Name: Balancing The Ledger: Blockstack Cofounders Paint A Picture of A Decentralized Future
Uploaded: 2018-06-08
Duration: 11 min 14 s
Description: Blockstack cofounders Ryan Shea and Muneeb Ali stop by Balancing The Ledger to talk tokenizing securities, being advisors for HBO's 'Silicon Valley,' and what a decentralized future will look like.

[ MUSIC ] Welcome to Balancing the Ledger where tech and finance intersect. I'm Jen Wieczner. And I'm Robert Hackett. And we're here with the co- founders of Blockstack, Muneeb Ali and Ryan Shea. Thank you guys so much for being here. Thanks for having us So last night there was some news from Coinbase. They've made three acquisitions, including Keystone Capital, which gives them a broker- dealer license pending approval. Now Coinbase has been wanting to get a broker- dealer license ever since the SEC See synthetic [ exchanges ?] should sometimes register with the FCC, if they're going to be selling securities. What does this mean for them? I think it's greatly used. We're big fans of Coinbase in general. And having a fully regulated Securities Exchange base in the U. S. I think it's a step forward for the entire industry. And I guess our view is that there is certain things that are clearly securities. One example could be equity in a company, right? I don't think anyone would argue with that, hey, is this a security or not? We've been functioning very well under the current securities regulations. And if Coinbase can help Tokenize some of these things, and have a fully regulated exchange where they can trade. I think that would just be a really good step forward. At the same time, Circle, which is now valued at $ 3 billion, they've been also pursuing some of these regulations These licenses. In fact I've talked to their founders quite a bit extensively Jeremy Alair and Sean Nevil and they believe that the whole sort of you know panoply of assets out there are going to be tokenized. In the future everything's gonna be portioned into tiny little digital slices that you can trade around. What would you say is the benefit of doing that? If you look at how crypto token generally works, you know, they're, They're trading 24 / 7. It's very easy to send them from one place to another so let's just imagine that Circle is also able to have a license and a regular security to change. You can transfer these things to coin base to another exchange. So all the benefits that you see of Tokens can be applied to traditional securities, and I think it's a very exciting area. We don't directly work in it, but we think that it's a very exciting area. So I want to shift gears a little bit and talk about your own company, Block Stack, but before we get to that, I also want to ask apparently you two were advisors to Silicon Valley, the HBO TV show. Can you tell us a little bit about that experience? Yeah, alright. So we're advisors for the season five of Silicon Valley. It was a really good experience. We got to speak with some of their writers and talk about our experience building Blockstack. And the experience building this new decentralized internet that we're working on. I mean that's such a big part of the show. Yeah. The new internet. The decentralized internet. And that's based on you guys. Yes. [ LAUGH ] Well, we're not say it's based on us. We have spoken and had some really great conversations with them. They have other projects that have advised them as well. One has made a couple of the The people from the main safe team. We just look at it like we're working on something that we care a lot about and we wanted to help them out in any way that we could. How did they execute? How true to life is the show, given your experience in this kind of wacky industry? They're pretty good. They're really good. I think they get details right, to the extent that if you're a hardcore engineer There is something there for you to appreciate, and if you are just, they have something for the broader public as well, right? So striking that balance is usually very hard, and they're experts at that. So spoiler alert, the decentralized Internet company in Silicon Valley does an ICO as part of their season. Did you guys recommend that, or what was your take on how to properly depict that? We didn't recommend anything in particular. A lot of the conversations were about what we've been working on, what we've been doing, what some of our future plans were. And so I think their goals was to draw some inspiration from us and from other projects, and And look at the ecosystem as a whole, and then paint a picture about, kind of figure out what is the really interesting stories that they could tell. So I don't think there's anything in particular that might have been taken from us, but we just wanted to give them as much context as possible. Well let's dive in and talk about Blockstack. What are you guys working on? So yeah, so we're building a new decentralized internet. And The goal is to allow people to be on control their digitals and we have a full application platform in developer community around making this happen that means that we give developers with the tools that they need, we provide support and an environment. Where developers can communicate. We provide some funding as well. Really, this whole thing is to build an entire economy that it decentralized. One really valuable thing that we provide and that we're building out as we release the Blockstack blockchain is this thing called app- rewards mining. And what that means is that Developers who have applications on Blockstack that are used and that provide real value, they will get a constant outflow of funding, of money, from the blockchain itself, right? This is part of the mining. In a system and we have a system where these app reviewers can actually indicate what applications are being used, and what applications are of high quality. And they can actually sustain themselves and be able to have a certain amount of revenue that way they can go forward. So it provides a baseline sorta business model while they Get started and can figure out their long term business model. They would receive tokens, Blockstack tokens. > Blockstack