Rethink Trust 2018: Adi Ben-Ari, Developing Platform Agnostic Blockchain Applications
Recording: Rethink Trust 2018: Adi Ben-Ari, Developing Platform Agnostic Blockchain Applications
all right thank you right I feel like the previous speaker Jonathan I've never actually met him before but I feel like we're soul mates so we're two Israelis having a girl trying to solve the same problems here Hey and then actually you'll see that even some of the slides are quite similar but we're taking I'll take you through the journey we've been on and really how we've come to the conclusions that we've come to so I do binary I'm the founder and CEO of a company called apply blockchain which I founded three years ago we're a company we're essentially a blockchain development studio so for three years we've been working with clients and building solutions using blockchain technology we've got we're selected by Gartner in 2017 as one of only four small companies worldwide in the report of companies in the blockchain space and we're actually in the 2018 report as well which I don't think has come out yet we've got a team of experts I'll show you them in a minute we're based in London but I'm starting to feel almost half Dutch and I'll show you why when we go through the client list they and inevitably we we we start off can people come to us asking for blockchain solutions but then they need to see the thing that's on the blockchain and so we end up building applications with web interfaces mobile apps wallets and so on so we have a full stack development team we're also one of our customers which is shell actually we ran a competition which we won we were awarded a very quite a substantial project with them and they offered to invest the show is actually an investor in the company as is a london-based VC called the calibrate so this is the team as I said they're all based in London but but we're starting to spend more time over here and these are some of the clients we've been working with over those three years now the interesting thing about the journey for us upon the fact I think blockchain in general is super interesting is that we have half our clients of startups and half the clients of corporates and it's been a 50/50 split since day one and that really gives us a very very interesting perspective because the corporates are coming to this understanding how blockchain can support and evolve and potentially disrupt the business areas that they're in and the startups on the other hand just wanted to stop the corporates and then want to move really quickly and they'll take big risks and what we can see from from from the two different types of actors in this space actually provides a lot of learning to us in the types of solutions that we can that we can offer so just looking through this list I'll go through some of the customers a bit later um but we've got some of the some of the large banks on here energy companies the United Nations some startups in things like invoice financing legal smart contracts IP registration consumer personal data all sorts of things so I'll talk you through something a bit more detail but when we look at blockchain in general if I had to say really two words that summarize why a company would look at block 10 in the first place permits about group security so when you have a distributed ledger and when you have these consensus mechanisms what you're actually doing is you're saying that instead of having the data in one place where it's potentially vulnerable more vulnerable to attack you spread it through a group and the group is really securing that data together so if somebody's trying to compromise they would have to would have to compromise a third or half of that group depending on the consensus mechanism so it really boils down to group security that's a really important thing to remember when you work your way through through these through the use cases as I mentioned shell shall run a competition invited blockchain companies globally on to to build a solution in the trading space we want the competition as I said the investors and we're involved in a number of projects with the company now we're also working out of Lloyd's Register which is the register of ships so what's really interesting in the blockchain space is looking at assets and we work with companies that are involved in assets in a different place in the lifecycle but actually where it all starts the asset creation and initial registration is really where where the blockchain work can actually begin and saloons registers is the registry of ships as soon as a ship is built and the shipyard it goes on there and if you think about all the trade activity and everything else that happens afterwards it's really all about this original asset and so it's very interesting looking at a blockchain where that first first resides a work of KLM and we have some people here from the company if anyone wants to talk about the project you can talk to them directly we also work who Sita which is a company owned by the airline industry working with them on a very interesting project around drones drone registration and specifically regulation around commercial drone flight activity we've also been working with IBM through a startup accelerator in the mobility space called rocket space another example of an application IP which is I like to call this provenance of people so it's where you studied and where you worked and proof of that evidence really when you go to your next employer and allowing onboarding and recruitment to be a lot a lot smoother more more reliable secure ties I love this company because they took a really really simple problem and they haven't left it they haven't lost focus or Chadha bolli ocean this is company signature lists which is who's allowed to sign what's on behalf of a company and that's all they do but they do it in a super secure way that can be shared between companies to reduce fraud so you don't get people leaving the organization and still signing some payments when they really are not allowed to ok so the subject of this presentation I really give you some background of where we've come from and why why we think we can talk about this so why build platform agnostic solutions and here this might look a bit like about like Bill Oh Jonathan slides originally we had Bitcoin then came aetherium adding small contracts tend them in so ok smart contracts super interesting but we like to make them private then parity with Leslie a split in the etherium founders and another version of this theorem client then JPMorgan came along and said well through is great but we'd like to add privacy so they created quorum consensus came along and brought together the enterprise a thermolysis alliance because they thought that all these