#207 Micah Winkelspecht: Gem – The Enterprise Platform That Powers Data-Driven Applications

Transcript

[Music] this episode of epicenter is brought to you by shape-shift I owe the easiest fastest and most secure way to swap your digital assets don't run a risk of leaving your funds on centralized exchange visit shapeshifter IO to get started alright welcome to episode of the show which talks about the technologies projects and starts driving decentralization and the global blockchain revolution my name is Sebastian Cujo Lam Monroy today we'll talk to me kubinka speck who is the

founder and CEO of gem gem is an enterprise blockchain company that uses oxygen technology such as hyper ledger aetherium and JP morgan's : in order to create a new type of flow for the exchange of data between enterprises and their customers Micah welcome to the show thanks for having it so we fully start tell us a bit about your background and you and how you got to be nolde in the blockchain technology space sure you know so I'm a developer by trade I've been building software for a good 14 years and the I got into Bitcoin originally I've been in the industry for a little over four years I originally

got into it largely because I was pretty pissed off at the financial collapse in 2009 and you know I sort of became a student of the history of money I started reading a lot of books about the Federal Reserve and and you know this thing called Bitcoin popped up on my radar and it just sort of fit you know what I was looking at both as a hacker and and as somebody who cared about you know the financial system and so I just got really involved here in LA and there was a small meetup group at the time it was about 15 people in a parked in downtown LA you know to Silk Road drug dealers just exchanging Bitcoin in the park very sketchy but it was a sort of eye opening for me and I thought that it

was this is much bigger than 15 people in a park and so I ended up taking over the group and running events and we grew the group from you know about 15 people to a thousand people in a year and so I sort of became the Bitcoin guy in LA along with guys like Brock Pearson and others and you know at the same time I started building open source libraries for Bitcoin so I wrote a wallet implementation one of the first hierarchical deterministic wallets and yeah that was how I got started but you know since then you know we got started by building Bitcoin api's developer

tools for the Bitcoin ecosystem and you know now we're building Enterprise blockchain software that is like why you switch from building Bitcoin API is to embrace blockchain you know I think this is again this is four years ago when we started so the market was very different you know there wasn't there was not a lot of Bitcoin developers in the world at that time so I think it was a great idea that was maybe just a little bit ahead of its time you know I think today it would be you know there's a robust community of developers that are really gravitating towards digital currencies and digital assets and tokens you know at that time it was a much smaller crowd so you know just as an entrepreneur you

you sometimes you have really great ideas and the new market timing is not great but what did happen was you know we had built up an expertise around digital assets security and you know we built the first first wallet that was backed by hardware security modules for example which really attracted the attention of the bank's when they started taking a look at this technology more broadly and so what we recognized was that there was this really large growing opportunity around enterprise adoption of blockchain and so we just decided to make a strategic shift and really focus on that opportunity so broadly over the last

three years I think the idea alone enterprise adoption of long chains still II gathered forcing or like late 2015 and so on what's your impression of how the broad uptake of enterprise blockchain technology has been well I think enterprises are known to be pretty slow in general right so the adoption cycle for any technology in the enterprise is two to three years at least and you know we've really only been in the you know I think we've really only gone through two full years of of blockchains as an enterprise technology and we're starting to see a lot more adoption and

you know I think the relationships with our customers has changed a lot in the last in the last year or so I think a year ago every engagement was essentially a an educational seminar for the enterprise you know explaining how this block blockchain technology is gonna be you know transformative to their business and then you know then you get to the point where they're willing to actually invest in doing a proof of concept and the proof of concept even six months ago I think the the point of it for the enterprise was to was to test the technology to see if it works and I think where we've gotten now I said it's no longer about testing whether the technology works or whether

it's going to be disruptive to their business now they're saying okay we want to get to production so let's start building down a production path and they're at the first phase of that and so the engagements are very different you know we're starting to see you know where we really had to push the message to enterprises we're starting to get RFPs that are being sent to us by large companies that are you know 10 12 pages of well-documented requirements for their project and they're just shopping for vendors that's a very different relationship so I I think you are really starting to see a lot of adoption there oh those early days right most your engagements were just unpaid you know what is what did what is Bitcoin I mean

even before even trying to explain how it was gonna be transformative through their industry I mean I've got so many pitch tags like what is Bitcoin and I feel like I feel like a guest lecturer you know or at least I did two years ago yeah absolutely and so I wanted to ask you so I mean we've been in the space for about the same time and and we're we're in sort of similar similar positions and in terms of the companies we were in and so I'd like to get your thoughts on where where do you think the industry is right now in terms in terms of maturity we went from this education phase to the the proof-of-concept phase to want to test things out and test whether or not the technology is mature and we're now

