EBC22 | Opis Cloud – Unlocking the Green Credentials of Blockchain

[Music] good afternoon everyone i hope you've had a really great convention we certainly have and i would actually like to just start with a round of applause for the organizers please because i think they've done an amazing job now to uh go against convention i will briefly introduce myself my name is adam rohney i'm the chief technology officer of opus group we're a british blockchain technology company and we build applications for cloud and for gaming that reward users for their participation so just a very quick piece of audience involvement before i go much further hopefully two questions which are very easy to answer can you please raise your hand if you have a smartphone on you right now okay breathe a sigh of relief can you keep your hand raised if you think that this evening you're gonna have to charge it okay perfect hopefully by the end of this presentation i'll have explained why by doing that simple activity you can join a revolution and actually help the environment in the same process okay so technology we're in a position where we're getting increasing usage of digital services i know we're talking about web 3 but web 2 is alive and well and it's continuing to grow year on year in addition to web 3. so e-commerce is still a huge developing area online streaming is now accounting for hundreds and hundreds of tons of carbon in terms of environmental impact and that's before we get to web 3 and the obvious impact that blockchain and related technologies have as well all of this comes with an increased issue for us increased requirements for data storage and for data transfer and an interesting way of thinking about it is that every time you take a convention selfie send a whatsapp to organize a meeting or even send an email you're actually creating something that has a carbon footprint that has an impact on the environment and that's something i want us to talk about and lastly we've got an increasing number of connected devices smartphones smart watches smart cars smart glasses and beyond in the next few years this number will just continue growing exponentially and this brings with it a number of environmental challenges that we really need to think about so what's the impact in technological terms well it means that we need more servers to deal with the data transfer requirements we need to have these servers be stored in locations data centers purpose built with enough power and of cooling enough security to deal with them and all of this means that we're drawing down more electricity now to put this in context for you a single data center broadly consumes the same amount of electricity as 50 000 homes that's 50 000 homes which is absolutely um remarkable in fact the cloud industry and the data center footprint now accounts for more carbon annually than the airline industry does in totality so when you sit on your plane on the way home if you flew to come here and you what's up someone strangely the whatsapp potentially has a bigger carbon impact than actually being on the plane to bring this home in terms of where we are at the moment there are 125 data centers in spain and in fact that number is set to increase over the coming years as more telcos and technology providers open more data centers so this number will increase now those of you very quick with maths might be able to do the equation i'm about to share but ultimately that equates for nearly 6.2 million homes worth of electricity in spain alone just from the existing domestic data center usage that's not counting obviously the global footprint what's driving this well going back to my first question about smartphones they're a huge part of the issue there are 1.4 billion smartphone sales annually and that number is set to increase and many of you in here in fact will have multiple devices that require charging so on the one hand you can look at that and say that's an environmental issue and something that we really need to think about carefully when we were doing our research for our company and building our solutions there was something interesting that we discovered though taking the u.s as an example around 90 percent of people actually spend six hours or less every day on their smartphones now i'm certainly not advocating we spend much more than that i think being stuck on our phones all day is not healthy but if you think about that for a second that leaves around 18 hours where actually the phone is basically doing nothing now the u.

