Rethink Trust 2018: Nick Kurat, Interview
Recording: Rethink Trust 2018: Nick Kurat, Interview
Hynek so thanks for amazing talk and like my first question what do you think like your place in blockchain economy and what kind of career paths bring you there to work with blockchain so my background is in technology I've been involved with IT for over 14 years and I was mainly working with products right so I had my own kind of service companies and then we had had couple of like product startups and so it was all about creating experiences for the user making sure that the technology is actually benefiting the end user right so it's not the technology by itself it's actually for the user and so when it comes to blockchain technology right now I think it needs a bit of that right so it's it's a great concept it's you know great technology and and it's obviously everybody's been like enjoying it but then the user experience component needs to be added to that so you know we're trying to get that okay cool so now a lot of hype around a blockchain but from your experience what's it like a real business problem you can like solve with the blockchain and what's it like real business drivers is that the drive blockchain now well so blockchain is is very versatile let's say right what I can totally tell you is that it's not a magical wand that will solve any kind of problem people tend to think on this hype wave that like blockchain you just you know you just throw it at the problem and then it magically solves this you know itself it's not true and there are some of the cases in particular that are working like why cryptocurrencies started like a rocket started just because it's a no brainer vertical solution for blockchain technology that enables that there are some others like you know finance banking logistics I mean it's it's all out there everybody's talking about that but when when you're kind of deciding to apply blockchain to your business Yuri you my my point is that you really have to do thinking not just hype thinking but like engineer thinking okay cool and now you're talking with a lot of like customers potential customers and what do you think like a qualities which they need from the blockchain technology and how you can approach that yeah so people are looking well all kinds of customers right so people are looking mostly like for for the way how they can record something into the ledger and for it to be untempered all right and secure and transparent so that's what people are looking for some of the projects as I mentioned already they do not need it and so we are kind of you know honestly saying hey guys you know you better go with centralized solution but for those where this can be actually leveraged for their business we're totally saying hey you know this is gonna solve your problem and yeah those those would probably be the most you know the biggest ones okay and what's a like a main technical challenge that you face it and like your blockchain project that's a lot so we're gonna host a workshop about this there are a lot of different like challenges and areas of improvement as I call them so we're we're a blockchain needs to improve in order to meet some of the standards or some requirements they ask from the enterprise a lot of it like I I counted nine areas and we're talking about them in our workshop so yeah there's a lot of them okay thanks and now like on the hiring market a lot of new profiles right it it profiles like bow chain engineer and so on what's the main skillset you think is needed like the work with the blockchain projects yes that's true I mean there are no there are a few let's say experienced blockchain professionals and because of the hype all of the like dev shops and all of the people that were involved like a lot of people that were involved with just like software you know they're they're kind of trying to hop on the train but like I think that to be able to handle blockchain and to be kind of you know a good engineer you have to understand at least one of the like back-end technologies like that is applicable to block chain like golang Java you know if you have like FinTech experience or experience in any any of the kind of verticals that where you are going to implement blockchain in that would be definitely beneficial but like it's not it's not a rocket science let's say right so blockchain is not like a like a you know lucky all right it's not like you know heaven given gift to the mankind right it's just a it's just a jump in the you know the in the evolution of distributed to knowledge is right so it's not like something totally new so that that's why I don't think it's like unreachable for good for good engineers okay thanks and as a community like what can you do like for the blockchain an enterprise like do not start this blockchain winter yeah okay so I really liked what Chris Ferriss told us so he said that we basically instead of each one of us developing our own thing and having yet another blockchain right just for our like you know yeah like niche right we have to unite right so we have to form consortiums that are working the same problem and that's that's how you know we will together be pushing the technology forward instead of like you know each pooling in their own direction so I totally agree with that statement okay and last question so what do you think about recent conference so far it's perfect I mean there's there's very few to none conferences of this kind right so it we brought it together specifically for engineering community because we had enough of the hype we had enough of the futuristic talks about blockchain how it's gonna change the world we had enough of that I mean it's it's clear let's not talk about it right let's talk about how to move this forward let's talk about the challenges let's let's talk about forming consortiums how do we solve these problems and make that magic happen for the markets so that that's exactly what everything Trust is doing and I totally enjoy being part of it okay thank you very much