moving into sort of pilot and production phase you know where are we in in that spectrum right now where are you seeing your clients I think that we there's still a large group of companies that are just getting their feet wet but I think we're starting to see the first batch of companies that you know like many of the companies we work with already have hired dedicated blockchain staff blockchain engineers you know they might be still in the innovation department you know rather than the critical infrastructure groups but you can see that these guys are you know they're investing pretty heavily in this they know I think at this point that

this is too big to ignore and so you're starting to see real real money actually getting push behind it I think that in terms of their actual execution it's still very early so we're I think we're starting to see just the first pilots that are you know going to market but they're very limited you know I think is gonna take a while one of the challenges with blockchains in general is that it's it's like a networking technology it's you know very low-level technology and it really does sort of transform the way they think about their their infrastructure you know and so for them to basically rip out their old infrastructure and put something new in place that's a very long process that needs a lot of bedding

you know when you're when you're talking about systems that are managing billions if not trillions of dollars right so it's going to take a while but I do think that we're where the the market is much mature and its understanding of the technology which i think is really important you know they're very educated now at least in some of the organization's we work with they really actually understand exactly how the technology works and they have experts on staff and now they're just kicking off these big projects yeah I think you're right about the about the the technology and being comfortable with the technology understanding the technology but I think that for the most part a lot of these companies that that we work with understand the technology

but that's only 20 percent of whatever you know paradigm shift we're in the other 80% is change management is understanding how and acknowledging and fully embracing the fact that we're no longer in in in in in a world where we will have siloed infrastructure but the idea is to build networks and that through collaboration and through sharing of data and and through building these network economies there is tremendous amount of value that comes out of that all right how do you how do you respond then what are your thoughts on on this well I think that that's why you start to see a huge increase in in participation and marketing and

sponsorship from guys like Ernst and Young and you know Accenture and KPMG and all of these guys I mean these guys are actively getting into this because what they recognize is that this technology shift is going to happen but it's going to take a lot of that change management and that's where they really you know shine and so that this is a whole new business line for most of these organizations I think and so yeah I totally agree with you I think I think in the industry we often focus a lot on the technological differences between one blockchain versus another and in the long run they're pretty minor compared to the amount of change that needs to happen in the enterprise to make this actually work and and it's really about

building an ecosystem around that technology and the ecosystem is the hard part so you gem works in different industries and we'll get into but I think you focus on of healthcare insurance and supply chains or trade are you seeing that certain industries are more mature than others or you think we'll adopt the technology faster or we'll have this sort of change management shift quicker than others you know so we got an early start in healthcare I think we were one of the first companies to really to even talk about block chains in healthcare and help to build that market we've seen a

pretty rapid change in that industry I mean we've had to to conferences in Nashville distributed health you know two years in a row I think the first year there was maybe 300 people the second year there's about 700 people and these are all you know executives of the major healthcare organizations that are showing up to these things so there's definitely a lot of attention in health care but healthcare in general is known to be a pretty slow adopter of Technology so that's going to be a longer cycle I think there are other industries that we're seeing where there's already a lot of technological change that's going on in those industries and so they don't have a lot of legacy infrastructure that can handle

it and those are the areas that I think the technology can be adopted much faster so like for instance in healthcare going after the medical record itself is a pretty daunting task because all of these like large healthcare organizations have already invested literally millions and millions of dollars in in digitizing their health records and putting them into existing EHR electronic health record solutions but there's other areas within healthcare where there's not an existing solution like genomics data for instance I think you know we're starting to see in auto this is an area that's rapidly transforming the you know cars are going

from dumb cars to smart cars and those cars are generating you know treasure troves of data and there's not a really great existing infrastructure for moving and sharing that data and so that's an area where I think we can have adopt much faster that's interesting one of our very very first pox that Stratham was the even the first one was a health care it was in health care and and for some reason and and even like we had contacts in health care like very close ties to health care and and we we totally pushed that that industry aside because we thought it was much much too complicated and at the same time I was seeing you guys sort of shine in that in that space like what are they doing but I think

maybe it also has to do with you know the different geographic you know we're here in France and you guys in the US maybe that maybe it's different that way but yeah we would totally push that aside in the very beginning well I can tell you it's it's daunting I mean look the the United States health care system is is a crazy patchwork of disconnected services you know which the need is really great you know and that's I think one of the good parts about health care is that because they are slow of doctors to technology like this is not a incremental change for them there is massive amounts of value that can be unlocked yeah I think that that's probably one of the reasons why there's such a need for that right like you said yeah that's work ecosystem let's let's move on to the next topic then and we've

