Name: Balancing The Ledger: Amber Baldet Gives A Clovyr Update, EOS Hits $4 Billion
Uploaded: 2018-06-01
Duration: 9 min 48 s
Description: Amber Baldet, cofounder and CEO of Clovyr, sits down with team Ledger to discuss the latest crypto and blockchain news.

[ MUSIC ] Welcome to Balancing The Ledger, where finance and tech intersect, I'm Robert Hackett. I'm Jeff Roberts. And today we're joined by Amber [ UNKNOWN ] the CEO and cofounder of Clever and former blockchaintly to taking Morgan Chase, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. Alright so, the news of the week. Eosio has raised four billion dollars. I mean they've raised more money in terms of an initial claim offering than any other project in this cryptocurrency zany mania world. I mean they haven't even released a product yet and yet they've managed to raise four billion dollars. That's a lot of money. That is definitely a lot of money. That's Uber, Facebook level money. That is. I mean it's more than an IPO for a typical tech company that's going out the gate on a stock exchange. I mean traditionally you would have some sort of pre money valuation against that and there would be equity involved and all these other things. But at this point it's just crowd funded people that wanna be involved So I look forward to seeing the product. I'm not sure if you saw some of the security news that came out around the US as well. Tell us about it. There was a remote code execution vulnerability discovered. By a security research group in China who have published that, and it was relatively quickly remediated but caused, of course, a bit of a flurry of news, that I think the news dropped on the exact same day. So yeah. There's been some crazy phishing emails too. We and our colleagues have got these phishing things that invite you to put in your private key to share their theorum for the project and I don't think that ends well. Yeah, we were looking at some of those sites yesterday You've got to be very wary about where you're sending your money and don't enter your private key anywhere. Yeah. I think people don't realize about blockchain systems usually. You might have heard the joke about the cloud is just somebody else's computer. [ LAUGH ] The blockchain is just all of our computers. So when these things have, have some vulnerability or exploit that goes to one node, it could potentially go to all of them. And you could end up with catastrophic failures, so it's hard, product and security development is hard here. Now, you're raising money for your own startup, Clovyr. Why didn't you go the ICO route? I mean, you could raise tons of money this way. Is there still time? [ LAUGH ] Now because, I think in a way that's regulatory arbitrage. And I want to spend more time building products than working with lawyers. But also the type of tooling that we're building and the products and solutions that we're building, we need to Sell to and work with people that maybe don't want to interact with people that are token companies. You've made sort of a splash consensus, big block chain conference with the launch of Clovyr. Can you sort of remind us in plain English what it is or what Clovyr's going to be? Sure, what we're working on with Clovyr is bringing modern application development to block chain applications. So, whether you are going to deploy something to a public chain, like a theorem or whether you're trying to build On some of these contortion change with [ UNKNOWN ] or [ UNKNOWN ] or even go a theory and vanilla kind of permission chain. We want the experience to be as though you were using the software sort of [ UNKNOWN ] for any other Kind of development. It's a little crazy, if you ask people if they're building a machine learning application, what tool set do they use? Like what do machine learning people use? It's a meaningless question. For some reason, the tooling in the quote unquote blockchain space just hasn't caught up. So we're working on bridging that gap and making sure that there's discovery mechanisms for those applications, and that the whole middleware layer of services that will make these apps useful and usable, whether that's data feeds or core, very unsexy, utilitarian things like DNS, etc, that they exist. We're just making it easy for other people to build their vision To life. Well what sort of people should think of using Clovyr? Who's going to come to you? Who are you going to help the most? Hopefully it's people across the spectrum. It's kind of like asking, who's going to build the website ?, You know, you're going to get people who want to build their Fortune 500 cooperate website and you're gonna get people who wanna stand up their small local business or little non profit and you're other individuals that wanna write a blog. So, the idea isn't to go out and capture everyone who wants to build a website and say we're gonna build this for. For you, it's to create what's the Ruby on Rails equivalent that caused this explosion of websites to appear, and businesses to get up on the web for the first time? Creating that kind of interconnectivity for that next generation Internet is really what we're working on. Let's talk a little bit about this shift that's happening in the blockchain world right now for businesses. We've talked a little bit about this. In the past, you've kind of used the analogy of private and public clouds. Tell us a little bit more about