is now, well, it wasn't like three billion real or a billion real transactions every three weeks, and I think now it's probably around 2 billion every month. Once the ServiceNow connector, and this is just your opinion, I know you probably can't talk about a lot of stuff, but once you would see a platform like the Service Connector or ServiceNow connector potentially go live, if it were to go live, do you think that we would expect to see even more real transactions per second for those enterprise clients that want to leverage Hedera's consensus service or the token service or whatever it may be? Maybe give your thoughts around what it looks like for these enterprises once these beta aspects go truly live.

‍N2 Help & Solutions – Nicholas Hoffman
Well, frankly speaking, I don't have a lot of expertise to answer, but we see a move of major players into blockchain. For example, as partner with Polygon Matic to work on a loyalty program. So, there are more and more cases where we do need a blockchain or DLT. So, ServiceNow has partnered with Hedera. So, I guess, as soon as they will publish it, there will be a need and a move and then increasing the number of transactions. But again, I am not the right person to have an opinion on that because we are not really involved in the discussion at this level. I think we should have someone from ServiceNow to answer this question.

‍King Solomon – Genfinity – Founder & CEO
Can you tell us a little bit about the DAO aspects that you guys are building out from, and to help and solutions, and what that represents within maybe the wider ServiceNow ecosystem as well as yourselves?

‍N2 Help & Solutions – Nicholas Hoffman
So, yes, as we say, the first use case was a membership card. The second use case was the auditable recruitment process. This is done now, and we are working on some other aspects. We would like to create a single sign-on aspect of. Basically, we would like to ease the connection to the ServiceNow platform with a self-sovereign identity. So, as soon as you have your NFT card and you have proved to be who you are, you will get access to the ServiceNow platform, which we have built. We are really working on the gamification of the freelancer life. So, that's our big concern or problem for the next quarter. Now, our big concern or problem is about funding. So, we are looking at how we are going to accelerate our growth, and the idea is to tokenize a cooperative. So, which will go on with a freelancer and propose to all the freelancers to invest in the project and get a token which will help to make this co-ownership of the platform a reality. Also, offering to people who are part of the Web3 ecosystem to maybe help us to finance the project. This is something much more complex, I would say, because it has some legal involvement and so on. We want to make it in a way that we keep the control and that we do not just create another coin. That's where we are in terms of the DAO, looking at what a community or cooperative will mean thanks to decentralized technology. And one more point, since we have created this village, or I would say, a village of freelancers, a global village of freelancers thanks to ServiceNow and Hedera, we are in contact with other technology specialists like experts on Google, experts on Amazon, experts on Salesforce. They say, "Oh guys, we would like to create the same kind of community for technology expertise." So, the potential is quite unlimited if we manage it properly.

King Solomon – Genfinity – Founder & CEO
No, that answered it 100%. I mean, the one question that I wanted to ask you guys, you know, understanding kind of the governing board members within the Hedera ecosystem aspects like have you guys had the opportunity to, so looking into ServiceNow previously, DLA Piper and Toko, which is their tokenization platform, has done some proof of concepts with ServiceNow as well. Have you guys, I think you briefed and touched on it, so like with the governing board members that exist out there, do you guys have more opportunities to kind of reach out and touch base with those governing board members to see if there are synergies with what you guys are building? Do you think that there are conversations going on behind the scenes with other Hedera governing board members?

‍N2 Help & Solutions – Nicholas Hoffman
On our side, we are in close relation with Nicol Atico, who is a person representing ServiceNow at the governing council, and we are in touch with some of the Hedera players like Gomin, like also HashPack and so on. There are some traction, but it's not like as you say, there are many things also we are not aware of, so that's what I can say.

‍King Solomon – Genfinity – Founder & CEO
All right, so I want to ask you guys, this as well. I mean, there's obviously multiple technologies coming about right now that aren't just blockchain or DLT-related. Thinking specifically about artificial intelligence, thinking about the Internet of Things, just curious from your opinion as builders in this space, how do you guys see the convergence of those? And I should preface that by saying ServiceNow, I think two or three days ago, just announced that they're going to be acquiring artificial intelligence platform G2K, and in their earnings call for Q1 2023, they talked a lot about AI. What's your opinion on how these technologies converge over the next, let's say, a handful of years?

