Real-World Applications Using Hyperledger Fabric and Decentralized Networks: Hyperledger, Google, Blockdaemon, and Tendermint
On June 4th, Blockdaemon, Hyperledger, Google, Tendermint, and Heavybit discussed Hyperledger Fabric (project hosted by the Linux Foundation) with a focus on dev tools, networks and decentralization that will make it easier to implement, manage, and build on top of all of the emerging public and private blockchain networks. We are looking forward to a fun conversation and to celebrate the launch of Blockdaemon also celebrated the launch of our latest Fabric offering version 1.4.1 on our dynamic hybrid cloud deployment tool!
Panelists include:
Brian Behlendorf, Executive Director of Hyperledger
Marin Markov, Engineering Manager at Google (via Blockchainworks)
Jack Zampolin, Product Manager at Tendermint / Cosmos
Konstantin Richter, CEO & Founder of Blockdaemon
Discussion points included:
- The real-world applications using Hyperledger Fabric
- Challenges and opportunities of decentralized networks
- Best practices in building and deploying application architectures with BYOI, security features, and monitoring.
Full Transcript:
Konstantin: 00:00:06 Hey everybody. I’m Konstantin. I’m the CEO and founder of Blockdaemon. I’ll be a host kind of emcee type of guy. Welcome here to the Heavybit Accelerator where Blockdaemon is part of the Heavybit accelerator program. It’s the leading developer tooling accelerator. The leading is probably optional but I believe it is. They’ve been really supportive and great and it’s a great community of projects, very focused on software and engineers. And so we’ve done pretty much… Once a quarter we do an event here to talk about… Actually probably always the same type of issues, which is open source, post open source, decentralization and what that means for our multi-client databases and then we kind of sort of wiggle out away around that and try to find an interesting topic to talk about.
Konstantin: 00:01:01 Also when we do this, we like to celebrate something, where I’m not going to bore you with any slide sets and I don’t want to make this a shill fest, but what we’re celebrating as Blockdaemon today is that we’ve just today launched our fabric 1.4.a out of the box deployment tool that you can see on our node marketplace on blockdaemon.com. It’s the first time that you can add peers individually to a network across a hybrid cloud infrastructure. So, if you’re interested, were very excited about it. And if I could quote Brian and you can take it back, but our lead engineer who worked on it Nye, was referred to as the world’s leading expert in hyper ledger at this very moment. And so Nai, where are you? Oh, he’s over there. That’s him. The world’s leading expert.
Brian B.: 00:01:52 He was asking questions no one else had the answers to. So I was like, “Well, that makes him like the expert because you know, yeah.”
Konstantin: 00:01:59 Yeah. So it’s a… I don’t know if it’s a big field, but yeah. So we leave it at that. And so, we’re very excited about it. Blockdaemon is a blockchain tooling company. We’re very focused to be a middleware platform that deploys pretty much every major protocol across any type of infrastructure. What that looks like today is we deploy 14 protocols across four different large cloud solutions and our own little data center. Our ambition is to have a middleware platform where we can actually monitor and manage notes that sit on your server, on on-prem, behind firewalls. We don’t care where they sit, and that’s what we’re working towards. And we’re doing it the hard way, and we do it by selling individual notes in different configuration sets.
Konstantin: 00:02:45 And so we have over 8,000 users. We run over a thousand full notes at any given point in time. Protocols range from Bitcoin, Ethereum to all the leading permission-based ones as well as now the kind of staking universe that’s sort of been opened up to us. We started the business 18 months ago, 18 months ago nobody cared about nodes really at all. I remember people were very happy using inferior API obstruction tools. People didn’t really understand what actually comes with a node that, you know, the core component of a blockchain is connected to a node.
Konstantin: 00:03:18 It makes the network secure, and it gives us decentralization. And so the awareness of what that looks like has changed drastically, I feel over the last 18 months. And it accumulates now in this sort of… In the sort of dawn of proof of stake protocols and we’ve always hear debated decentralization. Decentralization in the old days, for example, on Ethereum or some of those projects, was really mainly focused on, oh, great.
Konstantin: 00:03:50 We have a hundred nodes and we’re really decentralized and we are all on Amazon East. That was sort of the state of networks 2017, early 2018, and so, the way we tackled that as to become a multi-cloud provider and to actually manage nodes across cloud providers so you can actually automatic scale up nodes and have latency and load balance across multiple different cloud providers. So, that’s how that looked like. And then sometimes that made us factor in centralization. Right? And so we had to really think about that and that’s where we ended up with what’s now actually really a package manager, a piece of code you can throw on a Linux environment that deploys a node, connects it to our back end, and then you can give it permission on what you allow us to do with it.
Konstantin: 00:04:40 But then, the next dawn and what decentralization looks like and that’s why we have an illustrious set of guests here that I’m going to quickly introduce them, then we’re going to ask them to tell us their story. But I’ll start in the end with Jack here from Cosmos and internet. What’s interesting decentralization for stakers looks a little different, right? Because the challenges for decentralization there is that it’s, it can be a zero sum game, right? So you end up with validators that it’s a little bit the chart symptom where once you’re in the top 10, you keep on selling more records so you stay in the top 10 and nobody else can ever get in it. And that’s kind of what we’re kind of seeing a little bit now in the staking economy where there’s a drive towards, you know, like the more, the better, your higher your steak is, the more money you have to bet better tooling to have a higher performing node.
Konstantin: 00:05:33 And so these projects try to artificially inflate the counter validator notes, and the question is how does that work? How is that feasible over time? What happens if Coinbase custody ends up with everybody’s stake? And then Coinbase owns every proof of stake protocol just by the merit of the volume that they can push around. So it’s interesting, and so Cosmos internement has been one of the projects that has been talked about for a long time as a high quality project that guys that have done really, really solid work. And I think the market and the attention that they’ve gotten speaks for themselves. We at Blockdaemon kind of have missed out a little bit on it. Like we’ve always looked at it as something that we find really interesting.
Konstantin: 00:06:20 We just didn’t really know how to connect to it. And we’re trying to make up for that now. but it’s something that really excites us. And I’m happy to have Jack here. Obviously there’s some, you know, stuff around STKs and securities and stuff. So, that’s another thing that we’d love to talk about a little bit.
Jack: 00:06:38 Absolutely.
Konstantin: 00:06:39 In the middle we’ve got Brian. Brian Behlendorf. He, runs the Hyperledger foundation. Brian is a burner and…
Brian B.: 00:06:48 And not a burner phone.
Konstantin: 00:06:50 Yeah. Not a burner phone. But he’s trying to decentralize himself and, so he’s also… But Brian’s worked with the Apache Foundation and has been really, really essential and kind of figuring out how to reward open source contribution at projects. Right. And so, I always find it super interesting to talk to him because fundamentally that’s what’s really excited about blockchain because we actually have ways to award technical contributions a little differently than we did in the past. So, Brian has a lot of great viewpoints as really one of the pillars of our communities. So we’re excited to have you here, and also, we talked prior a little bit. I hope, I don’t forget to ask about Sawtooth and some of the sort of more interesting sort of public private projects that are also happening with Hyperledger.
