In this episode of TFiR Let’s Talk from Open Source Summit in Dublin, Swapnil Bhartiya sits down with Melanie Cutlan, Managing Director – Technology and Innovation at Accenture, to discuss Hyperledger and the role the metaverse is playing in the modern economy. She goes on to discuss Accenture’s open source announcement and why metaverse companies should embrace open source.

Key highlights from this video interview are:

• Cutlan explains that she is excited to be attending in-person events again, having been to the Hyperledger Member Summit and the Hyperledger Global Forum. She explains how it has been great to engage with the new projects and to see the new business ideas.
• Accenture is a strong supporter of the Linux Foundation and is involved in a number of committees and different foundations. Cutlan discusses how Accenture is supporting the growth of standards and accelerators and projects in the blockchain space and her role on the Hyperledger board. She explains the push to rethink the future of money and how they are working with interoperability, assets, and accelerators to achieve this.
• Cutlan takes us through the role blockchain technologies are playing in today’s world. She explains that the model is undergoing a paradigm shift currently so that people can own their own data and consent to share it with others. She explains the growing maturity of digital credentials and tokenization and how this is powering the metaverse.
• Cutlan feels that there is more of a need than ever before for organizations to be able to collaborate together across an entire supply chain, to identify where a product or good is, and the provenance of the goods. She explains the example of how this can be used in organic farming and other use cases across other industries.
• The open source movement and the Linux Foundation are working to organize and orchestrate the innovation around hyperledger and bring people together. Cutlan discusses the role of the Hyperledger Foundation in creating utilities of value to accelerate the industry.
• Cutlan goes over the recent announcement with the OpenWallet Foundation (OWF) and the role Accenture will be playing in contributing. She explains that it realizes the idea of creating a digital wallet that carries your money, identity, and objects across the board and is portable. She discusses how this can change the game with sharing and exchanging digital objects as we move towards the next generation of internet.
• OpenWallet ties in with broader themes such as having verifiable credentials on a blockchain, and verified attestations attached to a chain. Cutlan explains that there are guidelines to be created and technology to be built around this.
• There are several Hyperledger projects working on the infrastructure in this use case, and is progressing towards a set of requirements and a roadmap to decide which projects will be part of the overall stack.
• The advances in headsets are driving the features and capabilities of the metaverse. Accenture purchased 60,000 headsets and over 100,000 have participated in an onboarding experience for employees needing to collaborate together. Cutlan believes that this is the future of a connected workplace and society explaining how this can potentially fit together with digital wallets and the tokenization of things in a virtual place.
• Cutlan explains how these immersive experiences in a virtual space differ from something like watching TV.
• Creating safe spaces in the metaverse is a top priority for Accenture. Cutlan discusses how they launched a responsible Metaverse team to ensure they are responsible by design, safety, security, and moderation. She shares her insights into some of the challenges Accenture encountered in reimagining these considerations.
• Cutlan tells us how the emergence of the metaverse is driving a need for more bandwidth and for both headsets and other devices to have the capabilities to handle the increase in bandwidth. She goes into detail about what she calls “an explosion of convergences of these technologies.”
• Open source plays an important role for Accenture and Cutlan is keen to see more of it. She explains how they are launching a community of practice internally around all the capabilities to help with the development of assets and accelerators. She discusses the importance of open source and the community.

Connect with Melanie Cutlan (LinkedIn, Twitter)
Learn more about Accenture (Twitter)

The summary of the show is written by Emily Nicholls.