J1 AG 05 Jeremy Millar EEA

okay I'm going to now endeavor to do the most boring talk in the history of SCC because we are gonna talk about standards a scintillating topic if you've ever read one standards tend to be very precise documents that describe how things work so that vendors and developers and people building systems if they all write their code to perform the same functions then all the products should work well together right so aetherium has some of this already it has the yellow paper it has the EIP process and the ERC process that produces various standards there are a couple of things it doesn't have right particularly around a way of driving in things like privacy and confidentiality into the into the public chain specifications there are things that enterprise that larger companies need that they want to see in it and and for for larger vendors and larger adopters of technology they need something that looks a bit more like what they're used to getting from you know Intel and Oracle and IBM then what they find in the community right so why standards development it's a it's a place for for members to collaborate and contribute you know but the real reason behind this is a network effects right it's not particularly helpful if your tools don't work together right because if I am building say an administration tool or a monitoring tool or a network analytics tool I want to be able to plug it into any VM all right and I don't want to have to hardwire against them and by the way if you're a purchaser of a tool or a user of a tool you want to know that you can mix and match in your stack right and to be able to Mitch mix and match in your stack you need to have well-defined interfaces so that you can plug out one piece and push in the other piece right in addition if you have good standards you can start to do things like certifications you can start to certify how well products comply with standards and that some of this already in the etherion community in terms of some of the test suites that are available but the the bar for some of the more risk adverse organizations to adopt our crypto ecosystem technology is a little bit more rigid than that right if if if we there have been reports in publications like coin desk and elsewhere about major investment banks wanting to trade cryptocurrencies right in order to do that they are de facto gonna have to run aetherium notes right to some extent their IT architecture committees will look for all sorts of things that really aren't there today when they select which VM to run right and so to expand the ecosystem there's a to expand the ecosystem beyond the early adopters we unfortunately need some things that are really really boring right and standards being a really really good starting point for figuring that out right so one of the reasons why we created the EEA is because what standards work that there is being done in etherium and there's quite a lot of collaboration around best practices and protocols what have you is being done on the public chain and what what was being done in private chains was really code base fragmentation people would literally download death and then change the code base right quorum being a very sophisticated example of this right and that means you run the risk that tools don't work together you run the risk that private chains won't be able to talk to the public chain right you run the risk that CIOs and IT architecture committees will choose hyperlink and go with IBM because it's safe all right and so we wanted to create the EEA to avoid that and to ensure interoperability to ensure that vendors could produce robust products that larger more risk adverse organizations could adopt more easily now I think it's important to note that in my view the EEA is not really about private chains okay in my view and a view that is certainly gaining thought leadership inside a consensus we will have a public global chain that interconnects many sub chains there are certain things there are certain pieces of information about me like my medical history I really want on a global cryptographic distributed ledger right and the reason why I want that is if I move I don't want to lose all of my data right I want to be able to choose to share things between my doctors right so I really want that sitting on the public chain right but I want it sitting on the public chain with a whole bunch of standards and compliance features built into it so that I know that people I don't want to see it can't see it right and that's what people inside of the Enterprise Alliance worry about right they worry about things like confidentiality and privacy and permissioning right but ultimately there is a growing belief at least inside of my organization and within the board and this the board and the technical development teams inside of the EEA that this really all should be interconnected through the global chain right and so we end up with these private permission sub chains that can interconnect through a double chain and potentially do that cross protocol and if we do that cross protocol then we're gonna need even more boring protocol standards to make it all work right so the the flip side of all of that is this this is a theorem so if it's not open source if it's not member led if it's not community led it's gonna fail right so the EEA started out in life very much as a membership driven organization bottoms up no real instruction on what to do that delayed some progress during last year and so we brought in a scene your executive director and put him put in place more technical management in order to increase the cadence of development and you I have a slide on that later but the goal is not to build a different aetherium the goal is not to fragment etherium the goal is to gather a set of requirements that aren't currently being pushed in the open the public chain open source community and create an open source community focused on that that will drive it back through the EIP process so it's about community it's about driving maturity and it's about being able to provide a versatility extends beyond the current earliest of adopters right and so the EEA is built in a way that if we show up at a large investment bank who wants to build a crypto trading desk they look at something that starts to look a little bit like the credibility of what a large traditional IT vendor or a large traditional technology standards organization would look like right this is I believe really valuable for the broader etherium community we we we if we want to change the