EthCC 2: Federico Rocchi

okay great so we already kind of got an idea about the segmentation of this audience we have around twenty twenty percent of the people attending this talk running or working in a business that provides block block chain solution but regardless what you do if you're attending this talk is because you're interested into something that I'm hugely passionate about I've been pouring my energies for the past five years in the blockchain ecosystem and so I'm the shaman alone on blockchain labs and we are based in London and the main universities LSE UCL empyrion and London Business School and we are the used largest university-based student hub for blockchain right so our mission is very simple we want blockchain to succeed we like the ideology we like the technology we think that much needs to be done the main road block for us is adoption and so we provide free education that's something that we've been doing for the past five years and we support companies with R&D and training efforts so in the meantime what I've also been doing I've met this very nice lady and she also happens to be a genius in Natural Sciences and so she opened my mind to something that is probably one of the most important theories in history say ah if you know this man a few people okay I was expecting it to be more these sir is Charles Darwin okay so if you don't raise your hand so Charles Darwin epistle ated probably that the most important theory in the in the field of Natural Sciences that of the evolution of humankind ok and this is I'm going to use Darwin in a sense because I will briefly narrate the evolution of the blockchain ecosystems so far drawing parallelisms between what we have seen because probably we have experienced firsthand in the in the past years what has happened in the ecosystem and drawing parallelism with the with the theory of of the arwing the goal here is that really to you know if gradually move from narration to creation okay so we want to just lightly touch on what is happening in the past because you can find all this information in the internet and use that basic knowledge to build a very basic but important framework that can drive your decisions investment decisions for years to come and it really comes down to understanding what drives blockchain evolution and survival of blockchain platforms okay so this is the goal we will it would be very fast because it's going to be only 15 minutes but really this is what we're going to focus about we will focus on Darwin's evolution and blockchain okay and it all started in a small island okay the were many birds darman's noticed many animals beautiful flora and just a bunch of electricity to run a few numbers of laptops okay and I heard from a trusted source that in this island there were also bunch of very smart guys that they wanted to fight censorship they call themselves the cyberpunk have you heard about cyberpunks before some of them not you know it's really the ideological background of the whole of the blockchain there were hugely intelligent very intelligent and a bunch of them you know or maybe just one we don't know decided to retire in a cave and really bunched collect together all the existing pieces of technologies that were invented in the previous years and bundled them together and create first peer-to-peer digital currency which you know what I'm talking about Bitcoin voila right and we don't know it is poor guy you know it went into huge media attention of course it's not Satoshi Nakamoto mean he says it's not so let's just that's just giving the benefit of the doubt okay something that happened then you know something that probably another term that everyone should be aware of is the Bitcoin told forums right so once the Bitcoin was created initially was a very local efforts like with the internet university based a few computer scientists based mainly in the u.s. starting to develop and you know Tolkien line Bitcoin talk forums and expand on the existing technology and initially there were really iterations of Bitcoin still as a cryptocurrency okay so we are talking about say cash which kind of introduced us to snarks zero knowledge proof something that is very important I've seen some companies that are building upon zero knowledge proves to receive to achieve very important things with a blockchain litecoin that started to to do something I know it's not different in terms of consensus mechanism so really that was the idea but initially they were just iteration of the of the cryptocurrency and then in 2001 2013 vitae like battery motoring which which we all know started to think well you know the potential here is much larger ok let's start to do something more in across all industries let's start to use smart contracts and the other guy over there is the guy that actually wrote the yellow paper of it helium right so I think that he's another person that everyone should be aware of his name is gammon would actually the first event that we had a LAN implosion labs three years ago was with Gavin so it's kind of emotional affection for him and we had around 100 events see then but Gavin was the creator of the yellow white paper with a what a yellow paper of helium and so what happened is that they introduce mark contracts and you know we all know the story and then something happened right probably two very important events raise your hands if you can recognize at least one of them yes okay what about the one of the left can you recognize them on the left down yes so the dowel right - I think that of course in the past years a lot a lot of things happened I've just 15 minutes so I can not talk about them all but I just wanted to talk about these two events briefly because they highlighted some important limitations on the blockchain ecosystem one was well you know bludgeon