sort of touched on it so far and you're mentioning it when talking about the the auto insurance space is is this idea of silos right and so you have these treasure troves of theta that exists in silos and the way that you guys addressed this this issue at at gem and I thought that was really really fascinating is to talk about the problem of identity silos identities living in silos can you expand on that yeah sure you know I think I don't know the exact number but essentially every single human on the face of the earth is now generating like an entire Library of Congress worth of data about them you

know we call this digital exhaust you know and this is through the increase of devices that are spitting off data you know you're you're increasingly working with a lot more digital services and you're essentially in your life going from service to service to service and each one of those services whether it's your whether it's your you know your physician or it's your insurance company or or you know your your looking travel every single one of these companies has one sort of slice of you that they can see and you're depositing data in each of these different silos and each one of them is managing an identity that is you that is me Mike Mike a Winkle SPECT

so I have an identity Mike a Winkle spec in you know provider a provider B provider C and none of them have a complete picture of me across all three so this is a real challenge because like in healthcare for example this is the really big problem the big driver of cost in healthcare is that there's no such thing as a longitudinal health record in in healthcare you know I deposit I deposit data when I go to my primary care physician they send me out to a specialist I'm giving them more data they're doing a bunch of you know manual copying and pasting of data from my previous record and there's no unified record about me that they can

tap into and this is what drives the cost of administration of healthcare and so if we can create a system that unifies identity not around the provider but rather around the individual themselves you know if I can walk around with my my life history of data and that belongs to me and I can provision access to that data at different service providers as I move along in my life then we can start to unlock a lot of that value of that data across my entire my entire life and that's the real big vision you know we want it to liberate your data and we really want to build

tools that allow for developers to put individuals back in control of their data and put them at the center of their data relationship that's an amazing like grand vision that yeah and it is I think a vision that is shared by like many people across the blockchain space and many other projects across the blockchain spaces is somehow to have all my data in like one central central place and then provision access to that data as an and as and when I need to so perhaps it like as you could also pick an example of like some industry that that you're

targeting and and how this fracturing of data impacts that particular use case so maybe the maybe maybe you mentioned genomics so tell us about tell us about how this problem translates into the genomics thing yeah so we're working with and this is a new project we're working with a large technology company in Northern Europe so they they build a lot of the health systems education systems welfare systems for the governments of Scandinavia mostly but for example they have about sixty percent market share for all of the EHR systems for Finland so they're really large provider they're in in northern

Europe and in some of the Scandinavian countries when a citizen is born they have a blood sample that's taken and that blood sample is essentially stored in what they call a bio Bank and the sequence that they sequence the DNA and use that DNA for medical research across populations but the the citizen has like very little control or knowledge of how that data is being used they very they don't have access to it themselves and it's actually their data it's about them right and so this data exists it's already there but it's not really being utilized and if we can actually put the citizen at the centre of control over

how that data is used and managed and shared then we believe that we can actually unlock a myriad of new use cases for that data everything from providing providing that citizen with you know better Diagnostics when they go to the doctor you can eliminate a lot of diseases if you know the genomic profile of the patient you know it can be used to selectively share your genomic data for specific medical research that you care about I mean if you have a if you have some rare disease or something like that then more than likely the citizens would be willing to share their genomic data and their health data with researchers that are studying that disease but right now

that's not even an option because that data is locked away in these silos so it's it's those kinds of ideas and it's not just in healthcare you know so like we're doing a project in in automotive as well where we're building a data exchange between automakers and auto insurance companies and so we're we're starting with two companies in japan toyota and io a nice a duo which is a japanese insurance company and we're building a an auto data exchange that that creates a unified driver profile essentially and it leverages the data that's streaming off of all the new vehicles the Toyota's putting out into the market so you know cars are going

from dumb cars to smart cars and they're now generating a lot a lot of data about your mobility about how you know where you go how fast you start how slow your how fast you stop how often you turn on your car a lot of other data right and that data can actually be used to create new types of products and services so we're working with this Japanese insurance company to be able to create a new type of insurance policy that's based on scoring your risk as a driver based on how you're using the vehicle and it's called usage based insurance and and the really key component of all this is that we we want to make sure

that the the individual the citizen is at the center of control over that data flow so they're authorized exchange of data for a very specific purpose to a very specific company under certain circumstances and if they can give that consent then the insurance company can use that to give them a you know discounted insurance policy so that's their incentive to share that data do you see a risk do you see a risk there I mean so we were talking about this before the show I came from who was but I was speaking to somebody really this week who was telling me about this exact thing that insurance companies had tried to do in France many years ago but failed to do because of privacy regulations or reasons of privacy do you think that may be one of

the risks of going in this direction is that all of a sudden you can't get car insurance if you don't provide them with all types of data I mean we like you know the same thing exists in health care right like if we could track everything that we eat for instance you know maybe that way you could get a better health insurance rate but you know the the the flipside of that is that all of a sudden if you don't provide all that data maybe insurers will not insure you yeah I think that's a great philosophical debate that we have to have given the fact that that we're generating so much data that eventually that data can be used both for good and and for for bad right we can use it to increase opportunities and

