# The Future of Digital Infrastructure

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2017-10-09
- Duration: 14:54
- Topics: blockchain, smart contracts, distributed ledger
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-CwnBCOOMxqI
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwnBCOOMxqI

## Description

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https://archive.devcon.org/archive/watch/2/the-future-of-digital-infrastructure

Matthew Spoke gives his talk on the Future of Digital Infrastructure

Speaker(s): Matthew Spoke
Skill level: Intermediate
Track: Society and Systems
Keywords: enterprise, adoption, consensus, scalability, cloud, latency, performance

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## Transcript

so thank you all for coming i introduce myself briefly earlier but my name is matthew spoke i actually I remember speaking last year at Def Con in London and I left that week in London feeling this really strange hi from spending time with this community I was really like in awe of everything that was happening in this space and I was pretty you know shook when I left to say the least at the time I was leading a black chain technology team at a big consulting firm in Toronto now I'm not so I'm going to give my general caveat right now for those of you in the room that work for a quote unquote corporate i will take absolutely no responsibility if you leave this week quit your job jump into the blockchain ecosystem there's many people who have done it you wouldn't be the first so briefly i'm going to tell you a little bit about the work that we're doing at new co and then i'm going to move on I don't want I don't want to kind of get too repetitive with some of the things that we spoke about on the panel or some of the topics that Victor covered because I mean a lot of the problems that are being solved by various party companies in this space are pretty similar I mean we're all looking at the same restrictions and limitations of what needs to happen to athyrium based technologies to be really applicable in the enterprise space we heard from you know that's this panel specifically how the path towards some of these solutions in the path towards some meaningful enterprise adoption and there's really some some tremendous companies up here that we're speaking earlier that i really admire and i think the the industry is in good hands if we can just look at the group of companies or solving this so newco a little bit about us we're a fully modular customizable black chain infrastructure framework that is designed to enable the creation of domain-specific block chain networks that can be optimized to solve specific problems specific applications in specific industries so we've we've essentially piggyback off of the the vision of etherium to create this this this framework to design a technology that can solve some of the pain and unattractive problems that we see in the enterprise world by bringing to it kind of a new ends of how do distributed systems change kind of the framework and operations of a large enterprise now one of the things that I like to kind of reiterate over and over again when I started in the blockchain space kind of two years ago enterprises and large companies we're kind of you know being framed as like the evil that needed to be removed from the world and therefore we created Bitcoin and then etherium but I think it's kind of important for us to recognize that these are the companies that we rely on on a day-to-day basis these are the companies that provide us services like bank accounts and insurance and although it's sometimes frustrating to deal with them there's an enormous opportunity to help these companies and these industries solve their kind of outdated systems so that's kind of where we're putting our focus is to really bring these critically important services that we all rely on day-to-day into the modern world with new technology to do this we're looking we're taking a slightly different approach I mean we looked at etherium as a technology that really is a public utility that that everybody can use for pretty much anything and we applied a lens of enterprise technology and enterprise infrastructure to it so we we kind of dissected the etherium stack and said if i were to redesign this asking the simple question of how would this have been built if it was built from day one as an enterprise technology and so what does that mean that the consensus layer what does that mean all the way up the stack of etherium so that it can really start to be meaningfully applied in an enterprise context and that led us to some really challenging but important priorities that have essentially become the roadmap of what we're building so for context I didn't give you the full background I mean newco is a relatively new venture as I mentioned we used to we kind of our initial core team started as a blockchain technology team at Deloitte we we left and we started this company four months ago were based in Toronto Canada so some of the priorities that we decided to tackle you know very similarly to the topics we were speaking about earlier are things like scalability so on scalability we're focused on optimizing the availability of different consensus mechanisms into the etherium stack so how do you AAPIs kate the consensus mechanism from the actual operation of the block chain so that you can bring in an appropriate consensus depending on the scenario that you're trying to solve for so you know proof-of-work operating on a public chain or of stake in the eventual roadmap of etherium has its its validity and a lot of value in terms of what it's trying to accomplish for a public network but we