s market's pretty large but if you track these numbers through this equates to around 265 million devices that have about 18 hours worth of idle cpu time per day what's interesting about that is that the most powerful device that you probably own is your smartphone year on year increasing cpu capability increasing gpu capability increased battery life and an upgrade cycle through annualized or 24 month contracts means that's probably the most up-to-date piece of technology you have and for us that posed a really interesting question with 4.8 billion daily hours of unused compute time in the u.s alone what could we do with that if we could harness it and do something interesting something that might help the environment or something that might even address this cloud compute issue i was talking about at the beginning this led us to develop our platform opus cloud opens cloud is currently being built for android smartphones and it will be released later this year simple download from the google play store and it's completely free by downloading and using this application you will actually be joining a mobile phone based supercomputer by charging that phone at night and leaving this application running we will be able to execute remote compute tasks on your phone as part of a grid network making you part of the supercomputer that i'm talking about now initially the types of activity that we're going to start with are probably in the tech for good space so helping charities solve scientific problems that could be um protein synthesis or protein folding or helping discover new cancer treatments or looking at environmental statistical analysis for example but in time we're going to use the same technology to build out commercial use cases so if you were a financial services provider for example you could use our distributed cloud compute platform to actually process financial transactions undertake fraud analysis and at the more extreme end of the spectrum potentially even do things such as building ai models on this remote compute grid the benefit to the clients is ultimately far cheaper cloud compute capability than a traditional cloud provider and the benefit for the users is obviously they get rewarded in cryptocurrency and at the same time they're helping the environment so going back to where i kind of started i think everybody put their hand up and said they have a smartphone and i'm glad everybody put their hand up and said it needs charging so once this product is launched which is actually later this year simply by plugging in your phone charging at night you will be able to join this global grid help the environment do tech for good and be rewarded in the process so if you'd like more information about this please head over to opus cloud opuscloud.io and i'm happy to obviously answer questions at the end but thank you so much for your time and attention i know that cocktail hour follows this so this is a tough slot but i really appreciate it and i hope you'll join us on the revolution thank you [Applause] thank you adam do we have any questions yes one there two oh yeah shout out so the question is is data anonymization an issue by which i think you sort of brought them in data security as as well yeah it it absolutely is an issue and um i could probably spend more time afterwards explaining in detail but there's there's a number of ways that we approach it um but one of the the best ways of thinking about it is that no node in the network has a full data set so there's a decentralized abstraction that's happening there and the second thing is that on the actual devices themselves we're effectively running a secure encrypted enclave so you can't actually get to that data in a normal sense so the title of the topic was about obviously decentralization and so really we're playing off the trend that actually people are trusting decentralized technologies and encryption much more than they have done before and we're going to leverage that basically to do the cloud compute that i'm referring to in this product hey uh just a quick question in terms of the environmental impact for it all um we've got uh if the app is being left open overnight and you're doing that isn't that then also a huge amount of data going back and forth and that doesn't then sort of offset the you know the the benefit of you know not charging things yeah sure so that's a really great question so the data uh sorry i'm british so i have to say data the uh the data um throughput is relatively low um this is not peer-to-peer it's it's decentralized but if you think about peer-to-peer um almost like file sharing or transfers like the throughput is actually relatively low the packet sizes are very manageable and you know we're not talking terabytes of data moving around between single devices and in fact it's probably comparable to the amount of data a phone is syncing back to a photos provider or a cloud address book provider so we're trying to keep that manageable not just for the um the data usage you're talking about but also for power consumption as well right any more oh another question can you shout it over so the question was when will the opus cloud app be available so we're hoping to have the first version out later this year um and that will be the um community projects version that i've been referring to in terms of um science and tech for good projects that we'll be distributing with the commercialized version to follow later and early next year um hi could you just expand a little more on this like rewarding part that seemed interesting like rewarding encrypt i'm just not sure if i got it like how it uh works 100 like because you said what's in it for the user right where you said like the user is being rewarded in crypto could you expand a little bit on that or tell me how it works like a little more in detail yeah of course so um essentially what happens is you can set up your account and define how many hours of units effectively that you want to process and we know that not everybody will want to run this all the time you may schedule a period of hours that you want the app to be running or a certain amount of time and basically for every full unit of work that's completed for each of the projects you're subscribed to you will receive cryptocurrency tokens in exchange so there will be a direct connection between um the effort that you're putting in effects will be in the reward that we're paying back and that's on a per work unit basis okay thanks uh but like cryptocurrency tokens like a new cryptocurrency type or established currencies on the market that's also just interesting for me to know yeah so we're actually launching a new cryptocurrency to accompany this it's a cryptocurrency which is going to be used across all of our group applications and so it will be interchangeable with the other products and services that opus group is launching both later this year and early next yeah i i think i have some more questions but perhaps i can just visit you at the at the booth later or something like that not to drink too much time glass of cava now yes cool very nice last one maybe i don't know i'm just postponing my fair wallet yeah we need to see farewell as well daniel any last question or that's it i'm listening to some music behind the dj started already okay thank you thank you thank you adam i'm gonna download i'm gonna download the app thank you adam