is about immutability but then the Tau as we all know right there was a theorem that even classic an interview so there was hard fork between people that you know didn't want to make a step back and mutate the blockchain so they kind of stick to the original ideology and people that were like you know we can make an exception here the technology is new and so we must do something about it and this event is important because it's you know it was kind of a shock for the whole of community you know it's like so it's not immutable after all and that has had repercussions since then the second major event was that of crypto Kitty's right not only because you know some of them sold for for millions but really because they slowed down the network so for the first time people realized you know what you know decided to look for statistics the sole visa 14,000 three-section per second and you know bitcoins seven transactions per second you know it really started to start to create awareness on these limitations and really something that can be summarized by what bita bit Alex called the trilemma okay the blockchain troll Emma that you cannot achieve scalability security centralization at the same time I can tell you I think it is possible and once we do you know this is probably the biggest problem where everyone is hitting the head against you right so this is the biggest problem but there are already some people that are finding some hybrid solutions either through governance or through different consensus mechanisms we are still not quite there but you know eventually this is the biggest problem that needs to be solved to really increase blockchain adoption other than that you know once we move away from cryptocurrencies and you know the term smart contracts start to be in the air then companies started to also realize that blocking could could also be a little bit more flexible right in the sense that it doesn't have to be public it doesn't have to be you know non permission but it can be also private and permissions and so in terms of the ocular system overall a lot of different private blockchains platform you know starting to come up I think they're the two most important ones to be aware of given the abundance of work that have been doing is especially hyper ledger hyper ledger fabric they are very active you know everywhere in the world and they are constantly working with you know enterprises on developing news cases and then poram which is a fork of aetherium developed by JP Morgan okay so basically but I don't really want to read the internet right because you can all find this information online so let's get back to our narration and I will get back to our narration with a with a number that struck me originally it was four years ago and so you know before the spike of Bitcoin prices and I met with my colleagues a little survey at our universities and we asked to 500 different people if they knew what blotching was and 1% of them right it was actually four people so slightly less than the 1% four people out of 500 knew what blockchain was so was that in that moment that our mission became to spread blockchain awareness and now the mission is shifted to educating people on the blockchain because as I was saying earlier I think that the main roadblock now is really education why am I saying that because well now with all experience the the the thrill of getting into the you know around 2017 2016 you know buying some bitcoins see them skyrocketing everyone getting former fear of missing out and getting in actually there was a report by PwC they found out that it was not only about users it was about companies so you know investors having the fear of missing out and pouring money in because they were very fearing that a competition was developing blockchain solutions and they were not and saying this of course was hugely unhealthy right we know what happened us last Christmas last New Year's Eve was hugely unhealthy because people were just investing their own savings without being without even knowing what they were investing on and that's why our mission shifted to actually educating people about that and so Darwin was sitting in to this island and one day a huge storm came in lasted for days lasted for days and before the environment was very dry and basic and after the storm passed the environment was extremely damp you know and moist earth the terrain was wet and so he noticed that birds you know before birds went mainly of the bath type that call these Darwin's finches right and the hand is very thick and big big such that they could strap him to dry ground and find you know and survive and the food but what happened after the storm is that now the majority was birds with smaller beaks my birds with smaller and thinner beaks and this was just after you know a little rain and that is very interesting because that is what led dolphin to stipulate the fundamental theory of evolution of humankind really of any kind of species out there he said well you know species live in an environment the environment is changing so the species that survive are the ones that can adapt best to the environment and you know is striking that blockchain is not quite the same thing right in the sense that it's trying to think that most of projects do not survive this is a this is a survey that has been done by the light they had been basically studying the whole github basically they just read hold it up no 86,000 projects I cannot imagine poor analysts the amount of work that it went through but ultimately found out the average lifespan for each project was one point two years right so it means that the impact that they had in the world was you know part none and this is important because it leads to our our first principle our own principle of natural selection in the blockchain