Konstantin: 00:07:39 And then to my left, we have a Marin from Google, Google Cloud an enigma. We’re talking to Google and we’re working on different bits and pieces with Blockdaemon past the starting point of our… I mean, it’s not an official relationship in any means, but we attended a bunch of Google events specifically talking about our Kubernetes Terraform sort of set up and using the sort of G-Suite products in our own stack.
Konstantin: 00:08:08 And so we started to build a relationship, and as it is with a large company like Google, there’s a lot of different… I don’t think there’s a centralized blockchain strategy in Google. Like Google is a little unique as a cloud company, like Google Cloud in that space where Amazon and Azure have very distinct aggressive offerings in the space. With Google you have sort of different people doing different bits and pieces. So we’ve met different people across the organization. The latest a person we met was Marin, so we’re very excited to have him here. He’s I guess also an expert at Hyperledger and working on the Hyperledger project within Google.
Marin: 00:08:48 We got the dope.
Konstantin: 00:08:48 There you go. We’ve got to, and so I’m super excited to have him here because you know cloud providers obviously are on one hand large beneficiaries of the current trend. We spend a lot of money paying for infrastructure. And so I’d love to hear a little bit what you guys are thinking and also what personally, where you sort of see this thing go and why actually Hyperledger is the area of your focus. But we’re going to start this off. So I’ve said a couple of things and they might’ve been wrong, but why don’t you… We go through, just tell us kind of where you’re from. What was your first sort of experience and why blockchain excited you, if I’ve gotten wrong, where you work or something and please update it and then, I’ll start us off with a couple of questions. Okay. So.
Marin: 00:09:38 All right. So I’m Marin, work with Google, but it’s mostly my opinions here. So I’m kind of like a data guy. When I started to engineering, I was in data. I was so excited about how data makes life easier, things better for all of us. Went into API’s and I was a bit late on the blockchain, but I’d say when I saw blockchain and I kind of like extrapolated towards the utility that it brings, it was like an awesome product I turned out so definitely within Google from the 20%, you might have heard into 100%, a hundred and something percent.
Marin: 00:10:15 So in general, really, really excited by the possibility that how blockchain would help us make life better for every one of us as consumers. Then in the enterprise space there is so much that it could transform. When we hear about data, when we hear about single source of truth, different places, multiple ERPs, all those things. If you think data, most likely share it and if you think share data, most likely you want to use a blockchain. And I’ll admit, yes, you don’t want to do that with transaction rates and stuff yet, but I’m hoping one day you will be there where you wouldn’t be thinking, “Oh, is it feasible or not?” So it’s for me.
Brian B.: 00:11:03 Cool. And as stated, I’m Brian. Almost got it right. It’s a Hyperledger project at the Linux Foundation-
Konstantin: 00:11:10 That’s right. Okay.
Brian B.: 00:11:10 … which really helps. I mean we’re inheriting, we have the benefit of inheriting in this, three and a half year old project now. This tradition that the Linux Foundation has established about in the system that they’ve established for helping support open source communities both at the developer layer acting somewhat as the kind of air traffic control or kind of just supportive infrastructure for helping devs get done what they want to get done in a way that delivers software that enterprises can go off and trust. But then doing also a lot of the coordination at the kind of business ecosystem layers so that companies can build on top of this code and build a thriving businesses, because you need that in order to get this kind of virtuous cycle going.
Brian B.: 00:11:50 So, we’re really benefiting from that and we’re incredibly proud to be part of the Linux Foundation. And I guess your question was what was like your first experience with yeah, blockchain tech or whatever. So 2008, I was working as an unpaid supporter on the Obama campaign as a tech advisor. And… Thanks. Yeah, that’s all him not me. But you know, I was really concerned about this intersection between open data and open source software, which I had a lot of experience with. But also, I have a nostalgic kind of memory of the internet being this kind of flat generative kind of space where you could run your own mail server or your own web server or your own data system and be a peer to everybody else in the system. And while I was as much of a cheerleader of the move to the cloud as anyone else, I had started a company called CollabNet, which was kind of like GitHub but about three generations way too early.
Brian B.: 00:12:42 I was all about like talking companies into using us to store their stores code and subversion for them. Right. But I was also uneasy about the degree of centralization that the move to the cloud was bringing and felt like there wasn’t a countervailing force until I did read, I admit just the abstract and maybe the first few pages of Satochi’s white paper, Nakamoto, not the other Satoshi who’s here in the audience. I want to be clear, I’m sure you had a white paper in 2008 too but yeah. Anyways, I was excited about the idea of finding an economic model combined with a technical model for answering the ease and scale that the cloud brings. Right? I’m trying to do that in the decentralized way. I was not a fan of proof of work, you know, the idea of burning CPU power to run a lottery to put the next link in the chain was not my idea of an environmentally friendly kind of thing to be advocating for.
Brian B.: 00:13:30 Nor was I a fan of coming out of the economic crisis in 2006 and ’07, the idea of a speculative financial instrument being the TCP IP of this whole new system. Right? Just because of the, what it would do to us as developers, the line between promoting your technology and promoting an investment would suddenly start to fade. I kind of put that on the back burner. I went back to helping this get this guy elected and served in the White House for a little while, served at the World Economic Forum as CTO for a while. But this thing kept nagging at me like, if we’re getting too centralized as a society, people are going to have to trust technology companies. Even with all this great open source software where we run it, we would have a declining number of options, right?
Brian B.: 00:14:13 And there’d be oddballs like me who had still run their own mail server. But by and large, it’d be hard to get that, that same freedom of choice that comes from, I mean, today we have five clouds. That’s great. What if we only had one, right? And what if we only had two? So, I kind of came back to it out of this recognition, that what did emerge out of those five years, I came back kind of in 2013, started looking at companies that are investing in open source as I was working at a VC firm, hearing all the bitcoin and blockchain pitches and said, “There’s got to be something more underneath this.” And that’s what led into Hyperledger. But really that was my first experience was reading Satoshi’s paper and going, “Oh God. But by cool that, oh God.”
Konstantin: 00:14:56 Yeah, lots to talk about. Yeah.
Jack: 00:14:58 Yeah. Awesome. Hey, I’m Jack Zampolin. I’m with Cosmos and I think my first experience with blockchain was during the 2013, 2014 run-up. I bought some bitcoin at that point. I found out about it cruising around the internet and thought it was really cool. You were working for the Obama Campaign in 2009. I was just graduating college and it was very, very difficult to find jobs at that point. So bounced around a couple of things and bitcoin was part of the catalyst that started being programming. So, moved from that and spent a couple of years kind of teaching myself programming, ended up moving out to the Bay areas. Part of that process, and was working for an enterprise database company at sort of the end of 2016.
