We had the opportunity to interview Sam Cassatt at TechCrunch Disrupt SF. Sam is the Chief Strategy Government agent of ConsenSys and has great involvement throughout the organization. Sam has an interesting background in that he moiled on biocomputation in the field of Cognitive Science at John Hopkins and then consulted in all directions from the topic for years.
He went on to work at ConsenSys just a few months after it was started and has been working there ever since.
Editor’s note: This question period has been edited for clarity. The full video interview can be found beneath.
CCN: How’s it going, everybody? We’re here with Sam Cassat, the chief strategy administrator of ConsenSys. How are you doing today?
Sam Cassat: I’m doing great. Hanging out at TechCrunch and a wonderful cool conference.
CCN: Yeah, it’s great to have you on. So talk a little bit in the air ConsenSys’ general strategy going into 2018.
Sam Cassat: So ConsenSys has decamped through a lot of different iterations over the last few years. We’ve been round since late 2014, early 2015 and we began sort of when no one knew the pledge Blockchain at all. People thought we were a little crazy when we flounced into boardrooms and said, “We’re going to revolutionize your technology infrastructure, your economic infrastructure, revolutionize the economy.” No one really understood what we were talking thither. Fast forward a few years. Obviously, Blockchain is a buzzword. Everyone realizes that there’s some operation of this to their world.
But when we started we had to really do everything. It was a trifling bit like 1991 and we knew that the internet or we knew that the web would be something engaging just like we knew that Blockchain would be something intriguing, but there was no infrastructure. In 1991 there was no browser or there was no web server, there was certainly no DevOps infrastructure. So we set out to de facto build an entire ecosystem at once and that necessitated building our company model as being a venture studio.
When we looked at how to build a sound ecosystem, how to build everything at once. You can’t just make one company that boost pretends everything. Because for one, I don’t know of any successful example of that. It’s distracting. It’s not the suitably level of abstraction to think about it. We felt it was too early to make a fling fund because everyone would have had to repeat each other’s incite. Right? If I had seeded 20 different companies, all of those companies would require had to build Truffle. They would have had to build MetaMask. They at ones desire have had to build Infura. They would have had to build all of these infrastructure components that are allotted between all the ConsenSys projects everyone was building on Ethereum and etc. So what we did is we unfaltering to make a company that’s at the level of abstraction above one company. It’s a troop that builds companies. I think we’ve done that fairly successfully by infuriating to build things like prediction markets, like Gnosis, attitudes like supply chain platforms, games, etc. That motivated all of the infrastructure that we needed to body. So we’ve ended up with probably about 50 or so portfolio companies that require been in that studio, in the part of the company that builds companies. That’s submerge b decreased fairly well.
On the other hand, as we progressed, as the market has progressed, managements, Fortune 500 companies, Central Banks entities like that. When you go Googling Blockchain, you go Googling Ethereum, you learn us pretty quickly and there’s a lot of demand for us to help the entities like that appliance Blockchain technology into their existing infrastructure. So we have a go away of our company called ConsenSys Solutions that is taking all the infrastructure we’ve built for our own necessaries for our own applications and helping other companies and institutions build their own applications that utilize Blockchain technology. So that one looks a not enough bit like, you know, like an Oracle perhaps. In the early days, you couldn’t straight buy a database off a shelf and plug it in. You can’t buy an IBM mainframe off a shelf and plug it in. You need a dissolving designed around it.
So ConsenSys Solutions takes the Ethereum Blockchain technology, stratagems a solution based on it and then implements that. So, we think that a bloc of making a whole bunch of companies that are really good signs of Blockchain technology that we build and support as well as helping all the incumbents in the crowd realize the use cases of Blockchain at the same time. That’s really gentle of the golden couple there. And then around that, we have a ton of other fashions going on. We have a venture fund, we have a social impact arm, we require an educational institution. Actually just today we announced that ConsenSys Academy is despatch their first non-developer course on Coursera. It will be available to each in the world through that platform. So we have a lot of things going on. Our sweeping strategy is to just develop the whole ecosystem of Ethereum, get it into the hands of as various corporates and as many governments as possible and get the whole world and realizing what they can do.
CCN: So one of the provocative things about the venture development studio model is a key concern above what I call the Amazon effect, which is, Amazon enters healthcare and there’s a 10 percent drip in every single healthcare stock. ConsenSys in Blockchain is comparable to Amazon on the patrons sphere.
