Panelists
Amber Baldet Co-founder & CEO, Clovyr
Silas Davis Chief Technology Officer, Monax
Duncan Johnston-Watt Co-founder & CEO, Blockchain Technology Partners
Susan Ramonat Founder & CEO, Spiritus Partners
← All talks
Turing Fest 2018
Panel: Taking Blockchain Beyond Cryptocurrencies
Auto-generated transcript - may contain errors. Tap a timestamp to jump the video.
Welcome to the blockchain panel. The description of this panel is taking blockchain beyond cryptocurrency. So I'm sure at some point the C word will be mentioned but what I'd like to do is, because we've only got twenty or so minutes, is actually start by asking each of the panelists to not just introduce themselves but also to tell us a little bit about how they are taking blockchain beyond cryptocurrency.
Amber, if we can start with you please. Sure, my name's Amber Balday. I'm co founder and CEO of a company called Clover and we're bringing modern application development practices to building applications. Not just blockchain, also other decentralized things but we are moving beyond cryptocurrency in that a lot of our customer base is enterprises and usually the way that they're engaging with the technology is as more of a data structure and networking layer rather than tokenizing things at this point.
We're also working with things in the public space where you might be using something that's not a cryptocurrency but is a tokenized representation of something else. Thank you. Silas? My name is Silas Davis, I'm the CTO of Monax, please come and visit us if you're interested.
Later, we were a company that was a pioneer in permissioned ledgers early on using the Ethereum virtual machine internally, and we're now building a legal agreements network. So, this is a shared database and a shared piece of infrastructure where you can represent legal agreements, and crucially, legal agreements which have some moving parts represented by a business process model, and there's something useful about just representing the agreement and having a hash that you can point at and say this is the thing, but down the line we want to,
where you have some relationship between organizations, where the source of truth is some agreement or system of agreements. We want these agreements to be able to talk to each other, trigger something else on another agreement, and then have systems downstream of that driven by that.
It's very un automated at the moment, and one thing that a blockchain database allows you to do is sort of share your root password with other companies in a way that you couldn't do with traditional infrastructure and there's a bunch of other things, but yeah, we're building actual contracts in smart contracts.
Thank you, Susan. Susan Ramanaut, I'm CEO of Spiritus Partners, and in many ways a double transplant. A transplant from Wall Street started Dow seven hundred and left at Dow nineteen thousand. You can look at the charts, it's a long time ago. I came across blockchain some five, six years ago, in dual capacity as head of corporate development and enterprise risk for a firm that provides investment processing, fund administration services to large banks and money managers.
The double transplant is we're applying distributed ledger technology in healthcare around the insurance that medical devices and equipment are safe and in good order and secure through their life cycle. We have the benefit of a pilot here with the NHS in Scotland, hence the double transplant.
My co founder and I moved here a year ago with four suitcases, some electronics, and a few photos. Love Edinburgh, love the community, and opportunities like this to share but also to benefit. Thank you. A natural sort of follow on for all of you is really drilling down on some of these use cases.
Healthcare, it's a big field. You've talked about devices. I know there's a CivTech thing here around actually tracking medical equipment so that it doesn't just get lost or wasted essentially. The circular economy, is that the kind of use case that you're focused on?
That's the decommissioning piece of this, that's the last leg. If you think, I'll draw a contrast. Everything from a bed, hoist and mattress, which needs to be sanitized, surgical tools, implantable defibrillator that's software enabled, to an infusion pump, long operating lives in an acute care setting, ultimately moving to community and home based care.
So the continuum really is almost anything. Across a life cycle, inspection, testing, certification, maintenance and repair, corrective action, and then decommissioning. I think an important point, not just on circular economy, for medical devices in particular, actually many of them are reprocessed and or recycled, auctioned, and sent to the third world.
They wouldn't necessarily stay here. So there is a meaningful issue, particularly around endoscopic equipment, infusion pumps, ventilators, and the like. We're concerned about that operating life, building enterprise grade So I'm wanting click on you, although I seem to be clicking on you. Why blockchain in that case?