‍N2 Help & Solutions – Nicholas Hoffman
Well, personally, I believe that we live in a world where it's easy to create fake, especially now with the machines we have. So, it's quite crazy what we could build. And in the world we live, everything which will be true and you can prove to be true and accurate will have an extreme value. And I believe the Web3 ecosystem and the blockchain could help that to prove that what you have is real and true, especially in a world where with AI, you can make crazy and a lot of things. The machines are so powerful that it's very difficult to control. So, I see a combination between the two. But that's really a personal feeling more than a real case study.

‍King Solomon – Genfinity – Founder & CEO
I mean, one of the other questions that we always kind of think about in this space is moving from proof of concept to actionable platforms. And you mentioned previously, proof of concepts around employee management and things like that. I mean, how early do you think that we are as far as seeing those proof of concepts really come to ideation in a way that affects the society as a whole or the mass populace?

‍N2 Help & Solutions – Nicholas Hoffman
Wow, I think it's going to take years. Personally, I really don't know. But if I look first for mass adoption, I really have no idea. But when we look to cases for employees and so on, it's usually for small organizations which have the control and have the possibility to try also to see if there is an interest from the employees and so on. But again, I may not have the full picture and so on. I do believe in decentralized identity management, like that's also a thing which could accelerate, especially in Europe, where I have seen on other blockchains a lot of projects where, for example, the European Commission is backing some concepts about your tomorrow, your electronic driving license, your electronic password, and so on. This, we may see a mass adoption if the government and so will push. But regarding Hedera and ServiceNow, for us, we are still really on proof of concept for some specific customers, if I would say.

‍King Solomon – Genfinity – Founder & CEO
Yeah, I mean, I always like to ask, you know, largest milestones you think from N2 standpoint, obviously working with ServiceNow. Maybe even if you could touch base a little bit on what you've seen across the Web3 ecosystem as well in the past six months, and then what are you guys looking forward to in the next six months, whether it be for N2 or from ServiceNow or the ecosystem as a whole?

‍N2 Help & Solutions – Nicholas Hoffman
I think we, the fact that we could really simplify the use of Hedera and also make sure personally I'm looking at the community, is it growing? Do we have because, you know, on our side, as we say, we have chosen ServiceNow, and then there are, we were looking, how do we, we don't know anything about what the blockchain, what the DLTs, let's learn about it. And now we look how the complexity, so when you look at the number of projects, the number of blockchains, and it's normal, it's a competition. So basically, what we are looking at is, oh, oh, this will continue to move, and how the market will make sure that the best projects are the ones which are successful, because there are so many. It's a jungle, to frankly speaking, when you don't know anything about Web3 and you enter it, you say, "Wow, it's, because all these aspects about cryptocurrency affect the speculation, create a lot of noise, and it's quite hard to really look at a real use case." So, I will hope in the months and years, we will see emerging concrete projects which are really valuable projects for the society also, and not again, a world purely based on speculation and, "Oh, I would like the Azure bar to reach such level," and so on. At the end of the day, is it really what we want, or do we want to build better technology and better solutions for the future? And I may be naive, but that's personally what I hope to happen, not only looking at market value and so on, because, well, this isn't for us, not very the interesting part of the project of a blockchain.

‍King Solomon – Genfinity – Founder & CEO
Yeah, and I think one of the interesting things, and you touched on it earlier, I think that there's still, in this space, a disconnect between community building and Enterprise mindset and the B2B mindset that a lot of enterprises have. Like, if you were to tell an enterprise, "You know, your transaction is going to be quicker, cheaper, more efficient, X, Y, and Z," they're going to be like, "Yeah, sure, how do we do that?" But a lot of the times in the space, you brought up, I think you've made the analogy before as well, where it's like, you know, a picture of a turtle running on a rainbow as an NFT. But I think a lot of the enterprises don't look at the community building aspects of what that actually represents, because if somebody does it, I mean, that's going to be the end-all, be-all. I mean, look at Pepe, the meme coin that just went from nothing to a 1.3 billion dollar market cap on literally zero utility. The only thing that was there was community building. So, if somebody can flush out how to utilize the utility of a network but also do the community building aspects in a way that makes sense for mass adoption, it's going to be pretty much game over for a lot of these ecosystems. I mean, I think with you guys coming into the space and building out solutions with N2, you know, understanding the ethos of the enterprise, understanding the ethos of a lot of these legacy financial institutions or IT builders that are kind of coming from the traditional IT space, it always makes sense to pay attention to as many things as possible that are going on in crypto because the space changes so quickly that it's very easy to kind of fall off the cliff and become a little bit irrelevant in certain regards. I did want to touch on that briefly. Like, I agree with you in certain regards because I think NFTs have a way bigger use case than PFPs, obviously, because you start dealing in digital identity, you start dealing in non-fungible account-based assets. By non-fungible account-based asset, I mean like XRP, Bitcoin, Ethereum, things that exist natively on Ledger. When you start dealing in non-fungible account-based assets, I think the aspects of disruption and how much mass adoption can play into it might make NFTs an even larger use case than any unit of account-based asset like Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatever it is because there are so many use cases. Marc, I know you had your hand up, and I'm sorry for rambling as well, guys.