we can use it to discriminate and there's there are there are regulations that are in place about you know the types of data that you can use to say offer an insurance policy certainly that's even more stringent in health care and so I think that's a debate that where we're actually having in the United States right now you know should should should the healthy patients be paying for the sicker patients and it's a really tough it's a tough question that is kind of at the heart of our societal belief systems but the reality is that there is data that is available and if you are a if you're a business a large part of you're a large part of the problem that you're trying to manage

against is risk you know especially as an insurance company insurance companies the entire business model is about pricing risk right and so from their perspective the more access to data they can have the better they can price risk and if they can price risk better then they can create a lower rate for an insurance policy and so that benefits the end consumer you know I mean as a driver if I have an if we were first what we already use you know in auto insurance we already used data to price risk right like if I've had an accident in the last three years then my rates go up right so we use data to price risk but if we use more data can we price risk better you

know and and I think that ultimately that's the way the world is moving and then I think that actually allows us to start building things that can be completely automated you know we can start to to build automated risk and automated adjudication and we can start to streamline a lot of these processes so when I'd like scan across the blockchain space because ultimately the problem of me having my data fractured across many places is well understood by many blockchain developers there are there are multiple multiple solutions proposed in this direction right so on the one side you have something like orbit which is building a personal server that I can put all my data in to something like decentralized identity

systems running on public blockchain networks where the idea would be the descent layer that my name would be given to me on that on a public blockchain like uthia but then I could associate that name with all forms of my own personal data on the system ipfs and I think there are many other solutions that are and are small and that are being tried according could give us an overview of what gem OS is like what gem is trying I would say all of the above I I think that what gem OS is trying to do is its trying to abstract a way where the data lives on

the network and it should be able to link out to any data system so long as it's accessible so gem is really more of a middleware solution that allows organizations to to register and link data that they have available about a common identifier like a patient or a driver and to essentially allow for other organizations if given the rights to be able to exchange and share that information and those rights can be governed by you know many different policies one of those policies could be getting the users consent for example which is what we're doing in most of our projects so I think that there's going to be data that lives on many

these networks public-private and we we take an approach that that's all good I mean I love I love what file coin is doing and and you know Juan Bonet and that project is really great I think that the idea of a totally decentralized file store is probably a little bit more advanced than most of our customers are ready to adopt you know in the enterprise they want they still want to build their castles around their data you know because there's a huge liability around having a breach of that data but our position is that that's okay you should be able to keep your data in a silo but what you want to be able to do is you want to build bridges

to those silos you want to build links to those silos so that you can free that data at the right time the right place to the right person and so we want to build those bridges essentially that connects those silos okay I think I'm starting to to get a better a better understanding of of what Jim OS is and we're a taxon II in the broader ecosystem I had a question about implementation and we can come back to Jim OS and talk more about that but it one of the things that I find challenging is when we're talking earlier about you know this paradigm shift is is finding the right people

that can sort of instantiate what is a network right so if if you look at something like banking well all of the banks are sort of in the same position with regards to some overseeing authority or some regulator or their customers right and the burden of proof or any type of sort of burden of having to share information sits equally on all of them with something like a supply chain it might be a little different right you might have a distributor or so say a chemicals company that is sourcing raw materials and their burden of proof is towards their customers right maybe like cosmetic brands or something or

or you know like processed food companies and the end customer so in your experience how have you been able to instantiate these these these networks right does it there's a start with one company or do you approach you know five direct companies or do it approach of a trade organization or like a Federation or do you push the regulator what what is your experience like so I think you're touching on a really big issue which is you know how do you bootstrap these things exactly you know I I think we're we're evolving right in our approach I when we like

when we first got into healthcare we we had this idea that we could just go to large health systems and each of them would run a node you know and then they would use that network to share health data with each other what we realized very quickly was like you know a health system is not in the business of running network infrastructure and they buy software off-the-shelf from vendors and you know that's that's how they acquire technology so they're probably not the right people to run nodes for validating transactions on a network that might be different in finance I think in finances you know the financial institutions actually might want to be nodes on the network but in other industries I don't think that's really the case and so you

know Mike my feeling on this is that we should probably look to companies who run network infrastructure to run these nodes you know at least in the enterprise and you know and we're exploring that path with with a lot of these projects there's a lot of interest from from a lot of the you know telcos and telecoms to be able to be infrastructure providers as a service for industry and that seems to be a decent fit you know the the end customer just wants to be a user you know they want to use a blockchain for the purpose of moving data they're not saying I want to own a network node this episode is brought to you by shape-shift the world's leading

