#262 Brian Behlendorf: Hyperledger – From Blockchain Hype to Production Networks

Transcript

[Music] this episode of epicenter is brought to you by top down top towel is addressing the talent shortage in the blockchain space connecting companies of all sizes with the world's best blockchain engineers if you're looking to scale your team check out top Cal calm slash epicenter hi welcome to the epicenter my name is Sebastian Cujo and my name is Frank rain today our guest was brian behlendorf he's the executive director of the hyper ledger projects and we've already had him on and just over two

years ago it was a very interesting conversation yeah I mean I listened to the episode before having him back on again and it's it's just really fascinating to see where our mindset was two years ago with regards to enterprise blockchain and I mean not just his but like I that what he was saying really resonated with me I think like where I was that back then and I'm wondering like if you've kind of felt the same way yeah so I mean many listeners will be aware that I used to work for this company moan axe which was kind of the first enterprise aetherium company there started 2014 to like forty cerium and make a kind of interest version of it and so I was working there until the end of its just just about

when we did that interview I think with Brian it's just about two years ago and and then of course moan axe their project became part of a hyper literature so it's not one of the hybrid lesser projects but then in the last two years I haven't really spent much time in the enterprise blocking space at all and haven't followed it too much so it's very interesting to kind of hear ok what has happened since then what progress has been made and even though the hype has died down and it's not really in the news so much anymore all of these enterprise blockchain projects you know it seems that really people have you know delivered stuff and will hear much more about that from Brian in a second yeah there definitely was a lot of hype and I mean for me I spent most of those years working in

that space course working in Stratham and I think I've kind of come out of that with a lot of skepticism but I must say that I I guess after speaking with Brian today that some of that skepticism has fallen to the side and I can kind of see how you know a lot of that a lot of those promises that were made you know early on or starting now to you know come to fruition and apparently some of these networks are now in production and there's actually use cases being built on hyper ledger speaking about that so I'm actually going to be there's a there's a conference going on from December 12 to 15 in Basel is the hyper ledger Global Forum and I'm gonna be there I'm doing some content they were

nice enough to pay my flight over there and invite me to the conference so that I could produce some interviews with some of the so the key key members of that community so if you're interested in attending that it's again it's December 12 to 15 it's in Basel in your hometown and I've never been so you know I'll get to see what what your childhood and teenage years were like living there yeah yeah how does it set me like you know the places you used to hang out that tell me what you're hanging us used to be a no check it out so yeah I used to live in Basel of course until I was around 18 years since my my hometown yeah so yeah it's gonna be a pretty big event actually there's

gonna be about a thousand people there apparently so if you're interested in attending I'm not sure what the prices but definitely check out the website and I think they told me there was some coupon code they haven't sent it to me yet but if you are interested in going and tweet at us and we'll we'll send you the coupon code for the event I think there's a coupon code they just haven't sent to me yet yeah so if you're going there be great to see you definitely come say hi so yeah without further ado here's brian behlendorf okay so we're here today with brian behlendorf he was a guest on the podcast today that was a very long time ago I think just around two years ago and we

spoke of course about hyper ledger and he's the executive director of hyper ledger and yeah so that was a fascinating episode we just listen to it again and last days and kind of revisit it so we were excited to have Brian on again and talk a bit about you know hyper ledger and about how it has developed and about generally and if the use of blockchain in you know enterprise use cases or other other use cases that highlights just been working on so thanks so much for joining us Brian thank you it's great to be here I think that was two years ago exact almost exactly or fourteen and blockchain years I think yeah exactly and and we do recommend people check it out it was interested Ryan has a you

know very interesting background he has you know among other things he was the main kind of initiator around the apache software license and the Apache foundation also key part of the Linux Foundation of the Apache web server so he's been kind of played a pivotal role in many of the key web technology so we spoke quite a bit about that in the last episode to and including things interesting things like you know the kind of pros and cons of different software licenses and and kind of the case for apache license so i think that was very interesting and i'm sure a lot of people would enjoy that and I think it says it's just as relevant so episode 160 episode 160 for those who are curious listen to it maybe give us just

a two minutes like a very brief background Brian about how you originally ended up taking on the the hyper ledger project and and kind of what drives you in this project sure so Sabri flea for those who didn't hear the last podcast or might otherwise not know so I've been an executive director for Hyper ledger since May of 2016 the project actually started about six months before I joined previously to that I mean I've done a bunch of different roles you mentioned a few I've also worked as a tio for the World Economic Forum I worked in the White House during at the beginning the Obama administration most of the time though I've been a startup entrepreneur and

then right before this I was working at a venture capital fund and in addition to nuclear fusion and robotic surgery and all the other kind of sci-fi kind of fun things obviously we were getting pummeled with requests from the Bitcoin a blockchain community to look at their companies their proposals and even met the talaq and Beauchene when they came around to the original ICO for a theorem so really started to understand the the the technology and the rationale in the business but joined hyper ledger because I felt like it would had really the most realistic sense of how this technology was going to play out that it was something that wasn't being paid attention to as much as some of the others and was closest to a lot of my background with both enterprise software

and and obviously it had a great organization behind it in the form of the Linux Foundation and so jumped right in so when we when we last had you on in December of 2016 it had been about six months since you've been working with hyper ledger can you give us a sense of like in the last two years how has this particular organization changed you know just you know what steam looked like but then also you know from your perspective how has it grown now and like what does it look like well the most important thing is we've actually been shipping now production code for just over a year fabric I think the kind of September

2017 I think it was went one dot oh general availability and in the year and a quarter or so since it's been launched it's now incredibly widely deployed we're tracking 50 different production networks that are running on top of fabric in one form or another and there's probably quite a few we don't know about there's also now production networks on top of sawtooth saw to theta1dot Oh in January of this year they're about to cut there 1.1 release and now both of these are different from each other as I think I talked about the last call they're kind of different in the same way that my sequel and Cassandra might be different as technology platforms but both of them have now kind of find that found their footing and are being used in to track real digital assets right I we've also

now added quite a few additional projects I forget which ones were a part of the group when we talked in December but I think we had launched India that point I'm not sure but maybe not but hyper ledger Indy is becoming this this really amazing project it's the platform for building distributed digital identity networks kind of formed around this concept of self sovereign or user centric ID and it's now the basis for this large network convened by an organization called sovereign the sovereign foundation and there are pilots now involving nation-states projects on the under horizon to do national ID systems for the government of Sierra Leone in the in Canada and in