Sam Cassat: Thanks.
CCN: If you know anything about Blockchain, you doubtlessly know about ConsenSys and you definitely know about Ethereum flatten if you’re just investing in Bitcoin. So is there any concern over discouraging struggle because you have so many spokes on that hub?
Sam Cassat: That’s an inviting question. I don’t think so. I think in the very beginning, definitely not because there was nothing. And we demand to make it move faster. So I think certainly there’s always rivalry in any market. I don’t think the market would have developed as quickly had we not put up chores like Infura and Truffle and MetaMask that everyone else make use ofs. I’m not sure I necessarily believe that we scare anyone into not undertaking the market. I hope not. But even if that does happen, there are a totality bunch of companies that wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for those aids and the ecosystem building that we’ve done. So I think net positive we have a humane effect on the market.
I hope we don’t scare anyone and entrepreneurship, I’ve heard people delineate it as jumping off a cliff and building the airplane on the way down and people like that, I don’t reflect on it’s scared off people in general. So I hope not.
CCN: Yeah, that’s an interesting plea. And speaking about that, what are some interesting companies you’ve seen rise out of the Ethereum ecosystem but not necessarily related to ConsenSys? Or maybe you guys justifiable did an investment?
Sam Cassat: That’s an interesting question. I think Loom Network is a at the end of the day interesting project. So Loom is a way to basically take DPoS which is the technology employed in some other Blockchains that Ethereum rejected because it doesn’t play a joke on the right security characteristics for us and for what we think is a layer one solution. What they did is they accepted the base Ethereum and they added a delegated proof of stake on top of it in a framework for totaling other ConsenSys mechanisms on top of it that then settle into the scurvy, what you think of as normal Ethereum.
So those top layer protocols can go faster, set upright? If I want thousands of transactions per second because I’m running a game or I’m running a group network or something, I probably don’t want to run every single, like, or click on my communal network through the base Ethereum layer because it’s expensive and too unpunctual. So what I might want to do is build another layer and then if there’s a question in that fast layer, I can settle that problem on the base Ethereum store. Does that make sense? Loom Network is doing that in anticipating a framework for doing that. I think they are a really cool circle. I also think a lot of the stake channels work that’s happening justice now. Companies like FunFair Tech, for instance, are doing a lot of really fascinating work in that and really advancing the ecosystem. So I think we want to bankroll companies like that that are working to promote the whole ecosystem. And I have in mind those are some really great examples.
CCN: So like, Loom, correct there an off chain scaling provider. Is that something that you see is contemporary to be needed 10, 15 years down the line or do you see that moving second on chain as you guys implemented proof of stake and sharding?
Sam Cassat: I contrive both. I think it’s needed right now. Proof of stake and sharding I remember will bring us in order of magnitude or two higher than they are properly now. You know, if we’re at tens of transactions per second, that could bring us to hundreds or thousands of transactions per twinkling, which I think is good enough for some applications. It’s certainly right enough for a layer one, especially of a bunch of financial applications.
It’s not fast ample supply to run Facebook on. You’re going to need something else that has different protection characteristics. At the same time, sending a billion dollars has much unique trust needs and much different protocol requirements than a ask preference on Facebook. So I think it’s a waste and it’s too slow to use the base layer of Ethereum for a identical to. So I think they’re — just architecturally, it makes sense to make another confine to bed or multiple layers, like in plasma, for instance, that can be much faster and cheaper and profuse appropriate to the application. I think that’s happening right now and we need it fairly now.
CCN: So let’s dig into that a little bit. Do you ever see a like on Facebook being an arrogate use case for on-chain Ethereum?
Sam Cassat: Depends on what you mean by on-chain. On a confine data structure of some sort, maybe. Probably not on layer one Ethereum, despite the fact that.
CCN: Got it. So that’d be something more for a directed acyclic graph that cancels, too.
Sam Cassat: Like a side chain or a DPoS or some kind of other decentralized database that take the weights alongside the base chain and maybe the root of the application. And the smart pucker that is the finances of that social network probably needs to sit on gyve, on layer one chain, but the like is probably, it’s not as important. It doesn’t need billion dollar guaranty. It can be someone else that needs less security, I think.
CCN: So that’s another intriguing point. As far as distributed database systems go, how do you see that progressing over the next few years? Because as it questions now Ethereum really is not good for a database and it’s not meant to be one.
