Decentralized Blockchain Applications, More Than Smart Contracts - James Duchenne @ TOKEN2049

[Music] hi everyone so I'm James Duchenne I'm the chief operating officer of Crown Machine and so just for a bit of context crowd machine is attempting to leverage the spare resource capacity of devices mobile phones computers laptops and create a decentralized cloud computer now what makes crown machine interesting is that within that decentralized computer it has effectively a zero code software creation tool what that means is that you're able to build complex mission-critical applications without coding currently this software tool is being used by fortune 500 companies including GE Aon Hewitt and anthem in the United States what we've done over the past what we've done over the past two years is effectively looked at how we can underlay this tool that was offered to the enterprise sector to open it up so that everyone can build faster more efficient applications in the blockchain space within and and within this within this crowd development tool all these software builder there is a component which she's very light github which is a monetizable github so that when developers and I use the term loosely creates behaviors of applications and software they're able to place it in this repository and if a third person actually utilizes this component and runs it on the network they're going to get rewarded so this is effectively you know for context in my speech today you will see that I've mentioned decentralization smart contracts and blockchain you couldn't find any three biggest buzzwords out there in anything in terms of what's actually happening in this space and even when I look at this which is basically an interest over time of those three words used in the media in searches you can see right now that blockchain is actually far outpacing decentralization as a term as well as smart contract as a term yet I think it's not about blockchain it is about decentralization because what's effectively happening is that we have hierarchical structures and models being disrupted to a decentralized ecosystem so I could effectively just keep mentioning these three words which is what you hear out there in the in the press and and when people talk about this industry so it's important first when we look at these three terms that we look at exactly what's happening out there in terms of the business that's being created to look after the sharing economy and the sharing economy is community-centric so we start with the community we start with a networks and we have to understand that consumers and service providers can often be the same thing you can drive an uber and still use an uber right as a service and what we're seeing out there as well is that skills are being applied across industries I'm sure in the room since we're talking 2049 that you will see that this marketers giving opinions about legal matters that you're seeing technologists give opinion about marketing so on and so forth so what is really important here I believe is that we understand the type of people the type of business hierarchies that we're dealing with and the way that they're being migrated to a decentralized ecosystem so I mentioned that it was about decentralization people I think often confuse blockchain with decentralization blockchain is a utility it is used to persist information into it is it is a tool that allows for a certain consensus to be achieved around a state of affairs it is not trustless you still trust that the mathematics behind it is correct you still trust that the network maintaining the system is doing their job they're doing their job so when I look at blockchain the first thing to understand is that blockchain is a utility we've got this thing about smart contracts today that we're going to effectively create contracts without a central arbiter and the trend that we're seeing is that a number of ventures out there are trying to smash so much into the smart contract layer that they are creating errors and creating errors with smart contract is effectively basically locking up value and you have the ability to look at something that has maybe you know millions of dollars maybe billions and if you make a mistake it is a mistake forever so one of the lessons that I'd like to share is don't overload smart contracts so poor design there's another reason for it is that poor design also increases cost gas costs compute cycle costs so if you add these two together it becomes clear that if you are using smart contracts to build you know whatever sort of project out there introducing complexity can have catastrophic results so what are the problems at least our perspective that we're looking at at this industry today the first one which is quite interesting is that there is a lot of hype in terms of what this industry can achieve yet for every 14 open spots for blockchain developers only one is filled and that basically means that we have a resource issue so we are growing as an industry over the next five years it is dated at about 16 times and we've got a 14x deficit already how do we catch up how do we bring the capabilities of what we have to the forefront and how do we service the the promises made by an industry so a few things needs to happen you need to be able to either code or either build software faster or you need to dampen the expectations it's mathematically either one or the other in terms of the other problem as well is scalability and a special chart out for critically today because it showed how clogged a network like aetherium can get once you try to smash too much into the blockchain and into trying to run too much at that low level sort of utility so for me the promised land looks like this we have the ability to do a decentralized or a utility from the smart contract or the you to the blockchain level but yet we push complex tasks still in a centralized environment Amazon AWS Microsoft Azure most of the blockchain applications are being hosted in those environment as we move forward in time we're starting to see decentralized storage we we're starting to look at an application that is centrally stored decentralized storage and using blockchain and smart contract as the decentralized base layer and where we're moving I believe is towards the decentralized cloud or cloud computer where not only is the application decentralized the blockchain obviously is already there and the storage as well and that basically creates a full decentralized stack so the next big cloud one of the one of the things that I think about when I look at this is how do we get to the next evolution we first had Bitcoin immutability aetherium flexibility and now we're talking about decentralized cloud computer right we can leverage billions of devices we can provide an inclusive system by designing a an architecture or a framework that involves everyone to participate in providing a decentralized cloud hosting around a rewards mechanism and that we already have had a number of years of experience we've tokenization so one of the things as well which is really important is that there is a lot of hype where people promise beautiful great applications out there and really when we look at this is it has to be realistic large companies enterprises will not switch immediately to a decentralized type of cloud storage it will not switch immediately to to an adoption from an environment that still benefits from some regulatory clarity issues so there is a process of migration and the process of migration first for me is that we need to resolve some of the problems so we need to be able to build solutions faster we need to abstract away as you know the different types of environment and the different types of languages whether it's solidity simplicity on Bitcoin and have the ability to code once or build once and persist in whatever blockchain in an agnostic manner as possible because that will offer speed to market and that will be able to address some of the limitations that we see today in the marketplace we also need to acknowledge that there are centralized solutions and decentralized solutions out there and instead of actually forcing one way or another we probably should offer the choice of centralized solution whether it's a cloud hosting solution or a decentralized one and allow the market to choose over time the best will win the mode the faster the most efficient the most cost effective and prove this process we can solidify communities around a sharing economy in a way that their they are empowered to participate in this ecosystem so some concluding remarks here so if you have to take a few points from from what I said today what I tried to share is that decentralization is the name of game blockchain is a utility don't overload smart contracts errors are costly errors can be catastrophic especially where there's the locking in of consideration of value the next big thing is very likely to be the decentralized cloud it's the next evolution in terms of a decentralized application stack we need to build blocked software in a blockchain agnostic why we need to look at the different types of blockchain solutions that we have out there and use them for what they are worth whether it's speed immutability or otherwise and evolution at the end of the day must be grounded in reality thank you [Music] [Applause]