Jack: 00:15:42 It’s a company Influx DB. We had a really strong open source component as well, and when I saw the next wave of blockchain adoption coming, I thought, I’m hugely passionate about this. This is part of what got me into programming. Like I have to take the job. So I quit my job and started working at this company called Blockstack. I was with them for about a year and help them raise around $50 million and then for their token sale and then moved from there to Cosmos about a year ago. And I’ve been the product manager there since then.
Konstantin: 00:16:15 Can you describe Cosmos also just briefly?
Jack: 00:16:17 Yeah, absolutely. Sorry. So Cosmos, we make an SDK to build your own blockchain. So, instead of forking bitcoin or Ethereum we’re using something like Hyperledger. You can use our technology that allows you to sort of specify a set of say transitions and build a application on top of your own blockchain. And then also a key part of that is there’s this concept of connecting blockchains and being able to transfer value seamlessly between them with something that we call IVC or Inter blockchain communication. So that’s kind of the overall idea of Cosmos and I can dig into any of the individual pieces there.
Konstantin: 00:16:53 Cool. Thank you so much.
Jack: 00:16:55 Yeah.
Konstantin: 00:16:55 So, yeah, so a lot of exciting kind of sort of angles that sit here. What I wanted to talk about a little bit is, and so first off, there’s been this game on Twitter and I don’t know if you guys are, I mean, I’m sure most of you guys are familiar that on Twitter a lot of the crypto blockchain stuff happens. It’s kind of the one ecosystem where a lot goes on. And there was this sort of chain around like, can you describe in one sentence what bitcoin is. I don’t want to force you to go through the same exercise, but one of the things that stood out to me, which I thought was very interesting was one of the definitions was to a degree faulty, but like talking about multi-client databases and obviously the ability to audit a complete history of a ledger.
Konstantin: 00:17:44 And one of the things that said there that I thought was very interesting because you can see the code executions as well, right? So you actually have a full history of all the different code executions within the ledger, and what I’m always curious in this debate is this a bug or feature? You know, like, is this actually something that has value or is this actually really more more of a problem. And it goes in towards what I’m trying to kind of get to is a little bit the question of we talk about open source and then we have these sort of permission networks, for example, like fabric where there’s questions, you know, where’s that line really, you know what I mean? Like, so for example in a ledger, if I participate in it, everything is actually fairly public, right?
Konstantin: 00:18:33 Like, and so for example, and I think specifically in Sawtooth it’s a somewhat public network where there aren’t a lot of private transactions in it. And so my question is, for developer where’s the volume and open source on blockchain? Is that a… Is it a bug or is it something that’s actually positive because it creates this… It creates a security risk, right? So people can actually see everything that’s there, and the only upside would be that developers can audit each other and hold each other accountable, right? So, but it creates a lot of problems that we actually continuously see. And so you guys also on the SDK side, just had bugs and issues. And the question is how do we deal with that stuff?
Konstantin: 00:19:18 But I first throw this to Brian because I’m curious what you make of it, and also tell us about Sawtooth. Even though we’re launching a fabric stuff, we kind of should have done the Sawtooth thing a little earlier, but I’m kind of intrigued because it crosses the line into public networks, which I always think with was interesting for an open source project like Hyperledger that actually worked on permission chains. Right?
Brian B.: 00:19:42 So, let me start back before even a lot of blockchain stuff and talk about what made open source work. So open source repositories form our ledger, right? They’re a pretty cohesive history of everything that’s happened on an open source project from the very first check-in to today. Right? And it’s that history of who’s checked in what and that accountability and, you know, your deltas are the same as mine. I mean, that kind of thing is what helped engender trust in the code and trust in the process. Not that any one developer is better than the other or whatever, like that matters too. Personalities matter.
Brian B.: 00:20:19 But it was always that ability to say, here’s that sequence of what’s happened. And I also say one thing that’s made open source work, and this, we’ll get into more governance models I think later is the right to fork. The right to do what kind of happened in the aftermath of the Dow hack, or is the fact that something you kind of want to rarely do, but the fact that you can do is important, which is if the four of us are working on an open source project and we three years in have a big disagreement, we can take the code and go own ways and that’s an incredibly powerful thing because it means that our investment isn’t sunk, right.
Brian B.: 00:20:52 Our investment like we can… We might not ever agree. We might come back together in the future and merge, but that right to fork is kind of inherent in it and that right to fork is what you get for free on the public ledgers, right? That’s one thing that makes them so powerful. I just have to… Everybody has to grant them that. Because it means that all of your participation on a public network is voluntary. So, being very deeply imbued in these kinds of lessons then coming to a world like at the beginning of Hyperledger and some of you were there at John Walpart is in the audience here, right back there. And in many ways was there at the birth of a lot of this.
Brian B.: 00:21:27 So I want to give him due credit for that. The idea was how do we take this world of what’s going on in the public ledger community and what’s the kind of things that have happened in transactional database systems between large organizations for a long time, which is much less about programmable money and much more about prevention of double spend, right? That ability to say, “Here’s a system that’s continuously auditing itself, continuously preventing somebody from spending the same token twice, or try perform other acts of fraud that the network as a whole can use to reinforce.” And then you realize this debate between permission and non-permissioned is about the size of the community and what are the boundaries for who can walk in that door and join our community, join our conversation here.
Brian B.: 00:22:12 And so even though we started out at… Hyperledger started out with Fabric and started out with Sawtooth as our first two projects, really, it became pretty obvious that we needed to talk about this as the spectrum. Because there are lots of use cases where even if you’re talking about just bringing 12 banks together to start exchanging data, you know, if they just posted the tip of their Merkle Tree to a public ledger, you know, once an hour, right. They’d always know that the history that they had shared between them on that network was the same no matter who suddenly had more hash power than the other, or whose votes could outweigh who. Right? So this full spectrum idea is important. And I’d say if I stepped in and, and it had only been Fabric, that intuition might not have or that that sense in the culture might not have happened.
Brian B.: 00:22:55 But with Sawtooth we had this very different technology so you could think of Fabric as something somewhat from it did come from IBM was part of their internal R&D team around blockchain tech. Again, very much based on their history in large scale distributed transaction systems. But Sawtooth was born by a team at Intel who had been very much inspired by Nakamoto consensus by kind of what they saw as possible with their secure Enclave and their chips and said maybe there’s another angle at this consortia forming at this network building where you can use in a random leader election, secure random leader election algorithms. They came up something called proof of elapsed time, which is basically uses a verifiable portions of the SGX extensions, a secure Enclave extensions on intel chips to decide who gets to put the next link in the chain, avoiding the proof of work, CPU burn, but getting the same effect of randomly picking somebody in the network to be able to be on that.