‍HashPack Wallet – Marc Ugas – Director of Operations
Oh no, no worries. No, I just wanted to speak to something that Nicholas, you mentioned, which was the transparency of Web3. And all of the different stigmas that are attached to Web3, NFTs, DeFi, and so on, because of the prior cycles. One thing that really spoke to me and was super interesting was the fact that both you guys, you know, with the way that you guys onboard your freelancers, and also how you guys allow companies to audit the trail of the different freelancers, and also how ServiceNow is thinking about implementing Hedera in their own applications with this NOW connector that you even mentioned, that you know, wasn't super technically complicated to do. I think that's super interesting, and I would love to hear your thoughts about it, because I know that you mentioned it on the Hello Future Buzz spaces a couple of months ago, where you know, you onboarded one of your freelancers into the N2 platform, and whenever when you said, you know, that there was an NFT that they would be receiving there was kind of a pushback initially, but then you know how you guys worked to make people understand that, you know, not because certain stigmas have been put around NFTs or Web3, that doesn't mean that everything is that way. So yeah, we'd just love to hear your quick thoughts on that.

‍N2 Help & Solutions – Nicholas Hoffman
Yeah, it's true. And so first, for freelancers, as I say, we have several cases where we told our members, "Oh, we have an NFT." "Oh, what is it?" And then, "You need to have a wallet. It's about blockchain." "Oh, no, I don't want to do that. I don't want to have a problem with the police." So basically, that was the answer because there was this trap that, "Oh, blockchain means crypto, means money laundering," and so on. So we have spent some time to explain and say, "Oh, fine, I understand. It's okay." And blah, blah. And on the customer side as well, when we explain to our customers that we have created a process and that they can check that the people they have recruited properly and so on, we don't mention yet blockchain, especially at the end of last year when there were all the scandals. You know, it was for us, we were very careful on saying, "No, no, we are a community of experts and IT experts. The difference is that we are freelancers. We built a cooperative. We are working on the protocol to ease and accelerate the collaboration between freelancers." And that is backed with a blockchain or even not a blockchain because then when you dig into it and you want to be accurate, you need to explain that Hedera is not really a blockchain as per definition, but it's a DLT. So there is the fear of something we don't know. There is a complexity of something we don't know. And our job is to simplify, and that's why we have gone through this process ourselves because I will say we are not blockchain experts. So I think this is the best way to be an evangelist when you understand the fear of people and you try to show them that there is nothing to be afraid of. And that's what we do every day.

‍King Solomon – Genfinity – Founder & CEO
What's your experience been like as far as onboarding freelancers or developers or whoever may be and kind of introducing them into the crypto and Web3 space, especially in regards to being ServiceNow platform experts? And do you expect that we'll see an increase of more platforms and ecosystems like N2 coming out, leveraging things on ServiceNow in the near future?

‍N2 Help & Solutions – Nicholas Hoffman
First, there is a kind of booming of the freelancer community. So we see more and more freelancers creating like groups and so on. That's for sure. I have seen a couple of other projects, but which are, to large a venture capital, apparently trying to create a platform which are backed by blockchain. But I don't know if it was what was behind the marketing. So I'm not sure if they are real other projects. But for sure, if we are successful and now when we see the interest, there will be other projects with maybe other ideas and so on. And that will, if our way we organize and we feel that that's now that there are a lot of interest from people, what we do, there will be other projects for sure.

