• Sergii Grybniak (presenter & moderator)
• Alex Bornyakov – The Deputy Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine
• Ramesh Ramadoss, PhD – Chair, IEEE Blockchain Technical Community
• Paul Brody – Principal & Global Blockchain Leader, Ernst & Young
• Hart Montgomery – CTO, Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust
• Dimitrios Psarrakis – Board Director GBBC

A Panel Discussion Summary

Overview

This panel brought together government officials, blockchain leaders, and technical experts to discuss Ukraine's ambitious initiative to map decentralization opportunities across all major economic sectors. The research aims to identify where distributed ledger technology (DLT) can provide genuine advantages over already-digitized systems—not just paper-based processes—while addressing privacy concerns and creating practical implementation roadmaps.

Key Participants & Their Perspectives

Sergii Grybniak (Moderator & Lead Researcher, Web3 Institute Ukraine)

PhD in Computer Science, 8 years studying blockchain infrastructure

The Research Mission: "We made the task for ourselves a little bit more complicated—we are comparing not how it worked without digitalization, but how the decentralized case will be advantageous to already digitized cases."

On Privacy Design: "The way privacy works in distributed ledger technology is different than how it works in databases. We don't have the same situation where we click a checkbox for login and password to have a private database. It requires different design—some private ledgers, public ledgers, communications between them, some proofs, something revealed, something not revealed."

Current Progress: The initiative currently has 17 articles in process, with legal and energy sectors likely to be published first. The team has already received awards for standardization work on recurring transactions and is exploring international collaboration, including with Taiwan.

Alex Bornyakov (Deputy Minister of Digital Transformation, Ukraine)

Priority Sectors:

1. Energy & Utilities (Highest Priority)

"The energy and utility sector could definitely benefit through decentralized projects like peer-to-peer energy trading, automated settlements. We have this big problem with energy security now, so I think that's where we could look."

2. E-Hryvnia (CBDC) (Critical Foundation)

"I still think that eHryvnia, our electronic version of currency, is the most important project because it provides a vehicle where you can build those DLT projects on. Without it, it's kind of hard to imagine how it could be done—it's going to be fractured and not have solid perspective."

The National Bank is working toward "municipal payment tokens, tokenized public bonds, decentralization that allows instant and programmable transactions, and even marked money where you can mark with some color and trace them."

3. Social Payouts

"Everything that's related to social payouts—that's the next big thing that could be using DLT technologies."

The Central Challenge: Legal & Cultural Barriers

Alex was remarkably candid about Ukraine's fundamental obstacles:

"We were always stuck at the point where we were trying to find a way to let government data be decentralized. The data that government possesses, especially personal data and citizen data—Ukraine is not an exception here—is protected by law to be stored somewhere under surveillance of certain authority. If you try to propose letting this data be on different computers, it usually just doesn't go anywhere and they aggressively protect this view that this data has to be centralized, otherwise they don't have power to protect it."

The Cloud Breakthrough:

"There was a huge step forward when we agreed—and only because of the war in Ukraine—to let government data be in cloud. I think the next step maybe some of this data could be decentralized."

Failed Attempts at Decentralization:

"I did several attempts myself. We were trying to propose that maybe we can store some register data like deeds. We have thousands of notaries, so they can serve as nodes and confirm transactions. But the Ministry of Justice said 'How can we release this data? This requires changes in law.'"

His Honest Assessment:

"I think the biggest challenge when trying to move forward this decentralization is basically our social consensus. Citizens and government have to agree to let this data go to different nodes and not be in one place. I don't know if it's possible at this stage because they're still afraid this data could be lost. I'm sorry, but I'm just trying to be frank—I quite frankly don't see a massive chance to let DLT projects on massive scale with government data in Ukraine in close future. It's close to impossible."

Policy Solutions Needed:

1. Change the law on registers: "According to this law, data from registers has to be stored in some centralized place. From a policy standpoint, there are two ways: First, strictly say in the law that this kind of data could be decentralized. Then private companies can work with government to make it happen."
2. Use the Web3 Sandbox: "We have a sandbox for Web3 in Ukraine. We can create an experiment or pilot where we can try these things and allow government employees to have legal background to give this data without legal consequences."