Brian B.: 00:23:51 Now it could scale to something as large as the public network. Certainly in terms of public read. No one’s ever really attempted to do a 10,000 node network with it. So, the permission list versus permission is still kind of in theory, like we’re still waiting to see somebody build a large network. But, one of the advantages we think is that it introduces a new concept of how you might join a network rather than being a certificate authority and having, having kind of this a certificate lets you join the network. It’s much easier for a note if they simply know the right address is to start talking to get on that network and participate in that leader election and be able to verify the integrity of the ledger and all that kind of stuff.
Brian B.: 00:24:31 So long story short, we realized that Hyperledger, we needed to recognize there are a lot of different ways to solve this problem of what blockchains are trying to solve, distributed ledgers and smart contracts. And we created space for that and that’s, I think, paid off. And in this time since then, we now have 14 different projects that Hyperledger along with another 10 or so, and Hyperledger labs, which are still kind of just small pieces or pieces that aren’t yet a kind of formed enough to be a project. The doors are always open for more if they hit a certain threshold of accessibility to the rest of the community, we have an open process around new projects that get brought in. and, and, and really this picture of saying there’s this broader spectrum is important to us.
Brian B.: 00:25:14 As you probably know, we’ve partnered with the Ethereum Enterprise Alliance last year, and to try to say, “Here are guys are working on standards. We’ve got some Ethereum Tech already and Hyperledger in the form of Hyperledger burrow, which is an EVM runs on top of a standalone on top of a Tendermint actually, but also on top of a Sawtooth, and on top of Fabric. So like, we want to learn from the public ledger technologies and I think ultimately there’s likely to be software, and I know that there in the great wide world, there is software that can speak equally well in the public ledgers and the private ledgers. And I do think this stuff converges over time and we’d like to be a useful force in that convergence.
Konstantin: 00:25:53 Yeah. And I always find it interesting because we spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to snapshot stuff from different chains into different chains, right? So we always go try to go back to bitcoin even when we secure actually particular permission networks that are much smaller and then-
Brian B.: 00:26:07 Just kind of fence posts to hash into that.
Konstantin: 00:26:11 That’s right. That’s one way to do it, right? Like there was a time where I always felt the… And it’s been, there’s actually, there’s a online support group for people who are blockchain and bitcoin enthusiasts, but work in blockchain enterprise, right? So it’s because you know it’s a little bit of a conflict, right? Like, so, for a time because there was this sort of trend.
Jack: 00:26:32 Blockchain not bitcoin.
Konstantin: 00:26:33 Yeah. Like this is like our permissions know networks, actually, blockchain, you know, and so, and because you’re so quickly touch on the distributed ledger sort of where’s the difference between a multi-client database and what the blockchain actually means. And so I don’t want to go too much into it, but I do want to talk about Cosmos and your experience to that. So interoperability which is kind of something Brian was alluding to and then, also the sort of progressive decentralization that you guys started. The thing that I found interesting, I think you were the first project and you’re like, that’s why you’re a horrible customer for us because you actually don’t run your own. You don’t have a node in the system.
Jack: 00:27:16 Yeah. One of the things that we chose to do was allow the the network, which is essentially the token, like who owns the tokens that we sold. We allowed the network to really start in operate the systems. So that means we as a company, we don’t run our own nodes. Like I run a node personally, that I’m a validator on the network and there’s a couple of other folks at the company who are as well. But we worked very hard to get out there in the community and find people who were interested in the same types of things we were in, wanted to run these nodes, through a series of public test nets, culminating in an incentivized public test net where we rewarded those validators with tokens and actually four of the top 10 validators on our network came out of that competition.
Jack: 00:27:59 So I think that approach, we’ll see more public chains take that approach moving forward. I think that kind of decentralized start, there’s some thought that, that’s going to provide some regulatory cover in terms of is this a security or not? Because there’s no issue or with a network like that. So, yeah.
Konstantin: 00:28:19 But then so the validator set up in Cosmos is, I think right now it’s a hundred.
Jack: 00:28:26 Yes.
Konstantin: 00:28:27 Right? So you cap it. You decide like there’s only a hundred folks that can run a validator.
Jack: 00:28:32 Yeah. So there’s a hundred validators slots.
Konstantin: 00:28:34 Yeah.
Jack: 00:28:34 There’s actually more than a hundred validators, but, the ones who are out of that top 100 do not participate in consensus in any tokens, bonded to them don’t vote. So currently the hundred validator has about 11,000 atoms delegated to them. So it’s around $50,000 worth of atoms in order to become a validator
Konstantin: 00:28:56 And just to clarify, when you say they don’t vote, do they actually receive a stake for having compute power?
Jack: 00:29:01 No.
Konstantin: 00:29:02 They don’t.
Jack: 00:29:02 Only that top 100. We’re looking to increase that number governance and then this touches on another topic that we’ll probably hit later. Governance will need to vote reset number. And there’s a lot of reasons why they would do that. Okay.
Konstantin: 00:29:17 Yeah, no, super interesting. We’re are going to talk a little bit more about it, but, and then, you know, asking Marin, so at Google, right, you guys have you know, I don’t really know exactly what’s going on. Like I know I’ve spoken to folks out there who are working in I think I’ve seen some stuff about APIs and block explorers and, and things that you can sort of, you know, kind of, sort of really in the history of the search engine to kind of sort of go through the different types of blockchains and find stuff. Other than that, I haven’t actually really seen a lot and we’ve met, I know you’re working on Hyperledger which, so I’m curious what your view is on public versus permission networks.
Konstantin: 00:30:02 You know, why Hyperledger and what do you make of for example staking like, and I’m actually curious, do you allow nodes, can nodes… Because mining for example, was very problematic for a lot of the cloud providers. So I’m curious if actually relay validators for sticking networks can sit on a cloud over time and monetize. I’m kind of curious what you guys think about it. You have a new CEO, TK from Oracle who champions a lot of block train stuff over there. So how’s it going?
Marin: 00:30:33 So we are looking forward to working to champion it and to go. Public versus private. This is to me it’s a bit like I have a left hand and I have a right hand and chances are I want both of them. So we really see it exactly this way. There are really many cases where public makes really a lot of sounds and we should use fumbling blockchains. And there are a lot of these cases where privates and for example, think of enterprise, no enterprise going to put all of their data in the public blockchains. I am not seeing that happening. And a lot of times you have-
Konstantin: 00:31:10 Are they going to put on the Google cloud.
Marin: 00:31:13 Well many do. And again, it’s just like some will, some won’t. There’s a lot of things going around. So from that perspective we are definitely on the enterprise side interested and we are looking into how do we use it within Google for our customers, again, my team specifically, we are focused on the bright side. This is what we are interested in. There are others that look into the public usage, public benefits of it. But again, whichever side you pick, you could find so many great use cases and utility for it.
Konstantin: 00:31:54 Yeah. And when you focus like in… And how do you guys think about it? Because obviously traditionally cloud part infrastructure, right? And then is what you’re working on a vehicle to sell more of that and take advantage of the decentralized nature, repetitive nature of distributed databases or, and so what’s the entry point there? What’s the strategy that you guys pursue? Or is it like, you know, up the stack different integration like blockchain as a service type of products? Like I’m genuinely curious.