‍King Solomon – Genfinity – Founder & CEO
What's up Neil? We've got Neil, who is the CTO of Xpectar, up here. Again, we are with N2, who are kind of ServiceNow experts. They have a freelance platform that they've also built out, leveraging Hedera services as well as the ServiceNow platform. Neil, what's up man? Go ahead.

‍Xpectar – Neil - CTO
Just a question, sorry if I misheard it, but I was curious about what you said there about the difference between DLTs and blockchains with legalities of issuing NFTs or tokens. Did I hear you correctly or sorry, did I misunderstand what you were saying?

‍N2 Help & Solutions – Nicholas Hoffman
Oh, we are just explaining that. Your question was how do we manage people when they are reluctant to blockchain and so, and we give an example of what happened. And I was just mentioning that if we want to be accurate, sometimes the complexity is there when we try to explain to people what's a blockchain, what's a DLT, and so on. So that was my point.

‍Xpectar – Neil - CTO
So, well, it wasn't about the legalities of issuing an NFT and the difference between a DLT and a blockchain.

‍N2 Help & Solutions – Nicholas Hoffman
It was mainly that some people in our network were afraid to receive an NFT even because they have made a kind of belief that blockchain is bad. That was even not about the legality. It was more about the emotion where when you talk about Web3 to people who don't know or even, let's say, concretely speaking, when we talk to our family and members who are not in the blockchain, it's like, "Hey guys, what are you trying to do? We don't understand what it's about." It was not really about the legality point.

‍Xpectar – Neil - CTO
Oh, okay. Sorry. I was gonna say it's more about the issuer. The issuer has the problem as opposed to the receiver, but I don't think there's a legal difference between the two. If you're issuing something that could be perceived as an asset versus not. Well, yeah, I think that's pretty much.

‍King Solomon – Genfinity – Founder & CEO
I think it comes down to the nascency of when we all came into crypto, which I think is what Nicholas might be discussing a little bit because I asked him, "What's your experience been like onboarding new devs or onboarding new freelancers and talking to them about the ServiceNow platform and talking to them about Hedera?" And I mean, a lot of us, when we first came into the space, like, were, I mean, I know I came in and I was recording an album with a producer, and he's like, "Yeah, I was like, 'You want me to pay you in PayPal?'" And he's like, "No, just send me Bitcoin." I'm like, "What the hell is Bitcoin?" And, you know, I had to go and create an account and do X, Y, and Z things, and I'm like, "This doesn't feel like I'm doing things correctly." That was back in probably late 2016, early 2017. And just what that experience is like. And I think it is kind of a resonant thing where it's like, we are still, like, when we talk to people outside of the ecosystem, I'm always interested to learn from other people's experiences how early they think that we are. Because a lot of people are still nervous even about interacting with blockchain or crypto or DLT or NFT in general. So that was kind of the thought process around it.

‍N2 Help & Solutions – Nicholas Hoffman
It's funny because when we started with our community, people weren't really into the crypto side of things. But now that we are getting to be a bit more known around the world, new joiners are really enthusiastic about the project. They understand more, they join us because they feel like we are really trying to achieve something interesting, not only with the community but also with all the technology that we are trying to connect to that community.

‍King Solomon – Genfinity – Founder & CEO
Yep, and I think, you know, what's always interesting to me is talking to... And by the way, guys, we're probably a hard stop in four or five minutes here, so I really appreciate all you guys' time. It's always interesting to me to see all the different use cases, whether it be a dev shop or freelancing or connections within connections. And you guys, leveraging certainly the expertise you guys have within the ServiceNow platform. I think there's going to be multitudes of use cases coming down the pike here, even in the future, where we see real people trying to start real businesses that don't necessarily involve themselves with just launching an NFT or launching a coin or token. And there's nothing wrong with that, but we also certainly need to see real businesses that exist already in Web2 that are going to exist in Web3, that probably have a lot of synergy with Web2 and traditional finance and traditional aspects of what they do, but that just leverage crypto and Web3 in ways that make sense for not only their clients but for everybody else that they're dealing with as a business. So, yeah, I really wanted to say that.
So, we always cut these kind of at an hour. It was a fantastic Spaces. I want to thank Mark so much from HashPack for inviting up again. Two guys, again, please give a follow to @N2_Help. And yeah, Neil, I know you have a question, so go ahead.

