Name: Balancing the Ledger: Parity CEO Jutta Steiner Talks Polkadot, Frozen Funds, and Facebook
Uploaded: 2019-03-04
Duration: 8 min 31 s
Description: One project Parity works on, Polkadot, could be valued at $1B after second token sale.

[ MUSIC ] Welcome to Balancing the Ledger where tech and finance intercept. I'm Jane [ UNKNOWN ]. And I'm Robert [ UNKNOWN ] And today we're joined by [ UNKNOWN ] the CEO of [ UNKNOWN ] Thank you so much for being here [ UNKNOWN ] Thank you So let ` s start off by talking a little bit about what Parity is and what it does. What were you trying to solve, what mission did you set out to accomplish? So Parity is a software development company where we develop protocol software for what we call webfree and At Web 3. 0, we have in mind a web that from a user interface perspective isn't too much different from what we know. It still has the shiny apps, but underneath, instead of closed servers and data fiduciaries that are sitting behind everything, it's a truly peer- to- peer interaction between the user, so We don't have to rely on any promises that are made to us. What happens to our data, what happens to our identity and what not. You got two products that you're working on, Substrate and Polkadot. Tell us a little bit about what those are and how they work? So Substrate and Polkadot, to me these days are like A bit of the third- generation of block chain technology. So it all started out with BitCoin where people recognized the power of this new way of dealing and transacting in a decentralized manner and then it got distracted into this project and protocol called [ UNKNOWN ] where Basically it showed for the first time that not only can you do financial transaction, but sort of actually create peer to peer applications on the web. And I was [ UNKNOWN ] were taking this a whole step further Abstracting various modules, to make it much more easy to develop and talk. Also address current shortcomings like scalability of the protocols, so that's what we're working with. Are you essentially trying to build a better Ethereum? Does Polkadot have the potential to actually replace Ethereum? I don't look at it really as competing against Ethereum. I mean people, I think when Ethereum came along had a bit of the same feeling like, Ethereum is competing with a company that addresses a completely different problem. We try to make this really much more easy for developers to also assimilate other technologies as they come along. People might have heard of zero- knowledge proofs like cryptographic technologies that Really makes it possible to build what I just described, like this decentral web. And yet, there was a big controversy that happened recently. One of the developers at Parity, who also is a developer for Ethereum, one of the big tech guys over there, people were saying that he was She was delaying upgrades to Ethereum in order to benefit Polka Dot. What was the basis for this whole scandal? It's really a shame that some people and we see some toxicity of people in the social media like everywhere thinking our society, it's really sad that That these things happen, although, what we're really doing is making the pie bigger for everyone. And really, if you look at the processes that are adopted, there isn't really a way for the company to manipulate anything if you truly investigate, so, I guess people are scared that some of the hopes that they have on what Ethereum could deliver, maybe it can't deliver. And so, it basically led to a [ UNKNOWN ] amount of tax against one of our developers. So, he basically step back from a lot volunteering that he was doing above and beyond what's he does for the company. A part of the contreversy seems to have started after the first [ UNKNOWN ] that you have for [ UNKNOWN ] where there was a hacker who actually Exploited [ UNKNOWN ] was able to freeze what was worth it at that type something like $ 300 million worth of ethereum. Mm- hm. We've just seen an upgrade in ethereum, how does this impact your ability to recover the frozen funds? So the great tool [ UNKNOWN ] that was added as part of the [ UNKNOWN ] Doesn't directly fix the frozen funds issue, however it shows and appreciates that effectively the tooling that we had at the time when we created the [ UNKNOWN ] library Wasn't sufficient to prevent bugs from happening. So basically what you're doing software development, you want to modularize because you want to reuse things. That's actually the power of software and one of the powerful things you can do with software and. But by modularizing a particular piece of infrastructure a bug was introduced and If that up code, that functionality, existed at the time, that wouldn't have been a vulnerability, basically. And so if you think now, okay, we introduced and sort of fixed the tooling, then wouldn't it be the right thing to offer fix the issues that arose when we didn't have the tooling? Yeah. Now that Create2 is up and live, it's in Constantinople, it's been adopted by Ethereum, does that mean you get the funds back? What other steps need to be taken? So, it doesn't automatically mean we get, not even us, all the teams that had stuck funds, get the funds back. It still requires the same thing as it requires another hard fork where that particular state change is made. But it gives a much more solid argument To why it's the right thing to do and recover the funds. Now, there's a new token sale happening I think now for a polka dot that could value at, reportedly, about $ 1 billion. Is Is this something that's only necessary because the original funds were frozen or is this something that you have other plans for anyway? It was something that was planned all along the way, like there was always a commitment to distribute most of the tokens on [ INAUDIBLE ] block before the Before the Genesis launch in order to have a decentralized [ BLANK_AUDIO ] basis dotholders before the launch. That's nothing that's been done because of the frozen funds issue really. When the Web3 Foundation raised money last time it was very successful. It was one of the biggest ICO's that happened but your fundraising goals or Web3 Fundraising goals now are pretty high as well. And the ICO market has cooled. There are fewer investors, there's less money being raised. What do you think the likelihood is that web three foundation will raise enough money or meet its fundraising goals in this next round? So with the technology that Parity has been building we've seen a lot of interest by the engineers, the developers, the builders in this space. And that's really what I care about like I've see the bear markets 2014 when Bcrank crashed when we're just starting with the theorem really. And that's what in the ends. The attention from developers from people that want to build on top is what what counts like in the end Polkadot is useless if there's anything that's being built on top, so that's what we really care about. You You've been very outspoken in terms of data privacy and what Parity can do to advance that, and help protect people's data. There are big tech companies that are using Parity, like Microsoft, like Google. And how are they using this? Is this something that could address data privacy? Maybe potentially even Facebook could use Parity to do that. I would hope so. I mean, it's technology that in the end empowers users, because Because it's basically open infrastructure and a fundamental shift from what we see at the moment where all the infrastructure is privatized, everything is closed behind servers of the companies of the entire giants that run this. And so I think it's a good thing that [ UNKNOWN ] other companies as well In particular for reasons of data privacy and agency. Well that all we have time for today thanlyou so much for joining us. I am Jane Vietshare And I am Robert Hackey. Coming from Fortune. com for more balanced ledger. We'll see you next time. [ MUSIC ]

Balancing the Ledger: Parity CEO Jutta Steiner Talks Polkadot, Frozen Funds, and Facebook

Fortune_Crypto

One project Parity works on, Polkadot, could be valued at $1B after second token sale.