Rethink Trust 2018: Adi Ben-Ari, Interview
Recording: Rethink Trust 2018: Adi Ben-Ari, Interview
so could you please tell us about your career arc and how would you characterize your role in a blockchain economy blockchain industry okay so my name is Adi Benari I'm the founder and CEO of a committee called applied blockchain my background is development so I'm a techie I studied computer science and I worked for 20 years as a developer leading development teams and working as a solution and integration architect 15 years in telecoms and five years in financial services Lloyd's insurance market and Lloyds Banking Group and then about three or four years ago I came across blockchain specifically aetherium and I threw him smart contracts when the technology first came out so long before the network was actually created but when you could first play with and build block 10 application smart contract applications the technology just blew my mind and I started building things initially I showed him inside the bank and it was very early so I decided there's an opportunity here left the bank and started my own company and haven't looked back really we've been building solutions for clients over three years now we've gone from from zero really to 40 people now we've been very very fortunate in our clients we have a 50/50 split between startups and corporates and we've got over 20 clients and the corporate clients include companies like she'll and KLM here in the Netherlands Vodafone Toyota United Nations some of the banks including both is a Bank of America and the startups really a whole range of startups looking at different use cases and different industries from recruitment to invoice financing to legal smart contracts to IP registration all the different use cases and we work with the startups really as partners so we get to see a broad range of activity and be active in a broad range of activity in this space from the biggest of corporates to the most adventurous of startups and this is how we come to the next question what do you think are the business drivers in blockchain industry and what problems we can solve with blockchain I think blockchain so going back to my background most of what I did for us 20 years was integration architecture so how do companies connect their data and talk to each other and that's actually not a very easy thing to do and when I looked at blocks and actually saw it as a new way for companies which would never trust each other to actually be able to communicate in a way in a world trusted way and therefore more reliable way that's really where I came to technology from so I think that that's where the value really is it's in having a database which is secured by group and therefore trusted by the group and you can do all sorts of thing interesting things on that once you have it in place including storing assets and using it as an asset registry and storing an exchanging value and when you have assets and value in one place which the parties can trust which is very difficult to defraud and calm and isn't centrally managed and you can use a paradigm like smart contracts to put in business rules in place move assets and move value together then I think you get really a super efficient business environment but for a lot of the activity that happens in trade and in lots of different areas today so 50% of your of the of your clients are enterprises could you please name the key blockchain characteristics for enterprises for working for blockchain enterprise so we don't really think of blockchain baktun itself as needing to be enterprise blockchain right we think of blockchain as needing specific properties in order for it to be good for enterprise all right so I'm very much in the school of keep it simple all right so we think if something works and it's secure and addresses all the non-functional and functional requirements of the enterprise then the enterprise can use it it doesn't need to be over complicated and you don't have to create a monstrosity to satisfy everybody's requirements I prefer to keep something really simple streamlined but addresses the key requirements of being secure of being a really piece of software of substance apart from being simple you tackle many challenges I'm sure could you please tell us about your personal challenges in bukchon industry and that your company faced as well so one of the first things that we realized across all the projects we were doing was that everybody wanted data privacy which isn't out of the box in standard blockchains everybody wanted a transaction anonymity because they didn't want other players in the industry seeing the volumes of their trade and so on and guessing who they are everybody wanted identity because if it's distributed you need to know who you're dealing with in most business scenarios so we ended up really creating some reusable common components in that space and we made them platform agnostic because in my 20 years as a software architect it was drummed into me that when you build solutions they should be agnostic of a vendor and agnostic of a specific technology and especially when you've got a movie target like blockchain way literally every week and today I think it's happened three times I've heard about new blockchain platforms that I'd never heard about before so who do you use will these platforms ever be around will they be around in three years time and so on it's impossible to predict and even the big platforms today we don't know what they look like or whether they'll be they'll be around and so on so we just say if you're going to invest in this you should build something that's future proof as far as you can and therefore you should not tie yourself to a specific platform if you can avoid it might be optimal for you so we work with the lowest common denominator across the platforms and we think that's a safer bet in this regard because he mentions that many companies blockchain companies will disappear well probably but what should we as a community do that enterprise blockchain strives it box in industry in general strives I think we should work really do something that goes against the DNA of most companies most profitable companies and be open and collaborate and I'm not saying that as a cliche and I don't think we have to do that about everything but I think there's a layer in the blockchain world and networking solutions that if it's not open then you're really going to create siloed blockchains where might sound nice in the short term for a company that's trying to profit from some things that it's building but in the long term will not bring the value that's perceived to be in it being a blockchain network with lots a solution so I think you have to identify a kind of base layer of the blockchain technology itself with a protocol data structures and maybe some basic smartphones rights make those open and then on top of that everybody can build their own applications in smart contracts and above commercialize those and so on independently and compete on them but I think you have to have that common base layer just like on the Internet itself we have a common base layer and everyone builds their own websites applications and so on what do you think the most what do you like the most about everything trust conference so far well I love it I'm not sure where to start it's it's fantastic for us I've got a new marketing person that started a month ago and she did all the research about which conferences we should really attend because there are many and this was the one she picked yes and the reason was because it looked to her like instead of inviting the whole world it was really a group of that I guess the the types of companies that we would normally engage with oh and and the people in those companies that we would really we think we would like to talk to and and it's really quite focused but at the same time really very high quality in terms of the the presentations here and very focused and not wasting our time and also the quality of event itself erm it's a beautiful location the food is like a five-star hotel super organized the staff for just every minute I feel I literally feel like I'm in a five-star hotel everybody's asking me if I'm ok and need anything thank you for a feedback and we are really glad to have you here as a speaker so we hope that you really enjoyed it and let's stay in touch thank you