world we need to change all of it right and that is gonna mean changing a lot of the legacy world too right so there needs to be some part of our community that provides that interface right now they're gonna be parts of our community that aren't really interested in that interface if you look at any sort of ecosystem or stack or technology platforms as many many bits that don't get used right how many people here have used were Microsoft Word as a word processor all right so how many people have used more than 20% of its features right no but it's a small subset that actually use all of everything so it's not it's perfectly okay for big portions of our community to not be interested in how do we have something that that appeals to traditional IT organizations but it's also important for everybody that is there and we have that capability so one great thing is a theorem is getting adopted everywhere right the enterprise aetherium Alliance is now over 400 members it's it's really focused deeply on technical standards but has a series of working groups that I'll come onto that are working up at the application layer and a higher level but this is actually again I think tremendous for the community and for the ecosystem in part because it is the largest come it's the excuse me largest consortium of commercial organizations in blockchain globally by some material margin and certainly the fastest growing and it's a very diverse group all over the world very very wide variety of industries are participating right so we have the smallest companies of the world the biggest companies of the world government's technology vendors financial institutions all coming together to increase the adoption of etherium so there is a question of around how do you actually do this right and so the first issue is understanding what are the privacy confidentiality enterprise scaling requirements that are actually needed right and to have a group of people that are good at going and figuring that out right because there's no point I'm writing a specification if it doesn't solve a problem right the second thing is you we need to be able to communicate this and the common language that we most of us speak most of the time our block diagrams right with arrows and interfaces pointing at each other right so we need to be able to ground a common understanding of of what this looks like this is one of the most educated audiences in the world and I bet if we had everyone come up here and because it's such a small crowd we could do this if we want to we would not all be able to draw an EVM and and those of us who could would draw very differently right because there isn't a common set of understanding beyond some very beyond some slightly esoteric documentation about what one of these should look like right and that may work for the core development community that might be okay but it's a barrier to entry for a large number of other people and organizations right who need much more traditional block diagrams like you find in classical technology whitepapers right and so what you do what you don't want to do is write reams and reams of specification that doesn't solve a problem and so you to get to a spec you need to have done the first two things and then you need to get to code and so there are a number of the blockchain startups inside of the enterprise aetherium alliance will have and will have specification enterprise aetherium specification compliant virtual machines probably within weeks of the specification being released so the EEA has put together a very clear technical development process which is based about market requirements like what people need at a user level technical requirements how do you built the system gathering a group of advisers to act on that and then developing the standards and pushing it out and so this is pretty normal actually for how industry consortium is write standards and specifications what we have done and this is perhaps one of the most significant and for a developer community perhaps one of the more boring slides possible to create what we have done is is try to put in place a much more structured approach to how the EEA operates so we hired a gentleman called Ron Resnick who had done a lot of the work around Wi-Fi and 5g standards he is a was an Intel executive but then went into the WiMAX and the Wi-Fi Alliance of various other places and he is someone who runs he's a he is someone who runs standards organizations that's what he does he's done it for the last 20 years it's just what he does and he's put in place a team of nine or ten people that he's hired that are there to administer the enterprise at theorem Alliance entity and organization it's not to do the work the work needs to be done by the technical steering committee which is volunteers and by vendors and technologists and with the user inputs from from organizations that want to build on top of this but we have a 10-person very professional management team ensuring that we achieve the outputs that we say that we're going to do which is primarily around specifications and standards as well as membership engagement education and events etc so in addition to trying to define a set of additional standards around aetherium for doing effectively private change in his actions in a way that is public chain compatible there's a series of industry user groups around things like digital identity insurance energy etc and this is important because if we want like the legacy world to shift to our ecosystem we're gonna need to show them how all right we're gonna need to give them an instruction manual and a map because when you go down the crypto rabbit hole it's not easy even if you're really trying to understand it let alone if you're working in an organization that's slightly resistant right so the idea of having these use case and application layer user groups is to allow for the diffusion of knowledge and the development of standards right so there are already a great deal of industry standards out there is you know X X X BR ml for financial interchange right in the old days those EDI there are already lots of standards out there and what we're gonna need to do with the application layer is make sure that there are just like there's the ERC 20 token contract standard that you have something similar for what is an insurance policy right if we really want to have insurance on the etherion blockchain we're gonna need that right and if we really want to have the ability to actually put like life insurance for you know five or ten million dollars on