A great question. What do you need? This ecosystem, and I will refer to it as a minimum viable ecosystem, just does not include the hospital as a provider and the OEM. There tend to be either certified firms that act on behalf of the OEM, distributors that have those responsibilities, and or the clinical and engineers and staff that are part of a complex health system.
The regulations of the FDA and the EU MDR likewise require not only that manufacturers have a line of sight to ensure in a post market sense that they're surveying and monitoring adverse events as well as picking up performance information that could be clinically relevant, but distributors as well.
You have an ecosystem of players. Some of the lives and service histories can extend over a decade. So I've tried to address, actually I just released a second piece, a two part article. The first one looks at the standoff between OEMs and independent service providers and hospitals about who's responsible, who's in best position, has the expertise, and then this proposal around this, what I call the middle ground.
Okay, so I know with Clover, Amber, that from what I understand anyway reading, you've had some great coverage since you sort of announced the company in consensus recently. It looks like you're in again a different kind of middle ground but one way you're providing a lot of tools.
So helping people develop applications rather than necessarily going into the sort of vertical of every single app. Is that fair or not? Absolutely. I was previously, my prior life was as blockchain lead for JPMorgan Chase and in that case I did a whole lot of use case consulting within the financial verticals but I also led the team that was producing the Quorum platform which is a permission and privacy preserving version of Ethereum and so because of that I was traveling all around the world talking to corporates that were using it for example.
Genentech and Pfizer were using Quorum for tracking ingredients for drug providence But Siemens, for example, is using it to track the veracity of code because they three d print nuclear reactor parts on-site these days which is crazy that that's a thing that they do.
But post Stuxnet, you really can't even trust your own systems. So even working within the financial industry to understand things like what might commercial paper look like if there was no longer the kind of antiquated system of issuing agents that we have now that sit in the middle of that or what might a multi broker dealer platform look like where what you're really trying to do isn't figure out how to implement a blockchain because that's not what your clients ask for.
They asked for could I not have to come in at five in the morning as a corporate treasurer and call five different desks to figure out what the going rate is and then when I call you back, you tell me the inventory already moved.
So what we were focusing on there was figuring out how to solve client problems, make the client experience better, squish the operating margins of middle office which are an increasing pain And out of that, I just realized man, this stuff is hard. People are writing white papers and issuing press releases like it's all good.
Building these applications, it's like you're using command line tools from the 90s and direct coding database passwords. It is not good. So, that's kind of where Clover is focusing. That, Silas, leads naturally given you're the CTO on the panel to really a question about as we move forward, not just understanding the characteristics of what make a good or application but how do we deal with longevity because we're all doing lots of proof of concepts, spinning things up, tearing them down but if these things are going to run,
they're going to run for decades, maybe tens if not hundreds of years. Yeah, block chains are slow and really immature, and some of that is bound up fundamentally in you're having a big ask from the computer science side in the consensus algorithms where, for example, what we use has to send worst case N squared messages to reach this strong level of consensus with malicious actors being tolerated.
So, that's about performance. In terms of longevity, I think we need to, you need to have some kind of an abstract data model so that for example, I'm dealing with this now in terms of upgrading very fast moving target in our consensus engine back end, how do we move what is a slower moving target in terms of our legal definitions, what we call our archetypes, which contain legal pros, a process and some parameters.
One thing that there is a circling, swirling standardization around is Ethereum, and Ethereum means lots of things, it means a virtual machine, but it also means a standard for thinking about the world, the Ethereum world view, which says there are these things called accounts, they reside at twenty byte addresses, they have state in a certain form.
So, there's an example where there's portability at that kind of what is an interface layer that there isn't necessarily portability, I can't just copy the bytes of my database across, but I think the idea of exporting state and importing it is important, and one nice thing that's happening now is we talk about the idea of setting up state channels, these many chain, well, where maybe you set up a blockchain that, although durability is a big watchword particularly for the public blockchains, maybe you can compress the information,
the interactions that happen between some counterparties, which also by the way keeps it private, and then store what's important about that back on a main chain, right? Anyway, the more that you're doing that kind of stuff, the more that hopefully we can work on a data model level portability for these things, but I certainly don't think that, like there's way too much that is wrong in the actual implementation level of these block chains to think that that's what we're gonna be running in one hundred years.