Ukraine's Agentic State Vision:

"President Zelensky said we need to build a country in a smartphone, and we introduced a concept of digital state. Recently we changed this concept—we don't call it digital state anymore, we start to build an agentic state. Everything is going to be based on AI eventually. We don't have much of the legacy that European Union has, and that allows us to do this."

His Call to the Blockchain Community:

"What I really lack as a government representative are cases where I really see the value of decentralized networks. I'm looking for successful examples. Show me those cases and, believe me, I'll be happy to start implementing them on government scale."

Paul Brody (Global Blockchain Leader, Ernst & Young; Chairman, Enterprise Ethereum Alliance)

The Capital Advantage (Short-Term):

"I was listening to what Alex was saying and I was thinking—in the short run, I generally agree around energy, although I'm not sure it's really around energy trading. I think it's actually more around raising capital. Micro grids are actually quite difficult to put together, but what's relatively easy to do is to finance batteries and solar panels and other distributed energy infrastructure."

"By far the most proven short-term ROI in the whole crypto space is really around raising capital. Raising capital and distributing it to entrepreneurs is incredibly effective."

Medium to Long-Term Benefits:

1. Resilient Supply Chains: "Really resilient, decentralized supply chains and resilient information systems are a big benefit from implementing blockchain."
2. Anti-Corruption Infrastructure: "It eventually expands into things like public sector procurement where it's very corruption-proof. Giving foreign aid donors confidence in how money is being spent is very important."

On Government Pace:

"It's pretty normal for governments to move relatively more slowly and be somewhat conservative in this approach. If you look at the US market, the Genius Act did a great job of unleashing the energy of banks and other entities, but the US federal government isn't doing a lot directly on chain themselves—they're accepting tax payments and things like that."

Why Public Ethereum (Strong Position):

When Ramesh described challenges of governance, validators, and treasury control:

"I feel like you're describing building a whole blockchain, and I'm mystified as to why one would even need to do that. Public Ethereum is out there. Just get on it and use it. You don't need to build it, you don't need to run it, nobody controls the keys."

On Ukraine's unique security situation:

"If you have an application running on top of Ethereum, it doesn't matter if there's not a single electron running in all of Ukraine—that application will still keep running. When your country is under attack, the ability to move some activity offshore is useful, not a liability."

On Smart Contract Security:

"Where people are losing lots of money, it's almost always at the cutting edge of sophistication like DeFi. But if you look at relatively straightforward investing, we've gotten really good at custody. The rate of custody breaches and break-ins has decreased dramatically over the last few years. It's an indicator of sector maturity. As you move away from the frontier, the level of risk and fraud does get lower."

Quality Through Regulation:

"The lesson from the last few years is that the quality of participants in the marketplace matter a lot. If you have really high-quality companies and entrepreneurs, you're going to get relatively good results. Quality of participants is heavily determined by quality of regulation."

"Companies that have a long-term time horizon are quite risk-averse in terms of not wanting to do things that might be seen as breaking the law or something you could be prosecuted for in the future. They're not going to test the envelope in most cases. The Genius Act and MiCA are two really good examples where establishing rules of the road brought in a lot of quality investors feeling comfortable that their risk would be rewarded in the market and not potentially punished by prosecution or fines in the future."

His Pragmatic Advice:

"From a very pragmatic perspective: start with bite-sized chunks, prove stuff out, and then move on to bigger applications."

Hart Montgomery (CTO, Linux Foundation Decentralized Trust; Director, Post-Quantum Cryptography Alliance)

The Identity Foundation:

"Something that no one else has said yet that I think is really important is a digital decentralized identity ecosystem. Lots of other things digitally go much better and much more smoothly if you've got good decentralized identity solutions backing them all up. Just as energy is the backbone for a lot of things, I also see decentralized digital ID as the backbone for a lot of digital efforts—particularly the funding, anti-corruption, even things like CBDC."