‍Xpectar – Neil - CTO
Oh, it was more around the businesses and the use cases for blockchain and NFTs as such. So essentially, I think one of the bigger problems is the legalities around issuing the NFTs. And that's the biggest problem that we need to solve for businesses in terms of: Are they allowed to do it? Where are they allowed to do it? What's the ramifications of issuing an NFT? Because ultimately, it's one of those things that's very unguarded in terms of legal protections. Right? There's not many ways that you can break the law inadvertently. But with issuing tokens and NFTs, it's a very strange time we live in because you can inadvertently break the law quite badly, depending on your jurisdiction, with a couple of lines of code. And it's really unprecedented in terms of how easy that is to do. And so, I think a lot of businesses, their lawyers are pushing against the idea of, "If we do this, what have we done?" And they don't really understand it. So, I think one of them is the law, or legal...

‍King Solomon – Genfinity – Founder & CEO
Yeah, and look at the Tornado Cash guys that literally put out open-source code around privacy. And I mean, they got sued for literally putting out something that anybody could use that had privacy aspects within it. So, yeah, hold on. We'll bring Nicholas up for one more second here.

‍HashPack Wallet – Marc Ugas – Director of Operations
Yeah, and just to add into that, you know, I think that, you know, as obviously, you know, we're living through this whole thing with the SEC, and them not having their thoughts clear even on how to regulate the space. And I think that, you know, more and more solutions will come to adapt to the current, you know, legal structure. I mean, I know of one upside Co-op building on Hedera, they found an interesting way of applying comparatives and being able to issue NFTs and fungible tokens in a way that is completely backed by a bunch of non-action letters. But, like, I do agree with you, you know, it's going to be interesting, and hopefully this whole thing with the SEC, no Coinbase, you know, by suing the SEC, you know, hopefully that provides some clarity, because, like, it is, you know, you don't really ever know how to really approach things in a way that is 100% compliant with all the different jurisdictions. And, you know, unless the US really takes a stride on this and, like, starts giving some further guidance, you know, there's a risk that each different country and region will regulate in different ways. And it's going to leave a lot of the projects that want to start really having to go through a lot of legal stuff, which is not always the best way of investing time and resources.

‍King Solomon – Genfinity – Founder & CEO
I mean, it's interesting because, you know, in the United States, especially, I think there's a lot of uncertainty, and it's frustrating because you want to see the innovation coming out of this country. But a lot of it is moving offshore, and then when it moves offshore, it's like a chicken and egg thing. If it moves offshore in certain jurisdictions, there's not as much stringency for actually maintaining certain aspects, whether it be financial or whatever it might be. And, you know, I don't know, we just need some regulatory clarity because I think we're all a little bit sick of, at least I am personally, the boom and bust cycles that keep happening. You want to build a sound infrastructure for innovation in crypto and Web3 in the United States, certainly. But it's not surprising whatsoever to see, you know, companies moving outside of the US as well. And, I don't know, we really do need to see something kind of shift here or pivot because I think it's a little bit frustrating for all of us to keep going through these boom and bust cycles. We've believed in our utility assets for quite some time, and then you see things like Pepe doing up 150x out of nowhere. But it is what it is. So, again, I really appreciate all your guys' time. We do these every Monday, the Hedera Corner aspects. We've interviewed so many people in this space. Have to give a gigantic shout out to Sarah for hosting from Genfinity's account, ForKerala for coming up here and co-hosting, Valor for being up here as a speaker, Marc from HashPack for helping us to streamline and put these together, if you haven't checked out HashPack, I certainly recommend. So we've done so many interviews, like I said before, and they've transcribed and shared the video content within all of those as well. Nicholas, times two, from N2 Help and Solutions, ServiceNow experts. I certainly recommend you guys giving a follow to N2. It's pinned up at the top. We always recommend people follow and try to stay abreast of all the ecosystems that we interview. And yeah, just really interesting to hear from people that are actually building in the purview of a governing board member of Hedera. And yeah, we will definitely be doing these next week as well. And Neil, thank you so much for coming up as well. I don't know how you're still awake because we were in space two hours ago, and it was almost bedtime. But I always appreciate your thoughts and you coming onto these spaces as well. So we will talk to you guys next time. And yeah, see you guys. Thank you.