think that in different contexts with different numbers of participants operating different types of applications there may be other consensus mechanisms that are better suited so that's one thing on scalability we're also building to ensure that the technology that we develop is completely agnostic to server infrastructure whether it be cloud or on-premise infrastructure I mean quite similar to what Victor mentioned so that as we scale this and as we go into networks of companies at all today operate on different traditional infrastructure some of which are moving into the cloud and they'll have different cloud providers how do we make sure that the the connectivity between these different infrastructures is solved using a blockchain that we can solve things like p2p latency when we want transactions to move seamlessly around the world so that kind of leads us to performance which is obviously an enormous reason why large companies have run into restrictions when they want to use athyrium to do anything within certain context if you think of like a very simple example high frequency trading in a financial market it's pretty obvious that running that on the public athyrium network would would cause problems just because of the sheer nature and size of transaction throughput that you would need so on performance we've got kind of two parallel focuses that we're working on right now starting with a suite of high performance throughput api's to kind of compliment or be alternatives to the available web three api that you can find or that you can use for the public athyrium network so that we can get closer to that enterprise level transaction throughput that's necessary for a lot of these use cases we've also designed and we're soon starting the process of implementing enterprise modifications at the vm level so that we can start looking at parallel transaction processing for smart contracts when it makes sense when transaction dependencies are at a state where there are not too many of them depending on the application depending on the industry so that we can really crank through the performance that's necessary on these networks now overall when we're when we identify kind of priorities for our for our development team for our engineers we kind of go back to some very simple design principles and you know when you when you consider the enterprise market the biggest thing that I kind of look at is their need and expectation of Technology maturity and as much as it's incredible to watch what's happening in this space we all can recognize that this is an extremely nascent space and nascent technology scares large enterprises because there's unanswered questions and unsolved problems so we're trying to bring a lens of enterprise maturity so that means that when possible and when relevant bringing in existing enterprise frameworks existing enterprise languages and existing enterprise tools and making them a meaningful part of a blockchain infrastructure so that it's a more familiar and seamless transition when we go to make that infrastructure change so our goal as I said is to make blockchains a very evident and obvious next step in how do we make infrastructures of the past get replaced with infrastructures of the future you know digital infrastructure and the replacing the replacement of legacy systems and large companies is not a new topic that was introduced just because blockchain showed up on the scene but black chains as we all know our kind of an evident tool that needs to be included in how we do that redesign so you know the more we can make that seamless and obvious the better off it'll be in terms of the transition for these large organizations now as we all know and we constantly hear this from innovators in this space there is an enormous amount of opportunity everybody who's here in this room although athyrium is kind of at that state of no longer being an infant and probably being more of a toddler right now and there's this enormously growing group of developers that are kind of being aggregated around this technology we're still the pioneers you know everybody in this room that's working on a project as a pioneer there's a ton of opportunity for everybody to carve out interesting markets and interesting use cases that maybe nobody else has thought of but I suspect I'm not the only one who really thinks about this and gets excited by this but also gets equally terrified by this because the the nature of those ambitions is not you know what a typical kind of app developer might be looking at when they want to accelerate your food delivery we're talking about changing how people interact with each other how organizations transact with each other on a global basis and it's important but it's also critically important that we get it right so that we need to slow down and kind of bring that enterprise maturity to this market now I can tell you how easy it is to easily become Desai be is going after when we look at like you know in our case just looking at the nature of a small team trying to tackle big global problems but I'll tell you what it is that motivates us at new co I mean we're a small local startup in Toronto you know 10 people operating out of a start-up office going after these globally impactful ambitions and I think the simple reason that we can do that is because there's a vision in this community that kind of drives us a vision of global changing vision of of deep impact that really will will touch unreachable previously unreachable populations on earth that now the new technology can kind of unlock so in some cases I mean having the financial reach of these large companies to be able to just dump 50 engineers on to a new project