Interview with ​Victor Wong and Kieren James-Lubin of ​BlockApps​ at DEVCON1 in London

Transcript

right now I'm joined by Viktor and Kiran who who are cofounders of block apps they recently had a partnership with Microsoft so I so we'd like to cover what what they are building so could you introduce yourself first we start with Viktor sure I'm the CEO and founder of block apps I'm experienced tech entrepreneur I've been the technical co-founder of several startups hi I'm Karen I'm block apps chief data scientist and also a PhD student at UC Berkeley so what exactly is block apps so block apps is an etherium blockchain as a service that allows you to rapidly deploy private blockchains and also

build and prototype blockchain applications on those block chains something yeah the focus of block apps is ease-of-use and modularity we've defined an interface so that when you create an application you can interface with public block chains private blockchains many block chains at once just by simply switching a URL we have components like wallets restful api that separately scaffold an application but individually could be used without any dependence on the others okay so so yesterday it was announced that like Microsoft is developing blockchain as a

service on a shoe and the block apps tools are part of part of that blockchain as a service so first we like to ask what is blockchain as a service and what is your what does your partnership with Microsoft entail right so blockchain is a services basically we want to take advantage of the Microsoft hazzard platform at least initially to rapidly launch new nodes on private blockchains and what this allows you to do is typically right now and the theorem world it's quite difficult to set up a new node you have to compile the go or C++ clients and kind of work with that typically that takes a couple days to set up but now with a zero you can kind

of launch this in minutes now once you have that launched usually most businesses Wasi they want to start building on something right away and we've provided an entire set of Tours so businesses and individual developers can just start using the tools and building applications almost immediately yeah just to reiterate the Azure process is extremely pain free it's a single click you wait maybe 30 seconds an instance is up you're running and you head straight to the documentation download the tools and you start building right away the turnaround time previous to that was again on the order of days so we've created a very simple environment so you

can start rapidly prototyping Marly gray are sort of point of contact and Microsoft's director of capital markets and our partner on this said we want to help companies fail fast and if they fail they pick themselves back up they iterate blockchain is coming blockchain is going to transform the way enterprises run and you better learn about it if you're a company so how did a small company like yours and like have this big partnership with Microsoft I guess you have been in stealth mode people didn't know about well so what when is kind of evolved is that when we

start building these tools we've had some small hackathons and to our surprise that we've had so these internal hackathons or sort of 70 private hackathons but people have picked up the tools independently so for example at the coin dos Kaka phone people started you know building on our stuff the winner of the Barclays Ryze hackathon built on our application stack so there's obviously a big demand in the community for an easier way to do blockchain application development and when we called Microsoft they were looking exactly for - a set like that one of the difficulties I think with this base is that it's hard enough to get your head around the concepts and the crypto but most

people just want to start putting application logic directly into the blockchain as soon as possible and we provided that yeah so this Microsoft partnership is spun up very quickly so meet to now with spend something like two months they've been really focused on pushing out their stance on the blockchain space it's been great to work with them I think that the thing that appealed to them is just how strong the fit is with their cloud platform it's it took us a very short time to get evidences put together and provisioned for deployment and you're just up and

running after that and if you saw the presentation yesterday adjure is focused on platform as a service it's not just you provision of VM it's they've taken care of all the problems you want to VM with our stuff you launch it if you want a VM with some no sequel database it's already built for you so really they're trying to take all the complexity out of getting up and running so that people can just build so so so let me get this right so in order to build a decentralized application running on say the etherium main net or let's say a private chain that I don't know maybe a few banks are running in the future the kind of tools you you seem to need are

one of the tools is an IDE or basically software that helps debug your solidity code they tell you what what the errors are etcetera and the other is a tool by which you can deploy your test chains yeah and have nodes on these chains yeah and actually when you write the solidity code deploy to deploy to it see it's property in properties in the real world out of these two SEP separate kinds of developer tools you are really focusing on something that allows deployment easily and not the actual tool to help right solidity code is that correct absolutely we we have tours on all elements of that I mean I think the the most difficult

thing that companies or individual developers are wrapping their heads around is it's not one tool that you need to actually deploy it's an entire set of tools so for example within our tools we wrap in a wallet a faucet blockchain node restful api and you know a connector to communicate with that blockchain so all of that stuff we bundle together and until you have it all in one simple package you can't really deploy an application so that's what we've done now each of those elements that we've created are also stood up in modules so for example let's say you don't wanna use our wallet you have your own wallet that you want to use you could still use our you know

restful api and our private blockchain node in order to do that our private blockchain node is completely earthier and compatible so if you wanted to use our node in cooperation with say NGO or C++ that works on that level too so the tools we've come organized it as kind of an easy way in but the farther you get along you can kind of break these apart and use the separate modules in whatever way you want I think our biggest value add is at the sort of integration layer just like in sort of object relational management for the the developers watching there's an impedance mismatch between you know representing data on