the interior blockchain we're probably gonna need some big life insurance companies to help us figure out how to do that right because they understand how the underwriting the policy stuff works so so this is a layer of this is the layer at which those types of discussions should be happening and then further down the stack we have the specification piece so this is the part that's saying look we've got the Athiya we've got the etherium roadmap and we want add it into a transaction confidentiality smart contract permissioning etc etc all the things that you need if you want to have your multi-million dollar life insurance contract sitting on the etherion blockchain which I think probably we do then we're gonna need to layer in some specifications for how privacy and management works right and so that's being done at the specification working group level Hey so the the principle piece when we launched the EA in February last year our goal was to get the spec out in a year and we haven't quite done that but we're not that far off so the first goal is to not be too late shipping the spec right and we and I think we are in good shape to deliver on that quite quickly the second is one of the challenges that you face when you try and run larger value transactions between complex multi-party processes and I don't mean just shipping a bunch of ether to coinbase I mean trying to do things like a complex insurance process is you need to start to get companies to do things like create IP agreements right and NDA's because they're gonna want to keep it behind the curtain and make sure they're not losing their valuable product right while they're collaborating on figuring out how to do it right and so the EEA is a really powerful infrastructure for doing that for two reasons one its building a test net so a test net of private chains that allows organizations to stand up applications very quickly and second is because it comes in it has built into it the necessary antitrust confidentiality and IP clauses necessary to do this in consortium so what that means is a EA members can collaborate with each other through the EEA without needing to go to their legal to get a partnership agreement signed with the counterparty right this is gonna save years of development cycles in terms of building large-scale applications in the theorem right it's because you can lose two to three months per project on trying to figure that out and sometimes a lot more than that right there'll be quite a lot of work around just attending more conferences like this participating in driving user education we have a whole more traditional organizations that now want to use aetherium and they need and we need to be presenting and communicating to them in a language and the style they're familiar with and so the EEA is taking all that as part of its mission and over time start to develop certification programs both for technology and for developers so that again to drive that adoption right if I'm a large company with 10,000 employees I will and I want to hire a developer I'd like to know what a good developer is right so an ee a certified development program would be a nice thing I'd like to know that the product when I install it is going to work with all the management tools Wow work with all the financial reporting tools and everything else right so there's a lot that can be done around certification and then the most important thing is be part of the community be an active member of the community in an open-source way that bridges between the legacy world in the new world so so the EEA is on a mission to increase its value to members to provide a knowledge base to provide for collaboration and to provide for deep connectivity right and a lot of progress has been made over the last three or four months around this and I expect to see a great deal of activity over the next six to 12 so I'd encourage anyone who has never looked at the EA website to go there it's not very expensive to join for startups it's very low-cost and find meetups there are meetups all around the world for the EA there's a large one in London a large one in New York I suspect we will have a growing one in Paris and remember if and let me just go back to what I said before if the theorem community really wants to change the world it's gonna need to change all of it it's gonna need to get if we really want to service the needs of the seven billion people on this planet and beyond then we really need to interact with the institutions that are serving them already right at the same time I am a big believer in starting companies and starting over and starting with a fresh piece of paper but even if you're doing that you need a venue in which you can communicate with your customer frictionlessly right and understand what their needs are and the EEA is here to help achieve all of that so with that we have two mics and we have a small group so we can either do the let's all draw all EVMS on the whiteboard challenge or we can do some QA does it it was that was that did that spur any thought or interest in this group of people that could lead to a question please we have a second mic as well I don't know if we can do the all right who is gonna be our Michaelson oh yes look at this so the person with their hand up got preempted by the mic helper this is great so the dislike with the different industries how did you choose the different industries you want to tackle we did not choose different industries we wanted to tackle they chose us so people show up right so car manufacturers show up airplane manufacturers show up alright they're just they're showing up and they're calling up and saying this etherium thing we see it taking off we see how many developers are there are are if there's a surprising amount of interest in tokens thanks BJ you're just you're helping my ratings we paid VJ to come to this literally what's that no no he works for consensus so so the the demand the membership from the industry participants is is literally people showing up but what an interesting thing is the increasing interest in tokens by very traditional players tokenize supply chain how to tokenize international payments international trade bills of lading insurance policies etc but it's people showing up increasingly now if we see a pattern right if three what we should be doing what we are getting to is a three car manufacturers show up in a month or two we should probably go talk to the next ten right and we are put that and that's why we put in place the team as marketing and PR and membership outreach