companies should be working together on an enterprise version of theorem and then of course we had we've got hyper ledger which you've heard a lot about today and hyper edge of fabric by IBM or is it open source IBM hyper ledger Sawtooth which is again another different blockchain under the high poly umbrella from Intel another Hyperloop oj I'm not even sure what that one is the bank's came along and created quarter then ripple came along and created sorry another Swift digital asset Holdings another blockchain solution more for Capital Markets chain again a blockchain solution for capital markets - a faster Bitcoin I think Stella another faster Bitcoin cosmos let's bring all the blockchain together and create networks of networks polka-dot let's do that but not use cosmos hey on let's do that but not create and not use all of the other to quantitate a layer over all of these blockchain so they can talk to each other plasma I think this is bolting a sidechain onto onto a public blockchain but I'm not quite sure Rayden this is a side chain dragon chain I really dunno what this is but somebody tell me we should check it out Leo if you can only work in China for some reason it has to be on neo and they are I think this is really a private blockchain being called a public blockchain a big chain TV super fast but it's decentralized we're not sure had their apparel this one's really good but it's closed so I can't really tell you and that's just that's a tip of the iceberg all right I think today we've had people come up here and talk about blockchain platforms which are not on that list so the situation is really a bit out of control and it doesn't really make any sense to me as a techie now if you decided that your business should actually has an opportunity here and could actually do something on blockchain whatwe g-star what do you actually use and how do you decide what platform to work on so one of the problems is that as you can see as you can see from those all as logos I showed you the landscapes really evolving and it's not just about lots of people having a go it's about lots of different innovation happening there are different attempts at consensus algorithms and so on and we don't really know where this is going so we don't know which platform we'll be around in the next in the next few years or which one will dominate one thing to think about which jonathan touched on is at the end of the day this is a network technology and that means that we have to work together and you only really get value if you've got others on your network and if we're all creating little networks in isolation then we're not really going to get the value we might feel that we're commercially protecting and creating a competitive solution in our industry but actually we're not going to get the value of the technology we're not going to have security to a group as I showed earlier we're not going to get some efficiencies that we had earlier so I think we need to think of it in terms of a network and I said early we don't know which technologies will be around so we so we might find that actually some really smart people in the room they've created a fantastic new blockchain just fast and everybody else and appears to be super secure but who knows if they'll be around in a few years time and if you're investing now in building application you're building that on top and you really want that to last so we think a lot about how to perfu proof you or your investment in blockchain technology and my approach to this really comes from 20 years working as an enterprise architect solution architect in in enterprises and what was drilled into me was to keep all of your solutions vendor and platform agnostic as much as you can and really protect yourselves from being locked into a specific technology and that's not only related to blockchain it's just quite a good IT architecture in general and the way to do that usually unfortunately comes down to going with the lowest common denominator so doing things in a way that you know is relatively compatible or won't require completely reengineer your solution if you go from one technology platform to another now that means that you're not always making the most of the platform it means that you're not always having the the optimal solution it's a compromise but it's a compromise that allows you to future-proof your investment and getting a little bit more technical so not very much so if we think about the stack of an application so user interface at the top we've got an application which sits on a server typically which will be the distribute may be distributed it may even be centrally housed but that's necessarily a bad thing and then below that we would put platform abstraction so we would say that most of the stack above it above the blockchain doesn't really need to know or care which box chain you are using and that sounds simple but it it isn't that simple to implement and that's because part of the blockchain solution has to sit with the user and that's the keys so we have to find a way of having the keys on top and having an application in between and then having the abstraction to the underlying platform so keys go with identity which goes with privacy which goes with anonymity and these are requirements that we've seen across pretty much all the projects that we've worked on and even if they're not requirements yet there will be soon for each of those projects so I guess the other thing to think about is that you might be developing a solution initially in your organization but if it's going to be distributed which it really needs to be for you to get that security as a group then it's going to be distributed to a group and that means that it needs to be something that can be deployed easily in someone else's environment so we very much look at docker and Claire and where this how this is going to be containerized and easily deployed into different environments another thing to think about there is cloud vendors because if you're producing something which is with one cloud vendor then you're really forcing everybody else in your network onto the same the same platform and they might come with their own preferred vendor or their own environment which you would need to do that your ledger will suit the solution in which you're trying to distribute they would have to be able to adopt it and then below that we have the blocked chains and I've listed a few here and the bits of the application that goes in the blockchain is the smart contract and there are different ways of engineering the smart contract again using this kind of lowest common denominator approach we're really keeping things super simple what you're doing in a small contract you can be quite confident you could do in a smart contract