British Columbia there's a big project using it for self sovereign ID for businesses that's I can go into there but India's really taken off it hasn't you know one da don't release yet but that feels pretty eminent and then I also pretty noteworthy is you know we picked up a theory and virtual machine project called hyper ledger borough which is an implementation of the EVM designed for enterprise kind of use non main menus pretty noteworthy doesn't have any aspiration of being a main that client but it it is now running on quite a few production networks and it's also been ported to run on top of sawtooth and on top of fabric so that's pretty exciting as well and it's the basis for a Mon X's agreements network that they

launched which is like a legal technology platform lots of other projects we've actually just added an xi project called hyper ledger ursa which is a library of cryptography routines used by the other projects we're kind of refactoring all that out into a common library so that projects can more easily pick up advanced kind of hashing algorithms or zero knowledge proof types of techniques and we're and that's being hopefully something that'll allow us to easily add zero knowledge stuff to fabric sought to you thorough indeed that sort of thing and and and these all these technology platforms are continuously improving even even after they had production released that's not the end that if anything that's the beginning so fabric 1.4 just came out for example it has support for zero

knowledge asset transfer inspired by Nick kind of the Z cash approach to to kind of obscuring participants and amounts in transactions even though you should be able to make strong guarantees with the overall integrity of the right and so lots of tactility that way and correspondingly more developers coming in as core contributors we've had over 800 different developers now make a contribution of some form to the software behind the different 11 different projects and that might sound small what you know there are millions of developers out there working on things like github that sort of thing but those are 800 devs we've actually gone you know outside of just using the code to actually feeding back upstream and I'm pretty happy with that number I think it'll it'll it'll grow to larger

no doubt just as a function of time but now on especially on fabric and sawtooth we have real evidence of a multi stakeholder multi vendor community growing around that and on that front you know and we you know I talked about kind of the membership model for Hyper ledger we you know of you know grew pretty quickly in 2016 2017 and this year continued to grow we have a 288 members at last count and most of these are companies but a few of them include nonprofits and central banks and government agencies and that sort of thing and really happy at the diversity of that crowd and the vendor directory now lists over 70 over 70 different companies building products and services

on top of fabric or sawtooth or one of the other projects so that's kind of by the numbers I'd say generally speaking this year has been a year where a lot of PLC's did go into production when pilots Apsara did go to production where we started to see banking networks trade finance networks get set up in China there's one that is about extending letters of credit to trading partners between this is set up between the People's Bank of China actually civic bank Chinamen Shang Bank and a bunch of others than they're currently issuing about a billion remand be a day which about 160 million dollars worth of letters of credit likewise the Hong Kong Monetary Authority just launched a system there's a another startup in

Singapore called ELT Ledger's that has done a project with a couple of big banks and agricultural firms for forty five hundred farmers in Australia and there in the two months that they've been in production they've issued 75 750 million dollars worth of trade finance extensions that sort of thing so seeing lots of those who are seeing supply chain stuff all over the place yeah I think I mentioned diamonds when I was last on that's that the ever ledger network has gone into even deeper production now and now we're claiming they've been saving millions of dollars in attempts at fraud on that network which is pretty cool but we also see now production supply chain networks in coffee in the Walmart Network of course which is initially just tracking

leafy green Goods green vegetables right as well as a big network around rice in China and then in healthcare that's been a little slower to take off but I feel like the impact there will be pretty big and in healthcare you have there's a network run by change healthcare that is processing millions I know it's a it's an even bigger number than that sounds I'm only allowed to save millions of transactions a day in management of these kind of claims between parties insurance claims between parties so a lot of good stuff going on and and the technology is doing well when it stood up against its competitors we see people running open fairly open and sometimes not open you know kind of trials between two or three different technologies and

choosing us a lot more often than they seem to be choosing the alternatives and and so it's it's real buoyancy to be waking up every morning to you know a new post somewhere and like going on a coin desk or somewhere else saying you know a new project being launched by three companies we've never directly engaged with you know using hyper ledger fabric or hyper ledger Sawtooth or whatever to go build something that we hadn't we hadn't had to push on anybody we hadn't had to sell and that feels like an inflection point of some sort some forum so that's what 2018 has been wow that's that's super impressive that's like really yeah that sounds like a tremendous amount of achievements and accomplishments I mean I'm curious Lee you mentioned

that you you know you it's standing up well against competition and people tend to go with that are you talking here about competition in the sense of like you know other blockchain platforms or you talking about kind of you know alternative approaches to maybe accomplishing some of the same aims that people generally want to use blockchains for yeah so certainly the number one competition is doing it with a centralized database all right and as I think I even might have said on the call two years ago there's no blockchain use case that couldn't also be done by a centralized database it's just it's something you don't want to do when you have a really either politically sensitive type of

thing or there is no central party that everyone trusts to be able to run that that's central server but Trust is always can always be bought for a price right like there are some organizations that are neutral organizations that sit at the center of marketplaces that serve as public utilities and some of those are dabbling in blockchain technology to understand them that's like Swift in DTCC and that sort of thing but there's others who are still happy to trust central providers if they can be as neutral as possible and so that's always the number-one competition and I'd say any time I've heard of pilots not continuing it's been for that reason and that trust though is also a function of cost all right the cheaper that we get these technologies to deploy and manage and easier it is to scale up and the more

developers there are out there who understand all these technologies work then the more and more use cases the more and more situations where the the cost versus trust issue will resolve in favor of using of watching technology of one form or another and then yeah to be fair there are other blockchain systems out there there are some who will sometimes tell you they're not a blockchain sometimes they are like our threes Corte Maru has a sales team out there that is aggressively selling into many of these operations and you know on our site you do have you know IBM with their sales team and Oracle and Accenture and a whole lot of startups kind of selling but sometimes you know a determined sales force will get a

product into into a space so there's there's some interesting art three projects happening out there and you could say they're competitive with some of the other trade finance networks but but at the end of the day I think these converge in some way and then there's quorum and quorum is I had a lot of interest in it and and and some production usage I'm aware of a gold trading platform that's using or aiming to use quorum when it launches I haven't seen as many out there and by the way one interesting site people might want to visit is something called the unbounded Network unbounded network this is a kind like a it's the beginnings of what hopefully could become a coin market cap kind of like system for tracking where these consortium block chains are it's

what's built by Jonathan levy and Sarah and is tracking who's out there what are they running on and what what is their intent that sort of thing and actually I believe some sort of directory like this and the long-term becomes a way that people discover and join these consortium networks but the the ones that are listed there the vast majority of them are on fabric quite a few on sawtooth and then a trickle of them on r3 and quorum and other other kind of aetherium private ledger equivalents so that's competition but by far the biggest competition is simply people who say I'm happy with the centralized Network and that's who I spend more time thinking about is how do we make the technology easier to use more people adopt it and and more appropriate for

more situations looking back in the last two years and sort of I think I think a lot of our assumptions about how these networks would work you know have either turned out to be correct or perhaps we look back on them and realized that are something we perhaps made some some false assumptions about how these networks which would sprout up these consortiums what are some of the biggest mistakes you can point to or the things you can look back on and say okay mate like maybe my thinking about this has evolved and I was wrong about this specific thing and the way that things have evolved to today

yeah that's a good question I don't know that we've made any observations that were fundamentally wrong I think I think the timing is always a question I don't mean timing in the way that you know what's the phrase even a stop clock till is the right time twice a day but I mean timing and the more just how long it takes for certain things to flush out I think we have gotten to production use cases about as quickly as I would have thought like this is we know that this is not technology like a new programming language or a new kind of web server where you know somebody with a motivated need can get something up and running and demonstrated overnight right that to really get the stuff in production it's always about building a coalition of businesses that have a common need and and demonstrating value means getting it