ecosystem which similarly is organizations that are best at adapting to a changing environment are more likely to stay and you may think well in a sense you know I kind of knew that already right every principal once stated becomes almost obvious if it is a good principles if it makes sense but what happens is that investors and developers alike tend to forget about this tend to get excited when there is no substance backing up what they are seeing and so I think that there are two main criteria here to understand whether a an organization has the characteristics that will enable their organization to survive one is the agent per se and - is the environment okay so when - when looking at the team within an organization of course you know if you read the Stanford literature and if you read you know if talk with VCS team is very important leadership is very important vision minimum viable product everything else but something that is very peculiar of the blockchain ecosystem given the high and you know variation of the ecosystem in the past years is that you must make sure that the team the leadership team is very flexible it's very flexible they have done their pesto analysis you know they have the know what is happening in the market they are aware of the environment and they have processes in place to make you know to streamline decision making if you know when I when I talk with startups they come to us - you know for nonprofit help and I asked them about their understanding of the market you know it's immediately a red flag I'm going to tell me that they haven't done the research and is something that immediately scares me away because when I kind of made research and apply this kind of thought of reasoning line of reasoning with previous projects it really made a difference between leaders that had a vision and a clear understanding of the market and leaders that not in terms of the environment something that you know one aspect of it is the geographical location right I was not mature enough to enjoy the dot-com bubble but mainly you know the explosion of the internet happened in Silicon Valley and so if you wanted to benefit from everything that happened with the internet you know if you lived in Silicon Valley you had much more opportunity I can tell you that this is not the case with blockchain you know the Reuters final study PwC has from the study but I can really feel it also by living in London that now geographical distribution allows for really the distribution of projects and also of the value that blockchain is creating in terms of number of projects San Francisco scores first London comes next then there is Beijing but really here what i'm the message trying to convey is do not base your decision of where your incorporating your company based on you know Silicon Valley in Silicon Valley because that is not the case anymore with the blockchain something important to know is regulation right regulation is an important aspect and finally really companies or leaders should have done primary market research about their target customer right so they should have the should be in contact they should be in touch that should know exactly what the customers wants at each point in time and I can tell you that this is something that isn't really happening many ICS has focused on the technology on the appearance on the PR but I actually have lost touch with the end user and you know this kind of sums up what I was saying now you know what up what is preventing blockchain adoption and regulatory issues definitely want probably the biggest issue but there really is something that I think groups everything is the lack of education if you think about it you know uncertainty on are I lack of in-house skills not a current business priority these are all things that can be solved with education so in when if you're thinking about where should you invest your money will really think about educating the other stakeholders not just your end-user but really your stakeholders you need the regulation you need to understand you need to let users aware of what pain points you're solving and by the way this is what happened with the internet right the main road block with the internet originally was you know making people aware of what pain points internet was solving right I read that basically people were thinking well you know I can use correspondence instead of emails they didn't think about the possibility of using videos and images right and in doing streaming content and all of that so really you must be you must help your users to become aware of the pain points and is what we're trying to do across the world where now is doing executive workshops again for free to really help you know spread education and foster a healthy development of the technology and now it comes to the other very important element of the evolution of the ecosystem which is sexual reproduction right so you survive but then at the same time you got a mate okay because otherwise are gonna be alone and what that means found is that you know the goal here at the goal for every species is reproduction and how it works is that usually we have a male that different males that compete against each other to gain access even though it sounds you know that it's like to really conquer a female right and the female chooses among the males of competition the parallelism that we can draw here is that companies are the males and users are the females you know we have an overabundance of icos now offering plus or minus good solutions and they are competing against each other and now there are just a few of them that there are alpha males that will succeed the other ones are either imposters or beta males okay and that is a very interesting concept that basically works like a peacock a peacock is very beautiful