Sam Cassat: Sure. Ethereum is not meant to be storing monstrous pieces of data. It’s meant to be storing things that need a lot of dependability. It’s meant to be, Sam had a million dollars and now John has a million dollars. That lenient of thing that we need — normally we need lawyers and court organizations and police to execute in our society and our economy. That’s the thing that the Ethereum vile layer makes cheaper and better and faster. It is not storing the entire DVD library in my bedroom or whatever. That’s a annihilate of that high trust resource. I wouldn’t take a lawyer and have in the offing a notary notarize the data of my DVD collection or something. Right? That’s a dwindle of that high trust infrastructure. So, we have other infrastructure get pleasure from IPFS for instance. There are messaging protocols like Swarm that are crumbling out.
There are a whole bunch of complementary technologies, many of which are designed to stockpile large amounts of binary data like video data or spits or large bodies of text or what have you. I think there’ll be a plethora of those. We use IPFS for a lot of the commission that we do in that domain. And I also think there are other decentralized databases, database technologies prove to be c finish up that will be useful for different aspects.
CCN: So can you talk through what IPFS is?
Sam Cassat: The interplanetary column system. This is a decentralized basically binary storage mechanism that is capacity addressable. So what that means is, say I want a movie. I can take the undiminished movie. I can do what’s called a hash it, which is one of the main functionalities that underlies IPFS. I jumble it so I can turn that entire movie into a small string.
Sam Cassat: Dialect mayhap it’s this long on the screen and that is sort of the name of the movie on the network. And it also is the way that I ascertain that movie on the network, right? So if I were to want to find a moving picture that came out recently, I don’t know, Jurassic Park. I want to ascertain Jurassic Park. I would look up in a list somewhere, the hash of Jurassic Preserve. I would submit that to the network of decentralized protocol. It would go perceive a whole bunch of copies that are stored all over the world of that close binary, that particular blob of data. And they would muster up it and deliver it to me. Right now, volunteers all over the world or people that penury to store that data for the rest of the network are doing that. So if I procure a business and my business depends upon me hosting data, just as though if I have a website and my website depends upon me hosting data, I would receive a server and store that data on IPFS.
It’s a different way to find that statistics. So someone could host that. A lot of people would copy that observations. So you end up with a decentralized set of copies of that data all over the world in lieu of of one server hosting the movie or the or the website data, a thousand servers superiority host it. Eventually, there will be a layer on top of that called information coin, which actually incentivizes people to store all that figures all over the world. So it’s a little bit like mining by hosting that information, they get a little bit of reward of file coin and what you end up with is essentially corresponding to a decentralized data center that stores all this data press into servicing people’s hard drives all over the world instead of using centralized servers. So the non-incentivized translation is called IPFS, the incentivized version is called file coin. And both of those are Non-Standard real interesting technologies that we use them in some of our architectures.
CCN: And I guess the other stimulating thing you could do there, you and I both download the Ethereum white letterhead to our laptops. We uploaded to Google Drive and they’re storing two copies, true? So if you guys built a retail-based application, you and I would be storing or referencing the in any event object.
Sam Cassat: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Content addressable is a altogether interesting property of it.
CCN: And how is the database lookups down there? Right? Because we’re talking down potentially hundreds of thousands of files.
Sam Cassat: It’s been a while since I’ve delved into the…
CCN: Oh yeah, yeah. No problem.
Sam Cassat: …guts of IPFS is swinging, but essentially it’s a search across the network. I mean, you know, all of these nodes, trust in all this data. There’s some registry that’s decentralized where caboodle is and a message gets sent out like a beacon looking for the data. Long run, the data gets sent back after that beacon was sent out essentially.
CCN: So that’s really a really interesting point. ConsenSys has 50 projects?
Sam Cassat: Fifty, a particle under 50 portfolio companies in our venture studio. In total — we contain a lot of projects. But yeah, about 50 things in various states of evolution in our venture studio.
CCN: Then you have the consulting arm, a dozen other opportunities. How as an executive at this company, do you keep up with that and how as the chief master plan officer of such a decentralized type company do you steer the ship?
Sam Cassat: ConsenSys is a in the end unusual organization, right? We’re decentralized. What that means, is assorted in different contexts. But in a sense when I make a decision or if I think something is a edible idea, it doesn’t necessarily mean I can tell someone to do it. We’re more alongside the wisdom of the crowds. We’re more about crowdsourcing. We’re more about reaching consensus, which happens to be share of our moniker. So really we have a lot of really brilliant people that under way for us.
