Rethink Trust 2018: Jonathan Levi, Interview
Recording: Rethink Trust 2018: Jonathan Levi, Interview
so Jonathan thank you for visiting our conference rethink trust and thank you for your speech could you please tell us about your role in blockchain economy so I'm the founder of a company called the Sarah I started very early on in blockchain I think it was 2013 or 40 no was 2012 when I left commas axe to start working on Bitcoin and then I worked on aetherium kind of in the early days of a theorem before it was launched that was like 2014-15 I what kind of Bitcoin exchange before that and now we're working on multiple edges I'm working with hydrology fabric we work with a lot of regulating decisions and our all kind of asset companies to try to make it very easy for companies in regulated kind of industries to work with secure kind of crypto and massive deployments where they don't compromise the security while having like the right user experience so you want to bring crypto and security to the masses that's kind of the promise I think the biggest thing I'm doing these days is we can't read a lot to the open source kind of ecosystem through for example hyper ledger but we also have our own solution that I think the biggest impact is gonna be when people see how we can securely connect different block chains move events and data around while keeping this overall security of the system this is only the people don't do very well today so thank you you mentioned a lot of open source but what are the key business drivers for you and your company in blockchains scene okay so I look at we didn't want to can kind of own the infrastructure or create another chain we worked very hard with existing projects to make sure that we have all that we need in order to integrate with them so our contribution to the open source is basically we make sure that the infrastructure is shared and we continue to make sure that it it's robust enough and it works well with what we do as well so we continue to also get back but our proprietary so to speak solution is basically the one that allows you to have some features on top our business model is basically if you want to use zero knowledge or you need lucky management or you want to be able to kind of manage identities at scale we make it extremely easy so you can always go and download the open-source chain or you can always go to one cloud provider and they'll give you like a blockchain as a service but when you really want the advanced stuff which you really need when you're scaling supply chain asset management banking of course every time you have to work with very sensitive data or identity you you realize that you really need somebody to do it for you you don't want to reinvent it and let's focus on enterprises what do you think are the most important aspects of working with enterprises in ball chain so well that a few a few anchors to this question right so what will land at the beginning is that we started when we were too small to work with very big enterprises so for start-up I think the key thing is to actually partner with the big guys at the beginning and then try to kind of grow and find your nation carve your way so enterprises I think the biggest thing now is compliance regulations and being able to share data securely the problem is that we don't have one solution like I'm talking to many enterprises and we looked at like more than a hundred use cases when we kind of worked I was a release manager of fabric 1 0 so we looked at so many use cases and requirements and the main challenge is that there's no single offer today that solves everything like that they're not sure shall we take a private theorem so we work with high village' fabric color with intel solid it's not really into solid hyper laser but there are like a few vendors that are pushing different solutions and what we started doing it which is like offering optionality so when you work with our start you can choose different clouds different deployments different block chains and you can add services as you need so we are not here to displace your chain or your existing deployments we can take your PLC and just accelerate and enhance it and we can kind of tackle more things and the main challenge if you ask me kind of looking back over the last two years I think that people paid a lot for PLC's they didn't go to productions and I think this is the you of going to production but the main challenges are security interoperability and I think we've all kind of really underestimate flexibility you're building something and then you need to get more people to join and you can't move like a cloud provider every year in an enterprise I just had the following question about integrity of blockchain right and different challenges that you meet on your way when developing these solutions could you please tell us a little bit about skills you need to tackle these problems yes so it's actually it's interesting like I think what's what's interesting in blockchain is it's a very multidisciplinary kind of area you have to be so it depends on what level right so our DevOps really have to be seriously like the Job Description you have to be like a ninja you have to work with like different clouds you know we work with docker sometimes we work with like you know bare requirement like different versions flavors of Linux we deploy Anzhi like the mainframe of IP so we have like very different deployments so on the Devils you have to be like really really flexible if you look at it like going to kind of all the way to the application layer you can't avoid understanding the business needs you can't not learn about the actual blockchain problem or the actual business problem that are now kind of that is that you face and like if you work in financial environment you if you understand finance if you work with supply chain you really need to understand the s key use and how stuff is being logged and how this state machine is moving around and what's a valid transaction and what are the concerns right of the supply chain customs insurance you know fraud you really need to learn about the actual use case so I think you have to be very technical in different kind of in different domains in kind of I don't know computer science or IT skills you have to be super flexible in terms of being able to adapt and kind of a business analyst you really have to understand the use case so yeah it's a super multidisciplinary kind of area and it really depends on where you are in the stock so yeah it's a good answer you know because we really need these smart people that can have approached from different size and the same is about community because when the prices on crypto are really low these people are still developing stuff right so tell us more about community blockchain community okay so that's interesting so to be fair we made a lot of money on coins just because we started early and we held a lot and that helped us actually fund the company like we didn't go to VCS we didn't need it so we boots out on our own and then when we really needed money the market gave us money so it kind of it was really nice so we were able actually it was difficult but we really worked very hard to keep you know keep our eye on the target like our mission was actually to make it easy to use block chains and we really wanted to kind of interoperate and work in different projects so we have teams that work on the theorem we have teams that work on fabric I continue to fabric still you know as a maintainer I'm sitting on the technical steering committee so we did a lot of stuff with different stacks and you're exposed to different communities like it's nice right you know theythey own community inviting sometimes to judge at any theorem kind of big hackathon you know we go and we wean being a katana consensus like a yeah go with Intel it's not the intelligibility so truth you know so we're very flexible in terms of like what we can do and it's nice to tap into different communities I think the challenges the people are still kind of they need to choose like camps you know like in the film camp or like in the fabric school or I think we need to think about more as a community to think about the actual solution and it's easy to do it if you really I think okay if you are like in one line I think the solution to having a better community is to try to make people not fall in love with the solution or their solution but to really fall in love with the problem if that's the case then people will start joining forces more often and we start this kind of silly arguments you know like the serum better than fabric is permission better you know I talk today and that that was kind of the big highlight kind of of my talk I said guys beacon was built with the blockchain that was there prevent censorship kind of right it's like a censorship resistance chain and now if you're looking at permission chase this is a different problem that we are solving so we cannot compare is this better than that you have to look at the problem and then find the right solution and then find a community it is interested in either the problem or the technology around that problem I think that's that's the recipe for happiness thank you just the last question so what are your plans to do next what are you planning so actually this year we are gonna go with a huge offering of connecting permissioned private and public chains it's only working for a long time work with different permission chains we already built for more than two two and a half years now an access control layer that is working agnostic so all the policies about who can see what how can do what what you share and the key management that is related to secure computation we already have that cross blockchain now I want to use it at scale to allow you to have some private chains or permission chains that can actually synchronize with the main net and that can be Bitcoin aetherium or some other big chain I don't know likely we don't mind but because we are so agnostic it's very easy for us to roll out big ok I'm gonna reveal the name it's gonna call the unbounded network we already have partners that are in sponsors that have committed to joining it and we are gonna allow people to interconnect and basically bring all these boxes together and share only the starter they want to share where there may nets so I think that we were in a very good position now to get like a lot more community support in solving the many many silos problems yeah thank good luck to you is this