into production across a number of different companies to all of their own integration needs and that sort of thing so necessarily this stuff is going to be slow burn I think one thing I had that that we spent a lot of time on and it's a-you know it hasn't been as easy to achieve as I would have liked would have been getting more developers in I mean the 800 number I'm pretty happy with I think that's a testament to the breadth of the technology portfolio we have but this has been early enough on that and people don't really like dealing with the plumbing as much as you know perhaps I did and my generation did 20 years ago I don't know people like getting to the apps like like you know using this stuff but then doing using it to accomplish

something can't begrudge them that but I getting more developers into the core of some of these technologies has been a challenge and many of those 800 developers themselves are new to open source and so getting them to understand how to work publicly and transparently and when they're bringing a technology from that might have started in-house and bringing it out how do you do that in a way that that really gets other people to feel like stakeholders in the process and and directly engage that's been we've had to invest a lot in that to get that there and where it's working but it's taking taking perhaps more than we thought but no major strategic mistakes you know another big strategic that I think I even said it and you know

two years ago was thinking about how we would relate to the pub like Ledger's right and to the look at the currency kind of community cryptocurrency community and you know while I've famously been skeptical about AI cos and and kind of not so much about tokens just kind of the the cryptocurrency driven token model I it's it's always been about figuring out how do we make that part of a hybrid rather than you know treating that as the other or treating that as the enemy worst of all because it's really not the enemy in any meaningful way but what could we do constructively from hyper ledger to to go and and and build bridges with that community where there's good technology coming out of that side of the spectrum right and that's where you know kind of putting effort in to reach out to the

etherion community bringing anna virgin in there MVM but also joining the enterprise etherium alliance and hopefully the cryptography library work that we're building will be useful in fact one of the co-sponsors on that project are a couple of developers from Definity so that's pretty encouraging right like ultimately ultimately want people to think of who hyper little er ledger is less as you know kind of the the enterprise kids trying to be cool again or something like that or you know trying to be anti public ledger in any sense and really to be more about that full spectrum of ways to use distributed Ledger's and smart contracts hiring is stressful let's face it it's a long

process of sifting through resumes and interviewing candidates without any guarantee of quality but it doesn't have to be this way companies all over the place are experiencing a new way of hiring with top-down if you go to their Trustpilot page you'll see that of the hundreds of people that have left reviews over ninety eight percent were four or five star ratings including one guy who wants to give his developer a bear hug that says a lot top dog gets all this great feedback because they focus on their clients and their top priority is quality they only accept the top three percent of applicants including highly skilled blocks and engineers one of these engineers is Radek Ostrovsky Radek has experience as a lead software engineer and data scientists for Sony and Expedia then he discovered blockchain and he

became totally consumed with aetherium he worked as a consultant for the firm start on chain and his time locked app when the top quarter consensus you port and the blockchain hackathon then he expanded his reach through top tile he worked with a bunch of clients on projects such as smart contract development and a POC the leverages blotching if you want to hire engineers like Roddick for your team go to top tile comm slash epicenter for a Norris trial a top tile director of engineering will deliver your next hire in as fast as 48 hours and you'll get $1,000 credit when you decide to hire we'd like to thank top towel for their support of epicenter so earlier I mentioned that there were quite a few projects that were in production can you talk about

maybe some of the ones that you feel the most promising in terms of you know the project but also the use case that it's addressing so there's a project in British Columbia being run by an innovative kind of group within the government of BC and they're called what they build the org book which is kind of as a kind of like Facebook but for businesses that are registered in British Columbia and they wanted to try to tackle the problem that small businesses have engaging with government when there's different levels of government different agencies that ask different things you know if you run a business you're in a restaurant you need a file as a business and then go

get a permit to serve food and then a permit from somebody else to serve alcohol and I mean all these different kind of engagements where you know lots of people in government have tried to provide kind of a unified front end to government services which is useful and great but that means a whole lot of integration work behind the scenes on things like identity and that sort which self sovereign identity gives us an opportunity to pivot that a bit and and so there their approach was that can we use self sovereign ID for businesses to register and so they picked hyper ledger Indy I'm not sure the backstory of why they chose it they've now loaded into and and are working with the sovereign foundation on that Network they've now loaded into the system

fifty thousand business registrations they built a front-end I mean the idea ultimately is that these businesses get wallets to manage their digital identity documents and permits and data stations and claims and all these kinds of things for the short term they built kind of a web front-end that acts as kind of a virtual wallet right for them and and that's in production now and now that team is you know sharing what they're doing they'll be at hyper literal global forum for example talking about it but they're sharing it with other government agencies and the chance there to use that same identity that same registration that same wallet to for a business to do you know to engage in trade finance to and to pay their federal level taxes to to do all these

different things is is like built into the system and that's that's really encouraging and I kind of wonder if you know in the 10 year horizon like the biggest impact that we have especially when it comes to things that the average consumer will be able to see an experience might be in this reinventing how digital identity works and that kind of project is getting a 10 now in fact Kiva the nonprofit that pioneered the peer-to-peer lending space announced that they're going to be building a national ID system for the government of Sierra Leone using hyper ledger indie as the identity layer and using fabric to implement a credit history system so that the cost of lending to businesses in Sierra Leone goes way down which is kind of their

bread and butter and why they're getting involved and so that that feels really awesome to me it feels really cool and that gets me excited and I mean the supply chain traceability of the healthcare projects all those are also interesting and happy they talk about specifics over there too but yeah let's maybe just spent just a bit of time on this particular use case because it's interesting because it incorporates a lot of the things that I feel sort of you know Enterprise blockchains promised to solve and it's one sort of dig in and so I agree I think identity is one of the one of the components that is sort of needed for these systems of disintermediation to function and especially if you're if you're talking

about known entities and systems such as businesses in this case so it's encouraging to see that that is sort of playing out and entering this sort of production phase but when you say that these systems are in production what what what constitutes sort of production and other than the fact that like other like actual actual users are using it and it's it's serving its actual use case but what are the volumes and more importantly is it is it actually are these use cases that are in production actually doing I guess what they were meant to do in the first place which was

like disintermediate the central actors that you know we're all trying to to separate ourselves from all other questions let me see if I can get to majority I'm um sure so for me the defining characteristic of a blockchain network in production is that it serves as the system of record for something it's not just an echo of some other business process that's actually defining what's going on but that if there's any question or dispute about how you know what's the reality on the ground its what's written to the ledger and to the best of my knowledge all 50 of those use cases that that we know are sorry of those production networks we know of are serving that purpose they're not just