tokens. Exactly. So, what is an example of one of these apps? And is this kind of payout method working right now? So the payout mechanism is not working right now. That's when the blockchain goes live. We are really excited about our open source. Community and the developers who are building apps right now. I can give you some examples. One of them is called Graphite. It's an alternative to Google Docs. So imagine just like you are used to using Google Docs or spreadsheets. Google has all your data. In the Graphite example, you download the Graphite app locally and you would plug in your private cloud storage, which we help with. And after that it's very interesting that you are using something exactly like Google Docs, but it's local. It's decentralized. And your data is backed up in the Cloud in your, under your ownership. Right? So you control all that data. Another app is called Stealthy. It's a secure messaging app. It's interesting that we had Edward Snowdon as one of the keynote speakers at our developer event at Berlin, and he was actually playing around with this app. And it was very interesting to see that people who are that concerned with privacy are actually trying out these decentralized apps for messaging. 1 ) And what are some of the benefits of having a decentralized internet, that currently don't exist? Or maybe what are some of the problems we have today? 2 ) Yeah, I think what would happen with the traditional internet, is that, you can think of it as people started designing the core system, it's not like aliens gave us the technology, like those people are still With us were some of the pioneers of the existing Internet. And didn't build out everything perfectly. And then some of those gaping holes that you see, fundamental things that should have been part of the Internet infrastructure. Those holes were filled by large companies like Google or Facebook. One specific example would be, Facebook built out an authentication protocol. And then a lot of developers use that authentication protocol so you don't have to make new accounts. But the thing is now every single app that is using it, they're actually sending data back to a single company Facebook. If that was a fundamental internet protocol, then users are basically, they are in control of their own user name, their own data, and they're not A single company cannot just track them. That's just like one example, but there are many things that the traditional Internet didn't get right and there are many efforts including us that are actually trying to fix those problems and give developers a new platform that completely just changes the game, right. Like they can build fully decentralized applications. Where it's actually easier to build these apps than it is to build them in traditional ways. Now you're actually putting your money where your mouth is, you've recently put out a request of proposals for people to submit ideas for social networks. Decenteralized social networks. Decenteralized social networks, and there's a million dollars up for grabs, tell us about that initutive and what you're hoping to garner from it. So the goal there is t To provide resources for developers for startups to build decentralized apps. And really, it's about opening up people's- allowing people to be as creative as possible. We expect to see teams that build decentralized FaceBook or decentralized Twitter equivalents, but we also expect to see things that we couldn't have ever imagined. You know, you even think of GitHub is a social network, SoundCloud is a social network, there's so many different things, but there is even new things that haven't been imagined yet. And we want to really empower teams to be able to do that. We've had a Over 100 teams actually applied so far, and we're really excited about being able to support them in any way we can. And this is just one of the types of applications that we are supporting on top of Blockstack, there's many more. We believe that we now have that infrastructure where you can build these apps that get millions of users. If you remember CryptoKitties, on Ethereum became really famous. How could we forget And as it was getting like 400, 000, 500, 000 users, you basically couldn't use [ UNKNOWN ] because the underlying platform was not ready for getting that many users. So, this is our way of telling developers that you can now give our platform a spin and try building out the next breakthrough app on top of Blockstack and you will notice that this infrastructure Has like years of RND work going into it and you wouldn't notice some of the problems that you might with, with other platforms. So these are early days, but long, long term. Do you see everyone on facebook today switching to one of these decentralized platforms? Everybody on the internet today switching to Blockstack. How does that look in the future? It's hard to say exactly what the future would hold. I would say We and many other projects. We are working to build a decentralized future and its very possible that if all of this works out, that if all of the vision of decentralization is realized that decades from now people will look at storing the data of millions of users in one central location as preposterous. Because at the end of the day. This what we call the new decentralized Internet will just be the Internet if all works out and what that'll mean is that we will all be in control of our digital lives and might look something more like each person has their own private cloud each person has their own keys on their devices and they control their identity and their data. And they can bring their data with them from one application to another, and it's more about the empowerment of the individual user. That's all we have time for today. Thank you, Muneeb and Ryan, so much for being here. Thank you so much for having us. I'm Jen [ UNKNOWN ]. And I'm Robert Hackett. Come to Fortune. com for more Balancing the Ledger. We'll see you next time. [ MUSIC ]

Blockstack cofounders Ryan Shea and Muneeb Ali stop by Balancing The Ledger to talk tokenizing securities, being advisors for HBO's "Silicon Valley," and what a decentralized future will look like.