Marin: 00:32:29 I’m definitely not authorized to talk strategy here, but I could tell you my opinion if you’re interested. So, at some point when people are thinking of blockchain, I mean there’s the realization you guys shouldn’t be thinking of blockchain, you should be thinking of the utility of the attributes that come as a blockchain. You have a database and oh, apparently you have a single source of truth that everyone could verify and everyone could use and there are a couple of other benefits as, oh, it’s, it’s immutable ledger. If it goes on it, it’s not going to disappear. I don’t know how that works with Las Vegas, but something similar.
Marin: 00:33:02 So all those prophecies that you could attribute to systems, products that use blockchain in the back. And so however you want to slice it, vertical or horizontal, there is everywhere a piece that the blockchain could use. So from that perspective, obviously everyone’s looking to utilize his resources that whatever we specialize or re specialize everyone else, how do we fit the blockchain paradigm into it and how do we make it useful?
Konstantin: 00:33:35 Yeah, yeah. Fascinating. Can I ask and then a question to give back to Jack, out of the 100 nodes, do you know where those notes are hosted?
Jack: 00:33:44 Yeah. Well, we just had a major Google Cloud outage recently, so we found out at least 11 of them are running on Google Cloud. I do know we’ve got a pretty strong mix of folks running their own infra and then the large cloud providers, I can’t give you an exact breakdown because a lot of folks run kind of two levels setups where you’re running a couple of nodes in the front is DDOS protection, with some auto-scaling ideally, and then your validator node connects to the broader network.
Konstantin: 00:34:09 Is that the century sort of network.
Jack: 00:34:12 Yeah. So, just circling back to this idea of like public versus private, I think one of the very interesting things that these economic networks that blockchains enable, allowing people to do is sort of start in the private and then bring in stakeholders and allow them to sort of spin up their own validators, give them token allocations and have them incentivized to grow this network and then slowly transition from a private to a public chain. And we’re starting to see some of those use cases now.
Brian B.: 00:34:43 Another distinction that might be more useful. I mean, the public private thing I’ve always kind of shaped against because there’s not just reading, there’s writing. You know, so there are examples out there of public read, permission to write blockchains like the sovereign foundations network built on the Hyperledger indie around digital identity, kind of connections around something called a dead ledger concept. And there they have a sovereign stewards who are the ones who kind of run essentially the super nodes, which you could think of it as valid. I mean, roughly metaphorically as validators.
Jack: 00:35:13 Yeah, yeah, that’s a sovereign to device that.
Brian B.: 00:35:17 Yeah. But all of the data set is public because that’s data you want the world to be able to consume and validate at a station information against the ledger itself, no matter where it is. Right? And that’s actually, I mean, sometimes we choose permission ledgers and smaller kind of networks because the algorithms that you can use, there PBFT style or SBFT algorithms can be very fast. There’s been some work recently in Fabric to get it up to 20,000 transactions per second in ideal conditions. Now, lots of things affect those ideal conditions. Counter intuitively the more nodes you add, the slower it gets, right?
Brian B.: 00:35:53 Probably more intuitively the more far flung your network is, the more latency there is between nodes, the slower it gets as well. That’s not true for some other more time-bound things like proof of work, right, where it’s every 10 minutes. But so these ideal conditions matter.
Jack: 00:36:08 I mean in the theory and they’re running much faster block times and you see hierarchical rates and there’s, I mean a bunch of issues with proof of work as well, but yeah.
Brian B.: 00:36:15 Right. But this architectural concept of having kind of a core set of nodes that are diverse enough and reasonably balanced, you know, where it’d be really hard to kind of get them all to collude against everybody and a whole universe full of readers, right? And copies replicated everywhere, I see that as kind of more of an emerging kind of architecture on the public ledger side that copies a lot or even reps is inspired a lot by stuff that’s happened on the permission ledger side. And then secondarily, I think there’s a big kind of difference between networks where the nodes are compensated for being nodes, like by a token that is native to that network.
Brian B.: 00:36:50 And where mining of whatever sort proof of work, proof of stake is the basis of that model versus networks that are run by nodes that are there. I don’t want to say for altruistic purposes, but because everybody has invested interest in a consistent ledger, right? So these other algorithms PBFT et cetera don’t reward the nodes. They presume that if you’re a network of 12 banks, you’re all going to run a node because you all want to be able to write to this network and you want to be able to validate the other transactions and know that these tokens you’re getting haven’t been spent before somewhere.
Konstantin: 00:37:19 And just to a point which… Because it’s something we see a lot is you would assume that, that’s the case, but it actually often isn’t, which is why a lot of the foundation actually run nodes is because we work with large networks where people always thought there should be a lot more validators on them. But people aren’t really, decentralization only matters when it doesn’t work, right? Like, so it’s this like interesting concept where in our own business model we see that a lot where people, we deal with billion dollar networks that, have a dozen relay nodes running on a couple of bits and pieces and, and they assume that somebody’s, all these banks and participants should run a node. But then again, it’s complicated and it’s expensive, this seems to work, you know.
Jack: 00:38:06 If you’re not compensating node operators, there’s no sustainability in that network and people are going to stop running in them at some point.
Konstantin: 00:38:12 Right. And I want to talk about the, I want to go into the consensus, but the one thing I do want to ask Brian, because it’s something we’ve realized also working with Hyperledger on the other hand is in a token lists environment where you don’t have that, right. How do you create, like we are talking about like, you know, we were trying to solve these problems that the world’s foremost experts now figured out Nai. But we were actually thinking about doing a bounty program to ask Hyperledger developers to help us solve this. You know, like obviously then you’re like, oh, we gotta like pick a hearing or something. Like there’s no inbuilt mechanism to reward the community. And one of the criticisms that Hyperledger faces often because of that is you’ve made a big part of your career figuring out how to reward open source contribution. So how do you get developers to commit-
Brian B.: 00:39:01 No, no I’ll push back on that a little because I… So there’s extrinsic motivators and intrinsic motivators, right? Extrinsic motivators is, I did a thing because somebody paid me. Intrinsic is I did a thing because I wanted to achieve some other goal or I felt like it was the right thing to do or it’s core to who I am. Right? And open source software has rarely really worked by extrinsic motivators. It’s really been intrinsic motivators. It’s you know in the early days the Apache web server, all of us needing to run websites and none of us wanting to become full time web server developers or go compete against Netscape who we thought would just crush all of us, but instead wanting to as webmasters cool our time to build a better web server. And that became the Apache http Daemon. In most of open source software, the rewards to people are not from, “Hey, I fixed this bug. Where’s my $20?”
Brian B.: 00:39:50 It’s, I fixed this bug. Now I’ve got this GitHub contributor history, now I got a job at Google or somewhere, right? That because of my work publicly or because I’m now working there and it’s in quarter.
