Working with the Federal Government on Blockchain Adoption - Benjamin Diggles

that's right thanks buddy i want to go ahead and first thank denver you guys are throwing an amazing conference i want to thank constellation network my team co-founders and uh the best community in crypto appreciate you guys i saw this guy chuckling up here because working with the federal government is not all that exciting but today i'm not here to just talk about all the cool stuff we're doing but rather hopefully enable everybody here to walk away learning about entry points and which can impact your business that could be funded by the federal government so hopefully this is something that can impact all of you in a positive way i'm not going to go through all of my accolades here because that's kind of stupid but i did want to just show that i'm involved in quite a bit of stuff whether it's through the blockchain lens or it's through the enterprise lens but i just wanted to show this so you know that that i do have the credentials and i'm not just some joker so i am benjamin diggles i'm the chief strategy officer and co-founder that basically means i'm the business development guy handling consortia academia enterprise federal general partnerships and so forth so i got this juicy qr code if you guys want to check out constellation network io and see a little bit more about what that is but to understand what constellation is for those that have not heard about us yet constellation provides infrastructure that enables businesses and individuals to transact and conduct commerce in web 3. and while i know that's a very high in the sky uh explanation to bake it down for you decentralists we are a base layer protocol the world's first l0 protocol we have a double layer consensus algorithm that is custom we are a directed acyclic craft framework and we uh we operate a very robust ecosystem uh with that ecosystem we have our own stargazer wallet which is very similar to metamask that allows you to conduct and transact our cryptocurrency dag dag after directed acyclic graph fee-less and instantly we also have our own d5 exchange that's been built on our core network as well as we just recently last year acquired a data mining company i'm sorry a hardware sensor company that allows folks to validate data from a hardware sensor and get paid in cryptocurrency in real time very cool stuff last shill plug is that we do have an accelerator that we coach companies to go from inception to token launch if they're interested in working in our ecosystem that hopefully explains a little bit why we were one of the first two companies to successfully lock down a contract with the federal government that was about two and a half years ago the other company was simba chain want to give them a shout out big fan of those guys if you don't know simba chain check them out but we went for the jugular on this and i don't have a federal background and i'm not one to really praise the federal government i'm i think i'm a little bit more like everybody here like not real stoked on the man but there is a chance here to really validate your technology and why i'm very proud of this work that we've done so far is that we went straight for the core promises of what distributed ledger technology brings to the market and that's really around immutable data security automation fractionalized payments all the stuff that everybody's here to celebrate as part of this conference right so right now i'm in that period of performance it's pretty hardcore happy to talk about the details if anybody's interested in what we're doing but this really proves out that this isn't just some fictitious technology but that actually can create true accountability from the source all the way to the ingestion no matter how data is being communicated so with that what the reason why we went into federal is because as the bd guy i was talking i literally feel like i've talked to every fortune 500 company out there and they were really scrutinizing blockchain and i found out to my surprise that the federal government is roughly about three times more adept at this stuff than the commercial space so it doesn't matter if i'm talking to a fortune 10 company they would be their engineer folks would be very skeptical closed they didn't want to be the first to jump in they didn't like the idea of a public ledger and putting their data or their transactions on it all very good reasons so i'm not like trying to tell them to just catch up but i get on the phone with the federal government these guys really understood uh not only blockchain and defy but really where this this this market is going and so uh the the biggest difference is that the commercial side is really roi uh focused right whereas when you look at the federal government they care about impact and this does uncover that we are working with the largest budget in the world somewhere upwards of like 700 800 billion dollars and i don't you know i know that there's probably some differing opinions of what the federal government is and how you if you like it or you don't but there is a big opportunity for projects in this room to get involved that will not only benefit you but i think benefits society and america at large one of the proof points is that the white house just put out an executive order january 26 around how we're shifting all of our infrastructure in the federal government over to a zero trust infrastructure and i've heard this from large prime contractors as well that they're all in a big migration effort to make a zero trust infrastructure and i think the term zero trust is a little misleading reminds me of the mid-2000s we talked about real time and that could mean instantly to some people that might mean in a couple seconds and so zero trust really can be scrutinized pretty hardcore just like decentralization and i do love that folks here like to fact check what true decentralization is right so with this the reason why i want to put this up is that this isn't like they're just kind of tipping their hat and interest in blockchain but that they are starting to make it court their their um their architecture and the reason why no one trusts anybody not profound right um so today i want to call all blockchain projects and it almost seems counterintuitive that i'm asking folks to compete against us in the federal government to get these solutions into the hands of those that can validate what you guys are building and what's very interesting about this is that there's this thing called the sbir it stands for small business innovation research and this is a fund that everybody who's a tax paying american pays money to go into and the reason they do this is that we can stimulate the economy with net new technology specifically