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wallet just as easily as putting on your slippers whenever you see that good-looking Fox you know that's where shape-shift is so the get started visit shape-shift I oh and start trading and we'd like to thank shape-shift for their support of epicenter so if James approaches that the data itself might be spread across different systems but in some way whenever I'm going to a provider and providing some of my data there I can use that same data across another provider quite easily right tell us like how you would architect for example a genomics data system so I'm assuming like for a genomics data system the main the main

parties might be me who's like sending my blood sample somewhere and getting my data it might be my the company that's doing the sequencing and has a repository of my data and researchers that want access to that data and my doctors so huh so what kind of technical architecture does gem bill that would allow this data to be easily shared between all of these all of these parties so we like to understand your technical architecture and like how it would map to what use case so gem is a piece of middleware that sits

within each of the enterprises that wants to connect to this data exchange network so you know essentially what they're trying to do is they're trying to create links to data that are that are linked to one common it's a citizen or patient identifier and they're essentially registering the data that they have available about that patient and if the if you the patient goes to one of these service providers you can essentially provide a digital consent which we are actually modeling on them as a document that gets registered on the blockchain you're registering a consent document that says I you know Michael Michael spec to authorize the

transfer of of this data from this provider to the to another provider or a researcher or whatever once that once that consent documents been recorded on the blockchain any other nodes that are watching the network can see that it's been registered and if they have a notification set up for that that individual they can get an instant notification that there is a change in consent there's a change in permission and now they can authorize the flow of data from from them to another party so the first step of all of this is that we're building is a consent management network on blockchain which is like the first layer of facilitating data flows

between organisations and that consent document itself is a document that's registered on the blockchain the next step is to actually register individual bits of data about that individual and actually do peer-to-peer transfer of data and so we're sort of stepping our way through that in healthcare so every party is a note on that network including the individual the individual is not connecting different they're not running like a full node they're connecting through a service provider that's you know managing their identities which it was just running a full node and those full nodes could be could be you could be like a hyper ledger node or like a tender mint node or sure yes I mean at least you know

from Jim Oasis perspective it's totally agnostic to the underlying blockchain technology the most of the projects that we're working on right now we're starting to use quorum you know it's similar enough to aetherium but is more configured for building federated networks which is what most of our customers are asking for right now and are you seeing any use cases where the federated network approach is not necessarily the the best approach and therefore you're using a public network like aetherium well I think the beauty of all of this is when we have it all linked together I mean I think you're gonna have you're gonna have value networks that are created as a federated network with a tight set of participants and then

you're gonna have public networks that you know where I can register by public identity and I can link that identity to an identity on a on a private network I think that it should be able to be transportable you know your identity should be able to be transportable across blockchain networks and if we can do that then really it's just a matter of building links you know you can you can essentially link out to the different block chains that you're a part of and into the the data that's registered on those networks but they can all be tied to your global identity so I think that you know I it's really hard for me to imagine that there's gonna be one world where there's one blockchain that rules them all and everybody is happily participating on it

there's going to be many many value networks and and we're already starting to see lots of projects that are trying to find ways to unify those block chains like polka dot and cosmos and others right so I think the industry is moving in that direction you know away from one blockchain to rule at all Bitcoin you know - we're gonna live in a world where there's literally thousands and thousands of different networks that you can connect to why is a blockchain relevant as a technological tool to the problem of data sharing or making sort of data liquid yeah so I think you have to look at the alternatives so the way data is moved and shared between enterprises today is one of two ways one

is that you have some central aggregation service that basically acts as a essentially a broker of data between right there like a central a central hub of all the data for foreign industry like health records are you know centered around EHR hubs but then there's many different EHR hubs and so you have this challenge of uniting health data from one EHR system to another so they've created these ideas of health information exchanges which operate like at a state level and those become a central hub for interoperability of health records from different systems but then the challenge

with that is that there's many of those hubs because they're only state statewide so if you travel from California Arizona now you're dealing with a different network so it's this idea of trying to centralize data is always a problem you just end up creating more and more hubs and those become more and more silos the other approach is to try to connect directly peer-to-peer between institutions and the challenge with that is it works fine if you have like one or two connections you know you're making you can use API technology to build a data connection from you know from a an automaker to an insurance company that's easy but what happens when you want to scale that

network out to all of the automakers and all of the insurance companies now you have to build a direct connection between every single party and so that becomes unmaintainable and then you have you have really big challenges around data sync data syncing because everybody has a different story and different time line of events so that doesn't really scale I think blockchains can provide a third alternative which is sort of the best of both worlds you have sort of virtual centralization you have one single point that you can connect to you know everybody sort of agrees to connect to the to the same point by connecting to the blockchain network but the the information and the data transfers are a