Konstantin: 00:40:02 Isn’t that a little naïve though.
Brian B.: 00:40:03 I want to fix that.I mean it’s the majority of any econometric survey of open source activity has always shown it’s in the 90th percent… It’s 90% of it is people working on this code for their core business. They might be paid as a contractor, but they’re building it to support some other thing. I mean that’s the sustainability model we always assume as that play in open source software. That’s why at Hyperledger we’re trying to help all these businesses like you guys build on top so that your incented to have Nai contribute to the occasional bug fix or more backup up stream to that.
Jack: 00:40:38 I think one of the things that cryptocurrency and a lot of these distributed ledgers adds is an additional incentivization mechanism for this open source development. And there’s a lot of people I think who view the current model is kind of broken when you can write something out in the open source, maybe even create a company behind it and then Amazon can go offer it as a hosted service and then suddenly you’re SOL on that. So these networks offer a lot more avenues to monetization for open source projects I think.
Brian B.: 00:41:10 Yeah. I mean, we’re making this more of an open source than necessarily about.
Jack: 00:41:13 I actually] but I’ll go to tell the talk.
Brian B.: 00:41:16 You know because the few companies that have complained, the vast majority of companies who use and contribute to opensource software realize that you do that in furtherance of another goal.
Jack: 00:41:23 No, absolutely and to be part of the community.
Brian B.: 00:41:25 propitiatory company.
Jack: 00:41:26 No, for sure.
Brian B.: 00:41:26 But I’m saying they don’t build their business entirely around contributing all of their IP out. And I spent two and half as an investor, but most of my time starting businesses was be on the other side of that and every business I started, even the ones that were very strongly opensource businesses built a lot of proprietary IP as the stuff that was our, that you had to come to us for.
Jack: 00:41:45 Open core and then you.
Brian B.: 00:41:48 And so there’s a few companies that have said, “Whoa, there’s this great active open source project will be that open source project.com and try to benefit from all that activity.” And when that didn’t work they said, “Oh, the open source model is broken.”
Konstantin: 00:41:59 Well, I think that but Brian-
Jack: 00:42:01 I totally hear where you’re coming from on this. I absolutely agree. No, I think we’re absolutely agreeing here, but open source business models are difficult. Like if you’re going to create an open source database, like look at what Rethink went through a couple of years ago. It’s a hard model to pull off correctly and cryptocurrency and distributed ledgers offer different models for developers to allow them to monetize on top of their open source work.
Konstantin: 00:42:27 Yeah and I think the term Brian.
Brian B.: 00:42:28 Most of the stuff in Bitcoin or Ethereum written by people being paid for per line of code or per a contribution.
Jack: 00:42:37 No, they were early in the community. They had the-
Konstantin: 00:42:39 In one way or another.
Brian B.: 00:42:41 And even if it happens an an intrinsic motivator to make bitcoin better because I have a lot of bitcoin.
Jack: 00:42:46 Yeah. There were people motivated to do that too. And I think a lot of the bitcoins in the theory in core developers definitely are that way.
Konstantin: 00:42:52 Yeah. And so I kind of I get it and, and there’s a lot of variety around it because once you actually go into commercially set up entities running on these networks where, you know, it is kind of, “Hey, I need a particular questions answered in a particular time frame because there’s something commercially connected to it.” It gets complicated. The thing I wanted to say because I’ve been so proud about reading about it is this the sort of post opensource world like has what you described earlier where, you know what crypto currencies really have done this. They’ve introduced a currency into the open source world where there’s an expectation of reward and that’s kind of sort of where open source now is going.
Konstantin: 00:43:37 Like where is, is there this sort of push away from… And you see that even you’ve talked about forks, like, I mean, look at the nature of most of the forks on bitcoin. You know, like you could argue a lot of them are done out of greed, you know, like, it seems to like it. I mean, you know, so, I think there’s this sort of interesting sort of cynicism that’s been introduced-
Brian B.: 00:43:58 And this is one thing that I’ve been concerned about for a while and trying to hope that at Hyperledger we could help try to address, which is trying to get two developers or two groups of developers to work on common code together is really hard, right? Because people have different ideas what they want to build, different motivations, different time schedules that can work on things, right? So there’s already a hurdle in open source software and getting parties to converge. Even when all of the reasons say that they should, right. And no small amount of ego will be honest, right? If those two groups of people now have tokens in their pocket that are different tokens. Right? And working together almost inevitably means somebody ends up richer and somebody ends up poor or not as rich, right. Especially when we can measure these things to 10 decimal points on coin market cap, right.
Brian B.: 00:44:44 That acts as just another multiplier on the negativity, on the negative motivations to work together. Like why couldn’t like the Ethereum and Ethereum classic communities, which I think probably work together better than like the bitcoin forks do on common code, right? Like, but why isn’t that software the same software with just like different runtime parameters, right? Or a different collection of modules enabled.
Konstantin: 00:45:08 And I have an answer probably for you and it’s probably greed based, like kind of somebody made a lot of money with it, you know, and so but anyway, I want to kind of throw this a, at our friend from Google here, open source kind of sort of like how does this look for you guys? When you guys do developments, and do you guys contribute to open source projects? What does that look like?
Marin: 00:45:33 Well, at Google definitely there is a lot of open source that had come out of and a lot of-
Konstantin: 00:45:39 Can you spell out your 20% of time on like open source contributing to open source projects or does it have to be a Google like, you know, the 80/20 is sort of-
Marin: 00:45:48 You absolutely could and I believe many do.
Konstantin: 00:45:53 Yeah.
Marin: 00:45:54 Actually-
Konstantin: 00:45:54 Maybe they can help us is what I’m thinking.
Marin: 00:45:57 Serious we don’t offer such. I actually think I’ve heard of people who are putting a 100% of time on it, about a point there is Google we definitely appreciate open source and we release a lot of open source because for example, they take Kubernetes, where did it come from? A lot of that again, back to the point of different people value different things. When you throw tokens and money at it, the only thing it does is amplify the people. So if I was going to do something really good, you give me more resources, I’ll make it great. If I was a bit greedy or just wanted money, you’re giving more money, I want more retainer. So, we absolutely do use obviously Hyperledger and so it’s products and we definitely are looking also in this area to be contributing back.
Konstantin: 00:46:54 Interesting.
Jack: 00:46:54 We use a number of Google open source projects including Go the language.
Konstantin: 00:46:58 Sure.
Marin: 00:46:59 Yeah.
Brian B.: 00:47:00 And this is an important point because I think there’s a very valid concern that startups might have. If I put the vast majority of the seed funding that I got into building a great open source killer app open source thing or contributing upstream to an open source project and Amazon is able to come along or Google able to come along and use that all for free and out-compete me in outselling. That’s a systemic risk, right? That’s, that’s like an existentialist risk. And A, that means you should adjust your business model a little bit, but B, think about the advantages of the open source that you have now. Thanks to stuff that has been opened by Google, by Amazon.