On Open Source Security (Correcting Misconceptions):

When Ramesh suggested open source might decrease security:

"I want to push back a little bit on the notion that open-source software decreases security. Typically, it increases security. We have a lot of data about that at the Linux Foundation. Definitely encourage you or anyone listening to read the research reports on that."

No Need to Build from Scratch:

"We have loads of code bases for blockchains both in the Linux Foundation and tons more outside. Whether you wanted to build your own L1, your own L2, your own L3, your own private chain, your own something in between—it's all already basically been done for you. It's all free open-source code, too. Unless you really need something new and different, which you probably don't, there are a lot of good existing solutions out there."

On Choosing Solutions:

"There are a lot of easy options. You can run something lightweight like your own L2 if you want as well."

Policy Recommendations:

"I agree with Alex—just letting people put not necessarily sensitive data, but important data that's needed for transactions and other functionalities on chain would be extremely useful. The Genius Act, as people have referred to before, was a really nice and useful piece of legislation, even if it wasn't always perfect. Just moving in that direction and allowing people to do things and trade things that might resemble securities on a blockchain is going to be extremely useful."

Dimitrios Psarrakis (Senior Fellow, Wharton Business School; Former EU Parliament Economic & Monetary Policy Specialist)

Background & Credentials:

"I was economic and monetary policy specialist at the European Parliament where I had the opportunity to draft Title Two and Title Three of MiCA, the DLT pilot regime, and the crowdfunding platforms regulation. Last year I was commissioned by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe to draft a regulatory framework for crypto assets for Ukraine. I took MiCA and tried to accommodate it based on the macroeconomic needs of Ukraine, because copy-pasting a European Union regulation to Ukraine at this stage is at least dangerous."

Five Economic Benefits for Ukraine:

1. Streamlining operations with lower costs
2. Lowering cost of capital with tokenization and global distribution
3. Faster, milestone-based disbursements that reduce waste and accelerate project completion
4. Export uplift with cheaper, faster settlements
5. Corruption dividend through transparency
6. Green industrialization opportunities

The Blended Finance Model:

"We need to find a model that allows crowdsourcing of partnerships for the accelerating process—blended finance, diaspora channels, corporate anchor buyers, local banks and fintechs all should work together. It also allows us to create key performance indicators to test how things work and pivot accordingly. I see this as infrastructure for accelerating growth and I'm very rosy and confident this could be extremely beneficial for Ukraine at this stage."

The Three Pillars Philosophy:

"There are technically three pillars that organize the economy: The state, the market, and the third pillar—community. This community has strong economic and social implications. Whenever we had a scientific revolution, market and state were trying to compete to control it, and on the process we had super-capitalistic states or super-centralistic states, and the community was losing its power."

"Now, in this blockchain-artificial intelligence-quantum computing revolution, for the first time we have the opportunity to have a technological framework that actually can give to the community back power. I suspect that for states and market, it's a little bit painful to allow communities to start building infrastructure based on web3 economy, because web3 is the infrastructure that will materialize the return of the community."

Ukraine's Unique Opportunity:

"Knowing Ukraine and having supported military operations using web3 sources (not the central state), I think this is very fundamental to build a new concept of state that Europe cannot do because it has a lot of legal legacy systems that work very well. America is exactly the same. Seeking examples in China or India, I don't think that's a serious thing to do. But Ukraine has the capability to build a new kind of state."

The EBSI Failure (Cautionary Tale):

"The European Blockchain Services Infrastructure was an initiative that came from our team to streamline operations in many aspects of data governance in the European Union. As it usually happens with most government initiatives, it was a miserable failure in the beginning—failure on two sides."

First failure: "Failure to ensure that the central government governance structure of the European Commission is really the appropriate organization to run a project like this."

Second failure (Swedish Health Data Example):

"The Swedish government said, 'You want me to upload the health data of Swedish citizens on this platform which practically is a centralized permissioned architecture and you want me to risk all this? I will never let it happen.' For the first three years we were just burning money."