Or, even in two years. Oh, in two years, would, So, with that in mind, and please any of you jump in, when I think about, we're here today covering strategy, growth and product. So we've touched a little bit on some of, I guess, the challenges around product.
In terms of growth, this is going sound very negative, but Gartner reckons this isn't going to really kick on until twenty twenty five. So I'll be mind you, it's quite a big market by then, it's three hundred billion dollars which is not insignificant.
But the idea, if you believe them, is that in the five years from then on, it is really going to kick on to be a three trillion dollars market, which is obviously huge. How, any thoughts on that? I mean should we all come back in five years time or you know, obviously not or we wouldn't be sat here but.
I mean that's one of the reasons that now is a very important time to be working on these things. You have, it feels a little bit like standing in the 90s and trying to imagine streaming Netflix on your phone when you barely had a Netscape browser and it's easy to say at that time the internet is only worthwhile for nerds and this is never gonna go anywhere and it can't Smaller doesn't exist.
You're not gonna be able to, we can't do media. But a decade isn't as long as it used to be in internet time and I think that twenty twenty five will be here certainly before we know it but if you wanted to have the type of impact as having gotten in on that very early ground floor of the internet and I don't mean because you found some dot com bubble company.
I mean because you can actually impact the type of very low level protocol type choices that we're making like the privacy choices that Silas is talking about have real impacts whether or not we use continuing strong cryptography there, whether we use state channels or whether we use zero knowledge proofs, they really will impact society at large.
In fact, the talk I'm giving briefly after this, guess this is a pitch for but it's not about blockchain, it's about building a more ethical internet. I think, sure you can wait and then get a job in the industry as it comes around.
Now is a fascinating time to contribute. Any comments from you guys? I think you come up to that level to say if there's a fundamental disruption in business as we understand it, and your operating model, and you can work around narrow use cases, proofs that bring together a proof of ecosystem as much as a proof of the underlying technology.
We see it as responsibility, and we both come from backgrounds, our CTO and I, of working with enterprises, and facing off with regulators or senior executives, being able to defend decisions, and the underlying policies, procedures, and controls that go with them. To be able to say, we're going to insulate you and future proof you, that the work that Monax and Clover do, or more broadly, Blockchain as a Service as an emergent technology that will be hammered out and refined, that if we can insulate and future proof,
but be there at the application layer and integrate So in that sense, it becomes like IP, is that the idea? Because we've had the semantic web that came and went, maybe it's having a little bit of renaissance, maybe Silas, getting a little technical here for a minute, is that really what we're talking about, that we're creating a different protocol or set of protocols that will drive business?
Both two things resonate from what Susan Ambrose has said. One thing is that I have relatively little faith that any company working in something that's so new knows exactly where it's going, but if as a useful exhaust fume from doing this you get some very powerful decentralized tech, then I'm on board for that.
So I think that in a form of iteration, Monax, formerly Eris, was pretty early on a similar market that Clover is now coming into, so there's that. I think the other thing is and what we really pivoted to is we are focused on a point solution, on a use case that sits at kind of overarching level on a lot of things because a lot of business processes are driven by some legal agreement, but we whisper blockchain these days really, and we think that we can create a market.
Part of this is we can allow law firms that would be fiercely competitive say to come in and be co founders on our agreements network, but we are trying to prove out the use case, if you like, fact that we blockchain is a longer term tactical strategic bet that we believe is coming to fruition and you know what, if you're not into that, the product should stand on its own and the network should stand on its that sense, I think you maybe didn't mean to say that but it's bigger
than a single company, right? Mean, been involved in Open Source for a decade or more and obviously I know you guys contributed Burrow to the Hyperledger family. It seems to me and as the moderator I can't say anything but I can say it seems to me that open source has a significant role to play and also the notion of communities working together to solve some of these problems.
That just obvious or do we need to spell that out? Yeah, I don't know whether it's obvious but yeah it's a huge part, personally a huge draw for me and I also think that there's, excuse me if I get a bit navel gazey with this but I think that in a way what we're doing with some of these ecosystem things is if open source is the idea that surprisingly counter intuitively you can get more back by giving away, the idea of having an open instance where you say okay
we're gonna give away control of the network, like we're gonna spin out, we're gonna lose quorum on this network, we're not gonna be able to control but it's like some analog I feel, the instance that you create when you run a particular network doing a thing is like a second order open source y type thing.
