# Going From Analogue to Digital woth Otonomous - Mano Thanabalan

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2017-10-09
- Duration: 11:33
- Topics: blockchain, smart contracts, distributed ledger, Science & Technology
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-TDzZvGfyPMQ
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDzZvGfyPMQ

## Description

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https://archive.devcon.org/archive/watch/2/going-from-analogue-to-digital-wth-otonomous

The Future of Digital Assets and Exchanges on the Blockchain

Speaker(s): Mano Thanabalan
Skill level: Intermediate
Track: Developer Infrastructure
Keywords: automation, law, corporate, legal, governance, company, organization, design, autonomous, history, nature, business, regulations, compliance, DAO, ID, identity, persona, verification, encryption, key, management, privacy, recovery, compromise

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Devcon is the Ethereum conference for developers, researchers, thinkers, and makers. 
Devcon 2 was held in Shanghai, China on Sep 19 - 21, 2016.
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## Transcript

[Music] Thank You Ming by the way good morning DEFCON 2 ah nice I think developer conferences are always a little bit more fun than business oriented conferences right but the participation from the audience always fantastic excellent so I'm my name is mano I'm from autonomous we're in the business of incorporating companies but I'll use the analogy of the starship USS Enterprise blueprint that I have on the top there to describe what we're doing so we're building the warp drive right in that schema that you see there the warp drive is what's gonna feel innovation production and the starship is basically the startups organizations and so on this is really the final frontier in automation I think we've over over the years we've automated a lot of things whether it's self-driving cars or completely fully functional robots but why we haven't innovated is in the area of law corporate law legal processes the way companies organizations are governed as a management and so on and this is kind of set and that's what we're trying to address so before I go into how we do what we do and in our design pattern it's important to understand first why the charter company so the charter company as I mentioned is the undepreciated engine of innovation and production right we all build amazing things only because we are organized without that organization I don't think we will achieve the things that aetherium is achieved for instance and it's legal so the way we designed our design pattern or the autonomous plan everything that you do on our dashboard is completely legal it's a mirror image of what happens in the real world and honestly I think it's the best use case for a theorem from our contracts I I don't know why nobody else has done this before us but I think it's the most straightforward use case that you can implement where you convert in our case we convert a certain section pertaining to corporate law into smart contracts self-governing self executing self settling smart contracts hopefully at some point we'll decentralize the courts and then lawyers become coders they'll be interesting so we this is basically what we do now there's been a lot of talk in the last couple of days about security especially yesterday there was formal verification stuff all that is amazing I'm a technologist I'm a developer so I really appreciate the mathematics behind formal verification but it's still complex stuff right it's not your average developer average or developer that understands these things so there's another tip I'm gonna give developers especially new developers you don't have to design things from scratch you don't have to create your own design patterns you can seek inspiration from two locations one is history which is what I've which is why I've got this timeline here and the other one is nature and you can learn lessons from there and design your smart contracts and this is how we do things as well and if we look at history and the blockchain and that the charted company evolution over time it's sort of where we have arrived now with the blockchain chart the company is autonomous so the first charter company was somewhat in 13th century these were the traders right they went around the world the ships were actually the the charter company itself then he had the Dutch East India Company then you had the Industrial Revolution and and since in distribution until today there has not been much innovation in the space of the corporation right a lot of the processes policies are still the same until we came along autonomous came along and we put we put the company on the blockchain we allow you to govern the company through a series of smart contracts which I'll show you in a bit and now what have we achieved we have automated the corporate governance process and why do we want to automate a corporate governance process cost of doing business today is so expensive because we have to hire additional compliance people now for new regulations we've got policies that there are more complex for us to comply to so we try to reduce all this friction we try to save startups especially money and let them focus on the core building of the starship right so that's what we do and we it's not that we don't believe in the decentralized autonomous organization we do and if you see we build everything towards the future of a decentralized autonomous organization but what I believe and if you see that the headers there that I have last header shows you that for a truly decentralized autonomous organization I think we need to go through some kind of socio-economic political revolution before we're truly ready for an efficient decentralized autonomous organization so basically what I'm trying to say here in summary is that when we design stuff we go by the secured by design framework and the company the cop the corporation the charter company through its years of evolution has arrived at a certain state today and I think is secured by design so we just convert that secured by design framework into a smart contract how do we do this before I can even speak about the company smart contract which is basically our main bread and butter I want to talk