that. Yeah right now it's very divided. The people that are building things for public chain and people that are building things for permission or busienss enterprise kind of chains. And I really think that nomanclature isn't really helpful either because it creates this kind of Animosity where we're saying that big business is on one side and the people and the proletariat are on the other side, when really it should just be about information residing where it makes sense and creating security boundaries that are logical. So exactly in the security case that we're talking about for EOS a second ago, if you have something that's Going to infect an entire network and you have a security boundary around that, well, if you're on the other side of the boundary, you're potentially protected. So creating an Internet of value that's a bunch of networks connected together, much like the Internet is a network of networks, it's just a lot more pragmatic. It's not about being a maximalist on either side of the fence. For block chain in general, where are the users? Cuz what strikes me right now is, the average person reads about this, they wanna go use some block chain. And just as in the past era when the internet came, it took a browser, it took Netscape for people to go, that's how it works. And so far, I'm not seeing something, an [ UNKNOWN ] to Netscape. How far away are we from that when the average person can actually kinda go and explore the block chain for themselves? Mm- hm. There's a lot of mobile first development that you see for end user applications, so a lot of the kind of payments apps that you're probably familiar with And that's great. We could use more full applications. There's some browsers that do exist, like Mist browser, etc. But people are just starting to download them because you have to know where you're getting to what to download them and use them. So I think as soon as people realize what the heck they can use the blockchain for, we'll probably see more assets. And are browsers and apps gonna be this sort of way to conceptualize it? Cuz remember when the internet came along for magazines, everyone at the magazines like Fortune took PDFs and uploaded to the internet. And said there's your magazine there. But the paradigm had sort of shifted, and you weren't benefitting from what The world wide web or the internet could offer. And then in terms of blockchain technology are browsers and apps, to restate my question, to get used to it or is there going to be some type of new interface for it? Decentralization neccitates a different way you think about and access these systems. So people that have been playing around with it. They've Things like mastodon or Riotchatter or things like federated systems. Piratebay for example. There are other examples of peer to peer systems that are not black chain base and they have user bases. So just getting people to understand what the value to them is going to be is All we have to do, and there has been too much focus on the investment side and therefore it's really taking away from people, it's the difference, are you building, are you investing? You know, it's taken away from the focus on hey, this thing is really cool, I can meet my friends here, we can swap Crypto kiddies, or whatever it is. But they're still finding their feet as to what that network's gonna look like. How quickly will we start seeing businesses adopt public chains, or get involved, start dabbling with them. There are businesses that are doing things on the public chain. And if you mean top corprates to be launching applications that are On the public chain, I think we'll see things that look like a www landing page in the relatively short term, as soon as there's some sort of regulatory decision around, hey, I need to pay to access this This network and that means I have to hold cryptocurrency on my general books. That's dissuasive but that doesn't mean you're gonna be moving your core operations onto a public blockchain. I mean we should all hope that no one moves their core operations to a public blockchain. Right away because it would grind the whole thing to a halt, so it's just, it's a little early for that. But what they probably will start doing is say maybe you have a permission network and you wanna pin that network to the public chain for added security, or maybe one of these self sovereign identity things really does take off and so you wanna start letting your users authenticate with that or maybe checking You know, their credit history from what's on their wallet. Then you're gonna say, hey, maybe that information is on the public chain, let's figure out how to integrate with that. And tha'ts exactly really what we're doing with Clovyr, is making sure, rather than kind of forcing public chain down people's throat that aren't ready for it Say it's okay build whatever makes sense for you. When you're ready and you wanna enable that service, you flip a switch and provide a wallet and you're off to the races .>> Well we'll be keeping close tabs on what you're building over Clover. That's all we've got time for. Thank you for joining us Amber .>> Thanks for having me .>> I'm Robert Hackitt .>> I'm Jeff Roberts. For more Balancing the Ledger please visit Fortune. com See you next time. [ MUSIC ]

Amber Baldet, cofounder and CEO of Clovyr, sits down with team Ledger to discuss the latest crypto and blockchain news.