documentary and function they're actually transfers of assets of one form or another and again serving as the system of record the transaction volumes though it could be all over the map I do not know what the transaction volume is on the British Columbia Network today I have when we're lucky we get information about this from other parties you know being able to share with you change healthcare for example being willing to say that there's millions of transactions on that network even that is hard to get a sense for scale from the network I mentioned the startup in Singapore that's working with DBS bank that's sorry that was the bank owes that's the Development Bank of Singapore Agri Corp which is a large agricultural firm 4,500 farmers mmm that's where I

have more concrete data in two months of operation they've conducted 2,400 transactions as they call them right but which actually represents 3.2 million entries to the ledger because a given transaction is a lot of data points and a lot of steps in it that sort of thing each transaction I mean that sounds like a small number of transactions right you know compared to some block chains that you know you could say well we could do 2,400 transactions a second right but each transaction in that network is average size in terms of the amount of credit being extended of $300,000 so that over those two months that is and that means seven sorry seventy seven hundred fifty million dollars worth of transactions right where the credit

being extended to farmers and other freeholders so yeah but all these scales are gonna be all over the map right there'll be some networks that are extremely valuable that will be a small number of transactions per day other networks that are gonna be trying about to be about facilitating micro transactions in some way that might be you know tens of thousands a second I think the fact that we're talking about lots of different networks out there means that there's this tool to bear to bear when you're asking about scalability well how do you guarantee we'll be able to scale up to a certain amount well by segmenting by interest there's a lot that we can do to make sure that scalability here is a question that can be managed locally rather than trying to answer the scalability question globally right but it does make it really hard to

try to come to an objective measure of again there's no coin market cap for consortio Ledger's all right I would love there to be I've talked to people about building something like that and because doing something like that will help build confidence that these technologies work at the scales people would like to use than that I think we'll get there over time and it certainly are our goal to collect even if it has to be anecdotal at this point there's enough information about transaction volumes and numbers of nodes on those networks and that sort of thing something we're also doing through the performance and scalability working group anti-guerrilla sure so so you're spoken about actually a lot of different examples right there are places where block chains are being used or you know

people have built applications on hypervisor and these consortia what do you think are the biggest you know the biggest value asks that have turned out and are there some some ways in which you know benefits have derived from these applications that you know may be like unexpected and you didn't expect you know that as to turning out as a benefit well I think the biggest value so so especially with trade finance you're often digitizing a process that heretofore has barely been standardized let alone digitized and the standardization has come in the form of you know a given geography a given region you know or a set of banks kind

of getting together and say okay we'll use a certain standard process or a template for issuing these kinds of agreements but then it still defaults to you know lawyer driven processes such as you know legal contracts signatures on paper fax machines that sort of thing and that's been an area that has been resistant to digitize not for any lack of computers in that part of the world but because there hasn't been a central authority who especially since many of these supply chains cross from China into the United States right or into the West where you know people have been happy to kind of leave the accounting to somebody no matter how neutral you could arguably present the mass right and because in a lot of cases these trade finance decisions are essentially

no your customer any money laundering kind of credit history types of things any sort of system of accounting for you know how well businesses are performing it has been hindered by information sharing laws that and and processes that were very batch oriented rather than real-time and we're kind of the knowledge of whose shared what with who was was kind of you know opaque to be honest um so some of the benefits of launching these networks are around digitizing a process that has been analog before but and and arguably you could have seen many of those benefits by digitizing and centralizing but by being decentralized you created the political will to create these networks that might not have existed before and

and so that's that's a hard thing to measure it's a hard thing to go well that was worth a hundred billion dollars or something like that or worse even the money that was spent to build that system but that's again you know without without kind of deflecting too much you could say that the internet 1998-1999 wasn't quite worth the money that was being spent on websites you know you couldn't really point to I mean what was the traffic on amazon.com in 1998 probably enough to justify raising some rounds of capital but probably not enough to say homerun ROI not yet right so so I think a lot of slack has to be cut I don't think there's any any of the projects that right now could say you know they would stand up to external scrutiny

you know we've generated this much of a return on the money that we've spent building a blockchain project but I think that's that's that's into that I think that's really close so I'd like to come back to my previous question and and really really understand at the base level where these networks are providing our providing value and so you mentioned digitization and sort of standardizing processes and I think that this is one one of the things that for for surely Enterprise blockchains sort of forces upon the actors engaging in the consortium because if you're going to engage on with competitors partners regulators or

anybody sort of involved in a process you have to be speaking the same language and and standardizing the way that these organizations communicates is definitely one of the one of the benefits of employment in these systems but in terms of actually disintermediating the central authorities or sort of the the incumbent service providers that might be you know in previous times providing that facilitation or that exchange of data how have these use cases turned out Oh just as an example so if you take the supply chain use case for example and I say this is someone whose previously

worked with a company that was working on these types of use cases actually both Brian I were previously at companies in this space you think the supply chains use case typically what what I would see is a client would approach us and this client was a company that for example a chemical company and this chemical company has supply chain where they were yeah cultivating some sort of natural resource and this natural resource was ending up in a product and this these projects were often being commissioned by these service providers like by these companies and what we would see is that the network's themselves would be operated by one or two or three actors

and all the others act all the smaller actors in the chain so be it you know the shipping company or even all the way down to the farmer we're actually just uses a network but didn't really have any that true validating power in the network and that if you sort of pulled the veil the system was still somewhat fairly centralized so my question to you is that the the systems that we're seeing in production are they still fairly centralized in this sense or is a really a true distribution of the actors that are participating in these consortia networks good question so one form of disintermediation that's going on is definitely in the settlement layer there one of these trade finance networks in

Asia is also facilitating settlement through the system in a way that allows the parties kind of to keep that record of who's who's settling up with who and then to true up basically at the end of the some periodic process day week month that sort of thing but in the course of that eliminating Swift as the platform for which those that settlement was previously taking place right now Swift themselves are conducting trials around reinventing how their network works using a blockchain partly because they realize there's this competitive risk that emerges they may wake up and discover their member banks don't need them anymore because they figured out either a different insurgent provider or they themselves I've set the stirred-up their own network but at the end of the day and all these networks there's still

some governing entity I would argue even the public ledger still has these governing entities out there who kind of decides who's in the network and who's out right and that should ideally be a very objective decision the very approachable kind of transparent thing something that is open no matter what size you are as long as you should you can stand up a node on the network and run right but the reality is right now we're working with businesses who have existing notions about how to form these consortium those are not only always the most open of processes I think we are going to see a lot of experiments in governance take place out there I think we've seen some of those experiments not work out as well there was a never called Batavia that was a trade finance Network that

didn't really pick up any speed and now has been folded into one of the other kind of a hydrology of trade finance platforms out there there's another one which is the joint venture between IBM and Maersk which despite signing up about 80 different partner all of those have been customers of Maersk and the agreement there is kind of very Maersk centric and that has meant that you know you don't have the competitors the Maersk on that platform and the competitors have gone off and formed their own blockchain networks as well around shipping and tracking and containers in particular and ideally ideally you have these large networks because I think the most valuable networks are going to be I mean we know