peer-to-peer it's one organization trading directly with an other organization through this network with no with no Center intermediary so it's a bit of the best of both worlds and I think that's the only way to really scale these kinds of exchange networks so in this example you gave about health records living in different systems in different states it occurs to me is that there may be one issue that remains even if you do have this sort of you know this one thing that people connect to it is a blockchain which is data formats so for an you know one state will have one type of data format maybe it's like XML and some structure and then maybe other states you're seeing Excel or some you know crazy

thing like that how do you how do you manage this sort of incompatibility between between IT systems yeah so that's the big challenge and that's why you need a sort of a middleware solution because you need to be able to somehow communicate in one common language on this network and every industry has their own efforts to standardize data formats and that a lot of that work is going on right now so like in healthcare there's a new format called fire fhir that a lot of the industry is starting to try to standardize around it so it's it's gonna take a while for the old systems to really adopt it so one of the first

things that we did was we built in well I should take a step back so gem OS has a schema manager that allows for organizations to be able to create or import data standard schemas in a json-ld format and so the first one that we actually brought in was the fire standard so just out of the gate you know gem OS allows for developers to be able to use fire documents so that we can communicate those across systems but it is a huge challenge and it's not one that blockchains alone will solve you know companies need to agree to speak the same language that's gonna be a universal problem across all these things I think I think well you know at least around identity there's been a

pretty great effort industry-wide in the blockchain industry to help define those standards you know we're part of the decentralized identity foundation which is trying to standardize the document types for an identity for a verifiable claim for like lots of lots of things that relate to identities in general so I think we can get some standardization around the identities first we're working on building you know consent consent document standards and and then you know each industry industry will have its own specific proprietary data formats so in this in this sort of data exchange so we said like the first model is a model where you have these data intermediaries right that mediate

the exchange of data across multiple enterprises but then the problem is there's lots of intermediaries you could have like peer to peer exchange of data the third model is something like a blockchain where presumably so I have I have my identity on on on a particular blockchain and then whenever i generate health data that health data is put on some other system but a hash of that health data is may be associated with my identity on the blockchain right and then in any scenario where there needs to be an exchange of data my two organizations can agree to trade my data

and be sure that integrity like the blockchain insures that the integrity of the ensures the integrity of the data and the exchange can be like an economic exchange between two insurance yeah there's many ways there are many reasons why somebody would exchange some could be economic you might be purchasing access to something that's one type of exchange it might be that I've you know presented a my my consent for sharing my health and information and the provider has to share it with another provider but in terms of the technology there's there's some reason for an exchange and what we're registering on the blockchain is a few things so you captured a lot of that so one is that we're registering the hash of the the data that's associated or linked to an identity

we're also registering the the permissions of that data as well so we're using a blockchain to be a global permissioning system for data so that it can prove that you know the right individual had the rights to modify or change the the permissions on that document and and then we're you know essentially the the hash is being encoded into a URI content-addressable URI so that we're providing a way to basically use standard HTTP to be able to like link out to that it's that data and so the the blockchain is acting like a like a giant index of all the available data about you but it but everything even even the index itself is only visible if

I have the rights and permissions to see it so you know we're like the standards that we're using here are pretty stringent around around privacy and you know one of the things that we want to do is be the first gdpr compliant data exchange you know powered by a blockchain so gdpr is general data protection regulation which is going into effect in May of 2018 and Europe so we're you know we're trying to build all these privacy features in as well so it's the thinnest like what did Jim like in terms of technology what what you have built until now and like what is GM OS and what it allows so Jim OS is a

application development platform for building data-driven applications and it has many different layers so you know we have a network layer that basically creates an abstraction layer for connecting to different blockchain networks we can we can use this this paradigm for data sharing on pretty much any block chain that has basic smart contracting capabilities so you know right now we have adapters for aetherium and quorum we're adding support for hyper ledger fabric and so we can interact with any of these block chains in fact an application could actually enter interact with multiple block chains at the same time if if there was the need for that you know it's a I

think in the future there'll be more need for that we have an identity management layer so we're managing the identities that each the organization knows about you know ultimately like they're there I they're managing a registry of all the say customers that they're aware of that are on the network and they're monitoring for changes any notifications or changes that are being pushed in the blockchain about those customers we have you know a data integration layer that allows for us to integrate with existing data infrastructure to register these data assets on the blockchain and pull them from the blockchain back to the data system so sort of like a ETL layer

you know we have a schema management layer that that allows for for users to be able to create custom schemas or use existing standard schemas we have schema.org and fire and we'll be adding a lot more and then ultimately what did what you do with the product is you you're using it to generate a custom application specific set of REST API s so our whole whole concept here is that we don't want we don't want a blockchain platform that requires blockchain engineers we want to build a system that allows for any reasonably skilled full stack engineer to be able to use the platform to build data applications on