The University Diploma Disaster:

"The deputy minister mentioned onboarding university diplomas. It took us three times terrible spending to do something that Ireland did in one month, and we paid 12 times more because in the beginning we had this Ethereum obsession that all the architecture should be decentralized and not use oracles. In the first two years, the officials running this didn't know what an oracle is. They wanted to go to Harvard year 1998, send an oracle there, get the data, come back positive/negative, put it in EuroPass. This never happened. It could cost $100 to do it. We spent €1 million three times."

Policy Recommendations:

"For a fast victory, I would suggest Alex read the regulatory framework for crypto assets I drafted, which is based on two economic assumptions: First, that your economy does not reflect the realities of the European Union. Just replicating EU regulation in the prospect of becoming members 7-8 years from now can only kill the ways you need to put in place to accelerate growth and sustainability in Ukraine."

"You need to strike the appropriate balance between accession to the European Union and the realities in general, because sometimes the way DG Connect speaks, with good intentions, is not always the most appropriate way in dealing with the syncratic needs of Ukraine."

On Engaging the Diaspora:

"Put in place a framework that allows engagement of the super strong in terms of human capital diaspora. There are ways to do it efficiently and link this flow of knowledge with flows of capital."

On Technological vs. Business Model Neutrality:

"I would suggest designing policy and regulatory frameworks for Ukraine that do not necessarily rely on the idea of technological neutrality, because technological neutrality is a fake principle if it's not coupled with the fundamental idea of business model neutrality. Regulation that favors certain business models over others brings market concentration and monopolies that are not necessarily good for the market and efficiency of projects."

Ramesh Ramadoss, PhD (Chair, IEEE Blockchain Technical Community)

Use Case Hierarchy:

"There are many use cases. Obviously CBDC is a great starting point. Once you do that, you could look at tokenization of national assets, and then use blockchain infrastructure for public expenditure tracking, tax collection, refunds. There's a whole list of things we can look at. I don't know if any country is looking at tokenizing their assets—that's one hot topic."

Technology Neutrality:

"I represent IEEE—we try to stay neutral. We don't promote a particular technology or product. The thing is to look at the technology."

On Governance Challenges:

"If you use a private blockchain, how many validators are you going to have? Even if it's run by government, they still have to have some sort of governance on who are the validators. For example, Dimitrios can talk about the EU—they have each country running a node. That's how they maintain governance."

Smart Contract Security Concerns:

"The number one security risk is in smart contract bugs. Even today people are losing billions and millions of dollars because of bugs in smart contracts. It's open source, still happening."

Practical Advice:

"It would be great to have a roadmap—where do you want to target first? Certain things could take 10 or even 20 years. All these blockchains we hear today are making progress, but they also have issues. None of them is perfect. It doesn't make sense for Ukraine to start building a new blockchain. They could use existing ones, see what's appropriate, compare and see what's suitable for what they're trying to do. Some governments are building their own blockchain—that doesn't make sense to me. The capital and the learning... it just doesn't make sense."

Critical Tensions & Debates

Public vs. Private Blockchains

Paul's Position (Strongly Public): When Ramesh discussed governance and validator challenges, Paul responded with confusion about why anyone would build new infrastructure when public Ethereum exists and offers immediate resilience—critical for a country at war.

Ramesh's Counterpoint: "Well, that's if Alex is convinced to use Ethereum, sure." [laughter]

Ramesh raised legitimate concerns about:

• Open source security vulnerabilities
• Treasury control (even in "decentralized" systems, a handful of people often control millions)
• Governance structures for validators
• Smart contract bugs causing billions in losses

The Resolution: Alex confirmed Ukraine was "considering Ethereum, Stellar, and others" and that the National Bank looked at "three or five different existing blockchains" for CBDC.

Centralization vs. Decentralization in Government

The EBSI Example: Dimitrios's story about European Blockchain Services Infrastructure served as a cautionary tale of centralized approaches to decentralization failing spectacularly.

Paul's Analysis:

"I personally think EBSI didn't work because fundamentally it was a centralized approach to blockchain, and blockchains that are centralized don't really work and have no particular use. I never really understood the point of EBSI to begin with, and I actually think the Swedes had a pretty good point there."

