Rethink Trust 2018: Miсhael Egorov, Interview
Recording: Rethink Trust 2018: Miсhael Egorov, Interview
Hi Michael, thanks for amazing talk. My first question, what do you think like your role in blockchain like for enterprise and what kind of career paths like bring you here to working with a blockchain? Right, yeah, so I was interested in blockchain since the last you know the previous Bitcoin bubble like pretty much since the end of 2013 and I kind of had a plan to start a blockchain company since then but to do that I first decided to move to the US where I worked in LinkedIn and and after that I started this company. Interesting enough when we started it wasn't a blockchain company first it was inspired by blockchain but firstly we were doing an end-to-end encrypted database called ZeroDB and at some point we actually talked to enterprise customers like like banks for example and what we learned from them is that they didn't want so much their slowish but secure database what they wanted instead is the ability to share data while it's encrypted and we we applied proxy re-encryption which we used to do that in the database context to just form a product just around that and we first applied it in a kind of centralized setting in although distributed in Hadoop and Kafka but then we thought why not take this to like the world scale and the area which seems like desperately needs this is is blockchain and decentralized applications so we are back to blockchain which was inspiring all of our activity from the beginning. Okay cool and now a lot of hype around blockchain like what do you think the real business problems that we can like solve with the blockchain technology? Right I think blockchain solves basically trust issues everywhere you have trust issues you you can think how to apply blockchain and whether it can solve them let's say when you when it is censorship resistance or when multiple multiple enterprise customers don't trust fully to charge to each other they want to prevent like everybody else from from doing something wrong so that's when when blockchain is really really helpful and also it's like a transparent leisure replicable and readable by everyone so so this is this can be made like as the source of truth. Okay thank you and you say that you are talking with a lot of like customers potential customers and what they're like their qualities about blockchain technologies their expectation? Like expectation about blockchain technologies? Yeah so so they they they want to kind of I think they they are driven by the vision to to decentralize everything so that you don't have a single trusted trusted trusted third party and the best way to do that is indeed using using a blockchain so and like if you take for example a medical data space there are there are companies who collect data of all the patients and this creates a problem because they they are incentivized very much to keep this this data with them and not share that with any other any other companies so let's say there are some medical providers partnered with one data company some other medical providers partnered with other data companies they don't want to share data with with each other and then it kind of prevents the free market from happening this drives the cost of medical in medical industry up and that's so that's kind of makes the system broken and to fix that they those companies they want to give data back to the patient and patient can share directly with medical providers without any intermediaries or third party so that's kind of just one of the use cases so as in principle it it can make the world better but yeah so their thing is like there are trusted intermediaries right now and it's not always in their incentive to make all the world to be more effective in their incentive is to make more money for themselves and it's not the same thing so that's why decentralization can help okay thank you and like what do you think the main like technical challenge that you face it in working with blockchain technology right yeah well i think one of the biggest challenges is the scalability challenge like for example we we cannot do everything on the main chain we probably need to have some side chain where most of the stuff happens it is it is possible to build but it's challenging right and of course of course another challenge is just just that the tools for for building decentralized applications are not super mature yet one of the biggest challenges is the scalability challenge is the scalability challenge like for example we we cannot do everything on the main chain we probably need to have some side chain where most of the stuff happens it is it is possible to build but it's challenging right and of course of course another challenge is just just that the tools for for building decentralized applications are not super mature yet it's a very young area and it's like let's say you you do something in a week and at the end of the week you find that your tools that you use already changed and you need to sync everything up with the with the with how it's changed so it's like constantly evolving constantly moving target and some some things are like still still not present over there because just because the area is so young so we sometimes have a lot of we have to build some some little tools ourselves but yeah still this makes things interesting right okay thanks and as a cto of the company like what do you think the like main skill set for their like blockchain specialist blockchain developer right yeah i think if if you if you want to find an engineer to work in blockchain not necessarily it has to be a blockchain engineer to start with I think probably somebody who has a distributed system in distributed systems like distributed not in blockchain kind of setting but let's say in Hadoop is a distributed system for example right so this is one kind of skill set another kind of skill set is just I think just a good engineer in working with multiple languages the thing is that the everything changes so much so quickly that it's not so important to have pre-existing pre-existing knowledge but it's way more important to have an ability to learn really really quickly so for example we have one engineer who who had experience with the Scala and Java and now he he makes things in solidity which I've never seen anywhere else so it's really doesn't really matter that some engineer doesn't have a pre-existing pre-existing experience with solidity it's more matters that the developers are able to to learn and willing to do that and can do it really really quickly I think this is the main this is this is the main quality okay thanks and what do you think like as a community we can do to develop like blockchain and enterprise to solve the real like challenges of the customers yeah in community I think I think enterprises should be aware of like what blockchain can really solve not not just the buzzwords but but what what exactly are the problems blockchain is solving so you don't want something but with blockchain you want to know like which trust issues blockchain solves and if you somehow come up come across this kind of trust issue and think oh yeah I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I think I 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