the blockchain and then representing it in user interface for people and kind of the this confused people tremendously at hackathons and such so one thing we we put effort into was just scaffolding an easy way to say why are the front end to the back out to where the back ends aetherium like you would in you know other web development situations so once you're up and running on that that that's the big friction that we we get you through and you can start to specialize sort of after that but we want to do the integration make sure our tools fit in with existing web and when you get further along we can still support you and you might start breaking things out but it'll all still work so you have like a

free offering and an enterprise offering right that's right and what's the difference between the two so we have several tiers of offerings the first tier is basically the free offering is you're running on our hosted private network the initial offering with Azure is you spin up your own instance and go that gives you your own private network and that's really inexpensive now all of these are just sand boxes so there's single node deployments for the enterprise offering we all offer multi node departments flow networks and we also allow them to we can put them on any of their existing infrastructure so many people are happy to use the azure

cloud and spin up multiple instances there but some people want some instances on the cloud some instances you know hosted on hardware that they control and we we have you know tested our stuff on many different platforms okay so yeah just a in the in the multi node case just to reiterate you can imagine you if you're multinational company you may need you may really need six eight ten 50 different locations because you go back and data databases you know account records to sync between these and this is a pretty good use case for a blockchain so you really might want to spin up a whole bunch of nodes but if you're in a developer and the

prototype phase probably you would get the first option until you started to understand what's going on and then when you wanted to scale up you would add more notes yeah you do you have any any any competitors today that are doing something similar I think there are a lot of people in the private blockchain space India fear in particular world I think we've kind of taken different approach than everyone else our key thing is to sort of integrate and interoperate with existing systems that's why we chose Russ for API so you know we can easily communicate to existing enterprise systems existing data that they already have we also built our stuff on top of a sequel database so we

can pull out you know arpan or using Postgres we in pull out and put in some other form of sequel database pretty seamlessly and so in that respect I think from the other part for blockchain companies were different because we're focused really on application and business logic on the blockchain and rapidly deploy yeah it's an interesting space right now I feel a big difference between the kind of New York companies and the Silicon Valley companies the Silicon Valley companies seem a little bit more Bitcoin focused and coming up things from less of a direct kind of enterprise focused or medium to large scale business focus they're trying to

create new things and definitely disrupt and there's a lot of value in that but what we're trying to do is talk to these companies see what problems we can solve kind of in their their back-end processing their back office and where we can save the money and that extent a theorem has actually been a big jump in functionality over something like Bitcoin because you really do need to automate the business logic in addition to the settlement so so you chose it helium because it just allows automation of business logic and is this the reason why Microsoft chose like the e tedium design as to offer as a blockchain a

service rather than the Bitcoin design absolutely I mean I think fundamentally the way we look at the theorem is not as a form of cryptocurrency but though that's one aspect of the overall platform but ultimately it's about being an application platform and allowing for you know back office automation and enter automating a lot of these pieces in the you know company puzzle that they want to just make more efficient and you know they want to turn it into from things that take days to things that take seconds and having that application logic on the blockchain with all the audit ability with all the historical records with all you know the immutable data they were really excited by

yeah to build on that there are just a lot of situations now that require human intervention to do tasks that seem like they could be automated in many cases just sending money from place to place in the u.s. been lost key once joked that you could probably send it there physically on on a plane faster and you know there's reasons it's sometimes it's purposefully slow because there's compliance and that sort of thing but a lot of the time you could actually in encode all the logic into the blockchain itself and this would enforce compliance and in you know nearly all of the cases and provide huge

cost savings yeah so so one of the difficulties I think many people have in this space is it's easy to understand what it helium does as a cryptocurrency and a lot of people say that it's gonna help with back office automation and verification but because most of the people have never actually worked in the financial industry and see in the back office it's hard for an outsider to understand the applicability of the technology there do you have any because customers already and can you give an idea of what kind what kinds of things these block keys make easy I'd love to tell you the list but you know wonder NDA's at this point but what I can tell you is we are

actively talking to many many financial companies and many of these companies have already spun up innovation labs and what they're trying to do is they have the knowledge on the financial side and we are providing tools where they can bring that knowledge and apply all of that business logic onto the blockchain and that's why we exist we're not war essentially thinking of ourselves as a technology provider or like you know think of it like a database company or something like this as opposed to trying to disrupt their business at this point in time yeah I can't say that common use cases have definitely emerged we are under NDA's but I've heard the same words many times and that's given us the sense that

the problems are really real and they're looking for a solution that they can just kind of grab and and run with there is a sort of a lot of time that will have to go into integrating their existing someone call them legacy systems with this new technology everything is we're gonna be very smooth on the new technology but they have kind of a tapestry of systems they've been using for four decades now that need to sync with it so that process really requires a lot of direct communication with with the domain experts so we can listen us find out more or block apps uh yeah come to our website at block up star net war setting up some education workshops to guide people into our tools

you can find our repos and in the next couple weeks you'll be able to find this directly on the Microsoft Azure marketplace they're setting up a new blockchain category just for us come and request a demo if you want to get us specifically or email us I can find it on the website nice to have you on the show thank you thank you thank you