top of a blockchain without having to understand how to build smart contracts and things like that like our smart contracts are all packaged in and so they're thinking more at a business object layer like they want to create a patient record they want to create a car record they can think of the business object layer and just interact with a simple REST API I mean when you say that your smart contracts are packaged in so like we've built contracts for identity registries and document registries and other basic and like permissioning registries all the things that are the sort of core components for facilitating this kind of data exchange we've we've been building those and those are they can basically be ascribed to any sort of

resource in our system so you can take any resource and turn it into a document for example we have a we have different behaviors that you can attach the resources one of the one of the behaviors is it can be documented which means you can record a version history on the blockchain of every change in modification to that resource over time so we built a smart contract for that that manages that versioning history and we have a permissioning registry that allows you to register the permissions of that document or that resource over time so those core functionalities we've sort of baked in but they're ultimately they are smart

contracts that are executing on top of a blockchain so we've talked a lot about data and data seems to be very much at the core of just a public discussion at the moment of course you know if we if you look at it from the regulatory side you know GD P R and Europe and then in the US there are some regulation coming into effect I think next year about health records and then there's sort of the the the higher-level discussion about you know who should control our data of course you know big companies control massive amounts of our data and users and customers have very little access to it there's sort of been this this acknowledgement right of this problem and and more and more people I

think are becoming aware and becoming sort of educated around this idea and I'd like to get your thoughts on where you think this is going are we going in yeah I see it sort of there's two directions right one that is desirable which is you know these types of technologies start to become more prevalent and users and consumers have access to their data can control who has access to their data and perhaps even sell their data and monetize their data right and the other way is well we just keep going in this direction of more more and more centralized so where do you think things are going and how do you think we can

[Music] the bootstrap this this this right direction we want to go into yeah I think I think that's a really big question that we need to be asking ourselves as a society right now because we are generating unprecedented amounts of data and we you know I think that we've generated more data in the last two years than we have in the last 5,000 years of humanity and and we're really only leveraging about 1/2 of 1% of all that data so it's just being collected and stored and it's largely being highly centralized to only a few organizations I mean Google Apple Facebook and Amazon

have the lion's share of data about us and that's troubling I think to me you know do we really want to live in a world where only four companies have a total grip over our valuable data and know everything about us you know we've seen what can happen when that data is highly centralized you know with with like the Equifax breach for example they lost 145 million Americans highly sensitive records so can we really trust these guys to be the gatekeepers of our data and and you know the other side of that is that data is becoming extremely valuable you know in a totally digital economy that's powered by machine learning and AI that digital exhausts

that we're creating is actually tremendously valuable and it will become the primary source of the value that I think humans create actually you know more than just money I think money is one side of the equation but data is the other big one so we have to ask ourselves who should benefit who should benefit from that new value and that value creation should it be for companies or should it be the individual so I think that there's almost a social imperative to find ways to put that data back in the hands and control of the individual now luckily there's legislation that's being passed you know globally that's actually

shifting in this direction and there's a bit of a movement around this in parts of the world about putting the data and centered back around the individual general general data protection regulation is a piece of regulation that does assert the rights of the individual to have more access and visibility and control over how their data moves and is managed it goes you know part of the way but there are other movements you know in in Scandinavia there's a grassroots movement called the my data movement which is a group of companies in Scandinavia that are all gathering around and saying we're going to push put the the data back in the hands of the individual and so I think that that's the way the world is moving and there's going to be a struggle between

the two worlds but ultimately if you can actually center the data around the individual and you can create a much richer data profile and that data becomes way more valuable because it's not just a sliver or a tiny view of data about somebody it's the entire story and and you can derive way better you know fidelity and information clarity about you know about an individual when you can see the entire picture whether you talk about their health profile or their driver profile or their travel profile or any other industry and so that's you know I think the world is moving in a user centric customer centric model direction I totally agree and I think

that there's a sort of a this idea that data in the aggregate is more valuable like so for instance if well I'll give an example so we had Trent McConaughey on a few months ago I guess and I saw him recently in Berlin at the 1984 conference and he gave a talk about about self-driving vehicles and so in in self-driving vehicles what's important is not necessarily the AI itself it's it's the data that is being fed into the AI that is well you know improving the models and making sure that we don't get into accidents that's correct you've got right you like Google controlling parts of that data and then you know for instance another company

controlling other parts of that data they're only getting their proportion of that data and then a is they're only learning and proportion that you have to be they have but if we're in a situation or in a system where users could essentially you know control their day day but but sell their data to all these self-driving car manufacturers or a I company x' we'd be in the situation where we'd be massively better off yes and we're are a eyes would be just learning so much more about us and and renting yeah and that's actually a real use case so in addition to the it's in addition to the goal of building you know usage based insurance in the audio industry one of the large reasons why they want to build this out of data