about the ID any smart contracts so again going back to the energy of Star Trek this is the dilithium crystals I see a lot of blank faces so I'm assuming you guys are not from the Star Trek generation okay so dilithium crystal meaning that this is the fuel for everything else that we build and the central point of all interaction with a company's Marc contract now what is this the identity in our case can be it's probably slightly different from the you port guys and anybody else as that's building an ID any smart contract we had to make this because we wanted it to work with our ultimate use case of the company smart contract so in our case the identity can be two things first persona so a regular person a natural individual second a company right so it can be a collection of a company that's governed by a constitution which is a collection of individuals and it can also be a verification entity so we said you know it's not enough for us to just allow the user to create an identical tract we also need to verify this and we don't want to do this in a central manner we want to do this in a decentralized manner as well and we said okay then we've got to create verification entities but the way we build them so autonomous in this case is a verification entity and we as a result of you having think if you decide to incorporate a company with us you will also create your identity and we will then have to verify this energy this identity can have a layered approach so we do a proof of identity type kyc where we ask for proof of address your your passport copy and so on but this can easily be extended so you can have a layered approach where a bank comes into play or you could have a government agency for instance verifying that a bank is allowed to do a specific type of care kyc and that's why you see at the bottom there on the left and more importantly this identity Mart contract also has got ID any information right so it's a collection of an encrypted identifier that is selectively shared so by default you can assume that it's shared with the public addresses of the verification entities and it has the stamps of this verification T so the KYC stuff I talked about it's all in a collection of stamps if you would and it routes calls so if you go to the I Denis mark on tracking and say hey get me the KYC of this identity with a specific bank then it's gonna route that call to that bank and get you the up-to-date kyc State should you not should you wish not to use the localized stamp it's got a secure key recovery mechanism in place as well that we've attached to the identity so basically it's not enough and a lot of things we design right we understand at the end of the day people are using the system and people are flawed systems might be perfect but people always lose their keys and we've had many many people losing the kids actually as we speak I think even my developers are still recovering some clients key I'm sure so we come up with a very secure way in which you can store your key and retrieve it so even the retrieval mechanism that we've put in place and show us that after you've recovered you can still continue to use the keys because they've not been compromised in any way during the recovery process and that's also something that we do and obviously you need to be able to replace it so in summary I think we've identified or we've solved at least for our use case we've solved privacy recovery and compromise right and with this you lay the foundation then to be able to sign documents hold assets and do whatever it is that you need to do otherwise in the real world in this digital world now this here is the main blueprint this is what we've been working very hard for the last one year actually I wrote my first marc contract right about the same time when defqon.1 was going on and today we've got a whole suite of them it's it's interesting so central to - - all of this is the company smart contract and what is the company smart contract itself is an identity it's an identity that's controlled by the stakeholders of the company so these can be directors this can be shareholders this can be there can be a corporate secretary involved in there and they all do this by way of legal documents so there are preset legal documents in the real world which you use to enact any action in the company smart contract whether it's a transfer or asset you want to add directors any corporate action that you have to do is by way of the proper legal document and process so we've also replicated real world legal processes so there can be a multi-step process that can be ten documents that you need let's say in the case of a funding run and they might have a certain sequence and that ten documents will have to be executed in the correct sequence otherwise it will not work I think I'm running out of time probably but let me just quickly go through what else we are trying to do okay so before that so that's that's what we do so we've got a collection here that's got a complete trace of legal documents identities transactions everything but what is cool is those two purple circles that you see one is the decentralized exchange the company itself could become a decentralized exchange which is pretty interesting and you can also do that by way of a synthetic equity framework as well and we've also designed this already so this is my synthetic equity smart contract in summary I'm not going to go through it but it is a a way to replicate the payoff that you otherwise have by holding real equity we're a smart contract so that's basically what this does so that is something that we've designed we haven't implemented yet and this is what I mean when I say we're working towards a completely centralized autonomous organization at some point these are things that you would need and of course the company has a decentralized exchange this is a very interesting slide - I'm not going to go into the details but in one line your company is a decentralized exchange now so this is also very powerful working towards this and the team if I mean just before before I get cut off here I think the team Han our CEO is right there and the team that's always working hard with me on the weekends guys stand up and take a bow please ladies and gentlemen these are the guys that give up their weekends for me thank you very much [Music]