Standardization & International Collaboration

Sergii on Pre-Standardization:

"A lot of these activities will result in establishing certain standards because the area of standardization is currently not developed. We established the pre-standardization initiative. Our research group already had experience starting standards and driving them to the very last stages. We recently received awards for the standard of recurring transactions, and there will be a lot of standards coming for solving different tasks for the economies."

International Opportunities: Sergii mentioned presenting to the government of Taiwan last week about "potentially Ukrainian researchers and Taiwanese researchers and then other researchers collaborating on creation of these standards."

Open Invitation:

"Researchers in Ukraine, researchers outside of Ukraine who have the required knowledge of some industry or distributed ledger technology—we are welcoming everyone. This research is designed to be decentralized. If you know something you think can be helpful and you would like to contribute to the future of Ukraine, please feel free to reach out."

The Web3 Institute Ukraine Initiative

Structure:

• Project office working for Ministry of Digital Transformation
• Supports academy, industry, and research activities
• Started summer 2024
• Currently 17 articles in progress
• Legal and energy sectors prioritized

Unique Methodology: Not comparing blockchain to paper processes (where 30% efficiency gains could come from digitization alone), but comparing decentralized solutions to already-digitized centralized systems to prove genuine DLT value-add.

Participation Model: Organizations and individuals from outside Ukraine can collaborate to exchange experience—learning from each other in productive partnerships.

Key Takeaways & Actionable Insights

For Government (Alex's Needs):

1. Legal reform allowing certain data categories to be decentralized
2. Sandbox expansion for experimenting without legal liability
3. Concrete use cases demonstrating clear value over centralized digital systems
4. Social consensus building around decentralized data storage

For Private Sector (Paul's Emphasis):

1. Start with capital raising (highest proven ROI)
2. Use existing infrastructure (public Ethereum) rather than building
3. Focus on bite-sized pilots that prove value
4. Leverage offshore resilience as strategic advantage

For Policymakers (Dimitrios's Warning):

1. Don't copy-paste EU regulations meant for different economic realities
2. Balance accession requirements with immediate growth needs
3. Engage diaspora to connect knowledge flows with capital flows
4. Ensure business model neutrality, not just technological neutrality

For Technical Implementation (Hart's Foundation):

1. Prioritize decentralized identity as backbone infrastructure
2. Leverage existing open-source solutions (proven more secure)
3. Don't rebuild what exists—L1, L2, L3 options all available
4. Enable data on-chain for transactions and functionality

For Standards Bodies (Ramesh's Pragmatism):

1. Create clear roadmaps with realistic timelines (some goals may take 20 years)
2. Compare existing solutions rather than building from scratch
3. Focus on technology evaluation while maintaining neutrality
4. Address governance regardless of public/private choice

The Philosophical Question

Dimitrios posed: "Is Web3 the last destination? Can we have Web4, Web5?"

His answer: "The feeling is that Web3 is the last destination, and then we speak about Web3 plus."

His deeper point: This technological revolution uniquely enables community empowerment alongside state and market structures—a balance never before achievable in previous industrial or digital revolutions.

Ukraine's Unique Position

As Alex noted about the "agentic state" vision: Ukraine lacks the legacy systems of Europe and America, enabling radical experimentation with AI-first, blockchain-enabled government structures that established nations cannot easily replicate.

As Dimitrios emphasized:

"Ukraine has the capability to build a new kind of state" precisely because it's not constrained by decades of accumulated legal and technical debt.

The War Context: The ongoing conflict has already forced one breakthrough—moving government data to cloud—that peacetime politics might have blocked for years. This same pressure could accelerate decentralization adoption if clear value and security can be demonstrated.

Final Exchange (Most Revealing)

Alex (Government Official): "Show me cases where I really see the value of decentralized networks. Show me successful examples. Believe me, I'll be happy to start implementing them on government scale."

Sergii (Researcher): "That's our job—to find them and combine them."

Dimitrios: "Minister, we have a fantastic volume that brings together all these cases. We are going to send you this and start exploring from where you can start."

This encapsulates the panel's core dynamic: A government eager but cautious, needing proof; researchers compiling evidence; global experts offering tools and experience; and everyone navigating the tension between moving fast enough to matter and carefully enough to succeed.