Rethink Trust 2018: Nick Kurat , Insights from Enterprise Blockchain Engineering
Recording: Rethink Trust 2018: Nick Kurat , Insights from Enterprise Blockchain Engineering
all right so let's resume again we have a very tight schedule have 10 minute breaks scheduled pretty often but we'll need to make sure that we are resuming every segment on time because we will not sleep you know we have a lot of excellent excellent presentations so we want to make sure that we have 10 minute breaks and you know about 2 minutes before the end of the break we invite you guys back so we can start on time our next two talks are from the companies which are the corgin eyes errs of this event and I must admit that for me it's pretty unusual by-the-by events I produced them myself in San Francisco I needed partners in Europe and I was super fortunate to find two amazing company so intellect soft I'll invite Nick korat who is the director of book chain lab he is basically of the catalysts of everything including this conference he his specialty is catalyzing so I met Nick when I worked in a co-working space in Oakland California and I was building my 2014 events Scala by the bay right and kind of my conference was young I was essentially kind of one-man orchestra and Nick was all the time and the phone booth conversing with his secret Ian developers and partners around the world moving multiple startups forward so you know he basically the next time he came and fresh off the boat he won like a pitch competition or something like that so so Nick is really the spirit of startups he he was instrumental in this and intellect soft that basically was fortunate to acquire Nick's company right has him as a director of launch energy interacts of itself proved really strong partners to the founders Alexander's kalibanos and Artyom they went to scale scaled by the way last year and they saw you know this was this engineering spirit and operation and they decided to support us and not you know the the basically the fielded a team so please meet them at the stand they have the amazing people who helped build this I want to you know please stand up our demand and so they are the founders index often eke is gonna tell us what is the bicycle enterprise use cases for blockchain and what's intellect soft taking this [Applause] alright hello everybody did you have a nice coffee break already how's coffee who likes the coffee I raise your hand I enjoy this coffee and this it's really good so I really would you find a really nice place with a good coffee sometimes they call coffee shops you walk in and there's no coffee in this city still alright so I'm gonna be talking today about some insights that we learned about blockchain development in the enterprise from our own experience and for you know for starters let me reduce myself real quickly boom so that's me I've been in the IT industry for 14 years in fact the first company that I co-founded was at the age of 17 and it's not like a small company as speakers are normally saying like hey you know I started this company which was a tech company it was like a little kind of crappy startup it's a pretty fair sized company we it currently has like hundred 50 people in it and working with Fortune 500 companies or the enterprises so for these 14 years I have been helping both both service companies and product companies across the globe to implement enabling technologies and currently as Alexi already mentioned I'm with intellect soft blockchain lab I am a director of that lab basically leading the whole blockchain thing for the for the company intellects of blockchain lab it's it's the department that helps SMBs and enterprises provide best talent when it comes to blockchain cyber security and cryptography we are enjoying access to one of the pools in Eastern Europe which is the you which holds the best guys in all of those areas so that's that's a little bit about us let me before we get to the overhype let me ask some of the questions to the audience so who of you are actually working with technology like full time so engineers like people that work in with technology all right that's good who are the managers then who's who's the manager ok well it's like 60% 40% that we really appreciate both of the groups here because we're a bit we're gonna be talking here about like technological side of things sort of a side of blockchain so I think that would be important for both ok so I am talking on a weekly basis almost daily basis to different companies that want to implement blockchain in their business and so when you're talking to these companies you recognize that there's totally sold on blockchain so they heard you know something about blockchain they they heard about some of the you know benefit that it brings and they're keen to implement it they have like budgets and everything they're like you know shut up and take my money right just do the thing for me and when you started up talking to them and like okay what is your use case you know we should check whether blockchain is actually appliable in your situation whether it's gonna actually help your business solve some problems that centralized systems cannot solve you see that they're not educated on that right so they're just under the hype the other guys they are well aware of the pros of the blockchain so they can totally name ok what what exactly from the blockchain is gonna help their business but then when you're talking about the downsides of blockchain some of the challenges some of the limitations they're not aware of that we are sticked ology people and we people that are focused on technology we understand that - to the deep extent and so what I'm doing in those talks I'm basically like to say I'm D hyping the blockchain down to its fundamental value right the fundamental value is there but then you have to educate people that hey walk chain is not solving any every problem in the planet it's not like a magic wand that you just know swing it and then magically all of the problems that your business had you know it just goes away we as technology people we recognize that you know there is fundamental value there is certain level of hype and we have to work through work towards like D hyping that and making that magic happen for these people that don't understand what's what's it is about so what is the blockchain fundamental value as as technology people would understand because we know what's under the hood what is the fundamental value right so we understand the technology lies behind it so that's why we can we can understand that so there is a there is a saying that Don Tapscott said he is a co-founder of blockchain Research Institute so he said in 2017 blockchain cryptocurrencies became too big to ignore in 2018 they will become too big to fail and while while I don't enjoy people putting blockchain and cryptocurrency in the same basket I'm actually really with dawn on the you know on his thought that blockchain is actually become becoming too big to fail Gartner just last year released this report it's a forecast about the interest and the growth the business value grows that the blockchain is going to make in the upcoming couple of years and so we see here that the interest is still growing it's still growing it's gonna be growing for a couple of years but then at certain point of time when people kind of either start