When we want something to happen, it usually results in discussion. If I about something is a good idea or I think something needs to happen then most often what — the way that we make that happen is you get a whole bunch of involved stakeholders and parties together, all of which are probably pretty smart people and procure a discussion about it and reach a consensus on what to do and then that brand of filters throughout the organization. It’s a very large organization. We have a lot of companywide intersections, we have a lot of communication. We have Slack with an extremely large amount of advice. We have a couple of meetings that are for the whole company every two weeks and every three weeks. So if you hope for to, you can let them know everything that’s going on. We have an event quite almost every day around the world. So just having really high-priced touch, really large amounts of communication. And really open chat is, I think, the best way to surface the wisdom of the really smart crowd that is within ConsenSys. So it’s a spot different than a normal company, but I think it also, it allows us to show up more information. And it allows us to move really in the sort of spirit of what we’re doing, which is structure revolutionary technology that changes the world. And if we didn’t try to do something numerous we would be charlatans, I think. We’re trying to walk the walk and make our chiefly company and experiment. It’s been a pretty successful one so far, I think.
CCN: So just out of objet de virtu, I’m trying to understand how the company’s governed and how it works. Let’s say your consulting arm has a giantess client that wants to use file coin. And at this point enter coin is decentralized and you need to make a pretty big architectural change there. That means you essential to have the consensus of the community, the miners and all these different stakeholders. How do you go almost communicating that, working with the developers and all the different stakeholders to gain consensus and move forward at a pace that an enterprise type customer would be used to from like an Oracle?
Sam Cassat: They’re two out of the ordinary things going on. There’s the public Ethereum network. Which see fit have file coin running on it and be a completely decentralized architecture. And then there are off the record implementations Ethereum and private Blockchains or semiprivate consortium Blockchains for perchance several companies share those projects and that infrastructure. If it’s something where it’s a top secret context and maybe there are ten banks sharing it or there are ten oil and gas companies parcel it or something, it’s pretty easy for us to modify anything you want and just jostle that project forward and do whatever we want. I don’t think the market is fairly there yet where these big corporates and governments, at least for the most partial, are putting their projects on public Ethereum infrastructure.
I think we intent get there. I think we’ll get to a point just like we are right now with the common technology market where the market will demand certain functionality of the Ethereum Blockchain ecosystem.
Performers will then utilize that. Those participants in that technology at ones fingertips in the market to build what they want. Those things pleasure meet each other but right now I wouldn’t say — we wouldn’t try to go cram something into the market-place, but it wasn’t ready for. But in the private implementations, we can do whatever we want.
CCN: So as far as distributed ledger technology, what do you expect is the most compelling use case at the moment? Whether you guys are working on something or not?
Sam Cassat: Uh, the most compelling use containerize? Well, I think the obvious use case, the obvious killer app that has already been the gunfighter app is tokenization. We’ve already disrupted the venture capital industry. We’ve already, we’ve already shifted the face of how startups grow and fund and capitalize themselves. So that’s a unbelievably killer app. I think security tokenization, like Meridio, this shirt I’m get into I think is a really great application. I think we have yet to see even the certainly beginning of how much innovation will come in the financial sphere from the actuality that a software object with programmable properties can also be a monetary product and a security and the legal framework around that will subsidize that behavior. I think we’re one step down a long road of that and then there’s tremendous invention there.
I think providing access to asset classes and to finance in accustomed for emerging markets is a tremendously powerful use case. I think disrupting journalism as secular as doing is a ripe area for decentralization. Right now we’re, we’re seeing the battle act a stress out between the centralized forces of our government and Facebook and Google and Twitter. And we had Jack and Cheryl in Congress yesterday vouchsafing about whether and how their companies should censor and change the front-page news or fake news or whatever. Our society is at a moment where decentralization power make more sense than centralization on those fronts. And we’re seizing with that right now. I think that’s a really ripe limit. There are a lot of them.
CCN: And ConsenSys is certainly working on tackling them all. So I’d honestly like to thank you for coming on and it was awesome talking to you.
Sam Cassat: Thank you. As a matter of fact cool to be here. Thank you.
Note: This interview is part of the CCN Podcast. The podcast and this vetting are also available on iTunes, TuneIn, Stitcher, Google Play Music, Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Colour sure you rate and subscribe!
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