Brian B.: 00:47:34 I admit the list of things on the front of my head that Amazon has open sourced is shorter than the things that I can think of that Google’s open source.
Jack: 00:47:40 Thank you.
Brian B.: 00:47:42 But I’ll give them credit then I just am ignorant on standing up here right now. But, if we were to start measuring all this stuff out by lines of code or by numbers of commits or stars on GitHub or something like that, we’ll just kind of drown in kind of an accounting and kind of mess that, I mean, good engineering doesn’t happen patch by patch.
Marin: 00:48:01 Yeah, totally agree.
Brian B.: 00:48:02 And it’s also fun when you’re an entrepreneur because in every fundraising when we got to kind of list all the open source software that sits somewhere in our stack that we’ve ever touched or uses it’s a really fun activity.
Konstantin: 00:48:16 So let’s talk a little bit about kind of sort of governance and how we make decisions on networks because it connects us back to nodes, right? So nodes are obviously transmitters into blockchain networks. I always think like, the way I always thought about nodes initially was, is really kind of like an API really, right? Like a node is sort of kind of an entry. It sort of connects you to a chain and allows you to interface with it. And so, I kind of want to go back to that a little bit, and, and let’s talk about consensus and what the issue is here when you can kind of by consensus in stake in those types of networks. And how does that, how does that look for you guys? So I’m still curious with Cosmos and all the stake networks, how decentralization works, if I come in with a ton of money.
Jack: 00:49:10 Yeah, I mean if you, if you come in with a ton of money and buy a ton of Adam’s like you’re essentially buying votes on the network and that will give you network power in the same way that on bitcoin you can show up and buy a ton of ASX and like suddenly get a large percentage of the network hash power. So that definitely a threat and I think right now on cosmos it’s probably a little bit difficult and extremely expensive to do something like that, and obviously the value of these proof of stake networks is highly correlated to the amount of value that they secure. So the more values you secure, the harder it is to perform those kinds of attacks.
Jack: 00:49:50 Our system, we have governance on chain, so the ability for the community and the token holders to vote for what upgrades they want to see on the chain with this next release that we’re going to be shipping here and we got to upgrade to that. So that’s a network upgrade. We’re adding the ability for the community to actually vote to change parameters, so the number of validators on the chain so that can… The community will be to vote to increase or decrease that inflation rates. A lot of the economic parameters, things like this-
Konstantin: 00:50:19 What is slashing on your network? Can you also-
Jack: 00:50:22 So this is a way to punish bad behavior essentially. So, there are two conditions under which you’re going to get slashed as a validator and then all of the funds on top of your validator will also get reduced as well. One of those is performing of Byzantine fault, i.e. Double signing or trying to alter the ledger in some way as the validator that’s penalized at 5% of all of the stake on top of your node. And then the other one is if you’re down for a lengthy period of time, I think it’s over 18 hours currently, you’re going to get slashed. I think it’s one-hundredth of a percent or one-tenth of a percent.
Jack: 00:51:02 I can’t remember exactly which, but it’s a very small number. And this is basically a way to punish behavior that we don’t want to see in the system. I think we’ll see different types of slashing as we add IBC and the ability for the hub to help validate other chains and secure them. We were talking about kind of that economic value being part of the security of the hub and of the ecosystem as a whole. So how do you share that economic value with smaller chains? So the ability to slash validators cross chain, there’s other forms of slashing that I think different Cosmos chains are experimenting with as well. So it’s one of those things that kind of early in the development of that feature and proof of stake networks.
Konstantin: 00:51:45 What do you think of a mechanism like that, Bryan?
Brian B.: 00:51:49 So I think governance as a topic is there’s in any like system, right, you’re going to have some, some part that’ll be automateable and some part that is inevitably human, right? And if you don’t have any of the bits that are automated, if you’re like, we’re just human governance down to the core, you end up doing a lot of drudgery. But dealing with a lot of debates and, and bad actors and things, and it’s really hard to treat everyone fairly. But if you try to automate everything and pretend that there’s no role for human governance, you end up with Lord of the flies. And situations where you deny that these issues are real and then that’s a, that’s room for people to come in and do bad actions with like majority of the network behind them, which would be bad.
Brian B.: 00:52:31 So, you know, I think there’s a balancing act there. And in different use cases, different places to draw that line between what’s automated and what’s human are appropriate. On the larger public networks, it’s appropriate to have as much of that automated as possible. As long as you still have that thin layer of, you know, the core devs talking with each other, and the people who running those validator. Now it’s like, I don’t know what the human back channel is on the validator.
Jack: 00:52:55 Well, we just did a security critical upgrade last week, so it was this job.
Konstantin: 00:53:01 What happened there? Like give us quick.
Jack: 00:53:01 This giant game of telephone to like find everyone. So yeah. Yeah. What happened there? We had a bug come in through our bug bounty program that showed that you could basically, so to kind of talk a little bit about the Cosmos consensus model, folks need to lock up tokens for a period of time in order to participate in consensus. There was a bug that essentially allowed them to those instantly. So, that’s problematic for a wide variety of reasons and we decided that, that was a security critical patch. We worked with our developers to fix that within 24 hours. And then the next 48 hours was essentially spent contacting various players within our ecosystem, folks who had built chains on top of the Cosmos SDK, exchanges and validators in working with them to deploy that patch. And we got it done in about 72 hours, which was pretty cool. S.
Konstantin: 00:53:54 Yeah, really well handled.
Jack: 00:53:55 Yeah. Thank you. I appreciate it.
Konstantin: 00:53:55 Yeah it was a good-
Jack: 00:53:57 A good team and the validators, like our community is really great and I know every open source project says this, but folks are really, really engaged and we are a globally distributed network. We’ve got probably a third of our nodes over in China and Korea, third of them in Europe, and then a third of them in America. So coordinating something globally like that, you know, half the like a third of folks are asleep and then you can kind of, there’s a rolling as people kind of come to realize what’s going on and then to kind of make sure everyone’s got the technical support and stuff that they need throughout that whole process is yeah, it was a fun little fire drill.
Konstantin: 00:54:35 Yeah. I actually realize we’ve been chatting for a bit here. I want to make sure we have time for questions, so I’m just going to open it up to the audience here.
Brian B.: 00:54:47 Yeah. We’re not sure what we are going to do that. So, it was a project that was started when Fabric was younger, when it was a bit simpler as an operating model. And I think there was the recognition that the path that leads developers down ends up becoming a dead end because it doesn’t teach you about how things happen. I don’t understand the command line, but at a deeper level without knowing that it became hard to take those proofs of concept and operationalize them into production code. And so the Devs who were working on that, who were predominantly at IBM, they made a decision to pull back and said they’re going to focus instead on better SDKs for Fabric, and better documentation about how to use those from apps of your choice, rather than trying to reinvent the IDA. Right? And meanwhile, there’s now support in VS code for Hyperledger Fabric that I’m pretty sure Microsoft is open source to code to that and work with IBM.