it intuitively but are going to be demonstrated to be the networks that are the most participants on it even for those participants who don't control those participants as customers right and so I think we will actually see competition between networks even in the same space and I don't think that's a bad thing I actually think it's good to have competing governing organizations with different is there there's there's a trade-off right the larger the network is the more valuable it is the more people you can do business with directly although you can always do cross ledger transactions that sort of thing if parties are on to different Ledger's but the larger the network the better but you don't want that largesse to lead to the governing entity having a controlling position charging fees it's

at creating unfair rules that sort of thing and so sometimes a smaller network will be better if there's a higher standard for participants on it you know more money at stake for anybody who is a bad actor for example greater penalties for doing bad things right which will necessarily shut out some other smaller participants so we're gonna kind of let water find its own level in this thing and encourage competition out there I think my hope is that if the technology is not only standardized right if if people are running a small handful of different platforms then interoperability between them gets easier in addition to explicit interoperability projects like we have hyper ledger quilt which is an implementation of the inter ledger

standard which should hopefully make having a company deal with multiple block chains even easier and conducting transactions across Ledger's it's not the final word in this that's one of those projects we would love more contributors to and there's probably other other interoperability standards and technologies yet to come in this space but a and we also need to make sure as we're building these frameworks that there's never a technology reason why you can't add another node or another participant to the network right we can't make it the case where oh these networks run well up to about 25 nodes and or 25 organizations and then after that you know there's no more room because then the technology becomes

blamed for whatever systemic hegemony you know the the industry might try to present there so that's a challenge to us as programmers that's something we should take on but the governance models I think there's there's need for competition there and need for for people to kind of map the landscape and for and figure out what works best on a on a use case by use case perspective I don't think it bubbles up to one gigantic global network nor does it mean a hundred thousand different networks but the more common the technologies are across all those networks the easier they are to deal with okay this is great this is kind of tied into something that I wanted to come back to anyway because one of the ways that I could potentially see this turning out let's say now you have some industry right and now you

have a bunch of a bunch of the players they come together they build this consortium right but now don't you just have but at least a high risk that you know some of these consortiums become very dominant in the industry and they can then actually decrease competition and you know kind of enforce rules in that industry keep out new entrants and so that like you know let's say startup comes up down the line it will actually be very very hard to compete not maybe harder than it is today is that something that you're concerned about so look any trust rules will still need to play all right and first there's nothing the technology platforms can do to keep collusion from happening right

even if we were talking about gaps on aetherium you could have gaps that you know are built by big players who have a preference for or even enforced interoperability with other big players in a way that serves an antitrust anti-competitive kind of purpose right and we will need technologies that help us that open we'll also need regulators who know how these technologies work and can recognize when anti-competitive behavior is happening I think it'd be awfully hard to hide antitrust behavior on you never compared to the alternatives right it's easy right now for companies to collude kind of off chain and and and come up with secret deals that that exclude competitors provide favorable pricing that sort of thing there's very

little the technology can actually do to prevent that kind of thing from happening if at all right but if it's easy to form these networks is it if it's easy to form a rival network to form a competing network and they're easy actually for a business to be on two networks at the same time then I think we have a much more competitive environment to be able to hold that kind of antitrust behavior to account and and limit its its ability to truly lock things down okay yeah no I mean I think that's a you know a fair point I guess we'll see we'll see how it turns out so we wanted to speak a little bit about the project fabric which is you know having the best known most widely used and most mature projects in hyper ledger so can you tell us a little bit about

you know what is fabric and what's kind of the essence of fabric yeah so fabric is easily the most mature of our of our technology stacks the one that has had the most different number of contributors to it both as individual developers and as different companies that have played a role in building it it's the one that forms the majority of the different production networks out there that we know about and fabric kind of I think came first initially it came from IBM's kind of internal R&D around exploring the use of distributed Ledger's to kind of reform a business that IBM has been in since day one which is not just having a mainframe in the

basement of your big company but how do those mainframes conduct business with other companies mainframes right and so there's you know a pretty deep history going well past you know before Satoshi whoever she was to I say to put together these systems that that are operate cooperatively but in a way that can be audited right in a way that Maps how business processes take place that involve steps between parties and things in a way that is more elegant than the kind of web services approach that a CLIA has been taken one that's more orchestrated one that's more you know and has this extra layer now of Merkle trees and proofs and that sort of thing that that you know the public blockchain showed us

were possible so fabric is based on the notion that you have kind of a defined set of who the participants are in that network that can grow dynamically you can shrink dynamically those participants run one or more different nodes on that network that are all capable of publishing to the network as well as reading all of the transactions off of it largely speaking rather than a kind of a competition in terms of compute power say that for proof of work you use consensus mechanisms that are more about you know making sure hey we can fiddle these transactions in an order and if that order is out of whack you know for example somebody tries to spend the same resource twice or transfer the same asset twice then the second of those gets rejected and thrown

back to try again right and so that's it's it's simpler it's less ambitious you might say that what bitcoin tries to accomplish and it's and it's a kind of decentralization kind of kind of thrust but it trades that off for really high performance for the kind of verify ability and integrity that you would expect from a system that is transferring digital assets the very first consensus mechanism was a Byzantine fault tolerant one which actually proved kind of complex and unwieldly and slow so they punted on that for one dot oh and went to use just Kafka as the consensus mechanism adding to that a couple of things around endorsement of transactions and such that that helped make it truly more of a block game but a after that they've now

added support for raft consensus mechanisms that's coming though that's there I believe in 1.3 Byzantine fault tolerance will come back in at some point in the future maybe buy one for maybe later but when your networks are on the order of a couple dozen to maybe even a hundred participants as long as you could detect bad actors as long as you have built-in protections against certain categories of frauds like prevention of double spend there's a lot that you can do on that network without having to resort to competition between CPU cycles as a way to decide you know what's the next data structure in the chain and how do you prevent bad actors from being able to get away with attempts to corrupt the system so uh and one of the

benefits you also get from this approach is immediate finality rather than kind of the eventual consistency that you get from less deterministic systems fabric I should add a few more kind of things now supports if they're iam smart contracts thanks to project hyper ledger borough so yeah III and that you know now you also have a JavaScript and in Java as well as the original smart contract language was go and so all of that now adds to the program ability of the the platform what are some other features mentioned zero knowledge asset transfer and a lot of SDK work to make plugging into that Network and building apps on top of that network even easier so it's kind of the workhorse right now it's one

that you know the ease of install is really improved and a lot of default templates are there and every major public cloud now offers fabric as a service as a recipe as a default template to go and deploy under their systems and in some cases you know above and beyond there's a startup called block daemon which is aiming to be the Heroku of blockchain as they saying and they've been doing a lot of work with fabric as has Amazon Web Services particularly for some reason in the Hong Kong office they've been doing a ton of fabric work so there's again pre-built images for AWS for Azure which sees a lot of fabric use as well and Baidu Tencent and Ali all offer block team as