out of like silicon valley to get in the hands of the government but also just make some of these companies grow correct so 1.2 billion dollars a year is sitting in this cash bucket for companies to bid against on their solutions and i'm going to talk through a few reasons as why here in a second but there's many many different groups like this and i'm going to touch on what they mean so these are not the sum of all the opportunities but the sbir is certainly the one that i would start with so with this they're called other transaction authorities it's kind of gross right but these otas the reason these exist and this is kind of like i would say the x factor of this this presentation is that we we live in a somewhat of a corrupt world right we got lobbyists that are ensuring that hey if some need is happening in the federal government that they're going to be the first in line and they're going to be the first ones to say you don't need any of that blockchain stuff just work with us and so forth furthermore working with the federal government sucks it's hard it's really hard and so you know even you had elon musk at this thing at the end of last year basically there was this big push from silicon valley saying we're tired of it time's running out if you want our technology so bad make it a lot easier to work with us because we're not going to jump through all these hoops when it's easier to make money in the commercial side so with that you guys have technology and you need money they have money but they need technology but the problem is there's been this big wall that really has thwarted folks from getting involved in this stuff so with that they created this program the sbir program hasn't been around that long so we're kind of dealing with a little bit of a renaissance right now and that's where i'm really pushing folks to get involved and so they have limitations to apply like you have to be a business that has less than 500 employees or certain less revenue goals and so forth meaning that if you have like a lockheed martin they can't bid on these things they can't get involved in these contracts so it's like they really are calling all of silicon valley and the folks that have innovation innovative tools to get involved in this so with that i want to just say why you should or shouldn't do government work right so the first reason why you want to do and lean in is to validate your tech with a significant customer that funds you to build your road map this is a big one right i'm not here to like slam accelerators i just told you we run one but i'm not in incubators but they often take a pound of flesh for a high risk involvement they'll be like great we'll take 20 of your company for 60 grand and like we'll see how you do and that's a pretty hardcore environment i don't think any of them have i guess returns that are that low but the point being is that then they also walk away with a you know chunk of your your your ip and equity and so forth whereas the government won't take any ip they're really good about this i know trust the government is not necessarily the most popular thing right now but they're really good about not touching your ip and they don't take any equity so they don't have a skin in the game so you have a chance to value validate your technology with some pretty hardcore use cases that you can put a pretty cool logo on that will show that you're actually moving in the right direction without having to lose control of your business you want to show some early revenue during your development roadmap these folks will help you build your roadmap and it's called a thing called trl which is technical readiness level they will entertain companies that are at the ideation phase you don't have to have production product which means if you have a technical roadmap that you can align with this program they will pay you to build that as long as that you are injecting value against their mission impact needs the third reason is you want to contribute to across pollinate within the federal ecosystem this means you may have a passion for federal you want to be a contractor you want to get involved and that's not for everybody right i just want to say that straight up but don't get involved if you just want quick money in a logo you will you'll get eaten alive right that doesn't mean that you'll get rejected by the host so much but you might get in over your head like when i won our first contract i was really stoked but then about 10 minutes later i had a panic attack because i was like well actually i have to deliver on i have to deliver on this now you uh if you don't intend on being a contractor or not in it for the long haul don't do it like it's only really for those that are seriously about making impact within these things right and if you can't feel the required dedicated resources to do it properly i've seen this in a lot of companies we're like hey who do we have that's good at writing proposals let's just throw one in and see what happens you really need somebody dedicated that's going to really lead the charge on on these activities so so this is where i'm going to leave it which is uh encourage everybody to get activated right again a lot of us don't trust the government and i the idea that i'm working with the dod my friends just roll their eyes and they think i'm a crazy person but what i've learned is we do live in a paradox that means there's good people and bad people what matters is the energy you bring to the landscape right and i believe that there's a chance that you can actually get the best of all worlds here and you might be pleasantly surprised that there's some wonderful people that work for the government so my encouragement is to start at sbir they have all these videos that teach you how to go through these multi-phase processes to make it very easy again this is their their north star is making it as easy as possible as an other transaction authority to bring you into their ecosystem so with constellation again this is my one shills you can join our community you can install our wallet we have the ability to stake nodes within our d5 platform and we even have the ability for you to buy one of these hardware sensors that will validate data and pay in cryptocurrency in real time truly bridging the promises of distributed ledger and the real world but again i just hopefully can inspire everybody here that there's pockets of money through a multi-phase program that will reward you anywhere from hundreds of thousands of dollars to millions of dollars to help you build your roadmap without giving out equity that will benefit your business and hopefully your fellow americans in the world so that's my uh that's my talk and i really appreciate you guys all having me here