right that's a male peacock in case you don't know and what happens is that being beautiful means that your body used entropy used energy to become more beautiful so that means that if if your body used that energy means that he had an over abundance of energy to become more beautiful we can think about the same thing within the block Shenfield organizations should focus on becoming beautiful in other words and user experience and PR if they have the internal energy to do so otherwise they will die or you know they will die and is what will happen but in the process they're gonna hurt the ecosystem and that's what I care about it I'm sure that you'll care about that that in the process that you heard the echo system because blockchain is based on trust but then if you know bad projects go on that really damages the trust and it's hard to conquer back so what we must understand is you know what makes a blockchain project beautiful right what makes it pretty because otherwise we always need the substance within the beautiful peacock otherwise it's just going to be a so and this is by the way what trial Darwin's called the sexual section or in other what's the technical term but it's basically understanding that organization that are most appealing and it can sustain those that you know being appealing are the ones that we grow the most right so before in terms of agent being flexible and having an understanding of the environment is what determines survival in terms of what that means growth which ante notice also that there means survival because you gotta have profits and revenue to so survive is going to be how appealing you are and my message here is that we're not talking about really just user experience and that we are talking beyond because the blood shaker system probably an important message that I want to give is that is a complex agglomerate of different stakeholders there are very much independent on each other okay so when you make it your platform appealing you should not focus on your end users alone really my main message here is that if you want to be the alpha male in the industry or if you want to select the alpha male in the industry word that you want to invest on look for a company that is also investing in their developers not only in their end users that is investing into engaging with regulators and educating them if this is lacking then probably we will you know have a very slow recovery from the recent loss that we have in the ecosystem and I will get in a little bit in in in terms of what other criteria we can do but basically I also wanted to tell you that we are organizing a conference in London which is called bite and it's called blockchain in the digital economy and the whole focus here is going to be very simple just focus on fostering blockchain adoption so really providing there will be no I cos no companies there just academics policymakers and top business decision-makers that will come together and discuss actually how what is needed to drive the industry forint in case you're interested but I'm going to end it since time is running with you know the kind of very basic framework that I promised you at the start and it's really something there are two things that I would like you to know this year one I'm waiting a little bit more the appeal side as you might have noticed right I'm pondering that a little bit more because appealing is not really just about and user experience is not just about PR is really about I think three different things one developers and community of developers a very important aspect of it especially in this period is is it open source how flexibilities in terms of programming language for example lease you know as a platform that provides you know the game basically opens blockchain to Yama script which is very common so that that is a huge value add especially at these stages you want to make it open source you want to make it as flexible as possible the second kind of column in the horizontal axis is about education and engagement with your stakeholders okay one aspect of it is educating your users about their pain point but the other aspect is really also engaging with your regulators built in your community and during the network what I have seen so far in London at least is that most companies are solely focused on building their community and that is wrong I think because it's not leading to results you know it's a nice experiment what we have seen that is not leading results what you showed you is really educate more about the pain points because they are not obvious they're obvious to you that you're investing in it that you are you know creating it there you're solving it the third kind of column is really about the technology so far the 4 Q's has been about developing the blockchain right and Bambara was saying before in the presentation give many different platforms at the end of the day compete with aterial whereas if they work together you know they could have achieved much better results if you don't want to work together however what the internet use case can teach us is to break down the bigger problem into smaller problems right so in terms of having a team that develops blockchain having a team that you know focuses on consensus algorithms having a team that focuses on governance so having very specific you know task forces that focus on developing specifics aspect of the blockchain and around the feed side you know really is about I'm done release of our agents and environment okay so I hope this was helpful and heat up many questions if needed [Applause] okay you can come talk to me or you know you can also email me if you can read it if you need some support and hopefully I will see also in London okay so is f e r o CC h I at London blockchain labs.com thank you very much [Applause]