understanding stuff and then kind of D hyping they will lose interest but the business value will keep keep building up and eventually it's going to come to what Gartner is estimating to three point one trillion dollars right and so obviously at that point you know the interest of the people in in blockchain will come back no matter whether you believe this this is accurate or not you know some may have some questions about these numbers and things but what we can totally say is that it's not just the sheer interest that we are seeing in blockchain technology industry leaders are actually seeing a true technology shift in blockchain and deities in general so I recently bumped into the blog book post of Matteo from essentia where he was talking about like the adoption right what what Broxson projects are out there and so he basically named like 50 of them are more than than that and he was kind of arguing ok so guys you know there's a lot of different blockchain projects out there like in production working I I went through some of them and there but you know not a lot of them they're in real production right there's a there's definitely some of them there that are used by a limited number of users but like it's not quite there yet out line ventures they have this whole tracker that is available on their website they're tracking enterprises they have a list of 300 enterprises you can find it on their website so it basically tracks the engagement that each enterprise each of the ones in the list has with blockchain and what type of engagement is that is that a POC what kind of technologies they're using it's pretty helpful but then when you go through it you figure out that it's actually pocs to write very few companies especially when it comes to enterprises have something in production that is there is actually working you know full-scale these companies are actually playing with an investing or engaging with with with blockchain and DLT but but not like on on a large scale basis so what I wanted to do today is go through some of the areas of improvement really quickly I just have a couple of minutes left so just to get through some of the areas of improvement where a blockchain has to improve to be able to be introduced into the production environments of enterprises because it's not there yet let's be honest we're old technicians here we don't need to each other right so a couple of things that I've noticed I understand that there may be maybe more for instance scalability it's actually per second it's not there yet right everybody's working on it you know everybody is you know like doing the marketing around it but like transactions per second is not their performance is not their complex query and data structures only simple data structures and and simple queries can be done on the ladder right now and it's not enough for the enterprise computation limitations team scalability and eval is another one so it's not that just the technology scalability but also people that you are able to hire from the markets when you go to all these like rare uncommon unfamiliar technologies for the enterprise or let's say limited like rushed like husk oh right like going there is no way you can hire on you know on the large scale hire these guys into the team and have it in their enterprise so that's why enterprises are freaking out because of this next thing is maintainability the community is fragmented everybody's making their blockchain I would I was I was really appreciating what Chris just said on his keynote because he said like it's time to unite everybody is doing their own thing and smart people are basically scattered around all of these different blockchain projects and imagine if we could take like half of those guys put them into one room and just work on the same standard same protocol where we what would we be by this day if that would it would have happened system versioning migrations continuous improvement with it as engineers understand that these are the kind of you know sensitive areas dynamic configurations one like people are forking entire blog chains for just one thing to change you know like for instance to change the block size you need to make a fork because it's hard-coded into the ledger so there's there's no ability to actually dynamically change the the configurations smart contracts updates people lose money was cut smart contracts if it's not if it's buggy right so if it's if it's not there yet so Interop Interop with existing legacy systems there are a bunch of them of eminent in the enterprise you cannot roll everything out on the blockchain there's not happening you're gonna be doing that module Mumbai module so it's really important to have that interrupts between the legacy systems cross chain interval interval bility as well right so if you have multiple chains how do you put them together fast forward cost of ownership I mean that's a big one right infrastructure costs block chains the technology is getting more and more demanding on that the team will already talked about it new functionality integration is that that's adding up to the cost as well so it may feel as if you were walking on the minefield when you're developing blockchain in an enterprise there's so many pitfalls that you can get into if you don't use the experienced people if you're not using some of the best practices or the people or the best practices are just not there yet right so cost of error at the same time is really high because if you do something wrong you know the budget allocated the expectations set of the enterprise's you know it all hurt and you know people are trying to rush with blockchain Enterprises trying to rush with blockchain I'm coming originally from Ukraine who recognizes this thing Chernobyl this is a nuclear power plant that basically exploded is the major disaster it's like 10 times more than Fukushima and so it's a natural nature disaster on the whole planet because the latest innovation technology of a time was rushed right and the team they had their plans so the cost of error is super high with blockchain as well imagine having your bank online banking running on blockchain and something going wrong no me nobody will give nothing about what platform you're on Iran it always worked and nobody care if it's if it's centralized solution or decentralized solution so all in all we will be talking about this war on our workshop is this happening at one pea in right behind the screen your Immortal welcome to come on we're going to be talking about the rest of the slides that I skipped so the rest of the kind of bottlenecks that Enterprise has both blockchain with real-life implementations and PLC's as well we're gonna cover some of the best practices we use in blockchain lab and intellect self blockchain lab some of the workflows we use internally this is actually the first time we're we're sharing that publicly so you're gonna you're gonna like it and then we're gonna share also the way how we choose which blockchain platform to use for any particular project so you don't want to miss this thank you very much that's me if you can connect to me in the social networks and LinkedIn I'll be sharing all of the links that I had in the presentation I'll be sharing the presentation as well so make sure you connect and you'll get access to that and see you at the workshop thank you