exchange network is because like for instance that one of the participants is Toyota Research Institute and one of their driving missions is to build autonomous driving it's actually one of the guys who was giving a talk Chris ballinger maybe one of the challenges with autonomous driving is in order to build safe models for autonomous driving you need lots and lots of driving data and not there's not any one automaker right now that has enough data to be able to produce a safe model so what they have all recognized is that the only way they're going to build safe models is if they can work together and pull their data and so they have to find a way to be able to do that and to be

able to do that securely and to do it in a way that respects their data rights you know so that's a really interesting thing is like if if I'm contributing a sliver of my data to some really valuable you know machine learning or AI model and it's generating a service and that's generating value because I've contributed my sliver of data is there a is there a world in which we can actually reward that that individual for their contribution you know can they actually receive their portion of the economic benefits of that service and I think that's where blockchains might be able to really help you know we can potentially tokenize these things and and actually have a working model for

you know creating direct economic benefit to people who are willing to contribute their data for building a service powered for powered by machine learning and are using similar initiatives in health care for instance because I seems like health care there's massive benefit there as well there is you know the research side I mean like drug makers in order to do a clinical study they pay hospitals up to a hundred thousand dollars for a qualified participant to join a study the hospitals are basically hoarding this data about their patients so that they can basically receive you know these these giant payments so that they can help track down and locate a patient that can join a clinical study especially for like rare diseases and

things like that so I think that market can be totally disrupted you know if I can as an individual have control over my my health profile my genetic profile and other other things I can essentially opt-in to join a study and hand over my data and potentially get paid a fraction of that price but at least I'm getting it directly so you know maybe instead of paying a hospital a hundred thousand dollars to find a patient they're paying me ten thousand dollars but I'm better off and you know the company is better off and it's a win-win you know but although I wonder that many times many times like the individual incentive in the case of the hospital the individual

incentive is to port the data so that you can make money so like me sometimes like the incentives of capitalism act against the sharing of of data as well it it like I guess what I'm trying to say is it just may not be an IT system problem it might it might be an economic incentives it's it's a total cultural problem too you know I think most people aren't even really aware of the problem and and so I think that it's a it's a big step for telling an individual to say you know it's an element to tell an individual patient that they should now take over their medical records you know I mean how many of us actually do that

how many of us have even a digital copy of our records from our doctors right we just we show up at the doctor and they recorded in their system and then we walk away but there are populations where people have actually really learned that for and so when you talk about chronic illnesses cancer patients people who are visiting doctors a lot they end up actually just as a requirement for being able to make sure they're getting the best care they end up carrying around binders full of their own data and they bring it over to every provider that they show up to there are people who are highly motivated to take control over their own records and and so I think that you know there are pockets where

this could be really valuable at least in health care I think this is a this is a movement that's gonna take a while to develop where the general population really has the awareness of what's going on with their data and the value that it's generating for other companies and not for them but as they start to realize that they they may want to take control over it you know that's why we're really starting more on the b2b side because there there's clear incentive already for facilitating data sharing but ultimately we want to drive this towards the consumer to what is like the near-term future for or Jim what projects can we expect to see and what might be some of the big

achievements that your company makes you know sure so you know we're doing this project with the health system in Finland around genomics data exchange we're we're definitely diving in and really focusing on building that out because we think it's a really strong use case for for our platform and for building out data sharing in general around digital consent and we're also using that as a use case to start complying with GDP our regulation because they're in Europe so that one's gonna be a big area of focus for us with the auto data exchange that were that we're building with Toyota and I owe you a nice a dough is a huge area of focus for us and we want to be able to expand that network out not just to Toyota and

ioe but to you know other automakers other insurance companies and to build a really large network around that and you know we're we have other customers who are who are launching data exchanges and want to use our platform unfortunately can't announce all of them yet but there other verticals like travel and and then you know I think in the long run we are looking to figure out how we can extend this from just business to business data exchange to bringing the bringing individual citizens in as participants

in the network whether it's through partnerships or through our own software our own apps but ultimately we want to build an ecosystem around this well Mike it's been a pleasure having you on the show one have you on for a long time so I'm gonna do it and that's great a great discussion so thanks for coming on we look forward to having you back on again sometime absolutely thanks guys and thank you to our listeners for once again tuning in we are part of the let's talk Bitcoin network you can find this show and lots of other great shows at let's talk Bitcoin comm of course if you want to support the show you can do that by Attlee Biscay leaving us a tip and the tipping address will be in the sort of show description and thanks to those who have been tipping I was looking

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