Brian B.: 00:55:41 I’m not sure. It wasn’t that Hyperledger yet but… And there’s people coming to us with different ideas about how they might want to, again, ease the developer onboarding experience. I’d say I would look for improving examples in… There’s a whole bunch of examples in the Fabric repo that I would probably at this point be a better starting point than composer. Composer isn’t going to be updated for 1.4. Now, partly this is what we have to work within in being an open source project, right? A, your product decisions are kind of organic rather than top down, right. And kind of a mix of will who shows up if no one shows up to do the work. It’s not going to happen, right? We have no teeth. We can’t mandate developers to work on things they don’t want to work. Right?
Brian B.: 00:56:23 And you have to kind of listen to that as well. If no one’s interested in doing the work, that’s probably a sign that it’s not the right thing to be doing. Right. So we’ve kept composer up, we felt that while there’s some other projects that might come in as kind of successors to composer, they could sit in the composer project and be a next gen for that. So we’re kind of waiting to see if those ideas bear out. I’d rather not spin down a project, but there’s no harm in that either. Right? There’s no… I mean, there’s a life cycle to these projects and I don’t want to mislead people and give them the wrong tooling. Right. So good question.
Konstantin: 00:56:56 Great.
Jack: 00:56:57 A lot of folks in the blockchain community kind of look to the work that the Linux Foundation and the open source folks that came before us have done in building the internet in ensuring that like pipes of it, you can run your own mail server in like that type of decentralization can exist and for me, that’s kind of the ideal that I try to build towards any way, Brian, sorry.
Brian B.: 00:57:16 Yeah. It’s the right thing to answer. The term decentralized has become weaponized in this industry become like, you are not decentralized enough and there is no objective measure for it.
Audience Question: 00:57:28 I still want doctor to take over the connective digital.
Brian B.: 00:57:31 Well, I think one thing that we may want to revisit is the way that people have said, “Hey, my favorite protocol is the TCP/IP of blockchain or that or the DNS of blockchain or something like that. Right? We’re in a world where we have DNS, we have TCP/IP, we have these things which were not decentralized, but there was a minimum viable centralization at play with things like the domain name system. Right? Where we kind of tolerated a few parties, kind of who I acted by and large, kind of in the public interest. I can at a very fair way. And they made some controversial decisions like launching a billion new top level domains, right? But by and large we have this globally consistent domain names system that mostly works and it’s constantly being refined and retuned, and that’s improved it.
Brian B.: 00:58:21 One of the things that we didn’t have to worry about with DNS or TCP/IP was that neither of them had shareholders, right? And we kind of with the public chains of shareholders with some that create this kind of competitive dynamic in this kind of winner, loser dynamic that I think drives a lot of parties away. So I think what we’re going to have to look at is we’ll probably have multiple public ledgers that will compete with each other and they’ll compete. And that competition will actually benefit us because it means no one will get to rest on their laurels and say, “We’re done with innovation.” Right? No one will get to say, ‘Well, our fees are low enough.” Right?
Brian B.: 00:58:55 There’ll be competition and it’ll be around, some of them will be specialized around payments. You know, maybe Stellar, it becomes like one of the major kind of payment backbones, compliments a bitcoin or something like that. Some of them will be around identity. And I think it makes sense to think of these as kind of separable things and kind of the deed ledger model that [Sovan 00:59:13] has is pretty cool, but Sovan doesn’t have to be the only debt ledger out there.
Jack: 00:59:16 There’s a few other ones.
Brian B.: 00:59:17 Yeah. And maybe there’ll be like, it was a block one or Verus one, I guess there’s another one.
Jack: 00:59:23 There’s one, we’ve got two different projects building the implementations of tender, but yeah, there’s Uport. I think also Sport did. I’m not sure.
Brian B.: 00:59:31 So there’ll be a bunch of these kind of public ledgers and they’ll all act like girders on a bridge, you know, kind of reinforcing the resiliency that we have not just at a technological layer, but also that kind of a business layer, right? Helping avoid even if we ended up with one true protocol that’s kind of a fragile thing no matter who’s behind it or what they’re doing. So, and then at the leaf nodes where these are permissioned networks. Some of them will grow to be 10,000 participants. Some of them might still stay at 10. And that’s because the world is complex. The world has these like different size communities and shapes communities. And I’m really agnostic around technology choices at the leaf nodes. If we can come up with ways to that, all of them can plug in to these, these main nets. And so, yeah, really interested in an ILP and IVC. Now you should keep talking about that, and other types of ways to build bridges across these different apps.
Konstantin: 01:00:21 And one of the other challenges with the decentralization, actually if you look at the software and stack layer, you know, like Docker has a lot of issues as well when it comes to security. So on the implementation side, there’s a whole other world of complexities that you can look at. Let’s do one more question. Maybe we’ll ask our friend from Google. Because I’m curious because obviously you guys have large enterprise customers. I don’t know if they come and talk to you guys about blockchain, but do you engage with them and reach out to them and how does that work?
Marin: 01:00:54 Who would not engage their his customers?
Brian B.: 01:00:58 Yeah, you’d be surprised, but yeah.
Marin: 01:01:03 True Story. So absolutely. There’s going to be a change. I mean, think of it this way. Internet didn’t just come up one day and everyone’s connected. The next one same with blockchain. Maybe at some point you could think about it’s like, “Hey, this is like the wild west. It’s stuff’s happening. We don’t know where it’s going to end. We don’t know where it’s when it’s going to reach there.” There’s going to be a lot of turnaround, legacy, it’s going to survive until it’s verbal. At some point people would figure out, it’s like you can got to move. So, absolutely. I’m sure every provider works with the customers to get them along the path.
Brian B.: 01:01:46 I like that. I do think it’s really important for people in this community to be talking. So we’ve been talking to people like the World Bank, different central bank authorities like monetary authority of Singapore, regulators, the regulators who are smart realize that this is a tool that might actually make following the regulations or enforcing the regulations autonomous and continuous rather than this like chasing after the horse after it’s escaped from a barn. Right? The smart regulators realize that and would like to figure out, how do you make this reg tech? How do you make this a tool of understanding how markets work and being able to respond quickly and keep bad actors from being able to perpetrate fraud as early as possible in the process, perhaps even from being able to do it at all.
Brian B.: 01:02:30 So engaging with them, I think is, is super important. And there’s a lot of opportunity to take existing companies legacy institutions and legacy business processes and port them over. But sometimes they just need to be completely thrown away and created over again, and that’s why this kind of like, let’s burn it all down and rebuild from scratch thing that happens sometimes in the blockchain world is actually really refreshing me. Schumpeter’s creative destruction is actually a real thing. And so I want to find a balance between the two.
Konstantin: 01:03:04 So thanks everybody.