on a different platform if you start going deep and using vendor specific or platform specific functionality that's when you're tying yourself to a specific platform so just to summarize number one is to keep the contracts simple generic and number two we think is to handle keys identity privacy and anonymity outside of the blockchain platform itself because if you do that most of what you're building you can actually be lifted and dropped onto something else it could actually actually be dropped onto an Oracle database from our friend who spoke earlier because the application wouldn't actually even necessarily be aware that it has to be distributed ledger underneath and I guess a bit like Jonathan who presented the solution earlier we've created an open layer of thin layer if you like to provide that abstraction and to handle anonymity data privacy like the keys so identity wallets on mobile web or on a server if it's b2b and we've done this in a block to an agnostic way and we've also done it in a way that supports gdpr because again we're in Europe most of our clients are and this is absolutely a requirement that we have again almost every solution that we work on so this is an open framework and and we've designed it to be used with any underlying blockchain platform but it's really to safeguard against being tied into the underlying platform you know in the activity that we've done at you one client came to us and said we would like to build a solution but we really want to understand which are the platforms we should use so can we pay you to build a platform once and get it working on two different underlying technology blockchain platforms and we did this with a theorem with Hydra fabric and we were able to demonstrate the application on top following the the architecture and a structure that I showed you earlier actually worked on both platforms and we had very similar versions of small contracts working on both so this does actually work in practice and then they asked us part of the wall who's really analyzing the difference in the platform's performance how complex they are to install lots of other properties of the platform's themselves I know what they were evolving over time yes it's quite quite difficult to to you know what we did a year ago might not be relevant now finally I'd like to speak about fun so furniture is a project which is I've got a product piece that we've started internally and the idea we're fern was really looking a lot of the projects that we build on I'm thinking where all these things going so as Jonathan said quite eloquently earlier you've got a permission this public blockchain and you've got the private blockchain now people are doing this we think because of the group security to make the solutions more secure for their users and learn more tamper-proof less open to fraud you can't really go into the public chain we think because for regulatory reasons performance reasons and cost reasons in its current form I want to say public Channel talk about cerium we can talk about all the other variations if anyone wants offline but I really think about cerium then private networks you can really use any of the platform's I described earlier it's obviously fabric of thorium and so on but most of the platforms that we build for both startups and corporates they start off in one place right they start off with one organization and it's actually very very difficult as a company as an organization to take the thing out of the building you built it it's it's really built for your environment and so on actually commercially politically of all sorts of reasons quite difficult to start distributing it and starting to start distributing control of a database which is going to hold your customers data but if you don't do that then actually you're not really using the technology to get any value out of it because you have complete control of the Ledger's and therefore you could potentially Deford it and if that's the position and you might as well just use a regular database so which one I think how can we help companies to actually create a distributed private network how can we encourage the ecosystem that's really what come up with fun and it is really early days it's quite quite experimental but the idea we've come up with is having on the one side having companies like our customers who've come up with blockchain solutions and they have these private networks that they would like to expand into the ecosystem of their counterparts on the other side we have well in the middle here we have kind of a new economy of providers so you could think of these as miners in the in the in the business in corporate world so companies providing hosting nodes or or providing API and Oracle services into the into these private blockchain environments now these these providers would be fully regulated and compliant with the corporate requirements or the business requirements and they're and that could be proven so they that pool would be a pool of identified providers and it could be audited by their by the businesses and seen and seem to be compliant the trick is and really what we've tried to do is create a protocol which is above the the the private blockchain network so it doesn't matter which technology you're using this sits in the smart contracts but it automatically selects a subset of that pool for your for you to work with as your providers for your private network now what we can do here and again we need to run this by our clients to see whether they open to this we can keep the ones that have been selected anonymous so you might not know which ones are actually providing a service into you but you'll know what you'll know you'll have proof that they're part of a group where you vetted the entire group so you could onboard them all as suppliers but actually only a subset and you don't know which subset is providing the service to you and we can provide cryptographic proof for that for that for that selection their activity and I think that gives us a kind of interesting paradigm here where we could say you have compliant proof of compliance on the one side but you have decentralized control on the other because it would be very difficult to Deford at the system if you don't know who the pot who the other parties are so that's a paradigm that were that we're thinking and you have to with me on this because this is really very very new and we're sort of experimenting with it but that's the kind of direction that we're thinking about how we couldn't make these real distributed systems in the the environments of the corporates have to have to work in and have to do business in I'm not just work corporates also any any company which is really there in a regulated business environment that's it [Applause]