to be able to go and do that cool next question he said we won't go on the stream okay so it's but their membership you see it's very cheap for startups how cheap it is and how come you have only 400 members right now so 400 members does make it the largest blockchain consortium in the world go aetherium and remember it's only a year old right I mean this is fairly unprecedented for membership growth we I think for small organizations like up to 25 people something like $3,000 and we're trying to figure out how to deal with highly qualified individuals as well which we have I was wondering what's gonna be treated about the thing you mentioned about sort of lowering the compliance and legal sort of friction for members to work with each other did I get that right um so I was wondering if you could like go a little more in depth about that like is this something that members subscribe to when they sign up so the EEA membership agreement when a company joins includes an anti includes antitrust language IP language and confidentiality language so if you want to work in a consortium between four or five organizations once you get past a certain scale right like if you're three people and the guys down the road want to work with you you typically just sign a basic NDA and you're done right if you're trying to work with Intel or you're trying to work with Citibank that's that's not sufficient right because they're legal teams get worried about things like antitrust provisions and IP leakage etc so the EEA is structured to allow its members to app to operate in consortium with each other on blockchain problems right so they don't so if if if a subgroup wants to spin up a project right like to do a to do a test for go back to the one I'm about medical records right out on the EEA test net they don't they can just spin up a working group to do that and they inherit right just like an object-oriented programming they just inherit all of the protections that their baseline membership agreement has in it right so there's no need for them to go and set up a sub consortium and go and create the documentation to go and do that if you've ever had to try and create you know that type of documentation you know how long and expensive it is so sir I think it is an it's an under sold benefit of the EEA and they'll become much more prominent when we have to test that up I'm running circle one question about the business model of the AE is the kind of organization that provides standard that companies like your Constance is for example will implement and will sell to customers yes so the EI is a not-for-profit it's a Delaware 501 6 C which is the same thing as the Linux Foundation so there's a you know in the in Europe we have this idea of foundations in the u.s. you have this idea of not-for-profit companies so the EEA is structured legally very similar to the Linux Foundation it's a 501 6c which means it's enough for probably the not-for-profit that can engage in lobbying activities unlike a 501 3 C 501 C 3 which can't do that and because of tokens and the reason why that's actually important is because of tokens there's a need to engage with regulators and there's a fine line between what's educating someone and what's lobbying right so the so we're set up as an organization who can do both but it's a not-for-profit it's a very very standard not-for-profit used in the u.s. technology industry so the and and yeah so there isn't a business model to the ei I mean the way it's able to pay its staff is by having members renew and pay their fees each year which means it needs to be doing enough for the members for it to be worth the money thank you for the talk are there any deployed Private Network facilitated by EA already or do you see them coming in 2018 and what are the specific cases that you can talk about so the EA is trying to build a private subnet in fact it's got one that's sort of in beta but where it hasn't been exposed to the public yet it's to enable these this type of consortium collaboration I mean the the if you think about where the sort of I guess Vlad's finished huh should I just do it all over again for the second act so so so I think when we have the test net up you're going to see different activity if you look at the if you look at the trajectory of how private enterprise style and deployments of a theorem have developed is it started off with people doing really primitive pocs like the UB UB s spark smart bond right then you got it a people trying to tweak guess a bit here and there right and so if you look at like and Claire Maddox has done this in a closed source way you know obviously you know quorum came a little later you started to get a combination of open and closed source etherium clients that would provide degrees of privacy permissioning confidentiality block apps is an early example from consensus Newco etc right you then had quorum come around which was a much more which was a much more thought which had much greater thinking about the issues because it came out of financial services right and so and so one of the things that had is it had real user requirements baked into it right and so chorim's been adopted in a number of instances I mean one project that is broadly public that we worked on is the scented air payments Network which is sort of a better version of ripple built on aetherium that so you know I would I would expect since JP Morgan built it they have quite a lot of it running somewhere though I you know and there are other instances of it going up around the world what we think we think this idea of having the standard get published in the coming months is really gonna be an inflection point because as an ITU if I'm an IT organization right like a CIO of a large company the fact that the standards there and a bunch of vendors have signed up to support it suddenly d risks aetherium for me relative to hyper ledger fabric in our three quarter right and if you look at the enterprise market today that is the market almost in its totality so I think so I think so I think there's three parts sorry for the complicated answer there's three parts to it is the EEA itself hosting test nuts there's the evolution of where we've gone through in the adoption and then there's the prediction of what will happen to adoption when we get the spec and the upgraded clients out next question oh I think we're done Wow that's excellent well thank you for coming sorry for those of you who didn't get to catch it I am told the first ten minutes was the most riveting presentation ever delivered on blockchain