a service platforms as well on fabric so that's it's that's that's that's what's exciting about fabric so in the in the sort of enterprise blocking space there there are other I guess protocols that are also used by projects that launch like consortium networks and I think tender mint is probably one of them also a theorem some assent with the theorem Enterprise Alliance you know briefly can you sort of give us the it may be like a sales pitch I'm like how other how hyper ledger fabric sets apart from those other protocols and how it's better so so fabric is definitely more of a complete kind of programming environment than ten Durman and in fact hyper ledger borough runs directly on tender mint as default

right and so I think if all you're looking for is consensus between a number of nodes as a driver for some smart contract work and to build-a-bra ledger then ten Dermot plus borough works works works completely fine there let's see and obviously there's other technology stacks out there I think you know kurta the structure for Cortes is but not really a blockchain it's more about being able to correlate transactions between entries in your ledger and entries in my ledger and not sharing a universal sense of the truth but but or converging on a common system of record and so so fabric is much more like traditional Enterprise blockchains in that way and when it comes to the etherium stack so we we just joined us

you might have seen a few months ago we announced a tie-up with the Enterprise etherium Alliance this was after I mean when they got started we followed many of the conversations about who they are and what they aimed to do and I think there was some notion early on that they might be both about building code and building standards and they hired Ron Resnick who was previously a head of a lot of standards work in the telecom space and so I met him actually saw him in Davos last January when he was like his first week on the job and we started talking about what EA could be and I saw that he really wanted to steer it in the standards direction so we've been supportive of that and as we've increased the amount of aetherium support inside of hyper ledger you know

being able to say you know burrow standalone or burrow + sawtooth or burrow plus fabric is a conformant enterprise aetherium stack right and and that can guarantee portability with other aetherium stacks it's pretty useful pretty important we haven't there hasn't that certification process hasn't yet launched but we are tracking what's going on in that community closely and trying to be supportive of them and and in general want to be good good members of the etherium enterprise community so that's how it would relate to that and then you know and then the competition can be about well performance it can be about additional features it can be about and tie ups with with other business

it doesn't have to be about a fight over your protocol versus my protocol and I think ultimately that's that's how we all win is when we converge to a small number not necessarily one but a small number of standards and protocols and just try to build the best engines under those standards that we can yeah I mean that that's a good point I think that kind of falls into my next question which which is with regards to I guess like if you remember serenity and polka dot and the substrate SDK or whatever you want to call it you know before I feel like and maybe perhaps still now there was really this sort of separation between like the public

blockchain you know tied to a token or some sort of currency and the the enterprise blockchain which doesn't necessarily have an asset and actually most cases is sort of tracking some sort of process and ensuring that every participant in that process is doing what they're supposed to be doing and that we can that we have that we have that lot of trail and in a lot of cases I think the use cases that we were envisioning in sort of the enterprise blockchain space specifically well the the public watching networks were not really suited for that purely because they were using a token and we didn't necessarily need one but also just because I'm sort of feature set alright we talked earlier I think about private transit private transactions the ability

to have a predefined set of actors that are either validating transactions or or just participating in a network what we're seeing now I think is that even public networks are starting to embody some of these some of these functionalities and some of these features so for example you know the ability to launch a sort of private network that is using a public set of validated or some of it that is in inheriting that security model the ability to do private transactions this sort of thing is certainly coming in the future how do you see how providers role moving forward sort of you know I I guess not necessarily competing but you know how does hyper ledger and these public networks interact with each other in the future

can we see sort of do you think we'll see private networks somehow connecting to public networks that use tokens and what would be the interoperability there sure well so in I think it was 2015 might even benefit earlier but definitely before I joined hyper ledger I met the guys at factum and they were showing you know hey we've got these private networks and they're fence posting their transactions into the Bitcoin network as a way to help participants on those private Ledger's have high confidence that when somebody presents a history of that ledger it actually is anchored to the public ledger in a way that guarantees the integrity and no matter what you know

two parties present different histories you can tell which ones telling the truth and which ones lying and to me that was like an obvious way in which these two worlds would would work together right using the public ledger for I know this sounds like a little bit of a joke but but and I think I might even use this metaphor or last time we talked to me if I'm wrong but I almost as like a like a public newspaper system of public record right you know in fact you've probably seen some people taking out ads and like the Wall Street Journal the classifieds posting hashes for contracts and things like that you know as a way to demonstrate even if you don't give the details here's the hash of a whole lot of stuff behind this this is also Tyrion's business model right this is something that people have been

playing with it's also been somewhat gratifying to see this idea that you know since a lot of the world's transactions deal with personal information and since a lot of the world's networks really need that sense of independence of operation even the chains like like with aetherium the conversation of plasma sub chains a lot of that is about branching things off into BFT or other consensus mechanisms that then report back to the main network in fact perhaps even the Lightning network could be thought of as a consortium network in that way where a lot of transactions happen off chain and then come back and get settled on chain right this seems like a pretty natural thing and combining that with the idea that actually there is a fair degree of

tokenization that happens on these private networks I'd actually say when you have a supply chain traceability network where title to that diamond door title to that bag of rice is being tracked not just metadata about it but but actual title to it you've essentially tokenized that diamond or bag of rice you've tokenized a a house title if you're tracking that you've tokenized an insurance claim yeah you know to some degree probably not a very fun jabal token but you're still moving it around so I think this idea is these are both about tokens and moving around one of them obviously more about public tokens and tokens that with a trust in them doesn't have to be tied to something real-world right but even on the private ledger you can have

tokenization of insurance insurance processes right I you know other types of things so I think we'll see lots of hybrid approaches I think we'll see most of the world's transactions especially those dealing with personally identifiable information even if encrypted taking place on consortium Ledger's where you can implement things like the GDP are the right to be forgotten or certain other illegal agreements between parties around data sharing and data reuse but a which you can't really do on a public ledger in the same way but uh but then a lot of things settling out or netting out to one or more public networks and I think this is the other key thing is I don't see these as a hierarchy so much as I see them as Islands connected by many

bridges and a lot of those might settle out to the etherium network but there might be other networks in parallel that these processes either secondarily settle out - or or settle out - instead of settling out - the etherium network um one of those could be a stable coin network run by central banks in a country whose tokens or your coins are considered you know highly desirable like the US dollar or the Euro or the remand B so we'll see one of the things I would love to discuss a few briefly is so when you came on the last time so it's 2016 right so if you think back of the period between I don't know maybe 2014 15 to 16 I guess there was really a lot of

interest in enterprise blockchain and enterprise blockchain companies were raising this massive funding rounds you know their company is like a digital asset or chain or a 3e or even block stream back then nothing was basically kind of talking about like enterprise blockchain use cases and they raced you know many cases 50 million close to 100 million or even more in funding but they seem to be so much interest in that and now in the last two years or in last I would say a year and a half there's been very very little funding for I mean there's been some for I think there was like Claire Maddox and and another one but but very little so what is your