Yeah, some of the innovation of what distributed systems have existed for a long time but you can have centralized distributed systems where you have some entity that's responsible for ordering or possibly censoring the network. In some of these more trustless decentralized systems, what we have is the opportunity to kind of reimagine a digital commons that in a sense we've kind of lost from the open world wide web as we know it, as we continue to see this push of centralization behind a relatively small number of forces that we all
know, the Googles and Facebooks of the world. And so, by reinstituting both the idea of distributed consensus but also backing it with some of these cryptoeconomics that add a new layer to how people who don't necessarily trust each other might be able to still interact and incentivize behavior with each other.
It's a way to imagine different kinds of business models that might actually be a countervailing force against this kind of centralization push. But nobody is gonna stand up a business model or a use case and say, you know, why don't we just see if we can decentralize ourselves out of business?
That sounds like a great idea. Sign me up for that use case. So there's this kind of tension between enterprises trying to figure out how do I squeeze margins and coopetition with people that kinda do the same thing that I do while at the same time other people are trying to say, what if we actually didn't need you to be doing that anymore?
Nobody knows what's going to come out of that yet. So, I know we're running low on time but just then to sort of bring this back to its impact on everyone, how do you see this play out and maybe we can go Susan, Silas, and then a last word for you, Amber, in terms of what is gonna be the ultimate deep impact of this technology?
It won't be transparent. It won't be transparent. It won't be transparent. It will have become that substrate, right, enable it be invisible? It won't be necessary to know and understand. And we're at this hybrid place, this is making me think of this, is the most virulent debate in sectarianism is occurring among those who know most.
They're in the best position to challenge one another on code, and yet, if we want to talk about broad societal impact, my mother, who's eighty two years old and lives in Cleveland, should be indifferent, but in her assisted living setting or wherever it is, it should be seamless and transparent for her that this is an enabling technology that puts her in a different position than she is today.
And an example of that, and I will let you guys wrap up, is the self sovereign identity that you talked about this Exactly, good Good example. Yeah, I mean that's an interesting thing in itself, I'll try not to get distracted by that. What Amber said is kind of a rallying cry for me, why I wanted to get involved with this tech, it's rather vague We're hiring.
But it's rather a vague path from here to there, the increasing decentralization of the internet, and it seems like if we can move towards providing what these super aggregators provide at the moment and if we can have things like DIDs, linkage done by users, if we can actually engineer in the means to protect certain things, then I think long term that's where I see a large amount of value.
Then from a technical point of view, if you can actually scale these rather powerful consensus networks you can prevent a whole class of software failure modes because you can have some kind of strong synchronization. We're not there yet. Yeah, of course I don't know exactly where it's going, that was kind of the point.
But, I do hope, or I think that where we'll be able to see some impact is in any sort of change in more traditional power structures. And, I look at the forty five percent of the world that still does not necessarily have internet access and how they're coming online as mobile first and some of the challenges that James Turrin was just talking about in getting those people access given the cost of internet services and how mesh networking might change that and how that might play into
some of the decentralized kind of technologies that we're working with. And then you look at self sovereign identity and who actually owns your ID. So my concern about this becomes the usability and the creation of a new kind of technocratic ruling class that has the tools to be able to own the next generation of tools.
So we see this kind of countervailing decentralizing to centralizing, now decentralizing force that's going to again centralize around new power centers. So, just as we saw the destruction of kind of your GEs and Kodaks as being in the Fortune ten for a new class of ruling companies, there's nothing to say that the new crop of ruling companies that come out won't be just as bad as the current ones for humans.
So, just because it's decentralized doesn't necessarily mean it's good and we all need to kind of help each other learn how to empower ourselves and our communities so that we actually can make informed choices with the new technology. So, to sum up, blockchain does not help us avoid dystopia but it may help us work around some of its rather nastier edges and so given we're in the country that spawned E and Banks and E and M Banks, I think that's a great point to end on.
Thank you Amber, thank you Silas and thank you Susan. Thank you.