is helpful but in most cases i actually think that the meaningful change is going to happen from small teams like the ones represented here from small companies of developers kind of operating in garages or kind of back office is saying we have an idea we're going to change something and i think the reason is pretty clear i mean i came from the enterprise world where you know instability and uncertainty scares people tremendously and anybody who's been in the block chain space long enough knows that if you're scared of instability you won't last i mean all you have to do is look at bitcoin over the last seven years or even you know more relevant to this audience look at athyrium over the last four months or a theorem over the last three days I mean there's always reasons to get nervous and scared and that's why I'm confident and absolutely certain that it's going to be small you know startups and community driven campaigns that really make change rather than large scale enterprises I mean that said I have no no hard feelings for the large scale enterprises I came from Deloitte I spent five years there and I think there's an enormously important role for those companies as as Victor mentioned you know integration and adoption by large enterprises in education is going to be a problem that everybody needs to kind of tackle together but the future of this technology really is be going to be determined by groups like this groups like us so we see the inefficiencies of these large companies as an opportunity for a new business model and we envision a future where unlike some of the rhetoric of the early blockchain days we want to allow people to get the services they need from the companies they trust rather than just cutting these companies out of the equation really helping them redesign their processes to make it better now to do this we're aiming to become a provider of infrastructure simply put and we want that infrastructure to be leveraged not only by these big organizations but also by smaller kind of application driven teams that have an ambition to change something in the in the industry so are our expectation is that if you have an idea that is really enterprise driven and you need an infrastructure to power that idea that can be well-suited for kind of the requirements and specifications of an enterprise market we'd love to be working with you so I mean by all means please reach out to us get to know us if you ever decide to do the etherium pilgrimage and come back to Toronto where it all began you know not so many years ago let us know and we'll host you while you're there 2016 has been a really interesting year and I'll spend maybe a minute just kind of looking back at what happened since I spoke at Def Con last year I've been referring to this year as kind of the year of the blockchain proof of concept and not just because of the number of prototypes being built but also because the mainstream world is now looking at Bitcoin and athyrium with a lot more interest and saying does this stuff actually work but I don't think we're the only ones to be frustrated by the fact that pocs can seem to be an endless cycle of not getting anywhere an endless cycle of not understanding how you can actually make meaningful change so as exciting as this trend is we need to figure out how to get beyond this type of RND work and into real production work and I'm confident that that's on the verge of changing and we're making sure that if they're that new co is kind of ready to get there now I'll give you kind of one closing thought because I know it's the end of the day and it's been the end of the long week but I want to kind of encourage this community if I if I can do that from my perspective I mean last year I talked about the floodgates kind of opening and the mainstream attention kind of dumping into this space because it was 400 people sitting in a room in London and not many people outside of that room had heard about athyrium before I mean I exaggerate but the mainstream world hadn't really heard about athyrium and for those of you who have been involved in this space long enough you know that that's completely changed we've seen companies get funded and founded and projects being launched over the last year that have really thrown etherium into the spotlight I think we've probably seen the etherium community grow by 10 x over the last year it's easily become the most readily available and most used technology in R&D labs around the world it hit its 1 billion dollar miles this year which is tremendously valuable for this community and and not to understate vitalik turn 22 this year I mean that's a big milestone here so quite the year for theriyum but we also learned some lessons this year I mean I think we also realize that there are challenges that we hadn't necessarily anticipated challenges to decentralized governance and the difficult task of dealing with diverse groups that have diverse interests and how do we properly solve that we realize that there are challenges that are legal and regulatory that apply to token systems and challenges with the development of like secure enterprise software or a thirion based software but I think all of this points to kind of a productive year for etherium and kind of a very positive looking year ahead and I'm really looking forward to being here next year so I'll just leave you with that and I mean before I wrap up because I am the last presentation of the day I thought it'd be worthwhile to maybe do a quick thank you and round of applause to Ming Vitalik George the etherium foundation I didn't want to steal your thunder Ming but you probably wouldn to thank yourself so thanks Matt I really appreciate it