what's your take on that is it just that maybe these enterprise blockchain use cases are taking off but it's hard to build like large businesses around it or like what do you think is going on you know you're asking about investor interest and irrational exuberance and and I mean I've been in the enterprise software space in one way or another for most of my life sometimes as a consumer like when I was at the World Economic Forum but most of the time I'm trying to sell this kind of concept whether I open source or not and the enterprise sales cycles are very long convincing companies to change how a core process works especially one that touches your core system of record and asking them

actually to trust something other than the database they can put their hands around or virtually put their hands around in a cloud right is a really hard thing to do and so I never saw this as a 18-month like get in have a big win and then go out and sell off to the sunset and I think to some degree the you know the sense the especially some of the early I co set this expectation that this was more explosive as a in terms of returns than otherwise it was enterprise sales software software sales is hard and sometimes it takes a new wave of investors to discover that all over again for for like the world or to reconcile but uh I think I think this is kind of like that saying things sometimes tend

to get overestimated in the short term and underestimated in the long term I don't have any doubt that in the long term a lot of those bets will pay off right I was reading recently about how the the operators of the Australian Stock Exchange who've brought in you know blithe and digital asset to come in and reinvent how they how they do their core transaction systems that that market will see savings in the tens of billions of dollars a year from the deployment of a technology like this simply in cutting fees and then cutting overhead and cost in in processing what they do so I don't have any doubt that in the long term you know the nets of this will will pay off for a lot of different parties but the other thing to keep in mind is that it very often in infrastructure investment waves the

amount of total return to the infrastructure layer doesn't pay off investment so when the railroads were were you know being invested in in the the latter half of the 19th century more money went in to building railroad startups you know the the Pittsburgh to Cincinnati railroad line right and all these companies there's a Wikipedia article about this which is fascinating more investment went in to railroads than ever came out in all the time since the 19th century right as an investment category it has been a lose for most people who've gone in and tried to I'm sure some people made made money in fact the railroad barons made sure that they capitalized quite a bit on it but for the average investor it did not pay out

and yet no one would doubt that the railroads made a tremendous amount of money for people on top of that infrastructure right for people should have been goods across it it's just a day managed to capture the bulk of the value created by this technology and that's perhaps as it should be maybe plumbing isn't the right place to try to capture reward you know the the majority of the innovation may be plumbing should be commodity maybe it should be something that that evolves and grows and goes through revolutions and that's what we're seeing now but the real money is in end user apps and I think that always has been the case and and you know is you know Google didn't make money by building a better search engine they made money by taking that traffic that came to the search engine and sending it off to advertisers

and others and I think that's that's something to keep in mind you know when in these investment cycles and I I know I've seen the curve for I cos you know in kind of investment in I SEOs over the last year I haven't seen a similar curve for investment in Enterprise startups that use bought chained in some way it would not surprise me if fewer companies pitching for VC rounds use the B word in there one first page a kind of intro or top-line explanation because I think people do realize this isn't magic pixie dust that takes a bad business model and makes it better we're past that point and thankfully so now I was interesting how you phrase this regarding the plumbing not making

the money because this is exactly the opposite I think what was the kind of did the going pieces that many B C's had and and nothing that drove many investments by B C's in the IC o---- space and of course at Union Square Ventures right they were kind of famous at that point for this fad protocol thesis right where this is exactly the date idea that you put the token into the plumbing and then actually the plumbing is what will capture the most value so I take it that's you know not have you share I can't I can't say I read that article and felt like I agreed with the main thesis I I didn't like it because you know none of the previous

technology movements ever had a situation worthy the hundredth person to pick up the technology made out with you know huge amounts of value over the millions person to pick up the technology it's like really great infrastructure my opinion creates increasing returns the more people use it rather than decreasing returns the hundredth person to buy a Bitcoin made out much better than the millions person to buy a Bitcoin and that's that's that's where I just didn't just didn't feel like protocols built that way would tend to lead to mass adoption in the same way that free protocols would I'm not the opinion that these companies that went out and raised tens of millions that perhaps even over a

hundred million dollars on the premise that they were gonna build enterprise infrastructure with blockchain I'm of the opinion that that the the reason why some of this is fizzle that is not so much because the sale site goes along but that the idea that the idea that which which was initially page to investors perhaps didn't really pan out and I I speak also from experience because this was my personal experience with the company that I previously was with and that many of these many of these companies went into the space with sort of a shotgun approach and tried to

hit every single you know blockchain use case which was floating around the time and tried to provide some sort of solution to that and in most cases weren't able to and it's sort of this lack of a product its lack of a clear vision and product that has been the reason for a lot of these companies not really you know becoming these large infrastructure place that they were meant to be I'd like you to maybe respond to that and get your opinions about what do you think about this I think for a lot of people they saw the etherium ICO and said I want to reproduce that and then and then more credibly they look at AWS and AWS is probably the strongest argument somebody

could come to against the idea that nobody makes money in plumbing in that AWS makes twenty billion dollars a year if I recall correctly and in plumbing right and being that kind of in you know pay for service infrastructure and if arguably there's a business and being the decentralized AWS out there which I know is behind some of the folks who are building some of these systems and I don't think that's necessarily an incorrect goal or desire or was was on its face incorrect I think it there is such a thing as well as timing there are times when I feel like one of the company I started in 1998 called collabnet which built the subversion open-source tool that also really

popularized the idea of making open-source software development a regular practice within enterprises and inside of enterprises between enterprises as well as kind of public facing stuff I you know I look at things like github selling for an obscene amount of money so it's a Microsoft which is great for them great for Microsoft great for github great for everybody tons of hard work but there's no no doubt I look at that as a little bit like well we're we just two generations too early you know it's a frankly had I started collabnet about six years later I would have definitely gone in a more a cloud friendly you know multi-tenant there's a whole bunch of like things I would have done differently right and I think there is such a thing as simply being too early not being wrong and I'm

willing to concede that a lot of the businesses that have raised funds or raise funds are the right premise the right long-term idea and if they have enough runway to survive if they cashed out of their tokens at the peak and have some money to survive the next five or ten years they may yet find that the technology base and the market comes around to they decentralized AWS to a decentralized you know answer to a lot of these things that does create some value for their tokens or for your enterprise value in the business that they build around it I just think the this wasn't a magic money machine that allowed us all printer and money and therefore be infinitely wealthy without any accountability or without any need to actually create value in the ecosystem that's where I think you know

this irrational exuberance came from in the market and and we've seen the appropriate correction for that I mean I always I wasn't speaking specifically about companies that went and raised ICO so I was actually talking about companies that did raise with VCS and you know companies like the ones we mentioned previously not not specifically I SEOs or you know token models well I think I think it's true no matter how you raise your money that it is possible to be truly into a market but I also think a lot of the companies you mentioned are not not dead yet you know I mean chained sold to stellar and is focusing now on stellar oriented applications for enterprises digital asset is signing up

new customers and moving forward with their project to the ASX these companies are don't seem to be flyby you know fly-by-night operations these seem to be ones who are building a business and it takes longer than perhaps some people thought it's the enterprise sales cycle but squared because now you're talking about n number of enterprises having to interlink their systems together before you see the real value come out of it so I you know I'm not just trying to be diplomatic here I genuinely feel like you know and I know you're you know what you want something spicy but uh but no this is this is hard work and what we focus on at hyper ledger is how do we at least avoid duplication of effort how do we at least encourage those companies to

build on common technologies so that they just have to spend less time doing stump doing the same thing over and over right they can move up the static as quickly as they can and that's resonating with a lot of startups in this space and big companies and others so yeah I wanted to speak a little bit about can I'm you know what is your ultimate vision for blockchain so what are the things that you know you hope 20 years from now that you know the impact blockchain is had you know on the world and do you also see kind of possible trajectories you know that maybe end up in like not a good place and and yeah what are your thoughts on that yeah I think I think be a fun game to go around

and ask me what's your favorite dystopian movie right and I'm 45 so it's movies from the 80s right and my favorite dystopia isn't 1984 its Brazil the Terry Gilliam movie I don't know if any of you saw it but I mean it's a comedy it's kind of Monty Python ask and humor but but really that's a society that is wrecked it's you know very technological but the technology is not very evenly distributed it's kind of retro futuristic and a way to off the typewriters everywhere but one of the most dystopian things is about bugs in the system in some cases literal bugs I don't want to give anything away but bugs that cause the wrong person to be rendered and to a prison somewhere rather than actually a you know treated

fairly and I worry you know we're definitely getting more digitized as a society and that's that's going to create a lot of good things but the risk is if if you get the papers your papers slightly out of whack is there if there's a type of somewhere or more importantly if there's a process that's not being followed that should be followed it's either going to result in somebody unfairly getting maligned or someone unfairly going to prison or disappearing from the planet right or most worryingly this creates even more opportunity for bad actors to get away with bad actions and that we can debate for a long time about who's a good actor who's a bad actor we can debate for a long time about civil liberties my my positive hope the reason why I'm

spending more time in this is I feel like these centralized systems even if we don't have that pure idea crypto anarchist kind of ideal of central assistance but instead we have more consortium networks where the parties keep each other in check in a meaningful way and where there's enough diversity in the network to avoid large actors from being able to get away with that actions then we have a much more fair basis for society much more auditable basis for society than we would otherwise have if current technology trends lead us to where it seemed to be leaving us otherwise my dystopian fear is that we never get past the bugs that as complicated as these systems get we introduce more and more error and we

simply drown in the complexity of it all and complexity only it ultimately serves the interests of parties that can afford to manage that complexity who can afford the armies of programmers and lawyers and others to buffer them from the reality on the ground it doesn't speak well to startups it doesn't speak well to innovators and and then my worries if you counter that with governance models that are too automated and too driven around a model of consensus that says majority rule or super majority rule then we forget that the appropriate role for civil rights in a society is to protect the minority right to protect the individual against the ravages of the mob the ravages of the hoard and so I that's what I wrestle with especially

with a lot of the desire to automate functions in governance that come from a good place I think saying there is wisdom in crowds but there's also madness in crowds and I don't know that we have enough protection against that that would be my fear is that blockchain technology gets weaponized as it seems like almost every other internet technology has but I think if we plant the right ideas out there get the right initial project that's why we're working a lot with nonprofits and government agencies to try to hopefully get the right kinds of technologies used and at the end of the day this is why open-source still matters with access to the machinery of these tools we can figure out what's wrong with them we can fix them we can subvert them we can

build new ones over and over again and that access to open-source code and my book is far more important than access to a network so before we wrap up I do want to talk about so the community aspect you've mentioned the last podcast about the importance of community and how important that was to Apache early early days talk about the hyper logic community and so it's how it's grown and you know who are some of the unexpected actors that are showing up there yeah so we have a real community of communities there's not only the 11 different software developer communities around each of those code bases we have cross-cutting kind of working groups as well around performance and scalability and architecture and identity and we have

people participating in those cross-cutting working groups even if they're not directly on the code base because they're bringing a level of expertise and a level of willingness to create content around white papers that sort of thing that's really important and a lot of that activity bubbles up to this kind of weekly gathering that we have every Thursday morning at 7 a.m. Pacific got the technical steering committee call and those meetings are public anybody can join the recordings are posted minutes are posted and that's where really the core governance of this growing ever growing community is managed right where new projects get approved where we review the performance of existing communities we try to answer questions and concerns about things and the culture there is is is it's really

strong III and I'm really happy to see how strong the commitment is to transparency in that in that community but we have unevenness out there in terms of projects and how active they are and such so something that my my staff continues to focus on and then secondly we've now got this growing end user community which were growing in a number of ways but the most important is setting up these sector-specific working groups we started with healthcare pretty early on and now we've added working groups in the public sector and the social impact space and we're about to launch one in trade finance as well and looking at other areas so this is basically a way for us to meet users in those communities with the technologies

and the developers kind of working on it to kind of like make sure we're speaking the same language to look for interesting use cases sometimes - it leads to new code so we have this thing called hyper ledger labs I forgot to mention which is a place where you know experiments and templates and documentation and other kind of things can sit without having to be full-fledged projects and there we've got the number of projects that have come out of this working group these working groups the healthcare one for example spawned a demo application around breast milk supply chain tracing which I guess is a big issue as like a way to explore these questions about you know like the the HIPAA for example the health care information and privacy asked basically ways to kind of see are

we every you know how would somebody building a system like that walk all these different balancing acts so that those communities on those working groups are growing as well leading to participants like you know the ones I expect the businesses in those sectors but also ones that we didn't like a lot of nonprofits I mentioned Kiva now now announcing that they're working with the government of Sierra Leone on those projects the government of Bermuda recently joined and is looking at how do they take a lot of their business processes a lot we have the government of Dubai government of Luxembourg all of them are starting to have these kind of internal blockchain centers of excellence blockchain expertise that they're building we're bringing them in in ways that I might not have expected

two years ago to have that degree of interest and hands-on engagement so so that's pretty fun and a lot of this is coming together at the hyper ledger Global Forum some one thing I definitely want to make sure people know about thank you is we have an event coming up in Basel Switzerland December 12th to the 15th called the hyper ledger Global Forum we're aiming for about 800 participants there and we'll have really a good mix of the software development side and kind of the technology what's going on as well as the the production and pilots and the end users and what they're doing with the technology Basel is really close to Zurich Switzerland is lovely in December lots of good skiing nearby and would really encourage folks to make it out

it's also surprisingly affordable especially if you're based in Europe it's easy to get to we'd love to see more people there so please if you have a chance Hyper ledger Global Forum check it out and I certainly look forward to being there I'm gonna be there doing some content on the show floor so I look forward to seeing you there hopefully reconnecting there again and and seeing everybody from a community at the event yeah so thanks thanks so much for coming on Bryan it was really fascinating and interesting to see how hyper ledger has grown and how that product and that community is evolving and looking forward to seeing what comes out of it in the future thank you thank you for having me here thank you for joining us on this week's episode we

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